brat diaries
Brat and it’s the same but it’s a nonlinear four-part essay about the abject humiliation of wanting success despite not being able to define what success would even mean to you and the thin line between self awareness and self absorption so it’s not
The year is 2024 and Charli “they don’t build statues of critics” XCX has made an album that, in many ways, sums up how I feel about my “career” as a music critic.
Honestly, I don’t even know if I’d call myself a “critic,” I don’t know if I’ve earned it. A couple months back someone introduced me as a “Gen-Z rock critic” which I thought was kind of an oxymoron (looking back, I think that’s what I like about it). “Rock critic” makes what I do sound way cooler and way more Almost Famous than it actually is. Usually, I just say I’m a writer.
I’m at this weird stage in said “career” where I’m reaching these milestones that feel really significant, but at the same time anticlimactic. Each accomplishment comes and goes and I still don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I’ll get a new byline or some momentary nugget of recognition that I know would be unfathomably impressive to a version of myself who’s a few years younger, and I’ll feel great about it for a moment, but then I’ll realize that outside of the few people who occupy the same little cultural niche as I do, no one gives a shit. On the flip side, now that I’m getting more attention (again, still relative) I’m also opening myself up to more criticism and am increasingly self-conscious about how I’m representing myself. There’s this increased pressure to not piss anyone off or burn any bridges even though doing so feels kind of inevitable.
Then sometimes I have to proverbially smack myself on the head with a rolled-up newspaper for playing the “Are They Mad At Me?” game and go look at that one screenshot from Jemima Kirke’s Instagram story where someone asks her if she has any advice for “unconfident young women” and she replies “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.” I have to remind myself that—as I so sagely said before—no one gives a shit. “No one gives a shit” is my frenemy. She’ll relentlessly make fun of me, but when someone else does the same, she’s the only one whose arms I want to cry into.
I’m lucky enough to have loved ones who are far less brooding and bitter than I am who try to curb my relentless shit-talking, grudge-holding, and haterism. I don’t want to become one of those increasingly common critics whose whole persona is being “a hater” This brand of criticism—and I say “brand” because it almost always feels like these people are trying to sell you something, peddling hot takes for clout—is excruciatingly boring to me. A truly artful hater is passionate and clever and constructive, their critical bent stemming from a fervent conviction that we deserve better and should strive for it.
Anyway, these friends will call me on my bullshit, tell me that I’m too negative or too invested in my own resentments and rivalries. I try to heed their advice—the same advice I gave so easily to the children I used to tutor and babysit: “Ignore them, they’re just trying to get a rise out of you.” Some days I’m no better than a seven-year-old.
I tell myself that my words are powerful and I shouldn’t waste them on petty drama. It’s because I believe in the power of my words that I’ve developed a terminal case of Monkeys On Typewriters Syndrome, where I’m convinced that I can get everyone to understand my thought process if I explain it well enough—even people who refuse to meet me with good faith. The problem arises when you realize that the monkeys at their typewriters are gonna spew a whole lot of bullshit in the process, and if, like me, you have a hard time shutting up, it’s likely that you’re going to get a mouthful of foot before you get Hamlet.
I’m making small talk at the wine-and-cheese reception of a school event when one of my favorite professors pulls me aside with a sly smile to ask my thoughts on a book review that’s gone semi-viral for its searing critique—just an all-out hatchet job. This professor asking me to gossip with her delights me in a way that I’m a little embarrassed by. I feel like I’ve been invited to hang out in the teacher’s lounge. During our conversation I say that I think beefs are an essential part of any creative ecosystem. I say we need the Tupac and Biggie of millennial women who write personal essay collections. I’m joking, but only a little.
A few weeks later—completely unrelated—a piece of gossip about me from someone whose opinion I tell myself I don’t value finds its way back around and balloons into an ugly, festering blister. I hate myself for giving those words the power that I’ve tried to convince myself this person could never have over me. I want to say, let them talk their shit, but I can’t let it leave me alone.
When I played soccer as a child, I never understood why our team had to win. I didn’t personally have anything against the girls on the opposing team, and I knew that we’d all get the same plastic trophies and pizza slices at the end of the season regardless of each game’s outcome. My corner kick didn’t reflect what I thought or how I felt or who I was as a person—not in the way writing did—so I didn’t understand why I was expected to care about winning. Or maybe I was just deflecting because I was insecure about how shitty I was at soccer.
I try to remind myself that the things that are meant to happen to me will happen when they’re supposed to. About 90% of the writing I did up until like two years ago embarrasses me now, and I should be grateful that very little of it exists in a published form. Sometimes I feel scared that I’ll look back in a few years and be embarrassed by the things I publish now. I might be embarrassed by this essay.
I try to appreciate the time that I’ve had to cook, but then I’ll see some girl my age or younger with a book deal (often accompanied by at least one of the following: glowing reviews, a beautiful apartment, clear skin, a flat stomach) and I’m not strong enough not to let it ruin my day.
I can’t listen to Brat without thinking about exactly who my “Sympathy is a knife” and “Girl, so confusing” people are (and who I’ve yet to work it out with on the remix). It’s one thing to see someone bask in undeserved success and soothe yourself by calling them a hack, but to see someone I respect and admire—as a writer and as a person—get her hard-earned flowers and feel the nagging, involuntary pull of jealousy, is another insidious thing. There are writers who I genuinely want to see win who still manage to unknowingly incite a horrible, panicked envy in me. There are women writers—it’s always women, most of them around my age—who I’ve been mentioned alongside, and while I’m flattered to be likened to them, it kicks at that competitive instinct that I thought I didn’t have, leaving me to compare and despair and wonder whether I’m just doing a worse version of what someone else has mastered.
I know someone might read this and accuse me of not being a “girls’ girl” which, honestly, I’m fine with—I’d rather see the complexity in the women around me than fall into shallow, reductive stereotypes about us being innately good or pure. My admiration for the women who inspire me is profound and individualized, it’s not blanket essentialist support. I don’t want to buy into this scarcity model of success, and I certainly never want to be the only woman who managed to get her foot in the door, but when the competition is already so ingrained it’s easy to play along without even realizing it.
It’s humiliating to want success and recognition, to want people to care about what I have to say. I know that even if no one ever reads another word I write, I’ll still keep doing this, because it’s the thing I’ve always done, regardless of whatever else I’ve been doing alongside it, but I don’t want to spend forever talking to myself. Each time someone tells me my work means something to them, I wrap myself around their comments and squeeze until I can absorb their words. At the same time, I feel guilty for my inability to tune out the noise and live on internal validation alone.
Charli’s autotuned warble on “I might say something stupid” roves around my brain while I’m spending too much time fixing my hair in a dirty bar bathroom mirror, taking my glasses off and putting them back on after dipping my fingers into the sunken circles underneath my eyes. She sings, I’m famous but not quite. I’m not famous in any capacity, not even in a “niche internet microcelebrity” way (is that still a thing?), but sometimes people recognize me at concerts. I don’t want to be famous, it sounds stressful, but I want to be known for my work. Even admitting that makes me feel disgusting. It also makes me fear that, just by speaking this wish into existence, the monkey’s paw has already curled around it, and next thing I know I’m gonna be grist for the hate-read mill after something I write goes viral for all the wrong reasons.
I want to operate under the assumption that my best work is still ahead of me, but I constantly worry that I’ve peaked already and that I just haven’t recognized my peak as a peak because it wasn’t very high.
A couple months ago I wrote one of my favorite essays I’ve ever written and immediately after sending the draft to my editor, I sobbed for an hour because in that moment I believed that that was it—I was done. I had emptied myself out completely and the tap had run dry and I would never have any good ideas ever again.
This particular essay ended with me bemoaning the fact that I was not a complex female character and instead a complex real-life woman—far less chic and even less easy to root for.
I finished my second year of grad school at the end of April and tumbled through May in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’d picked up a new mantra from my friend Kyle: “At worst, it’ll be interesting.” He and I got into the habit of saying this when we needed to hype ourselves up for something that we weren’t sure we wanted to do.
Meltdown May was one for the books, but at least it was interesting. I spent most of it spiraling, feeling like my career, social life, and psyche were in shambles most of the time. There were grievances I refused to speak about publicly no matter how badly I wanted to; instead I corralled my Typewriter-Monkey impulses into journal entries and group chats.
The deep, deep lows were punctuated by short bursts of incandescent elation, almost always while I was with my friends. We found each other constantly. It feels strange to say that about an already-established friend group, but every time we ended up gathered together—draped over couches, leaning across kitchen counters, squeezed into limited balcony and patio space—it felt incidental yet serendipitous—there you are! We watched movies, cooked dinner for one another, dangled our feet into apartment complex swimming pools, walked along the river. It felt like summer camp. Four of us decided to write haibuns every day for the whole month. I’d never written one, but now I have a whole collection of prose poems and the belief that more essays should end with a haiku (not this one though). Sometimes it shocked me how much we needed each other.
During my final week, I put together a DJ set for a friend’s party in a barn. It started with “360,” one of my most common earworms these days and my de facto song of the summer. The color-changing dots reflecting from the disco ball made the room feel like it was spinning, everyone scattered in a sloppy circle. I kept my sunglasses on all night, whipped around the corkscrew curls I’d been growing out, watched my friends blur together and apart. They looked like streetlights in the rain. The barn walls seemed to swell from the sound and the heat.
By the time I left for Portland at the end of May, I was scared of what would happen to me while I was without them. June in Portland flew by, but it balanced me out, helped me feel more tethered.
I cried at least twice a week for the entire month of May. I cried because I felt like I was always on the precipice of ruining any semblance of a writing career that I had, because I felt I’d hit a wall with my thesis, because I thought my friends were mad at me, because I thought my family members were disappointed in me, because all I wanted was to be good—a good friend, a good girlfriend, a good daughter, a good sister, a good student, a good writer—and I felt like I was failing at all of it.
When Brat leaked, I cried while listening to “I think about it all the time” because I’m terrified that I won’t get a book deal before I have a baby and I won’t have a baby before my parents die. I ended up having a few conversations about pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood with my boyfriend’s mom, in which she seemed to be trying to suss out what my feelings were on all of it. I played my cards close, trying to give the impression that it was something I wanted, but not anytime soon. I wrote an essay about pop songs in which female songwriters explore potentially wanting to have children. I thought it might clear some things up for me. It didn’t.
I spent a weekend in Southern California. I hadn’t been to Los Angeles since a trip I’d taken there in February of 2020 (an unwitting last hoorah). I’d been newly 21 and was experiencing LA for the first time as an adult, without my family.
Now, four and half years later, I remember what I loved about LA, the way it makes you feel like you’re living in the version of your 20s that you imagined in your head as a teenager. I let myself indulge in the fantasy. I embrace my inner tourist. I make my boyfriend play Norman Fucking Rockwell! in the rental car and I sing along: I’ll pick up all of your Vogues and all of your Rolling Stones / Your favorite liquor off the top shelf / I’ll throw a paaaaaaarty / All niiiiight loooooong. I mug for the camera and flex my biceps in front of Muscle Beach, rapping Frank Ocean’s “Oldie” verse. Further down the boardwalk I deadpan, “It’s me, your little Venice Bitch.” I’m indulging in layers upon layers of playing pretend—pretending that I’m the effortlessly cool girl in a Lana song, and pretending that I’m too cool in real life to be pretending in the first place. The next day in Amoeba Records, I find myself using the same disaffected drawl as I hold up a Beach House vinyl and slate: “Hi, I’m Grace, I’m at Amoeba, and this is What’s In My Bag.” If I were to ever do a “What’s In My Bag” interview, I don’t think it would occur to me to choose a Beach House record—not that I’ve got anything against Beach House.
We drive to Pomona for a music festival that I’m covering and check into our hotel. Nothing to do that night and a movie-worthy sunset slowly playing out behind the mountains, we post up at the pool with our books and watch the natural light fade. There are lots of kids around—playing Marco Polo in the water, splashing each other, singing Olivia Rodrigo, making up choreographed dances. They remind me of my cousins and I when we were little. I add them to the running list I’m keeping in my head of snapshots of summer that I don’t want to forget.
(The pink trapezoid-shaped shadow on the wall next to my boyfriend’s brother’s bedroom door. A photo my sister sends me of my parents’ tuxedo cat, one of her ears folded flat against her head. The teenage girls in front of me in line talking about wanting to start a band. A “You! Me! Dancing!” sticker on the bathroom stall door at the Dikembe concert. The sky growing darker during each set at the generator show under the overpass—white gold during Mealworm, pale blue during Dollar Signs, deep cerulean during Simple Shapes. My best friend’s old driver’s license still in my wallet, three years expired. Hearing SOPHIE's “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye” on the house playlist after the Los Campesinos! show, then going home and listening to Charli sing to SOPHIE on “So I.” Sitting in the park on the evening of the summer solstice listening to Get Disowned followed by Celebration Rock while watching the couple with two chihuahuas toss a tennis ball down the hill—marveling at how aerodynamic one of the chihuahuas is, how his little feet seem to barely touch the ground as he flies through the air to retrieve the ball, and at how serene the other chihuahua looks as he ignores the tennis ball completely, content to sit squinty-eyed at his owners’ feet and watch the sunset with them—a sunset that takes forever, like the sun’s getting comfortable before it sinks down into the Pacific to rest.)
On the hotel balcony, I tell my boyfriend that it feels like we’re on the lam, or like we’re on tour, or like we don’t exist. I tell him that I already like Pomona even though I’ve seen practically none of it. I say I love the view from our hotel room. “The view of the parking lot?” he asks. The view of the mountains above the parking lot. So yes, the view of the parking lot. It’s a beautiful parking lot.
In a place that can make you change / Fall in love again and again
You’re doing the work. Keep doing the work.