Forever Alone | Chapter 3: Exes & Existential Crisis (Part 2)
In which I get the puppy from hell, quit my job, lose friends, run out of money, get back together with an ex, and clearly succeed spectacularly at adulthood.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
Life does not hand you instructions for how to be a functional adult—and certainly not a thriving one. All I had was my idea of what I wanted life to look like, so I started checking the boxes.
I bought myself an iPad (this was 2011, and it was brand new tech) and a MacBook, because that’s what a popular blogger would own.
When I was too exhausted to cook dinner, I bought sushi and wine at the Trader Joe’s across the street multiple nights in a row, which had the air of, “Early twenty-something who doesn’t quite have her shit together, but who cares because indulging in shitty food and alcohol and being a bit of a mess is its own kind of glamor at this age.”
Kristen and I got gym memberships and shared a personal trainer, because that’s something people who have their shit together would probably do.
Once I was a popular writer working for myself, I envisioned long walks with my future dog, who I got to spend all day with because I worked from home. So, I got a puppy.
Kristen and my mom joined me on the day I picked Scarlett up and brought her home. From the minute we got in the car and pulled away, she was not the dog I expected. I’d wanted a sweet, docile, cuddly creature who just wanted to spend time with me. This 8-week old puppy was already a hellion. She was stubborn, rebellious, and had very little interest in cuddling or me.
None of the training techniques I tried worked on her. She’d regularly lunge at my and Kristen’s feet with her razor-sharp puppy teeth, and when I tried to roll her on her back and hold her still, to assert dominance or whatever I’d read on the latest dog training site, she screamed like a chimpanzee being exorcised of demonic possession, right before being murdered. When I sat down to eat I’d put her in the kitchen, blocked off by a baby gate, and she’d scream-bark at me, non-stop, the entire meal.
From her early days she also struggled with incontinence, potentially a birth defect later made worse by getting spayed. For months I was up at 3am, no matter the weather, to trudge downstairs to the common area behind the apartment complex and make her pee.
At my wit’s end, I hired a dog trainer who spent a few weeks attempting to make progress with Scarlett and eventually said, “This dog is not normal. The level of aggression here is concerning. You’ll never be able to trust her around children. I suggest you give her up and try again with a new dog.”
After that I spent an entire weekend ugly crying, unable to imagine giving her up, but equally unable to imagine how much worse things would get as she got older, and how ill-equipped I felt to handle it. At one point as I bawled on the floor she crawled up on my lap with a toy and happily chewed on it—something she’d rarely done before, almost calculated to make me feel that much worse—which it did, and I sobbed harder.
Ultimately my parents encouraged me to get a second opinion, and thank god I did. I found a trainer who took her overnight for three weeks—something my grandma called “doggie charm school”—and she came back … if not a different dog, then a well-behaved one. Still willful, still opinionated (yes, I maintain that dogs can be opinionated), still rebellious, but manageable. And as for kids, I’ve gained three nieces and a nephew in the past 5 years, and she’s been completely good with all of them, not to mention any kid she meets on a walk. Needless to say, I’m very glad she and I stuck it out. For all the crap we’ve been through—and it’s been a lot … accidents, injuries, surgeries, medicine, physical therapy—she remains the one reason I can actually say I haven’t been truly alone this past almost-decade.
But at the time, having the puppy from hell absolutely burst my bubble. The big-girl apartment and the expensive gadgets and the personal trainer and the sushi and wine hadn’t convinced me that crafting a perfect-looking life doesn’t actually equal a good or happy life … but the reality of having a puppy, compared to the image I’d constructed, shattered some of my illusions and made me look more honestly at my entire life.
The truth was, I’d thought getting to live with my best friend—working together on a shared vision—would be a dream. But it wasn’t enough to combat my anxiety or depression. In fact, the dissonance between the vision I had and the reality I was living—going to a job every day that I hated, barely able to afford the apartment we’d just moved into, still sad after a breakup I’d initiated, exhausted from caring for a very high-maintenance animal—made me feel even more despondent. I so desperately wanted my reality to be different. I could see it, but it felt incredibly far away, if not impossible.
And to make matters worse, that shared dream wasn’t panning out. At all. Kristen and I had never seriously worked on our book after we moved into our apartment. Between the drudgery of work and the labor of functioning as an independent adult—all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping; much of which we hadn’t had to deal with when we lived with our parents—and not to mention the crazy dog taking up all of my extra time, our goal had quickly fallen by the wayside.
What had started as a fiery purpose six months earlier had been snuffed out by the weight of life, and I spiraled … right back into a relationship with Stephen.
Before Stephen and I broke up we’d been asked to be groomsman and bridesmaid, respectively, in a friend’s wedding. Ten months after we’d last seen each other, we had no choice but to come face to face again, and I was majorly stressing about it.
Kristen was also going to be a bridesmaid in this wedding, but I couldn’t lean on her for moral support because she and I were in a weird place. A couple months earlier, Kristen had started dating a guy I absolutely loathed, and it had driven a big wedge between us. It was clear to me that this guy wasn’t seriously interested in her; that she was just at his beck and call whenever he got bored, and she was allowing herself to be taken advantage of. She thought of him as her boyfriend, and he wouldn’t accept her friend request on Facebook … you can do the math. I was enraged that she continued to deny reality and let herself get entangled with this cocky, dishonest bastard, and she thought I was being judgmental and bitchy. I probably was … but more than anything—even more than I was angry—I was lonely.
There was the ever-present existential angst, of course. But I was also going through a phase where most of the friendships I’d built in high school and college were starting to fall away. As time went on it felt like we had less and less in common; that I couldn’t connect with them on a deep level; that they didn’t understand me anymore, and that I didn’t really understand them, either. Kristen remained the one friend who really got me, and who I got in return. But with the unwelcome introduction of Cocky McDoucheFace, I lost the most meaningful human connection in my life.
So, I basically walked into that wedding single and walked out with a boyfriend again. Is it really any surprise that, lonelier than I’d ever been, vulnerable and completely adrift, I ended up clinging to something—well someone—comfortable and known? Someone who’d always done a pretty good job of making me feel seen and understood? And for his part, there was satisfaction in getting to prove me wrong—he obviously hadn’t liked that I thought he lacked direction or ambition, so us getting back together was sort of an “I told you so” from him to me.
Oh, and did I mention I’d also just quit my job? Yeah, that.
This was Chapter 3: Part 2 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 3: Part 3!