Faking Cool — If Only Being Un-Chill Were Hot

I was 16 when my friends dubbed me The Neurotic One. Wait. (I had to stop and consider this.) Not everyone freaks out the way I do? People walk around just feeling relaxed all the time? It was a groundbreaking revelation. But surely my friends were wrong. My worries were so legitimate — a sign of intelligence, really (though maybe don’t say that out loud…) If only I could just explain them. But, strangely, no one was interested in learning how to worry more.

At last it dawned on me that my worries might not be the most riveting conversation openers; that maybe, in my friendships and dateships, expressing every tumbling concern in my ringing brain (however important I was positive it was) was not the most attractive quality. If only it were hot to be entirely un-chill. Clearly, it was not.

So I learned to suppress my anxieties. This is a skill not therapist-recommended perhaps, but a merciful service to other people. I’ve saved countless friends (though not the lucky few) from debates about what’s the least creepy way to sign off in an email to a favorite former professor — warmly, best wishes, xox-? What if the guy I accidentally swiped left on, when I meant to swipe right, was the man I’m supposed to marry? Do you think the yoga teacher was mad at me because I had to leave before the third om? Is it a problem that I still sleep with my stuffed dog Mizzy and have actively missed her when I’m in bed with a guy?

And yet — astonishingly — I’ve managed to convince every guy I’ve dated in the past two and a half years that I am Cool, Chill Girl.* (If you’re reading this, Patrick, I know what you’re thinking, and that’s because it was three years ago.) Cool, Chill Girl is a male construct happily scoffed at among female roommates over glasses of wine, but it’s a coveted label nonetheless. “I knew you were nice and everything, but I just can’t get over how chill you are,” I’ve been told on numerous second and third dates. “I mean you, like, smoke weed and stuff!” And even, a few months in, “You say you’re neurotic, but I don’t believe you.”In return a laugh and some sidestepping remark like “All right, I’ll take it,” while I simultaneously glow with satisfaction and worry about what it might mean that he thinks that.

But the thing is, I’m not always pretending. I am Cool, Chill Girl too (you won’t believe me, but it’s not a lie.) I fulfill some of the essential requirements. I like dive bars and beer and I hate social melodrama and I might cringe a little on the inside, but I mean it when I say I’m “down for whatever.” She is a part of me — I’ve just learned how to make her seem like the only part. She’s the easiest to show, the one people want to see. No overly soft spots or jagged pieces: It’s safer that way.