I’m seventeen years old and I have already been famous twice in my life. The first occasion was a dream come true. The second occasion was a nightmare from which I still cannot wake up.
Fame seems from afar like one of those things that’s inherently great. Like owning a pony! It’s only once you get it that you realize your pony is in fact a wild stallion. It will turn on you. It will wreak havoc. It will run away. It cannot be contained.
My fame arrived, both times, because I love words. I love the sounds they make, the funny and surprising ways that the same twenty-six letters work together in infinite different combinations. I love the stories behind words: where they come from, where they’re going. I love piecing them together like a puzzle.
You get punished for loving something too much. That is the truth of it all.
This sounds stupid now, but I used to want to be a writer. I thought that writing might be a good place for all the words I have rattling around in my brain. And it was, for a little while. Until someone read what I had written.
That’s supposed to be the best, right? You work hard on something, you practice and execute and refine it, and you claim, “It’s just for my own enjoyment. As long as I like doing it, that’s all that matters.” But even as you say that—because you know it is the noble thing to say—what you really hope is that outsiders who know what they’re talking about will see this thing you have produced and say, “You’re a genius!”
So I’ll own up to it: I didn’t just want to write. I wanted to write, and I wanted people to read what I had written, and to like it, and to like me by extension.
This obviously did not go the way I had envisioned it.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is. That’s how you know it’s not a good story. Good stories have morals. The moral is that there’s no place like home, or the moral is that love conquers all, or the moral is that love actually conquers nothing of consequence. You should come away from a story thinking that you at least kind of understand what the point of it was. That it wasn’t just a bunch of made-up people doing made-up things to no purpose.
What is the moral of my story? Don’t aspire to make anything of yourself? Don’t try to do anything? No one will ever understand you? Shut up and sit down? Whatever the moral is, it’s clear that I haven’t learned it yet. I am no wiser for my errors. Wounded, but no wiser.
The best I can hope for is that my story isn’t over yet. That the moral will show up sometime much later.
Before we go any further, I want to make sure you understand this: I am not a good person. If that’s important to you, to only read things by good people and about good people, where all their conflicts are unfair things that happened to them despite their pluck and kindness, then you should stop reading right now. I am not the girl for you.
I’m sure you know what I did. Everyone does. You might not remember that I did this. Or you might remember that somebody did it, but not that the person in question is me. I will jog your memory because I don’t want our relationship to be founded on any pretense. I want you to know who you’re dealing with here.
Pretense. If you trace its origins way back, it comes from the medieval Latin word praetendere, which later turned into pretend. Use it in a sentence: I have no pretense to innocence.
I am Winter Halperin. I’m the one who went online after the National Spelling Bee and posted, “We learned many surprising things today. Like that dehnstufe is apparently a word, and that a black kid can actually win the Spelling Bee.”
That’s what I wrote. And I put it online for the whole world to see.
You can stop reading now, if you want.