This Used To Be My Playground

I took a walk down memory lane, quite afraid that it would hurt my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! It won’t help your cholesterol, but it won’t make it worse either!….)

This morning, while grocery shopping, I found myself pondering those age old questions. Who the fuck am I? Why am I here on this earth? How do I claw my way out of this professional purgatory? Why does Ava DuVernay have her own Ben & Jerry’s flavor? Not that she doesn’t deserve it. It just seems like a strange choice. I bought some beans, some chicken thighs, paused over a 24oz can of Hard Mountain Dew Baja Blast, trying to imagine a situation where I would non-ironically encounter such a beverage in the wild. I lingered before a pyramid of Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Mac N Cheese boxes, thumbing my nose at the macaroni’s 760mg of sodium per serving. Then suddenly, it hit me. Who died and made me the arbiter of grams of sodium per serving? What makes my lips too precious for a Hard Mountain Dew Baja Blast? One man’s gut rot is another man’s sensible snack. We may buy different groceries, but we all get them from the same place. You know what I mean?

Love the flavor, truly!

This last week was spent on an odyssey through my past, which I found myself anticipating with both excitement and dread. On Thursday, I left my children for five blessed days — five days of no one asking me to get them toast or find a very specific Pokemon card among the graveyard of half empty sippy cups and forgotten stuffies under their bed — to attend my twentieth college reunion (!) and see some friends back east. I don’t exactly frequent the reunion circuit. I went once before, five years after graduating, and everyone just stood around with nothing to talk about because who’s accomplished anything five years out of college except maybe getting bed bugs?

I went to Yale. After graduating, I spent a lot of time and energy not talking about going to Yale. When people asked me where I’d gone to college (which they stopped asking years ago because eventually it doesn’t matter where you went, just whether your kids are in the same karate class) I’d say, New Haven. I thought I was resisting staking my identity on my fancy, Ivy League education. But instead, I was staking my identity on appearing incredibly low-key about my fancy, Ivy League education, because people usually get that when you say you went to school in New Haven, you’re not talking about Gateway Community College.

Years later, when I was writing for The Daily Show and strangers would ask me what I did for a living, I’d pull the same shit. I’d say, I write for TV! I’m not sure why I couldn’t just have a normal conversation, why I had to present like a bashful geisha, gatekeeping my resume from behind my fan. Out of kindness to myself, I’d like to believe that my very deliberate modesty wasn’t entirely a production. People can be mean if they find you undeserving! In college, I dated a guy whose little sister had been in my high school AP Physics class. When she found out I’d gotten into Yale, she told her brother, “but she wasn’t even one of the smart kids!”. (Why would her brother tell me that? I couldn’t say. Maybe he was on the spectrum. In fairness to her, I did get a 1 on the AP Physics exam, and still don’t entirely understand what thrust is.) Or sometimes people can be a little too tickled by your credentials, and it makes you feel equally bad. Like when I got a DUI at 21 and the judge assigned to my case asked me, in front of a courtroom full of strangers waiting to contest their traffic violations, “I just have one question for you Ms. Haglund: why Yale and not Harvard?” In that moment, I understood how those Duke lacrosse players who ducked a rape charge must have felt, and not in a good way!

Only 1 gram of fat!

Anyway, accolades like going to Yale and working at The Daily Show are getting smaller in the rearview mirror of my present, and that distance has begun to inform a new sense of identity. I am beginning to feel like someone who used to be impressive. How could that not hurt my feelings? I imagine my children finding my Emmys beneath a trash bag of old baby clothes years from now. What are these, Mom? They’ll ask me. Well boys, I’ll tell them, before Mommy supported you by operating a very niche piece of surgical equipment, she used to write for television! Do I sound insufferable? I’m sure I do! And yet, because I lack the self-awareness to pinpoint exactly how, I proceed, haunted by the vague sense that I’m embarrassing myself, too blinded by the arrogance that I have a point to make to pump the breaks.

Anyway, last weekend I hung out at Yale, where no one was particularly impressed that I went to Yale because… no shit, they did too. I enjoyed a weekend of catching up and feeling very comfortable with friends who have known me half my life. Then I spent a few days in the city with my friends from The Daily Show, who only care that I used to work there insofar as that’s how they know me. These people also made me feel loved and at ease. When I far away from them, I worry I am an object of pity. But up close, I see that I am just their old friend. And after all that, I went home to my children, who don’t give a shit about The Daily Show and definitely aren’t interested in where I got my degree, who love me because I am their mom but were also pissed I brought them back Yale sweatshirts instead of some sick-ass Legos. I was surprised that in all these settings, there seemed to be something consistent I had to offer, some core part of me that transcended details of circumstance like where I went to college or where I used to work. It was small, solid, round, like that ball of mud the river spirit (mistaken for a stink spirit) spits out after a really good bath in Spirited Away. This morning, it came with me to the grocery store, and (I suspect) would be there still even if I served my family Cheetos Flamin Hot Mac N Cheese for dinner, and chased it with Hard Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Is this what people called a self? I guess I have one of those. It’s nice to have the company, no matter where I happen to be.