What’s The Best Story You Tell About Yourself?

𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓬𝓾𝓵𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮💬

Really did not expect my London event on Thursday to hit capacity in 5 minutes …! I will try to open up some more spots!

A shake-the-table moment of my early twenties was reading Carrie Fisher’s Star Wars diary. Fisher was young, hard-headed, and having a clandestine affair with an irresistibly aloof Harrison Ford. Someone told her that who you choose to be in a relationship with is what you think of yourself. “So Harrison is what I think of myself,” she said, her tone as apologetic as it was deadpan. A shake-the-table moment of my early thirties happened just a few weeks ago, when someone cautioned me against having a friend set me up on a date with a mutual: who someone sets you up with, the person had said, is what they think of you.

I am confronted with myself all the time, but I am only occasionally girded enough to actually face myself. It’s the same way I have written over 500 (!) posts on this newsletter and a dozen magazine cover stories plus so many more Vulture blogs and features and yet … I would rather die than leave a restaurant review under my name, the only name I have, on Google or Yelp. Last summer I got lunch with some colleagues and we were offered a free round of drinks if we showed the waitress that we’d left a positive review on Google Maps. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’d actually rather pay.” It’s never a story I tell about myself, but it feels rather revealing.

The stories I tell about myself are almost always related to what I’m watching or listening to or reading. My mom tells a story of me performing a Patti LaBelle song on our fireplace, I’m almost certain in a wig, and I lost my balance. “Patti LaBelle … fell!” I said, resuming my performance. Andrew would say that “Euphoria” had the opposite effect on me than it did on everyone else, that I found one man’s 8-minute hateration quite soothing and empowering. It feels like a big unlock that in high school I would wake up at 5 AM to watch 1940s screwball comedies and melodramas before school. Even then, at 15 and 16, I couldn’t really be convinced that knowing the Pythagorean Theorem would ever materially benefit my life. All those stories add up to what I believe about myself: that I’m bossy and nosey and determined, that I’m drawn to performers and performance, that real critique is rich and passionate and often artistic. And that I just love a good double entendre.

@huntrbidenand yeah every entry was signed with my signature #childhooddiary #wheniwasakid #leo

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Now that I’m re-reading my diary and being confronted with just how much I have (and mostly haven’t) changed, I’m curious: what are the stories you tell about yourself? What are the moments you hold up as evidence of how you move throughout the world?