That is terrible. And I think that’s why I like this book so much. I am Grover. I walk with him every step of the way on his journey. The Monster at the End of This Book is a lighthearted book about anxiety—anxiety about being confronted with the kind of person you really are (LOL!), anxiety about the inevitable passage of time (LOL), anxiety about being trapped by forces beyond your control (lol), anxiety about a deep, dreadful uncertainty (…meep). Even when I read it for the first time at age three, I got that.
I was an anxious, though immaculately conceived, child. And an anxious, square, pious preteen. And an anxious half-zealot/half-gay teen. And an anxious, aimless young adult careening toward this moment. I’m anxious right now, actually, come to think of it. I’ll definitely be an anxious dad. I’m sure I’ll be an anxious old man, and I’ll probably end up lying in my grave going, “Ugh, I feel like there’s something I should be doing right now. I wonder if everyone is angry at me. Oh my God, how long is this going to take? And what happens next?”
Grover, too, is struggling. He is using every tool at his disposal to keep the thing that he fears the most at bay, and that thing is himself. He is almost crippled by his own fear. But he is still trying. Grover is the Willy Loman of Sesame Street.
* * *
—
On the internet, I play more of an Elmo than a Grover: I write funny columns, most visibly for ELLE.com; I make jokes about the news on Twitter; sometimes I write plays about social justice that have the audacity to end happily. I try to take what’s dark about the world and shake out the satirical and the silly.
Everybody loves Elmo, right? Elmo is a closer. Elmo gets all the Glengarry leads. Elmo stares into the abyss and the abyss whispers, “Tickle me.” But in real life, I’m a Grover. I have always been black in a white environment, not black enough in a black environment, working-class in an upper-class environment, Christian in a secular environment, questioning in a devout environment, gay in a straight environment. Never quite right.
I grew up a little ball of potential (but oblivious) gay energy in a Baptist family from a black Baltimore neighborhood where there were more abandoned houses than lived-in ones. My parents sent me to school in a rich suburb where most of my classmates were white. Every moment from then on, I was an Other. The thing is, I felt it, but I didn’t realize it.
Other felt like a funhouse narrative; it felt like doing something wrong. Or worse, being something wrong. So I ignored it for as long as I could, creating certainty where I could. And when that didn’t work, I anxiously awaited a spoiler to burst through time and let me know if this whole thing was going to end badly.
That, for a while, seemed like life. And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. The only option was to sit in the pews every Sunday at church and casually wonder if I was going to go to hell because of who I was? No, thank you. Or to understand that the structures on which the country was built were engineered against me? Hard pass. What choice did I have besides constantly code-switching between identities as a means of hiding in plain sight? And wasn’t it just normal to feel like such a mistake as an adult that every time I walked over a bridge or stood on a subway platform, I had to talk myself out of stepping over the edge? I came to believe I was a monster and that I deserved to feel the way I felt. And I didn’t want to turn the page.
But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was.
In the book stacks, I found The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud and more. I saw a new vision of Otherness in those books, and the pages kept turning. At the end of every one was a wall waiting to be broken down—a lurch toward becoming—a new paragraph in a story with an ending far different from what I’d ever dared imagine. Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.
Hope is tricky, however, when what’s waiting at the conclusion is monstrous, literally or figuratively. You can declare your own worthiness to the world, but that doesn’t always mean you believe it yourself. There’s a Nayyirah Waheed quote: “If someone does not want me, it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings.” That is the problem that troubles this book. “Listen, I have an idea,” Grover says. “If you do not turn any pages, we will never get to the end of this book.” And yet…
I’m a spoiler kween; I’ll see you at the end.
The Audacity
I am awake because everything is hilarious. And also terrifying. And also embarrassing.
Don’t pick up the phone, I tell myself as I lie in bed on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, 2016. Go to sleep, my brain hisses, as I slip my hand out from beneath the sheet and unlock my phone. I open the Notes app and my bedroom is suddenly illuminated by garish, gray-blue light, like I’m in a reboot of Poltergeist. Well, I think to myself, it’s not like I have a choice now. I hitch myself up in bed and start to type. There is a joke emergency.
I don’t realize it at the time, but I am entering a season of sleepless nights. It’s the middle of July and I am three weeks into my new job as a person who contributes to this great democracy by making fun of politics online for money. It’s immensely enjoyable but it does have the strange side effect of forcing me to know more about what’s happening in the world, particularly in the political world, and as I said, that’s hilarious and terrifying and deeply embarrassing. So, perfect for the internet. I’ve never been a particularly internet-y person. I like a good meme like the rest of the youths, but I’m never on the cutting edge of internet culture. Though I’ve had a couple of lackluster blogs, I’ve never been a blogger. I read television recaps on the legendary site Television Without Pity for years but never commented or engaged in any meaningful way beyond wishing that they’d miraculously email me and ask me to join the team. I must admit I know what Tumblr is but every time I think I know how to search for something on it I am proven wrong. I am a consumer on the internet, a regular, a normal. And, suddenly, recently, a viral creator. Clearly, the internet is broken.