I’m Special

Preface

Growing Up Gimp

Getting Hit by a Car (and Other Amazing Things That Can

Sometimes Happen to You if You're Really Lucky!)

The Devil Wears Urban Outfitters

Young Unprofessional

What We Talk about When We Don't Talk about Money

Being Gay Is Gay

Finding Love (and Losing It) in a Sea of “Likes”

Best Friends Forever, Best Friends Never

How Not to Drink or Do Drugs

The Rx Generation

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

To Mom and Dad:

Thanks for fucking me up just the right amount.

Preface

HEY, MILLENNIALS! YOU NEVER
thought for one second that this world wasn't meant for you to use, to exhaust, to squeeze the juices out of, did you? Your whole life you've been given the privilege to fuck up, to phone in the most important moments, to sleepwalk your way to your college diploma, and throw love away like a crumpled gum wrapper. Everyone is responsible for your vague anxieties, relationship ADD, lack of direction, and crippling fear of intimacy. Everyone is responsible for you but you. So take a bow and give thanks to everything that has made our generation possible. Give thanks to the Internet, texting, Skype, Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, Grindr, and Tinder for making face-to-face communication obsolete and terrifying. Give thanks to the loneliness that radiates from a bright computer screen and the sour surprise that comes from having hundreds of Facebook friends and not a single person to go to dinner with. Give thanks to your parents, who wanted to give you more, more, more. They showered you with affirmations and praise since their own parents never did it for them. Being a baby boomer meant that when they fell and scraped their knees, they found the Band-Aids on their own. It meant that they could disappear with their friends for hours without having to check in with dear old Mom. If our parents present their love to us in HD, our parents' parents decided to go in a more lo-fi direction.

Some people believe that part of being a parent is being able to give their child what they never had, and if that's the case,
this
is what the baby boomers must've lacked: Parents who acted as a pair of helicopters, hovering over their children every second of every day. Parents who poked, prodded, and engaged in the careful use of “I” statements when upset. Parents who not only bought Neosporin for you but practically lathered you in it from head to toe. The definition of what it means to be a good mom or dad has changed, and now we're all paying a special price for it one way or the other. By trying to shield their children from the messiness of life, our parents have created a generation that is bound to step in all of the dog shit.

Even if your parents took a more hands-off approach to raising you, you still could find other ways to be acknowledged. Ever since you signed up for that free trial of AOL with a dial-up modem in elementary school, you've been encouraged to share every brain fart, every hangover, every boring Saturday afternoon, so you do it! You share! Your latest tweet / status update, “Beautiful weather today. Going to eat a tuna sandwich. YUM,” received six “likes” from borderline strangers, which means that people really do
want to know what you're thinking all the time. They might not know it consciously but deep down they crave it. It's like a drug. HIT ME. HIT ME WITH YOUR COMMENTARY ABOUT THE WEATHER AND LOVE FOR TUNA SANDWICHES, PLEASE. I NEED IT.

You're special because whenever you date someone, you get to list yourself as “in a relationship” on Facebook. Showing your friends and acquaintances that you've finished first in the rat race for love is like giving yourself a virtual hand job, and every time a frenemy stalks your page and sees that you're taken, a little bit of your cum gets in their eye.

You're special because you have so many awards. You participated in a slew of extracurricular activities, and after each one came to an end, you were bestowed a meaningless superlative like “Most Spirited” or “Best Sense of Humor on the Kickball Team.” Everyone got an award—it was the original version of No Child Left Behind—but yours held a greater weight than all the others. Afterward, you'd run home and place your new award next to your kindergarten diploma and a trophy you received for having the best ant farm in the second grade and then just sit back and smile, knowing that you were on the right track to success. Because the person who wins “Best Sense of Humor on the Kickball Team” doesn't become a fuckup. No, sir! They become astronauts, politicians, or, at the very least, a manager of a Sport Chalet. This was a sign that you were destined to do big things. Think about it. If you aren't going to be successful, who the hell is?

You're special because you have a blog. You're special because your father used to carry you to bed whenever you fell asleep on long car rides. You're special because your ex once made you a mixtape. You're special because you saw an Olsen twin at a concert once and she told you she liked your shoes. You're special because you get five OkCupid messages a day. You're special because an overweight balding man took your picture at a party and put it on his website. You're special because 212 people are following you on Twitter and you're only following 126. You're special because you did really well on the SATs and one of your teachers called you precocious. You're special because you grew up believing you could do anything you wanted and couldn't imagine thinking any other way. You're special because there are TV shows about you and your friends and because the
New York Times
won't stop publishing essays about twentysomethings. You're special because everyone is paying attention to your generation, wondering what kind of mark you'll make, and you like feeling noticed.

I know why you're special: because I'm special, too. In fact, if you looked up
Millennial
in the Urban Dictionary, you'd probably see a heavily filtered selfie of me. I've dipped my fingers in every cliché twentysomething pot imaginable. Helicopter parents who are obsessed with my every move? Check. A constant need for validation on the Internet? Check. An on-trend addiction to prescription pills? Sadly, check. I dated all the rotten boys, took all the internships that led to nowhere, drank all the wine, and swallowed all the drugs. I treated my life like it was a grand experiment, and then I had the audacity to be surprised when everything blew up in my face. Pretty dumb, right? Well, that's probably because, on top of being a typical young psycho, I'm retarded. No, really. I am. I was born with mild cerebral palsy (or, as I like to call it, cerebral lolzy), which means I walk with a limp and have little sprinklings of brain damage. So I'm not only special in the delicate snowflake kind of way, I'm also “riding the short bus” special! But despite my disability, I really am just like you. I'm someone who's trying to stop binging on poisonous penis and pad Thai delivery and learn how to actually, you know, love myself. It's not easy! Millennials have been told repeatedly that we're a giant failure of a generation and, unsurprisingly, many of us have started to believe it. But if you look back on history, you'll notice that every generation has been scrutinized and stereotyped—paging slacker Generation X and
Reality Bites
—so try not to sweat the criticism! Tell your insecurities to GTFO and just accept that our legacy might be a little un-chic. Once you do that, you can stop worrying about being the person the world expects you to be and start figuring out who it is you actually are. It may seem like an overwhelming journey, but I'll be right there with you. And if sharing any of my mistakes makes you feel less insane and alone, then I guess I don't regret anything I've done. Actually, that's not true. I regret running into oncoming traffic and getting hit by a car. But more on that later.

Growing Up Gimp

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND
why you are the way you are, you must go back to the beginning and take a long, hard look at your family.

This is my family. This is where I come from.

My older sister, Allison (who, in her early twenties, renamed herself “Allisun,” because you can do those kinds of things now and no one will even bat an eyelash), is a free-spirited vegan who is part of a small community of Hula-Hoopers in Brooklyn. (They call themselves “Hoopers,” and they perform dances at Burning Man–like festivals. Some of them actually Hula-Hoop
for a living
.) “There's nothing cooler than being a Hooper,” my sister told me one night while Hula-Hooping for me in her bedroom. She was using a hoop that had LED lights and retails for $360. “We're taking over!”

Although our five-year age gap prevented us from spending too much time together growing up, I do recall her being a part of some milestones in my life—the most important of which being the very first time my father learned that I might be gay. I was fourteen years old and still very much in the closet, but after my sister spent a semester at a liberal arts college, she came home one morning for Christmas break, took one look at me, and said, “You know you're gay, right?”

“No, I'm not!” I screamed at her, cleaning the dust off my Billie Holiday record and carefully putting it back in its case.

“It's okay, Ryan! Just be yourself!”

“Um, hello? I
am
myself. I don't think it's humanly possible to be anyone but me.”

My father then walked into the room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and asked us what the hell was going on.