Even if you are having the best morning in your life thus far — and let’s be honest, you almost certainly are not — this will make it a little brighter. For this rest of us this is probably as good as it’s going to get all day, so let’s take the time to fully appreciate it.

“Today, it was reported that HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ will be promoted by a new mixtape called Catch the Throne. It includes a new track by Big Boi, above (via Nah Right), which opens with spoken samples from the show. Naturally, there’s a lot of stuff about Khaleesi, then, amazingly, he goes, ‘Fuck the Lannisters and everybody ride with ‘em/ Jon Snow and the Night’s Watch, finna slice some iron in ‘em.’”
 — I definitely lost my “what it’s going to be like in 2014” wager from ten years ago.

With Leah McGrath Goodman’s identification of the founder of Bitcoin at Newsweek (not really a slam-dunk case? But, I’ll take it, for now?), the greater Bitcoin-Internet is aghast. How dare this magazine expose this person? Not only are the comments on the piece itself entirely about how outrageous the reveal is, certainly Reddit is AFLAME.

● “This is unbelievable. How can we, as a community, protect Satoshi? It’s on us. He gave us this gift. What can we do for him? I’m thinking bounties on the heads of any criminal that touches Satoshi? Is that too rash?”

● “This is scary as hell. This thing makes me so angry for some reason.”

● “Leah McGrath Goodman, you are a BITCH!”

● “This article is horribly written and seems fake.”

MEANWHILE. Here’s the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen from a news publication.

Hitting the paywall on Newsweek’s piece on true identity of bitcoin’s creator? Free summary: http://t.co/mFdNz1Zive

— Christopher Mims (@mims) March 6, 2014

It’s every dog for himself on the Internet. I guess the Bitcoiners were right, economies really are a race to the bottom of human behavior!

by Sharon Adarlo

“Once you go Asian, you can’t go Caucasian. Once you go yellow — hello!” JT Tran told his audience of hopeful men.

This was in a Manhattan conference room on Valentine’s Day, and JT was running a weekend-long bootcamp with a simple mission: to help Asian men get some skin in the dating game, and maybe even get laid.

The class’s methods and language were taken straight from the pickup artists’ world. And yet, the course also resembled a rollicking post-grad symposium on race. Yellow fever. That infamous OKCupid survey that showed Asian women overwhelmingly preferred white men. The culture clash between an Asian upbringing and a Western world that has different expectations for success. And the ease with which people speak racistly of Asian men — like the way Lorde and her Asian boyfriend were recently torn into on Twitter.

Laboring in a dating world that seems stacked against his kind, JT, whose name is Jerry and who bills himself as a transformational figure in the Asian community, is a man on a mission to transform the Western image of Asian men from asexual nerds into shagworthy dating material — all through the science and/or art of picking up women.

The depth of subjects covered during the course belied the sleazy promotional photos of JT and his students, bathed in the sharp light of a camera flash, sucking face and embracing mostly white, leggy women at clubs and bars, as displayed on his dating company website, ABCs of Attraction.

As a Filipino American woman and feminist, I had a problem with these photos. Are white women the ultimate, idealized dating goal? Aren’t pickup artists inherently scammy and sleazy? It was troublesome. But I’m the wife to another Filipino, and the sister of five brothers, one of whom is comically inept with women, and so I came with an open mind. Can a pickup artist actually make men into better, more confident versions of themselves?

“If you want the girl of your dreams, you have to be the man of her dreams,” JT said, during his lectures. That’s a non-gross principle that just might work. Throughout the weekend’s bootcamp, the eight men in attendance actually changed. A tall and shy Chinese student talked to the most girls during the group’s first nightclub outing. On the next night out, another student, who had a halo of scruffy black hair around his bald head, underwent a makeover, danced with girls, and managed to score a phone number. There was even kissing.

Often clothed in a sports coat with a dress shirt unbuttoned almost mid-chest, his hair styled into a small quiff, JT has a round, open face and is stockily built. He is five foot five. He is 35, from Los Angeles, and Vietnamese American. He is a short, average-looking Asian guy.

But he also has a certain panache. He moves like a man completely sure of himself — a turn-on for some women. A skilled flirt, he doesn’t let his physical attributes deter him.

Raised in a poor family with two brothers and a tiger mom (speaking of stereotypes!) who emphasized school, JT was a cliché: a nerdy, studious, shy Asian boy. He went to prom by himself, before jetting off to major in aerospace engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology.

After college, he worked as a subcontractor for NASA and the Air Force — literally as a rocket scientist, he said — and settled in Los Angeles. He was working out. Driving a Mercedes. A nice pad at the beach. But he had zero luck in the dating game.

“I tried everything. Speed dating. Match. eHarmony rejected me. They told me I was too cerebral and analytical. ‘We have no matches for you,’” he said. “What’s wrong? No girls chose me. It was brutal that my market value in the dating world was non-existent.”

Things changed when he became a student of Mystery, the infamous, funny-hat-wearing pickup artist who was immortalized in Neil Strauss’ book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The lessons, which encompassed psychology and self-improvement, changed his life.

“My God, this is possible,” he said. “This was like discovering light and fire. It was the first time I ever thought that talking to girls is a learnable skill.”

He gave himself the nickname the Asian Playboy and started a blog detailing his successes and failures — a kind of “Sex and the City” chronicle for Asian men.

His recreational pickup practice turned into a profession when he answered a call from a Chinese woman who begged him to help her son, who was getting harassed by neo-Nazis in Toronto. He helped his first student gain confidence to deter his bullies along with the skills to talk to girls.

“I never really thought of making this into a career,” said JT. “Just fighting racism and being a role model to other Asian men.” But by 2005, he’d started his company.

The boot camp had eight students. The men were a motley group. A doctor, a scientist, and everything in between, they made up various ethnicities from Filipino to Chinese. One had come from Newfoundland, Canada. They were of varying levels of attractiveness and fitness, some handsome, some overweight. They had differing levels of experience with women, from limited exposure to a few coming off long term relationships. Their names have been changed to protect their identity.

There was Eugene, the balding Chinese scientist with the heavy Fresh Off the Boat (FOB) accent. He came in wearing a wrinkled military-style shirt that made him look like a reject from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Total ladyboner killer.

Derrick was a cute Korean American who had traveled to the boot camp from Northern Virginia and had told no one about his weekend plans. He was coming off a long-term relationship and was ready to branch out beyond dating other Koreans.

Chris, the Filipino from Montreal, probably had more experience with women than the other guys. He had long-term relationships before and was comfortable in clubs, but felt like he needed a refresher course due to a demanding job.

Henry, the tall shy guy from mainland China, had the same deep voice as Dolph Lundgren.

One student, Ken, was Jewish — and was taking the course a second time. The 20-something sported a nimbus of blonde curls and social skills that deteriorated under a punishing 60-hour work week on Wall Street. JT said he’s had white students like Ken take the course before, which is marketed to not just Asians but also other ethnicities and “not classically good looking” men. (“Imagine if we taught clients who didn’t have any unfair disadvantages (like stereotypes) and all they needed were the techniques. It’s like throwing gasoline and napalm all at the same time on a 10-foot bonfire,” JT once wrote.)

The course started unceremoniously.

“I call this a tough love program but without the love,” said JT, who pointed to a message on the computer screen: “If you are not ready for constructive criticism, then you should not be here! Over this weekend: I may hurt your feelings.”

What followed was a lecture on self-improvement, about putting in the work to become better, more attractive men, and psychological principles about dealing not just with women but also with other guys. JT rattled off his success stories: the virginity lost, the multiple sexmates, students who dated celebrities, serious girlfriends, the weddings. One student repaired his relationship with his parents. Another quit drugs.

“It’s how much you put in,” he said. “The possibilities of your success are limitless.”

Befitting his background as an engineer, he put up sine wave charts on the dance and pull of flirtatious encounters. There was a flood of material. There were intricate tips to remember about voice tonality.

“My God,” one overwhelmed student whispered.

JT had his students act in role-playing games with his trainers and his designated wingwoman, Katie.

Katie was a tall, pretty brunette who exuded an unforced sensuality. In a past life, she was a pageant queen. With her face framed by wavy brown hair, she made the perfect wingwoman as she gently corrected the students with a flirty, sweet smile.

There were three other trainers, all former students: Andrew, an elfin Taiwanese American, was a daredevil. He had played with poi and had old burn marks on his chest that looked like mild eczema scars; Drew, the beefy bro-ish Vietnamese American guy, with the strong, empathic handshake; Jared, the handsome Jewish guy, who had a bedroomy stare and a fine, slender figure.

There were instructions:

“Body language is more important than what you say.”

“If you feel nervous, wiggle your toes. Nobody can see your toes.”

“Attractive women are very rarely single for long. There’s an infinite supply of desperate horny men.”

“Nice guys. They don’t rock the boat, but nobody likes them. It’s okay to be polarizing.”

They also did “kino exercises,” a PUA classic, where the students practiced getting a woman’s attention by turning her shoulder to pivot towards them. They all practiced on Katie and the trainers, who corrected them on their touch, approach, and all the cues of the body.

Two hours in, JT deemed the men ready to hit the field.

It was cold and dirty snow littered the ground.

That night, the DL on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side was full of couples, packs of drunk single chicks coming off work, men prowling in groups, and us. I met up there with my friend Emily Chu, who is Chinese American, pretty, and a lesbian, and who was just as excited and curious about the outing as I was.

After smokes in a chilly patio with a few of the men, JT parked himself next to a lounge area and set his students loose in the loud nightclub.

They approached girls one after another. They kinoed. A few were brushed off by women; the the trainers stood by to quickly give advice to the rejected students. Henry, the Chinese Dolph Lundgren, started talking to a tipsy black woman, who looked like she’d just left her cubicle farm. She exhibited actual interest.

One of the students, a chubby doctor from the hinterlands of Canada, disappeared with a woman to the dance floor. Eugene — poor Eugene! — stuck out like a sore thumb with his baggy military-style clothes and bad haircut. He would approach women but couldn’t sustain a conversation.

The other students had varying levels of success. A few got phone numbers. Henry won the distinction of approaching the most girls that night.

And whenever I approached the bar for a drink, men — white, black, and Asian — would try to kino me. One young Asian guy with a weird Donald Trump pompadour grabbed me by the arms and led me to his group of other Asian friends.

“Did you know you look like this Anime character?” he said, showing me a picture of a short, four-eyed Asian anime girl with black bangs and wearing kiddie clothes; a chibi.

“You suck at this,” I told him.

One 20-something white man pivoted me on the shoulder and introduced me to his other white male buddy.

“Hi. I am married,” I said.

It was strange and funny. I wasn’t trying to attract attention. I had greasy bangs (I was on a no-shampoo kick) and I thought I looked rather innocuous with jeans, leather jacket, and my heavy Harvard Bookstore bag slung over my shoulder. I’d fancied that would serve as a chastity belt — no man shall pass.

“They are wannabes,” said JT, about these other would-be pickup artists at the club.

Despite being subjected to the same maneuvers myself in the club, it was actually gratifying to see JT’s guys approach women, fall, and dust themselves off again — and then succeed. I actually clapped when Henry did a successful pivot on a woman and engaged her in a long chit chat.
Emily spent the night alternately chatting with JT and the students and thumbing through girls on Tinder. She was impressed too. “Online dating has made me lazy,” she said.

The night ended at a pho place in Koreatown, where the students and trainers dissected their encounters or “sets.”

The outing could be summed up by that Samuel Beckett quote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

If it had not been for the pickup scene, JT would have probably fulfilled his childhood dream and trained to be an astronaut, instead of teaching Asians the finer points of approaching women, seduction, dating, and grooming.

But there is a need. His company’s mission dovetails with certain facets about being yellow in a Western hegemony, where white men are at the top of the social and economic pecking order.

Let’s get to the facts first: In that OKCupid survey that basically showed everybody is racist, white men got the most replies from women of every ethnicity.

Looking at white, Asian, and Hispanic women:

“These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%.”

Specifically, Asian women responded to Asian men 22% percent of the time, and to white men, 29% of the time.

“White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else — and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively,” OKCupid concluded.

Data from the Facebook app, Are You Interested, showed that white, Latino, and Asian women again responded most frequently to white men. All the men, except for Asians, responded the most to Asian women. Tellingly, Asian men responded the most to Latinas.

A study on intermarriage by Pew showed that Asian women are twice as likely to marry outside of their race than Asian men.

This data is borne out in the field during boot camp. The Asian women JT and his cohorts encountered during class outings either walked away or explicitly said they were not into Asian men.

“I used to obsess over it,” said JT, about being snubbed by Asian women and the many Asian women with white men he would encounter. “I saw it constantly.”

Why the marked preference for white men?

Is it a Western culture that glorifies white men and stereotypes, slanders and marginalizes other races? Asian men are seen as nerdy, feminine, short nobodies with small penises, black men as loudmouth gangbangers with not much income potential, Hispanic men as short, creepy guys who beat their girlfriends.

I see this stereotyping at my husband’s work, where his non-Asian, mostly white co-workers call him “a small Filipino guy.” (My husband, five foot seven, has the same build as Bruce Lee, slender and muscular.)

“You lose status when you date an Asian guy. Socially, you are at the bottom of the pecking order,” said JT.

Case in point, the vitriol directed towards Lorde and her boyfriend James Lowe, who’s been called every name in the book online.

“That upset the natural order of things,” said JT, who called Lorde’s boyfriend a hipster.

JT also believes Asian American women imbibed this cultural stereotype of weak Asian men and implicitly prefer white men because they are at the top of the power structure in this country. Tall white guys are the type that Asian women go after, at a significantly higher rate, he said.

A dirty little secret in the pickup world is that white professional pickup artists can inflate their success numbers if they just target Asian women, said JT, who described it as a “cheat code.” Many white pickup artists have yellow fever, which is a whole different can of worms.

JT described many professional white pickup artists as former nerds, like himself, and they gravitated towards Asian girls because they are seen as studious and nerdy like themselves. And there’s the whole image of Asian woman that they are drawn to: different and exotic.

“He has social status as a white male. It’s easy to pick up girls, of course, because you are a decent looking white guy and you are targeting Asian women,” said JT.

I asked him repeatedly: “Are Asian women easy?”

“You are marrying into the ruling class,” JT said. “I am not blaming Asian women because they use it to make life easier.”

As for the snubs from Asian women, JT left those hang ups a long time ago.

“Nowadays I don’t give it much thought. The only thing you can control is what you do,” said JT. He himself has a thing for blondes.

He encourages his students, who are mostly Asian, to branch out and see women from other races. A great deal of Asian men in the U.S. will never get married, he said, citing census figures. (In 2012 government data, 36% of Asian men in the U.S. aged 30 to 34 have never married, compared to 22% of Asian women the same age.) So it’s best to expand your dating pool, he said.

“The biggest misconception about Asian men is that they only date Asian women,” said JT, more than once during the boot camp.

The strangest thing happened during boot camp. I found that many of the lessons he gave to his students could apply to me, an Asian woman.

Like many Asian families, my parents were strict towards me and my five brothers — probably stricter than other similar families. They forbade us to hang out with friends and made it difficult for us to participate in after school activities. Academics and church were to be the main focus of our lives.

When I went to college and into the workplace, I was ill-equipped and socially inept. I felt out of place, an alien in my own country.

“They taught us to survive, but not to thrive,” JT said about Asian immigrant parents.

Drawing from the same conclusions as that Wesley Yang story on Asian Americans in New York magazine, I also decided that the tools and standards of success my parents had instilled in me were not going to help me in the workplace or the social arena. I was great dealing with institutions that had quantitative measurements, like earning grades. But navigating the social minefield of college and work was tough. It was difficult for me to make friends and allies in either place, and difficult to make my voice heard above the din of more socially skilled peers.

Some people call this barrier to achievement for Asians the bamboo ceiling — a series of factors and processes that impede the advancement of Asians in the working world. Sure there’s racism in this process, but I blame mostly cultural reasons. We’re taught to be quiet and diffident to authority. There’s a mindset that many Asians take on that hurts their self-esteem: not being white enough, not being American enough.

When I was a crime reporter, I could be assertive and aggressive when I interviewed people in the streets. When it came to dealing with difficult bosses or coworkers, I was meek, and I hated myself for it.

This learned cultural behavior doesn’t help us in the Western working world, and also doesn’t do Asian American men any favors in the dating realm, where they are seen as quiet, weak and passive. Easily cowed. All the while, they’re battling an internal racism that they don’t quite measure up.

So I couldn’t help but see pieces of myself in the students. The goal here, after all, even when couched in the language of pick up artistry, was to better themselves and overcome whatever cultural or learned behavior that was thrown up in their path.

Their success on the second night out was gratifying.

Eugene got a haircut (thank fucking God!) and he bought new, more stylish clothes. He had much better luck on the second night’s outing. At one point, two blondes were vying for his attention.

And Chris chatted up and then made out with a model-beautiful Indian woman on the second club outing.

“Even I was jealous,” said Drew.

Three girls were looking for Max, a Chinese guy. Two girls kissed Derrick.

“Yes, it was awesome,” he said, and smiled.

“There were multiple people on fire,” said Andrew.

After the boot camp was over, I asked JT, “Have you thought of modifying your classes for the corporate world? For both men and women, to combat the bamboo ceiling?”

Taking a course like that would have probably saved me many years of trial and error. The journey to be surer in myself might have been shorter.

I told friends and relatives that I was following these guys, and they chimed in with their take on JT and pickup artists.

A few asked for JT’s contact information. My shy brother, a gifted artist and illustrator, wanted me to give him the skinny on JT and his cohorts.

Another friend, who shall remain nameless and is clumsy with women, said: “I am horny. And I want to get laid. Do you think he can help me?” (“Uh, thanks for telling me,” I said.)

One of my best friends, Suleman, a Pakistani Canuck, wrinkled his nose at the numerous pictures of white women draped over the arms and laps of JT’s Asian students.

“They are just picking up drunk, stupid white girls,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any achievement in that. I think it says more about their racial insecurities than their ability to talk to woman.”

One female friend had strong negative feelings about the whole pickup scene. She called it predatory and manipulative — especially after the dustup over a Kickstarter campaign last year to fund a seduction guide that ostensibly encouraged rape and other creepy behaviors.

“They are objectifying women. We become interchangeable commodities,” she said.

That can be true. The PUA world runs the gamut from the horrific to the fascinating, with lots of stops in-between. (Reading materials on JT’s website, you can get all of it at once: the mercenary methods are also mixed with insight, like that a woman might resist hopping into bed with a strange man because of “the hazards it presents to her mind and body.”)

To me, pickup seems innocuous to other methods of snagging a mate, such as mail-order brides. I have a friend with an Asian fetish who has been cycling through long distance girlfriends from Philippines to Thailand. He would share photos of girls he was talking to online. At one point, he even shared a photo of me on his Facebook wall without my permission.

In light of exploitive practices such as those, JT is closer to someone with his heart in the right place.

“I thoroughly condemn any use of force against women, having been raised by a single mother myself who had to deal with domestic violence. As you yourself saw during the last day of the ABCs Of Attraction lecture, I always tell my students that when a woman says no, you stop (if, in fact, you as the man don’t stop first before she even says it),” he wrote to me.

After talking to girls he dated, he learned more about the vast extent of sexual assault. He took those lessons and the trials his mother had suffered to heart.

“The world is a dangerous place for women,” he told his students during a bit on how to make women feel comfortable and safe during the course of a hookup or date.

This talk, though, preceded a lecture on how to take a (consenting!) woman’s clothes off in two easy steps. In case you need to know: 1. After asking her to take off her shoes, slip off her thong and skirt in one move and 2. Unhook the bra and lift that off along with shirt. (My very deep thoughts on this matter: there should be a merit badge for that.)

When it was all over, students said they would recommend the course.

“I definitely learned a whole lot. If I didn’t take boot camp, I wouldn’t have learned this by myself for sure,” said Chris, the Canadian Filipino, probably the most experienced student.

“I took another boot camp but with a white guy. But I wanted something Asian specific,” said Eugene, the FOBish scientist. “It’s really good with social skills.”

The boot camp’s influence is more evident in JT’s former students turned trainers, who took the class’ lessons to heart. Drew turned his life around because of the course. Before he was henpecked and emotionally abused by his tiny Vietnamese girlfriend, who used her size to demonstrate her power over him, he said.

During a lull in the course, he showed me photos of women he had dated — all who appeared to have the same curves as Daphne Joy, cover model and rumored mother of a child with 50 Cent. Drew’s last girlfriend was a busty, pretty black woman.

Andrew, JT’s Taiwanese American trainer, said the course changed him from a sad college student who was friendzoned a lot to the more confident man he is today.

“I was very good at hiding my emotions, but in reality I was really depressed,” he said. “I took the course and I admitted to myself I had to put the effort in to change.”

This was the same guy who, on the first night of boot camp, necked with a woman he had just met at the bar. Photos of him getting kissed by leggy white chicks adorn the company website.

And there is Jared, the 20-something Jewish trainer with the soulful eyes. It was hard for me to believe that he was a shyer, more diffident person in the past.

But what about the master himself?

While running his dating business, he has had serious relationships, mostly with white women, one of whom got involved in the company. But he said he’s learned to separate “church and state,” especially after the relationship ended.

He’s said he’s looking to get married, but isn’t in a hurry.

“I’m looking for an almost impossible alchemy of class and crass, beauty and practicality, style, wickedness and sexiness with an irreverent attitude who thumbs her nose at the establishment and healthy love of fun,” he wrote to me after boot camp. He described his ideal woman to be in the mold of Audrey Hepburn, whatever race she happens to be.

Most likely she will be non-Asian. He admits to liking taller, gregarious women, but it also comes to simple practicality, he wrote. There are many Asian women who don’t want to date Asian men, he again reminded me.

“Am I little jaded? Sure. It’s hard not to be after 10 years of socializing and seeing female behavior condensed into a four-hour Darwinian struggle for survival that exposes the harsh, hypocritical and politically incorrect side of dating and sexual preference,” he wrote. “But I’m still that rocket scientist who dreamed of being an astronaut when I was younger. I may not be as big of a romantic as when I was younger, but he’s still there. The biggest difference is that I no longer put girls in the ‘fantasy girlfriend zone’ and instead treat them as normal human beings with all their flaws and foibles.”

In March and April alone, JT will be teaching in San Francisco, Miami, Las Vegas and Atlanta. He may teach again in New York in the fall. Prices for the bootcamps are tiered by access, ranging from $499 to $2999.

At the end of the boot camp in February, JT turned to his students and gave them his version of a commencement speech.

“How many days are in a human lifetime? If you live to 100 years, that’s 36,000 days. That’s not a lot. Time is the most important non-renewable resource that you can never get back. You have already spent one third of it. Those first 12,000 days are gone. The best 12,000 days are right here, right now. Do it now. It’s your turn to fulfill your destiny and not just lazily lay back.” He paused. “Congratulations, you are all graduates.”

Sharon Adarlo is a writer and artist based in Newark. She can be found at her personal website or on Twitter.

“New research discovers a nearly fivefold increase in risk for heart attack in the two hours following outbursts of anger.”

I counted 29 uses of the word “disruption” or variations on same in this article, but maybe you can find more!

As I have no musical training I lack the formal vocabulary with which to adequately discuss the kind of beat that carries songs like this along, but I can very definitely say that it is a sound I rather enjoy, signifying as it does both propulsion and possibility. It is difficult to know with music — with anything, really, but music in particular — if these feelings are subjective or universal, so give this one a listen and see if you don’t nod along. [Via]

“The electronic cigarette lounge on Bedford Avenue may soon be able to serve beer and wine after the local community board’s State Liquor Authority committee unanimously approved its license application Monday night. Being able to serve beer and wine will let MoVapes offer ‘vapers’ — as e-cigarette smokers are sometimes known — a laidback place to use the nicotine devices, owner Dr. Sathish Modugu told the board. ‘It’s not about alcohol, it’s about the hobby of vaping,’ he said, reassuring locals that MoVapes would stop serving alcohol if it gets too rowdy.”

“Ten years ago, when you told New Yorkers you were going to eat Japanese noodles, nearly everyone pictured soba. When you say it now, half your friends will ask which ramen-ya is your favorite and the other half will be in line in front of you.”

Hi Polly,

I drink a lot, some weeks nearly everyday, some weeks once or twice, and once I’ve started (usually when I get home from work) I always keep going until I go to bed. I’m OK if I do it alone, but if I communicate with people in any way while I’m not sober and then the next day I don’t remember each and every word of the conversations I start panicking and feeling I did something horrible.

I’ve had a rough life, but I’ve worked hard and, after a couple of psychiatrists that didn’t help much and 1.5 years of therapy that did, I’m finally, at 29, in a very good place. I have very interesting and kind sisters and friends, a job I really like, lots of projects and great dates with myself and crime novels in new restaurants every Friday night.

A year ago I cut my narcissistic abusive parents out of my life for good, and now I’m working (pretty successfully) on being less productive, going on more adventures and not chasing after unavailable pigs who didn’t even read my comics. I’m starting to think men liked me more when I was deranged and full of anger and that’s a bit upsetting, but I’m very happy with my life in general.

A few months ago my therapist and I decided I was ready for a break so I’m not seeing her at the moment, and I was drinking much less during my time with her and never addressed this, so I ask you.

I’m not a loud drunk. I don’t cry, vomit, derail the conversation, break stuff, put myself or others in danger. I’m polite and mostly dance or sit around having fun and being nice to people. Then what’s the problem? How do I stop waking in panic the next day, going over my memories looking for the part where I screwed up and now everyone hates me?

I was raped while I was in a K-hole once (or twice), so I could just be getting triggered by the feeling of not-quite-remembering the night before. Or maybe it’s just my mother inside my head going all “Look at what you’ve done, you relaxed and had fun and probably forgot to stop the horrid real you from shining through, and who’s going to love you now?” I don’t know. I struggle with the idea of loveability being subjective, a lot. A part of me will never stop looking for the exact formula.

Or maybe those are just excuses and I’m just a good ol’ drunk.

I’m not hurting anybody (but me, and only by panicking) and I don’t want to stop drinking if I don’t have to. Can you think of another way of stopping the panic?

Thanks a lot!

Paranoid/Drunk

Dear Paranoid/Drunk,

You should stop drinking.

That paranoia and panic you feel isn’t irrational or avoidable. That panic is your soul pleading with you to put aside your elaborate justifications and your self-protective intellectualizations for once, and accept that you are actively choosing a self-destructive path that will eventually destroy the happiness you’ve worked hard to achieve.

I want to urge you to open your heart and read this without quickly deciding I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I want to urge you to treat yourself with real care for the first time in your life. I know you believe that self-indulgence is self-care. You’re wrong. You want me to help you with this relatively simple matter of feeling less panicked and paranoid in the wake of your binge drinking sessions. It’s not that simple.

All of your growing self-doubt and self-hatred is pushed to the side when you drink heavily, so you have to wade through much more of it whenever you’re sober. No wonder you seem to want to be sober less and less. But when you drink as much as you do as regularly as you do, you lose the ability to reflect rationally on the big picture of your life. When you’re always drunk or a little hungover or gearing up to get drunk again, trust me, you don’t see yourself or the world clearly. You think your sober moments are unreasonably negative when, in fact, they’re rare chances for clarity, during which you question your self-savaging impulses, and grasp for a chance to take care of yourself, to keep yourself safe.

You believe that alcohol allows you to access who you really are. That’s not true. What you access when you drink is a temporary escape from your self-hatred and anxiety. It’s a short-cut you haven’t really earned, that doesn’t stick around for long. The boisterous, dancing, celebratory self after 2 or 3 drinks might be OK, but you never stop there, do you? It sounds to me like you’re incapable of stopping there. You believe that you’re owed more than that, that you have to grab more for yourself because no one else will. And soon the happy drinker is replaced by a sloppy, forgetful drunk.

Wanting to remember what you said to other people when you were wasted doesn’t make you a control freak. It makes you a conscious, considerate human being who doesn’t make excuses for her selfishness. Do you think you’re a good listener to your friends when you’re drunk? If you can’t remember what you said, how do you remember what THEY said? Do you care what they say at all? How do you think it feels to have a relationship with someone who doesn’t remember a lot of your interactions?

But thanks to your narcissistic parents, you may not be able to hear what I’m telling you. You may think I’m saying that YOU’RE BAD. You may think I’m saying that no one will ever love you, because you are horrid and rotten to the core. That’s the black and white thinking of the damaged. That’s not what I’m saying. In fact, what I’m saying is that you’re turning your back on your vulnerability at the exact moment when it holds the key to moving forward. You’re trying to push your sadness away, to write it off as irrational, instead of confronting it and accepting it and learning from it. Maybe you THOUGHT your way through your problems in therapy, but you haven’t FELT your way to the truth yet. You can recognize intellectually that you were once open and nice and you were misunderstood and hurt and rejected by a cruel world, but you haven’t mourned that loss completely and given yourself permission to feel disappointed and broken. Instead, you’re determined to sally forth armed with ideas about what you should and should not accept, shutting out all naysayers and giving yourself exactly what you THINK you need along the way.

You ARE good, but you are going to lose that goodness if you can’t ever make yourself vulnerable, if you can’t feel your feelings and admit that you’ve gotten off track, that you can’t survive by shutting the world out and drinking until you feel alive again. You’re hoping that you’re not THAT crazy. And when I tell you that you have to stop drinking yourself into a stupor and dare to be a hurt, crumpled, flawed, sober person who has made more than a few mistakes, you will hear me saying YOU ARE CRAZY AND BAD. This is your big challenge right now: to listen very closely and accept the fact that the people who SEEM to reject you don’t loathe you as much as you think, and that the people who SEEM to accept you completely may have problems with certain aspects of your behavior that they’re afraid to voice. Or, they’re damaged like you, and they’ll flee the second you show them your real, sensitive, emotional self.

I suspect that you’ll find some inaccurate details here and use that to justify ignoring ALL of this. You might think that if I’m right about you, then everyone else who’s ever rejected you (including your mother) and implied that you’re nuts (including your mother) will ALSO be right about you. But that’s not true. People can ask you to change your behavior without rejecting you to the core. You don’t know that because you don’t have good role models for that in your life, and you don’t do it yourself. You either embrace people or reject them. They are either great or terrible. That’s what deeply damaged people do.

You know what else damaged people do? They get very, very good at telling themselves elaborate stories about their rights and entitlements, how healthy they are, what’s wrong with the rest of the world. When you were younger, this was an adaptive strategy, a matter of survival. As you get older, though, you are using these same tools to shut other people out, to become a self-reliant planet of one. Instead of NOT getting blackout drunk, you’re simply going to stop calling people to talk. Problem solved. And slowly but surely, you yourself will become a judgmental narcissist. Where do you think they come from, anyway? They grow from the wreckage of damaged, overly criticized, under-loved, self-protective humans like yourself.

The first step to becoming a narcissist is making your own rules for everything. “Other people consider this alcoholism, but they don’t know shit. All I’m doing is going on great dates with myself, and making myself happy. I won’t let any more unavailable pigs tell me that I’m not lovable. I am lovable if I decide I am.”

You know why men liked you more when you were deranged and full of anger? Because that was real. Right now, you’re pretending. You went through therapy, but never told your therapist about your drinking. Maybe you were drinking less then, as you say, but it seems strange that it never came up, and that you started drinking more once you quit therapy. When you lie to a therapist? That’s not therapy. That’s bullshit practice, easily and cheaply sourced from any local bar.

You also say that you were raped once — or maybe twice — while you were in a fucking K-HOLE?! Dude. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

To state the obvious, you have been through some horrific shit. And I really am sorry about that. But your confusion and inability to trust yourself or take full account of your actions will continue until you stop bullshitting yourself and everyone else. This is your moment. Today is your day to look at the truth, to accept the truth, to feel the panic and the pain and the hurt of where you are. You have constructed something that won’t last. The walls are rotting around you. It’s time to look at what’s true here, without fear, without hiding.

You were judged badly. You were hurt. You felt like nothing you did was ever right. You took on your mother’s voice and adopted it and now it’s in your head. You gave yourself shit constantly, and then you learned how to turn those voices off: By drinking too much, by giving up. When someone else criticizes you, you have an easy solution: you shut them out completely because you can’t stand one more harsh word. You used to be furious at yourself all the time, for being unproductive, for falling behind on everything. So now you’re over that. You think that’s the solution, treating yourself like a petulant baby who needs what she needs no matter what. You pretend you don’t care about being productive, that you’re nicer than you are, but the anger is still there. Alcohol helps you to pretend.

So today, you have to try something really hard. You have to try to look at the truth without overgeneralizing and thinking that you’re ALL BAD. You have to listen to other people, and allow them to give you guidance and support. You have to choose a path that leads away from narcissism. That means recognizing that other people with opinions and suggestions aren’t ALWAYS just as unfair and selfish as your mother. You have to be vulnerable, feel your sadness, feel your grief, without believing that it means you’re weak. You have to embrace your truly open, available friends and stop chasing men (and friends and family) who prefer the pretend, drinking, boisterous good-time-girl to the flawed, messy, sober, scared you. You have to accept that flawed woman and love her fiercely and try to protect her from rapists and K-holes and friends who think it’s kind of funny that she gets fall-down drunk regularly, or friends who don’t care enough to ask if she’s been drinking too much, or friends who also drink way too much, or friends who get weird and squirrely the second she shows the slightest needy or negative emotion.

You have to return to your therapist or find a new therapist and tell that person the truth about your drinking and everything else. You have to tell everyone the truth. You have to ask them to challenge you, instead of playing along with your lies.

You may laugh off this reply. I know I would’ve done that, when I was hiding and rationalizing my bad behavior, telling myself that I never hurt anyone, telling myself that anyone who criticized me was just damaged or jealous. But this happiness you say you have is tenuous at best. Your identity is still forming, and you’re warping your sense of yourself with this boozy horseshit routine of yours.

Today is the day that you decide to care for yourself, flaws and all. You need to make a commitment to yourself, to stop serving up drinks that keep you confused and hazy and bewildered and full of empty bluster. Do you know what that empty swagger of yours is worth? It’s worth nothing. You might love basking in the illusion that you’re carefree, but no one else is buying it, not really.

Today, you can choose to reach for a life that really IS carefree. You’ll have the earned swagger of someone who truly listens, and remembers everything. You will be productive again — without beating yourself up over it — and you’ll feel real satisfaction in your accomplishments for the first time, instead of feeling nothing. You’ll indulge yourself with rewards that make you feel relaxed and proud of yourself, instead of making you panic. You’ll return to therapy and you will stop drinking and after a few weeks of sobriety, the world will shift, and you will SEE where you’ve been clearly. And you’ll see where you want to go.

You will stop pretending. You will go on a run, make a great dinner for yourself, read until you fall asleep, and wake with the sunrise to write your comics. You will love yourself, and the world will love you, too. You will be angry and lost and regretful and distracted and unproductive sometimes; you will be messy and emotional and way too sober, and you will be loved.

Polly

What are you running from? Write to Polly and find out!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Alan Levine.