Dear reader,
Telling one another what brand of soap you use in the shower is the type of thing that your foreign language instructor will teach with great urgency, so much so that you will be very disappointed when you come to find that it rarely comes up in conversation while traveling internationally. Most of the time, though, you can count on a pretty mundane conversation that will help you practice conjugation and implementing some new words. Imagine how taken aback I was when, at the ripe age of 16, my Italian conversation partner Laura told me she uses two different soaps. “Dove for the body,” she explained in Italian, “and Ivory for the face.”
My jaw was on the floor. The way she referred to her face and body as the face and the body made her indication that she used two soaps seem less like a fun fact and more like a social more that I hadn’t been aware existed. The ease with which this rolled off her tongue, the savoir-faire, the “One simply must. . .” of it all – to this day it fills me with envy.
But the lasting impact of her revelation lies in the fact that I never expected that some of my peers had such sophisticated opinions in regards to their grooming rituals. To have a preference of which soap goes on which part of your body is not something I had achieved by age 16, and I was taken aback to find that someone else had. To make matters worse, this was not just any old classmate. This was my conversation partner. This is someone I had trusted with valuable, vulnerable information in response to questions such as “What does your mother cook for dinner?” and later, when we learned the past tense, “What is your favorite childhood memory?”
I just couldn’t believe that Laura, who damn near knew my mother’s baked ziti recipe by heart thanks to our intimate conversations, was moonlighting as a soap savant. I had straight A’s at school, but I feared I was falling behind the curve when it came to how I interacted with my own flesh and blood.
Suddenly I began to wonder – was everyone but me having sex with their boyfriends?
I know the jump from body wash to bodies copulating sounds like a non sequitur, but you have to understand that I was shocked. I thought I knew my peers so well – I was on the student council, for Christ’s sake – but I had no clue what they were doing to their skin. It was only natural I began to ask other questions. What deodorant was everyone using? What are their after school snacks? Has everyone else outgrown after school snacks? Are my snacks immature? Should I swap out my peanut butter crackers for, I don’t know, fruit smoothies with greek yogurt? I had a lot of questions about snacks. But the main question that haunted me was, Is everyone else fucking without me?
This was the first time in my life I felt anxious about falling short of a societal benchmark. There are many imaginary landmarks on the road through adolescence and I fear they aren’t coming to a halt anytime soon, even now as I enter my mid-20s. First kisses. First jobs. Buying a car. Buying a home. Marriage. Landing the dream job. Finding the perfect cast iron pan. All of these are quintessential to the American folklore of “growing up,” but who knows when and if any of them will happen? Comparison is the thief of joy, I know. Still, sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for air, wondering, What kind of soap is everyone using?
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I love you!
XO, Matthew