Excerpt from Stuck in Downward Dog

ow did my two best friends—the girls I’d once done everything with at the same time, from getting our ears pierced to getting our periods—get so far ahead of me and so sure of themselves? Okay, so they had their differences. Mitz was a traditionalist. Although she had a very good career, being a chef and caterer only prepared her better to cook meals for her family-to-be in her future role as full-time housewife and mother. And while Olivia might not make pesto from scratch, she knew which of the city’s caterers did. In the end their dinner parties were both successes, each in their own way. And while Mitz might wait for a man to open a door while Olivia would open it herself, they both knew which door needed to be opened—the one that led them right to the next opportunity, whether it was a new client, a new promotion or a new, better, more beautifully decorated home.

I looked down at my split ends, chipped nail polish and the thin layer of brown cat fur that didn’t blend into my blue sweater vest. Where my friends were decisive, strong and perfect, I was indecisive, weak and so full of flaws that I didn’t even know which to start fixing first.

I thought about this as I walked west on College, through the hospital district to the base of the university campus, where students filled patios and emptied their beer steins. I walked along the edge of Chinatown to Little Italy, the most romantic neighborhood in the city, where couples strolled the street after intimate dinners, stopping on the sidewalk for gelato or a spontaneous kiss. A community made for coupledom. A place I no longer belonged.

I opened the door to my basement apartment, and Pumpernickel jumped down from the window ledge in the kitchen, galloped over to my feet and reached up to put his paws on my thighs. I dropped my brown-and-orange argyle yoga bag and reached down to pick him up. I carried him into the bedroom, grabbed a notebook and pen from under the futon and then returned to the roaster box, where I sat, putting Pumpernickel at my feet, which he sniffed and then flopped on top of.

If my friends were perfect and I was stuck in a rut, what I had to do was become more like them. I wasn’t about to plagiarize them, but a little harmless imitation-as-flattery couldn’t hurt.

I needed to start with our similarities and build from there, but as I thought about all of their accomplishments I realized the only thing I had in common with my two best friends was the yoga class we had, until today, attended together. Getting better at yoga was a start—at least that way when we joined a new club in the fall, any instructor who watched us chanting “OM” in unison might think that if we were at the same level in yoga, maybe we were at the same level in other areas. Maybe the yoga teacher would never know in how many ways I lagged behind my two best friends. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to be just as good as they were at everything else in life.

And then I had an idea. Since I had nowhere to go but up, all I needed to do was create a list of the ideals that Olivia and Mitz embodied, the rules they lived by that made Olivia and Mitz—OM—so perfect, and then methodically implement the list, item by item. I would give myself a deadline and, I thought, suddenly feeling it all come together, a party in which I would have all my friends over to witness how much I had accomplished.

Which is how, four days after my twenty-eighth birthday, I put pen to paper, and came up with The OM list.

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