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had become so afraid to commit to anything—to express an opinion, to sign up for anything long-term, to buy any clothing that made any kind of statement about herself, lest she find herself boxed in on something she wasn’t wholly sure of yet—that she found herself incapable of showing up anywhere as human being enough to attract another. She didn’t have many friends at Brown, or any, really; friends, too, require a declaration of some sort, and she just wasn’t willing to do it. You have to join a club (but what club?). You have to go to a game (but are you a game-going person?). You have to have a passion and an interest, and as time went on, she found all such exploration—despite what she said in her own defense to that counselor—a waste of time as she began to feel time breathing down her neck. She went on a couple of dates with a few guys she met in classes or at the V-Dub, but no one serious, since the exposure of only her negative spaces and not her positive, active ones created a self-consciousness that stymied her. On the rare occasions she had sex with someone, she wouldn’t make a sound, then be so disgusted by her own participation—the way her body reacted to someone else’s desire, or its own—that she would spend the postcoital period not admitting to even having been there during the act: “Was it good for you?” “Was what good for me?
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