Chapter 36
My pep talk must be an inspirational one because Tara and Niles become an official item soon after. Apparently Niles was wanting
to make a move and they were both waiting it out. Life can be like that, one big game of chicken.
Without the clubs and all the love affairs—or lust affairs I guess I should call them, now that I can see their flimsy frames
in daylight—I need other things to focus on. I set myself a goal of reaching one hundred rejections of any kind. It feels
overly analytical to have a number in mind like that, but I like the clarity it brings. How it’ll mean I’m really trying and
going for things that I wouldn’t have in the past.
I work hard on a script, three full acts. It’s an expansion of the concept I dreamed up on the mountain about the woman who
falls to her death and confronts all her regrets. It feels good to sit down and see something through to the end. I always
kind of knew what I was doing, what I was avoiding, by jumping from script to script, the same way I knew what I was doing
by jumping from body to body. But it’s amazing how much you can justify and deny your own actions until suddenly it all comes
crashing down so you can rise again.
I submit the play to a bunch of contests and theater companies and agents and managers, and by the time September arrives, I’ve gotten thirty-eight rejections and am waiting to hear from a couple dozen more.
Sometimes success doesn’t start as success, I keep reminding myself.
More often success starts as failure that you refuse to interpret as failure.
You look at it as a stepping stone instead of a sunken stone.
It feels good to take a hammer to the walls of fear I’ve been living within for so long, so I do an audit of the rest of my
life to see where else I can shatter old habits. One thing that bubbles up is how scornful I’ve been of anyone who works a
corporate job, even though I’ve never done it myself. I decide I’ll make up my mind about it from the inside, so I apply to
a bunch of Wall Street firms in Manhattan because those really are the worst of the worst, all those men sitting around making
billion-dollar trades to their fraternity brothers, off gallivanting on their yachts while the rest of us hustle around driving
Ubers or pouring coffee or playing drums at subway stations to put a roof over our heads. At least that’s the view I’ve always
had.
The job applications ask for a résumé, which I don’t have, so I upload a photo of a sunflower whose petals are just starting
to unfurl in the sunlight. That’s really the most honest résumé there is. Anything else is just ego. I’m tempted to reach
out to Chris to ask him for connections in the finance industry, but I don’t. This is something I’ve got to do alone.
I don’t get any interviews, what a shocker, but the rejections don’t get me down. I just add them to the tally. Then I download
one of those apps where you can trade stocks with your own money because who needs the Wall Street gatekeepers anyway?
I buy shares of different companies, diversifying picks so I don’t have all my eggs in the same basket. One of my portfolio
companies is an airline that’s been in the news for having some plane crashes. I load up on that one because I figure they’ll
get their act together and come back stronger than ever—I know all about that. Then I buy this woman’s digital health company
and some shares of Uber because I’m hoping they’ll pay their drivers more if their stock price goes up. I’m strategic like
that.
It’s pretty addicting to watch my few hundred dollars go up and down and back up again. Some days I lose half my money but other days it triples; it’s quite the rush. I’m still an adrenaline junkie even though I’m off the drugs. I just get my thrills in different ways.
I text Hal for investing advice. She doesn’t make any snide comments about how I’ve been a terrible friend since she married
Astrid. She just comes over and we sit out in the garden like old times.
She gets on her high horse telling me all about how I shouldn’t be investing in individual stocks because that’s way too risky.
“You should get an index fund that’s benchmarked to the S&P 500,” she advises. “And then just let your money sit there for
decades without touching it and come back and check on it when you need it for retirement.”
“Where’s the fun in sitting and waiting?” I ask. “I like to be in the heart of the action, you know that.”
Hal gets a kick out of me, says it does seem like a healthier outlet than the booze and the bodies and all that, so she’s
supportive. “You should join one of those social media forums where day traders talk about what stocks to buy and sell and
all that,” she says. “You’d be a natural ringleader.”
It’s a decent idea, so I make an account right there. My username is @RedstockingRebel and I immediately like the forum’s
energy. Everyone’s trying to screw Wall Street and help Main Street. The issue is that nearly everyone on there is a man,
so I start a chat called “Women’s Revolt.” Within a few weeks, there are over five hundred women on there and they’re all
talking about how they’re tired of men making all the money, talking their big games about investing. They want in too. It’s
about time.
Who knew that stock trading would actually be part of my contribution to women’s liberation, but I guess it makes perfect
sense because money is power. You can sit back and point your middle fingers at the system like I used to do, or you can wiggle
in through the window and make it better from within.
Building a stock trading community for women injects me with a similar type of empowerment to what I was hoping to feel by making Mr. Hubert pay for his evils.
It makes me realize that I don’t always need to route my rage into direct revenge.
I can channel it into different avenues too, different outputs of the same origin.
Hal is impressed with my work. “When our start-up goes public,” she tells me, “we can get everyone in your chat to buy the
stock and push the price high. Rig the system, but legally.”
Tara and Jenni join the Women’s Revolt community too, and the whole thing brings the Redstockings closer again. Though it’s
not really the trading that does that. It’s how I’ve finally gotten out of my own way enough to see that Jenni and Hal didn’t
betray me by getting married. It wasn’t the sword in the back that it felt like at the time, just a blade cutting them free
from the ropes I’d tied around their wrists.