Work Text:
Marissa goes back to therapy the summer after returning from Greece. Turns out when she picks the therapist herself, she actually gets something out of it. She gets sober after graduating from Berkeley with a degree in psychology (class of 2011).
She starts taking anti-depressants around her 25th birthday. She gets diagnosed with bipolar II and changes medication sometime in the year she turned 28.
And then, sometime around age 30, she begins to realize that she, Marissa Cooper, is — maybe, possibly, hopefully, finally — a functional person. That Marissa Cooper — she of the fun flask and Tijuana alleyway overdoses, the girl who gets drunk at school dances, who shoplifts for the thrill of it, who runs away from home — is actually doing just fine now.
Marissa Cooper. The girl who couldn’t stop causing drama, the girl who everyone blamed for fucking things up just as they were getting good. The girl whose parents had no time for, who treated her as though her pain were a terrible imposition, cutting into the lives they were much too busy fucking up.
Well, that girl grew up. And she’s just fine now.
***
She decamps to the East Coast after she graduates from Berkeley, heading to NYU for her MA in psychology. She starts work on her PhD in clinical psychology at Columbia. She doesn’t spend much time in Newport these days.
No, she's a New Yorker now. She drinks her coffee black and still wishes she could smoke most days. But she doesn’t, and she’s proud of herself. She misses the burning taste of vodka too — she especially misses the fuzzy numbness it gave all her sharp edges, melting the pain and fear into something manageable. Containable.
But inside, she still thinks she’s maintained the beating heart of Marissa Cooper. Not the one that everyone always saw, the spiralling manifestation of pain and trauma and fear and mental illness; not the poor little rich girl everyone wrote off as dramatic and overwrought and hopeless. But the real one: the sweet, tender, hopeful one. The one that is defined by something more than pills or booze or cigarettes or shoplifting or risky sex.
The sunny, thoughtful girl who sees the best in everyone while still seeing the nuance. The one who wants to help. Who feels the burden of all her privilege — her father’s stolen money that pays for her Marc Jacobs dresses and Chanel purses, her prep school tuition and her debutante ball; her coltish, heartbreaking beauty — that she is expected to both embrace and remain unaware of, even though men have been catcalling her since the age of 11. The beauty that makes strange men and boys desire her, feel entitled to her, even as they seem to fear her, blaming her for the choices they make. The beauty that somehow brings out a million hidden beasts, seeking to possess her, when all she ever tried to be was kind — and then everyone always seems to blame her when it happens, asking why she was so kind in the first place if she wasn’t asking to be hunted down like prey.
She had learned, from a young age, that there was something glittery about her that other people seemed to resent as much as they coveted it — and she learned to be nice so they wouldn’t try to hunt her down and make her pay for whatever this something is — the something she still doesn’t understand.
Is it in the beauty she barely sees most days, too focused on the bitter black rot inside of her, spreading through her veins like poison? The beauty her mother taught her to guard like a prize.
Is it in the lanky frame she feels desperate to keep? (Her mother’s constant reminders about how lucky she is, how men think girls like her are so elegant, how she must do what she can to ensure her figure is not ruined by puberty — desperate to hold off whatever terrible future lies in wait. She gains at least twenty pounds on antidepressants, and she stops weighing herself and starts hanging up on her mother whenever Julie mentions her daughter's weight).
It is something to do with the it-factor she apparently possesses — that cool, unnerving quality she has of not caring too much (it’s called disassociation, she thinks, wryly, you should really try it sometime) — shot through with the occasional lapse into heartbreaking vulnerability (it’s called being depressed while being beautiful, she thinks, and she’d gladly share the burden of this if she could). The way everyone thinks she does everything so perfectly. As though she doesn’t try — only a man could ever imagine a girl like her doesn’t have to try — every girl knows the real perfection is in hiding your tracks, making it all look effortless. No one wants to see you sweat, to see you ruin the illusion, after all. As if someone could ever be Marissa Cooper without trying so hard she feels like she might break with the weight of it.
She has grown up knowing that when you have this quality, the one that makes people love you and fear you and covet you and resent you all at once, everyone feels entitled to you. To your time, your attention, your love — and if they don’t get it, they call you stuck-up or bitchy or cold or bitter. Men, especially.
***
Back at Berkeley, she nearly fails a senior literature seminar called The Muse in Literature when she starts asking why all the muses are women — why all the writers are men — why we treat their narratives as truthful representations of the tragic muse, why she gets boiled down to some tragic, flawed, inevitably doomed beautiful object for the male protagonist’s self-discovery.
Why the muse never gets to write her own story, chart her own course, develop outside of the gaze of the male storyteller. Throw off the shackles of being a muse — of being either a tragedy or poetry or both — and become a person, with her own wants and agenda. Why the muse never gets to tell her own story.
Why her story always gets filtered through the nostalgic gaze of some emotional, lovesick man who only ever saw her for the role she played in his own journey — in his own emotional development into a fully formed person, while she remains a flat caricature. Feminine and therefore uncomplicated, illogical, an illusion. Never changing, never growing, doomed to be forever seventeen. Forever a man’s version of seventeen: uncomplicated and made to be looked at, sung about, written about, depicted in paint and charcoal and photographs.
Not the messy heart of a real seventeen-year-old girl, raging against a world she barely understands but can already tell hates her for existing; joyful and sour, excited and desperate for something more than this. Gleeful and giddy with her friends, angry and fearful, happy and free, powerful in ways she doesn’t realize, powerless in ways understands all too well.
Instead - ironed flat in the memories of a thousand of male writers and artists and musicians, robbed of all her complexity and capriciousness — her depth and nuance, her righteous bitterness, her complicated joy, her ambition, her uncertainty — herself. The girl who does the telling, the defining, the depicting — not the object who is told about, defined, depicted. By someone who will never, can never know the pain and fear and humiliation, the rage and nascent, little-understood power of being a teenage girl. By someone who only remembers her, only depicts her through his own teenaged understanding of the world — and is somehow never challenged on the simplicity of that unexamined narrative, who gets to grow into the man who tells the story of his teenage fantasies and hurts and dreams and fears without anyone calling them jejeune.
And this is somehow the literary perspective? Bullshit.
***
In her late twenties, she learns to take care of herself first: that she doesn’t have to help every sad-eyed boy who wanders into her path, no matter how much he depends on her, or how much her heart might ache for him. She learns that she doesn’t have to sacrifice her happiness or her peace or her boundaries just to make the sad-eyed boys of the world happy.
She learns how to be kind without being nice. She learns that it's okay to set boundaries - with friends, with her parents, with boyfriends. With men - male friends, bosses, neighbours, brothers of boyfriends - who want too much of her tender heart and then blame her for it. She learns that it is okay to distance herself from people who can't understand this. That she doesn't have to set herself on fire to keep anyone else warm.
She learns that maybe there is a life to be had, a purpose to be found that is greater than making other people happy. A purpose greater than looking after everyone else first and herself last. She learns to channel that desperate need to help — to make up for the privileges she never earned - into something productive.
When she became a fully licensed psychologist she cries a little for the girl she used to be.
And she hopes that she can be there for some other little girl lost — the way no one ever managed to be there for her. To help other teens who don't know it's not their fault - not their fault that their brains don't produce the right chemicals, that their parents don't care, that they can only find peace at the bottom of a bottle of pills or a bottle of vodka or when they're throwing up their dinner. That they aren't a failure, a bad person, an aberration.
She wants them to learn, as she had, that, as it turns out, she isn’t some tragic, beautiful, hopelessly doomed archetype who can’t stop destroying everyone around her, doomed to die young and propel others onward in their stories. Selfish and self-destructive and tiresome.
Turns out she’s mentally ill. And it turns out there are things she can do to treat the melancholia that seems to lives under her skin, the deep empty ache that seems to exist inside her very cells. That she can take a pill, go to therapy, and feel the sadness, the anxiety, the crushing weight of existence…slowly disappear into normalcy.
And she learns that maybe, just maybe, she can sparkle without owing anyone a goddamn thing.
***
And suddenly, she is 32, and she's still doing just fine. Better than fine, in fact.
She has a great little apartment in the West Village, and she has friends who don't just want a chance to party with the legendary Marissa Cooper. She loves her work, in a way that she hadn't known was possible. She feels so alive, so purposeful, so focused every time she sits down with a patient.
She goes to yoga most days (and she'll roll her eyes at anyone who says its because she's a California girl at heart) and walks everywhere. She tries to eat a reasonably balanced diet - which she knows is good for her mental health - but she still eats a lot of popcorn in the evenings when she watches trash television, texting furiously with Summer the whole time. She still blasts Stiff Little Fingers when she's at home, as though to prove that she's not a completely blissed-out self-actualized person. She's still a work in progress. And maybe she always will be, but that's okay too.
She's happy, she realizes, stunned. Marissa Cooper, happy. What a world, she thinks.
And she starts thinking that, maybe, it's time for her to stop simply surviving and to start living properly. To start writing her own goddamn story for once, instead of simply trying not to die in someone else's. Maybe she's already doing it, she thinks.
So when she gets an email from one Ryan Atwood, after so many years, she doesn't delete it. She's always been afraid to re-open this door. Afraid that all her past selves will come crawling out in his presence. That she will regress, that she will drag him down with her.
But, she reminds herself, she doesn't have to be that girl anymore. She has coping mechanisms now. She's not dependant on a variety of substances. She has boundaries. She has yoga. She has medication. She has a psychiatrist and a psychologist. And, most of all, she has herself.
She writes back.
She doesn't need him by her side, but she wants him there, if he wants to be there. If he wants to get to know the grown-up Marissa Cooper: the muse who, in spite of all the odds, grew up and got happy and healthy all by her damn self.
Turns out he does.