ANNE ARKEY
Special to the Lampoon
Instructing reporters not to go anywhere, and saying she would be right back, Fredonia student Hannah Mancuso, 21, stepped briefly into the other room Friday in order to slip into something more comfortable — namely the old toxic yet somehow comforting patterns of selfdoubt, selfhate and despair she’d thought were long since resolved.
“It’s odd,” she said, calling out from behind the halfopen door to her bedroom where she was presumably stepping into a habit of selfflagellation as easily as one might step into his or her favorite pair of soft flannel pajama bottoms. “I understand intellectually that this is something I’ve been conditioned to do by a confluence of factors, including the lowkey but sustained trauma of high school, but I just can’t help myself.”
“No, seriously,” she continued. “I can’t help myself, and I fear all may be lost.”
Despite demonstrating a clear understanding of the emotional and psychological mechanics of her habitual feelings of inadequacy, and even recognizing the social forces which create and enforce them, Mancuso says there is nonetheless a certain comfort to be found in adopting, as a sort of default, a stance of preemptive deferment to the perceived or presumed needs and desires of others.
“It’s like that song where they say, ‘Hello darkness, my old friend,’” Mancuso told reporters. “Except instead of an old friend it’s more like, ‘Hello darkness my exlover with whom I had a fiery but ultimately toxic romance and resolved never to speak to again until, one day, there he is on my doorstep and the whole thing just starts again.’”