How I Escaped my Addiction to Hip

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During those years, I discovered in therapy some terrifying aspects of myself. I was, in fact, terribly shy; I craved intimacy and a monogamous relationship. I discovered that I really loved clothes, make-up, clean sheets, and my own bathroom, and that despair and suicide no longer felt romantic. I discovered that my real safe place was in my authentic values and beliefs, not some abstract notion of hip. Most of all, I discovered that I could find myself in my writing, which I no longer did to chase success, but for survival.

What never left me was the outrage, the desire to change the world. By then, it was the '90s, and hip had become some bizarre exclusive class of people—empty, cynical, and part of the capitalist machine. Hip had become a style thing, a heroin-eyed/anorexic/Calvin Klein/don't give a shit/help yourself/life sucks/become a commodity/make money/greed thing. I wanted to be useful. I wanted women to stop being abused and ethnic wars to end, racism to stop, and people to care about the earth.

Then suddenly all these hip people started coming into my life. They came, I think, because I no longer needed them for validation. They came to serve the work I was doing.

One night, not long ago, I found myself standing on a Broadway stage after a benefit performance of my play about Bosnian refugees. Next to me was Meryl Streep, who had just performed the work. She was hugging me. We were crying. The audience was crying. We were all momentarily suspended in a state of grace. That miraculous state that comes sometimes in the theater when we find our humanity together.

How did I get there? Alchemy, I suppose. The alchemy of years in therapy, in rape groups, in recovery. The alchemy of years working in homeless shelters, protesting in city parks, and visiting refugee camps. The alchemy of being loved deeply by a good man and a tender son and supportive friends. The alchemy of writing and more writing.

Those years melted the hunger away. In that moment with Meryl Streep, it all came together. For a few seconds, I felt totally liquid, there and not there, somebody and nobody, full and yet somehow empty. I felt proud and irrelevant.

I like to think of this as hip.

Eve Ensler is a playwright and screenwriter. Her most recent work, the Obie Award–winning play, The Vagina Monologues, will be published by Villard in February 1998.

Part of Utne Reader cover story, November/December 1997.

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