Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [15]
I Love New York and It Likes Me Okay
Failing at Everything in the Greatest City on Earth
I WAS HESITANT to write this essay because, of course, I would rather you guys think I’m some kind of wide-eyed wunderkind who just kind of floated into my job at The Office without even trying. I want you to picture me as a cute little anime character that popped out from behind a mushroom or something and landed in Hollywood. But writing about my struggles was actually really fun. Besides, who wants to read about success, anyway? Successful serial murderers, maybe.
COLLEGE RUINED ME
Not to sound braggy or anything, but I kind of killed it in college. You know that saying “big fish in a small pond”? At Dartmouth College, I was freakin’ Jaws in a community swimming pool. I wrote plays, I acted, I sang, I was the student newspaper cartoonist. All this, of course, was less a function of my talent than of the school’s being in rural New Hampshire, where the only option for real entertainment was driving one and a half hours to Manchester, on the off chance the Capitol Steps were touring there.
After beer pong, floating in an inner tube down the Connecticut River, fraternity hazing rituals, building effigies and burning them down in the center of our quad, a cappella, and driving to Montreal for strip clubs, student-run theatrical productions placed a strong seventh in terms of what was fun to do on campus. We had a captive audience with low standards, which was a recipe for smashing success and the reason for the inflated sense of self I have to this very day. If you’re a kid who was not especially a star in your high school, I recommend going to a college in the middle of nowhere. I got all the attention I could ever have wanted. If I had gone to NYU, right now I’d be the funniest paralegal in a law firm in Boston.
I got even more confidence from having a steadfast companion in my best friend, Brenda. A few words about Brenda. Bren is the shit. In college, she was the star of every play at Dartmouth from her freshman fall on. She looked the way a Manhattan socialite should look: perfect posture, gazelle-like, with a sheet of dark blond hair. Girls always worried she was going to steal their boyfriends, but she never did. (I didn’t understand that at all. It’s college! Steal some boyfriends, for God’s sake!) Bren and I befriended each other early on, became inseparable through a shared sense of humor, a trove of nonsensical private jokes, and had the same enemies within the Drama Department. We clung to each other with blind loyalty, like Lord Voldemort and his snake, Nagini. I, of course, was Nagini. If you messed with one of us, you knew you messed with both of us, and Voldemort was going to cast a murder spell on you, or Nagini was going to chomp on your jugular. It was such a good, dramatic time. Bren was the kind of best friend I dreamed about having when I was a little kid. I never knew you could have someone in your life who was pretty much on the same page about essentially everything.
In theater, Bren would play Beatrice or Medea or Eliza Doolittle, while I wrote well-attended comedy one-acts and occasionally played Medea’s little buddy or something. I felt like a big celebrity on campus. Well, the kind of celebrity you could conceivably be at Dartmouth if you weren’t a jock or a sorority girl, who were the real celebrities. My fame was akin to that of, say, Camilla Parker Bowles.
In 2010, Bren was my date to the Emmys. People thought she was on Mad Men and I was her publicist.
Our other best friend, Jocelyn, whom we met through our singing group, was more or less