“It just… it became my whole identity,” I tell Jack. “I felt like I had to be perfect at it all the time, because it’s who I was, and then I wasn’t perfect at it, and my art and my identity were so tangled up in each other that I just…” quit.

I don’t say it. I don’t give Naked Jack that satisfaction. She is right, though. I got fired from Laika, and I just quit trying. But she’s wrong about that not making me a total failure.

Naked Jack sits down on the edge of the bed, and the bed frame groans. “Did I ever tell you the story of why I dropped out of college?”

“I’m sort of having a panic attack–slash–existential crisis over here….”

“It’s related. I promise.”

“Fine.” I cross my arms over my chest, still halfway through the process of putting on a shirt. “Tell me the story, then.”

“You know how school wasn’t my thing, but it was really important to my parents that I go to college, so I enrolled at the University of Oregon anyway and declared as a business major. And the thing is, I’m pretty good at going with the flow,” she explains, “at fitting in. Anyone who saw me freshman year would’ve thought I was having the time of my life, but I was abjectly miserable. I hated college. There was this restlessness inside of me all the time, this emptiness. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with so much energy, I’d have to go for a ten-mile run. Or I’d get in my car, and I’d drive to the coast or the middle of the woods, disappear in a tiny town where no one knew my name. I’d get blackout drunk at a frat party or do ’shrooms with strangers. I tried everything to fill that emptiness in me, but none of it really helped.”

Jack rubs her hands up and down her thighs, like she’s trying to get warm, and shit. She’s probably freezing. I go over to the bed and drape the quilt over her naked shoulders. She looks at me with such tenderness, I feel like I’m wearing my itchy insides on the outside.

“The only time the emptiness really went away was when I was baking cookies for everyone on my floor in the awful dorm kitchen,” she continues to narrate. “That was the only thing that brought me actual joy. And I eventually figured it out—the emptiness was the absence of myself. I was emptying myself to become the person my dad wanted me to be, and I kept searching for all the wrong things to fill me back up. I couldn’t keep living like that, so I dropped out.”