Of all the sub-groups of our species, one has for too long eluded classification, even though small children can spot a specimen in their midst. As it awaits full-scale sociological scrutiny, this remarkable order at the very least needs a name. To that end, adapting the signifier that leaps to the lips of the rest of us, we might go with the Gotittogethers.
Unlike Swift’s immortal Struldbruggs, Gotittogethers sport no such identifying mark as a red dot above their left eyebrow, yet anyone with eyes to see can single one out. As their name suggests, what sets the Gotittogethers apart is how good they are at life. Yet their special status can’t be captured by test scores or professional accomplishments or socioeconomic status or Instagram likes or Facebook friends. Who’s Whos are as likely as not to leave Gotittogethers out, and paparazzi to pass them by. Indeed, they do life so deftly that they often go unnoticed beyond their circle of family, friends, and associates and may be overshadowed by less-together, if showier sorts. Gottittogethers are bright, yet not brilliant; talented, yet not gifted; good-looking, yet not stunning; amusing, yet not hilarious; athletic, yet not Olympian; confident, yet not commanding; magnetic, yet not mesmeric. Clearly, Gotittogethers are balanced beings, but their balance is more a symptom of their singularity than the cause of it. They haven’t got it together because they’re so balanced; they’re so balanced because they’ve got it together.
Like the smoothest dancers on the floor, Gotittogethers can’t be codified. Yet we know one when we’re near one. True, it takes a little time, best spread over several encounters, since an ineffable sensibility is what stamps them as together. Not an image, but an aura; not a look, but a glow. Soon we sense that she’s on top of it, that he’s got life licked. They’re naturals, ballplayers who totally get the game, always making the right move in the right spot at the right time. They don’t use snooze alarms, for they see each new day not as daunting, but do-able. Our mountain is their hill. They don’t sweat the small stuff or the big stuff or anything in between. What makes us anxious, they find fun. To them, public speaking is the perfect way to get the word out; a job interview, the best time to brainstorm with their boss-to-be; online dating, a simple shortcut to that certain someone. They find tight spaces cozy, wide-open ones liberating, crowds invigorating, solitude relaxing, intimacy reassuring, rejection bracing. When Thoreau said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, he was leaving a loophole for the Gotittogethers.
Yet the Gotittogethers aren’t the Alpine swifts of our race, high-flying birds that never touch earth. They in fact work hard, wait their turn, play by the rules, take one for the team. Like everyone, they sustain setbacks and aren’t immune to tragedy. But while they, too, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they aren’t fortune’s fools. “I got this” springs as quickly to their lips as “Why me?” to ours. When knocked down, they bounce back up; when one door closes, two gates open. The hardest hits don’t rip them apart, nor does the weight of years grind them down. That’s why our noses know them more keenly than our eyes: they reek not of ease or entitlement but of self-assurance and aplomb. They’ve just Got it.
Gotittogethers should by no means be mistaken for a much larger and far less impressive crowd, the Tootogethers, though these types wish you would. Tootogethers make it their mission not actually to get it together but to act as if. To that end, they study the mien and manner of Gotittogethers and mimic them while out and about. In recent years, social media sites have become their holy land, a platform for photoshopping their personas, livestreaming their lives, and Insta Lying to go with the Got brand. Their one throwback move comes at Christmas, when they mass-mail greeting cards recapturing an annus mirabilis in which they and theirs blazed across the world stage, winning trophies and awards and elections, earning promotions and fellowships and degrees, and along the way setting a standard of gotittogetherness never to be topped, except by them next year. True, not all Toos are this blatant. Some think they’ve perfected a slick Tootogether two-step, humbly bragging that though they might seem to be incredibly together—and here they rattle off their stunning assets and accomplishments—underneath it all they’re mere mortals, as shown by their occasionally putting off the laundry. This won’t wash. If you’ve Got it, you don’t flaunt it. Essential to gotittogetherness is unawareness of same, because to know it is to need it, and to need it is to be non-together. True Gots would never so much as hint at anything exceptional about themselves, not even to their families or to close friends or to other Gots or even to themselves in the wee hours of their restful nights. That would be a disqualifier, and they’d have to drum themselves out of a corps they’d never admit exists.
Tootogethers can’t help but orbit around Gotittogethers, not just to pick up pointers but to feed their delusion that they breathe the same air. Yet if they try too hard to sync their orbits, they bring on Götterdämmerung. In your mind’s eye, take any Too along this tragic trajectory. Make this one a college boy, and set him on a couch in a commons room watching the NFL with a bunch of bros who are whooping or wailing over a blocked punt. For the benefit of the Got beside him, he strikes a classic Too pose—legs crossed, hands tented, head tilted, lips pursed, eyes doing a bemused half-roll before gazing off at an endless horizon—then leans in and says, “Hey, we both like sports, but we don’t live or die by them, do we, dude? We’ve got our shit together.” To which the Got might reply, “Not me, man, I’m too into my Raiders,” or “Honestly, I’m not that guy,” or simply, “I wish.” At first our boy’s too Too to feel the blow. For days he’ll dream he’s been anointed as not just a Got but an alpha of the breed, with even its betas bowing down to him. Till it hits him that his Got gave in too readily, with a grace he himself lacks, while deftly driving a wedge between them. This thought will trigger a Tootogether death spiral, with the Too trailing after the Got and all but begging for some sign of brogetherhood, unleashing wild eye-rolls and circus-tent hand-folds and crazed horizon-gazes until even he gets that the Got’s dodging him. Finally, in despair, the Too takes up life coaching.
And what of us, the quietly desperate mass of men? We Nevertogethers are broken souls, forever seeking repair and reconnection. We stumble down our road like the scarecrow in Oz, hoping somehow we’ll be healed before our stuffing all falls out. Yet we keep getting shredded, not just by life’s storm winds but by its cold gusts, these carrying the message that we don’t measure up. For man, after all, is the measured animal. These days more than ever, we’re measured by how many goals we meet, bucks we make, cars we own, promotions we get, laps we run, calories we consume, wrinkles we show, friends and followers and likes and hearts and clicks we can count. And we’re ceaselessly stacked up against other people’s brains, bodies, talents, attainments, careers, lifestyles, popularity, and peak experiences. Yet while all this might tear us down, it’s the Gotittogethers who rip us apart. We can handle high achievers, since they’re likely good at just one thing; we can shrug off celebrities, since their real lives are a mess; and we can laugh off the Toos. But the Gots hit us in the gut. Without them, we could accept that it’s too hard for anyone to hold it together. We could even take cold comfort in the common prayer that paints all mortals as Nevertogethers: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” We’re human, that’s why, we could cry out, were it not for the counter-example of the Gotittogethers. For they mostly win, healthily and handsomely, while we lose a lot and win ugly. “He hath a daily beauty in his life,” says Shakespeare’s Iago, “that makes me ugly.” He had Cassio; we’ve got that goddam Gotittogether.
Yet even we Nevertogethers have our pride, and the hour might come when one of us, fed up with futility and eaten up with envy, strikes back. Say it’s you, and tonight you’re partying at the tasteful home of a Gotittogether straight couple who are attentive to everyone’s needs and are, on top of that, bright, witty, attractive, companionable, and kind. You hate them. By your sixth Scotch your plan’s in place. You wait well past midnight till all guests are gone except a Tootogether pair whose hangdog postures and air of depression betray their being in the last stage, abject acceptance, of had-it-together grief. At last he lets her drag him out the door, pausing only for a feeble one-quarter eye-roll at you for presuming to outstay them. You wink at him gaily, then double back to the living room, gazing through the plate-glass window at the moonlit duck pond. “Before I go, guys,” you say, “can I run something by you? I realize,” you go on, watching their shiny reflected selves ease onto their couch, “you must be worn out.” Amid their pleasant protests you wheel and spring your trap.
“It’s obvious,” you begin, “how we all look up to you, think you’ve really got it together.” They tense up. “That’s why I feel bad for you, with all that pressure to live up to our hype.” They exchange puzzled looks. Here you launch into a scripted spiel, avoiding any technical together-terms, about the impossibility of anyone, no matter how good an egg, keeping it together in the face of the head-spinning complexities of modern society, the crushing demands of and comparisons to eight billion other earth dwellers, and the carrying on of pop philosophers about the absurdity and meaninglessness of our tiny lives. “Face it, friends,” you
recite, “in this universe entropy rules, things fall apart.” You then praise them shamelessly for holding their high-wire act together even while knowing deep down they’re doomed to fall. Still worse, you add, faking empathy, it’s lonely up there, since they can’t share their secret with anyone, even each other, both being too modest to admit how amazingly close they’ve come to getting it together. But here you unaccountably ad-lib. “And anyway,” you blurt out, “why would you want that, because—because if you’ve always got it together,” you blunder on, “how will you ever know fire, passion . . . that stretching for heaven that breaks us?” They’re mystified; you’re mortified. You tighten it up. “But forget that—feel free to let go, like I was saying, fly off your trapeze and let the net catch you.”
Cornered, they grope for each other’s hands. What are their options? They could have a hissy fit, booting you out the door while shrieking something like, How dare you dissect us, who do you think you are? Or they could opt for aloof and Olympian, saying, Hmm, quite clever and provocative, you must’ve spent tons of time thinking this through. They could even crack like eggs, blubbering how only you get them, it’s all too much and they’re at their breaking point. But any which way. you’ve exposed and unseated them, knocked them off their high wall. Got ya! you almost cry aloud as you await their great fall.
Instead they’re stricken. They’ve never had it knocked at all, they together gasp out, not even close. “Somehow we’ve been sending out signals,” he says, “that don’t go with who we are.” “Please stay and share with us,” she says, “how we can stop acting like jerks.” But by then you’re reeling toward the door, begging forgiveness and blaming all that crazy crap on your binge drinking and twisted sense of humor and misdiagnosed bipolar disorder. They’re sincere as can be, that’s the worst of it, and you’re Humpty Dumpty, beyond the help of horses and men. For they truly have it together.
After earning an English lit PhD from Duke and teaching at colleges and independent schools along the Eastern seaboard, William Slayton has relocated to the Rockies, where he’s finished a novel, Under the Banyan Tree, and published short fiction in Fudoki, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Meat for Tea.