#7 - My 'Get Your Life Together' Plan

The identity crisis struck Mid-April.

It came crashing down on me. Feelings that I had spent years of my life purposefully stuck, not learning anything new, unchanging. I was blocking life out by waking up, plugging in, switching off. No thoughts, head empty, except for the pop culture podcasts I kept feeding my ears directly so that I would have yet another excuse to go back and re-watch the discussed cultural touchstones again. At one point, I was watching TikToks while simultaneously playing the Sims 4 and realized that uh, things had taken a turn. You know, like when the hardcore stoners from freshman year become seniors who are now crushing a mountain of pills to make it through their classes and re-filling half their kombucha with red wine. (Oh, just Ithaca? Got it.)

So! Getting my life together was something that I decided to kick my own ass about. Gone were the days of waking up past 11 in the morning with the vague excuse that it was “making up” for the lost sleep of yore. We all know the real reason. Depression! (Which had manifested this time as hours of scrolling through Reddit threads snarking on Instagram influencers instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour!)

As a child of the 90s, I love a good instant makeover. I’m a firm believer in going whole-hog when it comes to things like this. Shake out that ponytail, throw away those glasses, suddenly I was going to be the kind of person who popped out of bed at five in the morning rip-roaring and ready to go. The kind that only shops at farmers’ markets and somehow seems to always have clean kitchen towels around and doesn’t need paper towels. The kind that doesn’t get diarrhea at 3 AM from working a little too hard on their night cheese.

But this time I figured that my usual all or nothing approach might actually be setting myself up for failure instead of success. And I so needed to break my addiction to failure (because it furthers my self-narrative of victimhood okay moving ON) that I for once lowered the bar as far down as it could go. Because I also realized I needed to tread very carefully in order to help myself avoid indulging in my people’s favorite pastime: shame!

Step One: Morning Pages

Started out with a minimum of three pages a day. Handwritten, in a moleskin. I psyched myself up by using this as an excuse to buy another pack of my favorite pen of the moment, Sharpie Gel Pens (they write so smooth! Sort of inky, very matte black, barely smudge!).

Wake up, make my bed, sit, write. However long it took to finish the three pages, I was marooned on Mattress Island. In the beginning, it took me well over an hour to finish. I would stop constantly to check Instagram, rewind a podcast, or start scrolling through twitter. I would get bored of my own thoughts or pre-judge myself and think things weren’t ~important~ enough to write down.

Thankfully, I admitted those things to myself and tapped into my all-time favorite writing secret: it doesn’t fucking matter what you write in your diary.

When I was a kid, I loved keeping a good journal. I would detail my days and make up code names for all my friends and hide them in random places in my bedroom (lest they be discovered). The first page was always a list of my favorite things: food, movies, books, friends, music, dog breed. You know, the life-defining stuff. Except, I would always fill out those lists with the things I thought other people would think were cool. So they were really just lists of lies! Who was fourth grade me even performing for?? Did I think James Lipton would one day be trying to find meaning in what my favorite book was when I was 12? How did I have it in my head to even be thinking about how this would be perceived by others in the future?

In the beginning, my largest motivation was finishing the notebook. It had been well over a year since starting it and I find so few things more satisfying than filling out every page. I’m so pleased to report that I did in fact finish the first one, and now I’m about six pages away from finishing the new one I started on April 24th. It’s a personal land speed record for me, so if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have to take both hands off the keyboard to more thoroughly pat myself on the back.

Step Two: Morning Walks

Oooh, are we sensing a theme yet?

The big hurdle for this one was that I, hate working out. I don’t hate physical movement, I don’t hate connecting with or nourishing my body, but there was something about committing to a workout routine that has always eluded me. As a kid, I was an alt-sports girl. Always a dancer and horserider, you know, the “soft sports” that people love to argue aren’t “real”. (I would love to see those people perform choreography or take a high-strung Swedish Warmblood through a 1.0m course but maybe that’s just me!)

So, I tried the Yoga With Adrienne playlists, bought memberships for Just Dance (the sweat mode did make me more competitive so that worked for a while), moved onto Chloe Ting ab videos and HIIT workouts to Abba. I could never really get excited about them and any enthusiasm I did initially have waned quickly. It turned out, my inner monologue gets super mean while I’m working out. All my fat kid trauma bubbles up to the surface and suddenly Old Faithful bursts forth and blesses us all with her presence. Memories I typically manage to avoid, all of the criticisms I had ever heard from others (or, even harsher, the ones I thought about myself), were on a very loud loop. Fun!

Enter: the morning walk. I go what the fuck ever pace I want to go, in whatever direction I see fit, and I stop whenever I want to take pictures of flowers, architecture, cars, and add to my now extensive catalog of all of the different fencing laid about Ridgewood. Here’s a top tip for any city designers out there: neighborhoods look a lot more cohesive with the same height of fence outside every home!

They started out early-ish, I was always out the door by 8 AM. I soon realized that was not early enough. Kids were always out and about, and nothing says calm morning like the sounds of scooters and screaming, amiright?

The alarm got set to 6:30 and the streets were empty. Like, even when I wasn’t fully vaccinated I felt okay pulling down my mask (which is something I only did on completely empty streets lest I signal ~republican~) (or you know, give the impression of not having the basic decency to care about others, but really, what’s more republican than only giving a shit about yourself!).

And that’s uh, it. That was my whole life improvement plan. And it worked! I naturally rise at about 6AM (even when I forget to set my fancy schmancy sunrise alarm), which means if I don’t nap midday I’m sleepy around 11 and conked out by midnight. I have started eating better because, on my way home from my walk, I go to the grocery store and buy produce because I realized that part of my aversion to doing it during big shops was the fear of being wasteful and letting things rot. Plus! I can buy what I know I'll want that day. The dream!

But the biggest thing that it did for me was breaking what I had failed to realize was a major anxiety barrier: stepping outside my apartment. Letting the world witness me, even if my hair was in a greasy bun and I was wearing bike shorts.

And of course, what kept me going was a mixture of the stupid rush I got from starting my morning pages with “went for a walk!” and the superiority complex that comes with being a morning person. I had a whole life before most people were even awake! I knew what the weather was like! I was drinking a bottle of water before my first sip of coffee!

In that, I realized I hadn’t been proud of myself (without external accomplishments) in a really long time. With this whole thing I didn’t want to even mention it to people before I had really done it. Committed. Followed through for at least a full month. That made it real, right?

Despite identifying as a personal essayist since I was in college, I have done more self-reflection in the last month than in the last decade. My insides are practically a mirror at this point. I reached out to old friends, expressed regrets I had harbored for years, opened myself up to the world again.

But in all of this, the only reason I have the ability to do any of these things on my own time is because I am receiving unemployment.

My 20s have been mostly about coping with the constant capitalistic crush of working retail and restaurant jobs. Before the pandemic, I was working 50+ hours a week at a job I took three subways to get to, because they were paying me minimum wage and without that extra 10 hours at 1.5x my rate, I couldn’t afford to live in my cockroach-infested studio apartment. (And I’m lucky! I split rent!) Despite working through the month of June, overall I made more in unemployment during 2020. I refuse to find that acceptable.

I feel the need to point out that historically, I’m a pretty great employee who is actually highly exploitable (shoutout to my guilt complex!). My bosses tend to enjoy that I work weirdly hard (because I’m constantly seeking approval and validation from external sources). But, despite that, I have been more sure about rental payments in the last year than in the last decade. Terrifying! What on earth is this job market? When will this nightmare minimum wage discussion end? Like, fuck you, Joe Manchin! I hope your houseboat sinks!

Anyway, this is why we need UBI. I need Democrats to step up on voting rights and minimum wage. Fight for $15? It’s the fight for $35 now babes. We gotta get way more radical because apparently negotiations for basic human rights in one of the richest countries in the world is just too hard. But then again, of course it is when the Senate is designed this way. They’re simply obsessed with reelection. They’re so old and so out of touch that most of them don’t know how to read e-mails. I’m not kidding, they get them printed out by staffers. Of course Leahy doesn’t know how Facebook makes money! He’s been in the Senate since WATERGATE, a political event almost no one in my generation knows about because we rarely meaningfully updated public school curriculums!

So by the time the most out of touch people in this country DO get around to making laws, the housing market has once again spiraled well beyond their control, companies have apparently ceased paying all taxes, every industry feels massively underregulated (hello, the internet!) and what could be considered an actual living wage has increased exponentially once again!

Senators need term limits like I need a new Moleskin. (Urgently.)

Lobbying should be illegal. (Duh.)

UBI for all. (But don’t vote for Yang for NYC Mayor holy shit. I beg you, please do not include him in your rank-choice. Which is actually a system I’m very excited passed because ranked voting makes way more sense!)

I’ll leave you with this, what is quite possibly the worst joke I’ve ever made:

Knock knock

Who’s there?

Joe Man

Joe Man Who?

Joe Man-don’t-you-wish-we-had-elected-someone-else.