#94 - Where I'm Happiest

I bought a new blender this week.

Smoothies used to be a big part of my fruit & veg intake but somewhere along the way my Magic Bullet stopped being quite so magical and the smoothies just kind of…fell off. But oh baby I ordered one last Monday and BAM we were back in smoothieville. It came along with the salad I had couriered (because I will always drop too much money for someone else to prepare a salad for me). Also, I’ve been getting a lot of iceberg lettuce recently and let me tell you—incredible. Why has iceberg been so maliciously maligned? Who cares if it’s not the most ~nutritionally dense~ form of roughage it’s crispy and delicious and keeps its crunch even on a hot burger I really truly see no downsides!!

No vegetable deserves to be deemed a “bad” vegetable by society. I’m so sorry potatoes, I promise to avenge you!

This week has been chock-full of moments where I keep finding myself happy, but like in a boring way. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced banal happiness before and let me tell ya, it’s a trip.

It’s spring outside again, I got to sit and drink cider and eat fried pickles and swap between cigs and spliffs in the sunshine. I continued to chip away at the ongoing project that is my apartment, and yesterday I woke up without a bunch of stuff all over the place and my mind remained restful in such a jarring way. I knew that clutter wasn’t helpful but I didn’t realize that I was still getting active anxiety from my old media console.

And there was a strong temptation to get down on myself, make fun of how long it took me to commit and get things done, how simple the task was once I had actually forced myself to start it—but I’m just too aware of how futile those types of regrets actually are.

I have devoted the last two years to consciously attempting to stop hitting myself. And that involved gaining some emotional discipline about how I spoke about myself, but that came after I finally learned how to stop bullying myself through my own internal monologue.

In my journals, I’m not allowed to be self-deprecating. I have to be nice to myself, I have to describe my actions with kindness rather than coating them in chagrin, and I have to take myself and my self-worth seriously.

It’s cheesy, and it’s unbearably earnest, but it was the only option I had. Everything was poisoned and the antidote really was learning how to appreciate myself and develop some semblance of believing I was worthy of life.

Because it was bad y’all like, we were sub-zero in terms of numbers. I had never developed even a neutral sense of self!! Everything, every action, motion, and word out of my mouth was something that I should be ashamed of. It’s wild how easy it was to convince me that the bare minimum of decency was actually a display of overwhelming kindness.

I latched onto whatever could provide an outside empirical sense that I was worthy of…anything. I threw myself way too hard into shitty jobs because I wanted the highest numbers, I couldn’t lose when it came to games because I was so distressed that my ruse was going to break at any moment. Everyone would see me as a fraud, someone who had tricked her way into an invite (just as they suspected all along).

The foundation of my sense of self was rotted. But I had developed some really good structurally sound support beams and walls and built a nice-looking house, but I was spending every ounce of my energy to keep the house from sinking. I was exhausted just keeping the decay at bay and an overhaul of the entire site seemed like a massive undertaking that I didn’t have the money (in this extended metaphor, money = time) to invest in a new site.

It turned out, I could pack up a lot of the structure. I got a new plot of land. Firm ground, no marshes. I dug a pit and poured a new foundational mix right on in there! The structures I had reinforced for years were suddenly functioning just fine without constant upkeep. I had been band-aiding something that needed surgery.

Is that one too many metaphors?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be an adult.

A lot of societal damage was done by the word “adulting”. I think turning the actions of what it means to mature into a new life stage into a Buzzfeed Catchphrase that made the actions of being an adult in a pithy verb form was…bad. Like, it was cute when we were 21 and saying it with deep irony, but I think the damage lasted.

(Also I have a theory about ironic sayings/jokes which is—they gain energy each time they’re uttered. It’s hard for our brains to actually separate what we believe from what we are snottily repeating verbatim. “It’s funny that I’m saying this because I am not the type of person who would make this joke” is not a joke form necessary to society. It’s just another person (a “good” person) repeating hateful rhetoric!)

Part of this is probably a reflexive response to the lack of adulthood cultural markers like owning a home or whatever, but a bigger part of it I think is a deep want to continue to avoid the responsibility we have for the paths our lives take.

I can still be sad, angry, bitter, or whatever, about things that happened in the past. I’m not advocating for a #noregrets lifestyle where we never examine past actions in order to apply lessons for the future or deepen our understanding of self. But me, today, at 30, cannot continue to blame my inactions on others. I can use the understanding of my past to figure out what help I need to complete a task, but the point is to learn and apply, not to sit and wallow about what could/should have been and excuse ourselves from having to ever participate in life at large ever again!

Yes, phone calls can be scary. Yes, you can and should ask for help if you need help. Fuck the shame that tells you it’s embarrassing or unnecessary. Flip the script and ask what you would say if your best friend asked the same request of you. Got those lines in your head? Great, now say them to yourself and pump yourself up and make the help request!

It makes total sense why collectively it feels easier to avoid responsibility.

(Don’t want to know what’s going on with your finances? Don’t check that bank app before you agree to go out babes! Why have a budget when you can subsist solely on vibes??)

Why get better at communicating and force ourselves into tempestuous conversations if we can instead just complain about a friend’s actions behind their back? Oh, friendships are actually a safe and wonderful place to gain those skills that we can then use in other parts of life? Friends aren’t just happy factories but actually people with complex emotions and responses that can help us deeply understand individualism and boundaries and also unconditional love? Cool cool. Got it.

And look, I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s necessary.

Growth is essential.

It doesn’t happen overnight, it often feels like I’ve been repeating the same things to myself for a straight year and a half, but it’s finally sticking. I had to go full refurb on the house that I now call home.

I have to live with me forever, so it was worth the investment to learn to like spending time with myself. It wasn’t intended to benefit anyone except myself, but I’ve noticed the positive effects it has had on my relationships with others. Because tbh thinking that I was the lamest loser in Ridgewood was not exactly giving my friends the benefit of the doubt when it came to their taste and life choices.

They liked hanging out with me, and I trust their opinion about other things, so maybe I could learn to extrapolate their opinion in order to find things about me that I also liked and wasn’t constantly apologizing for or trying to change or cringing at!

"Find something about you that you like and focus on that. If I don't like my face, if I don't like my skin, if I don't like my weight, I think to myself, 'I have a nice teeth.' And it may just start with that one tooth. Look at that tooth. That's a nice tooth, man. And then once you can accept that little thing about yourself, you can just accept you for who you are."

- Bob the Drag Queen

I did that, but for my personality. (My acceptance of my body has been a low-simmer for years but like, it turns out that while I can pluck, curl, and paint my way to a more ~conventionally attractive~ me, there was no external change that was going to help me accept what my body looks like, it had to come from within. Those changes were not actually helping me gain self-acceptance, they were helpful in achieving a closer approximation of societal beauty standards and therefore could relax a little bit. But the radical acceptance that this is the body I’m going to have for the rest of my life so I should stop starving it and berating it for holding fat the way it does could only come from actual internal acceptance.)

I’m funny. I like that about myself. I do not care that my sense of humor was probably over-developed as a defense mechanism, I now get to make people laugh and there’s nothing that makes me happier.

So there must be other stuff too, right?

I actually do deeply care about my friends and not just for the ephemeral Friendship Points that I was secretly counting and comparing for years. (That makes it sound more conscious than it was, but I do think that when you doubt that your existence is a positive influence, you tend to seek tangible affirmation and friendship is one of those spectral abstractions that is mostly influenced by chemistry beyond our comprehension.) (Some people just click.)

I am extra—I go overboard in the kitchen, I love to make an « event » or « adventure » out of mundane activities, I will always go smoke somewhere with a view. Oh, I would be thrilled to make a little itinerary for an afternoon in Williamsburg, so glad no one asked.

I think comfortable silence is overrated. I don’t need to talk less, I just needed to find people who either talk more or who love listening to my monologues. I’m kind. I try really hard to live my life in a way I’m proud of, with the least amount of suffering caused.

It sounds like selfish work and it was. But it also allowed me to stop taking everything so personally and to stop assuming that everything was my fault or even about me at all. Through actually digging in and allowing myself unrepentantly selfish reflection I was able to satisfactorily answer the questions I had avoided knowing the answer to for years. Then I could stop being obsessed with myself and my actions and finally listen to other people, engage in what was actually happening.

The shame kept me from growing for so long.

Sometimes I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over again. That I harp on the exuberance of self-discovery, that I share too many faults, that recovery is best done privately.

But I write things to remind myself that they’re real.

My heart rate doesn’t spike during text conversations anymore because I’m no longer running scripts in my head trying to craft the Best Most Perfect Response that will cause no offense (but also will ultimately block connection because I wasn’t able to show up authentically because a rejection of my actual self would be too painful and the rejection of a false self could be excused by the knowledge that they weren’t rejecting me). I sleep better, I don’t wake up with hypertension because I’ve been able to actually allow myself to relax for the first time. Like ever.

I had bad habits and heaps of defense mechanisms that served to keep me safe but warped my perception of others’ actions.

I no longer diagnose people’s problems in order to rationalize imagined situations because I no longer have anxiety spirals throughout the day caused by nothing.

I don’t feel guilty when I make noise in my own home. I don’t feel guilty when I don’t clean every single pile because I finally understand that my home can look like a home rather than a catalog without that being something I berate myself over.

I relax. I motivate myself through the knowledge that I’ll feel better, more rested, and proud of myself for doing whatever thing I’m struggling to get going on. I feel at peace with my decisions because they’re representative of what I actually want to be spending my time doing.

The posturing is finished. I don’t have to be on defense anymore. Stand down girliepop!

It really did use to be exhausting to be me. I was so beyond anxious, I had so many questions that I couldn’t coherently ask and therefore couldn’t get answers to, I was holding myself back and contorting constantly. It’s embarrassing in some ways to feel like I’m only just now gaining these skills that seem so obvious in hindsight, but isn’t it worse to continue the ruse because I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t know? The process matters just as much as the results. Also, I’m autistic, which explained a lot of the unexplainable. Having answers is tremendously powerful!! Learning what masking is helped me finally understand how to stop doing it!!!

Gaining self-worth has been slow. This year has really been a journey in not focusing so much of my time thinking about myself and spending much more time in the real world experiencing being myself.

The house isn’t constantly in danger of sinking into the swamp. Being an adult meant taking responsibility for the renovations and seeing the project through.

I know where I’m happiest now & it’s right here.

(I even decorated it myself!)