Shoulding Myself

I'm having an attack of the shoulds. The volume is up on my gremlins today. I can't get past my long list of things about me and my life that "should" be different.

I feel like nothing's good enough: not my glasses, not my khaki shorts, my apartment, my cleaning habits, my organizational schemes, definitely not my job(s), my income, my budgeting, my goals.

I've been obsessing about my day-to-day choices...first I obsessed that I was too tired to go to the museum like I'd told Redbeard I would, and now that I chose to stay home and relax, I'm obsessing that maybe it would've been better to go to the museum.

The ridiculous thing is that I know I'm being ridiculous. It's not exactly a new revelation that I tend to ask too much of myself and make unrealistic, impossibly high demands of myself, the people around me, and life in general.

I got into my dream school (Ivy League, bitches), with a scholarship, and I'm going... yet my mind can't help drifting to the one person, among a sea of well-wishers, who made an ass-y comment about how many loans I'll be taking on. I've been doing an admirable job completing scads of paperwork, yet I'm dwelling on the one field on one form that I missed (which is now, naturally, gumming up the works.)

I don't want to be that person! I want to be one of those positive-thinking, blessings-counting people! But you know what? My fear of being a Negative Nancy might as well not be one more thing to beat myself up about.

Deep down I already know the antidote. I know that self-acceptance and kindness is the way out of this mental state. I know not to compare my insides with everyone else's outsides. I know to remember that everyone has "days"...sometimes several in a row. I know that no one's life is quite as catalog-ready as it might appear. Life can be messy and hard. Choices are not always clear. Outcomes are not guaranteed. I don't have to live my life according to anyone's rules but my own.

I know this. I do. It's just hard to remember sometimes.

Super Fucked-Up Squared Times A Million

In two days it will be one year since my cousin Alfred died. I hate that, because a year sounds like a long time, but it doesn't feel like a long time. The wound is fresh. And I hate it because after one year comes two years, three, and four, and on an on, and that is too long to live without him. One year has already been too long.

After his death I decided I needed to do something with my life. I needed to try to make my own life worthwhile. A year later I've been accepted to grad school to learn what I hope will be a profession where I can be of service.

It has been a year of being brave and soldiering on and life going on even after you're convinced it can't and won't, and not wanting it to.

But now I'm tired. I don't want to be brave anymore, I can't fathom a life of having to be this brave. I want to go back to the way it was, back when everything was a normal amount of fucked-up, not super fucked-up squared times a million.

I'm tired of keeping the faith, telling myself that life is precious and worth living. Life is barbaric, people are awful, corporations are slowly going to squeeze us until we die penurious in the street, probably of drinking tainted fracking water or eating unregulated meat juice or the terrorists winning.