Hello! And welcome to my home. This is my second attempt at a blog; the first was in 2010. I called it “Brave Dumb World.” It chronicled my foibles in fumbling toward adulthood in my early 30s. And here I am, in the last year of my 30s and still I grapple with most of those themes, minus the fact that I now poop wherever I want. With abandon.
Despite some half-hearted attempts at cleaning up my act, I’m still flailing at this thing called life. Always crashing in the same car. I am not alone. “Adulting,” the oft-maligned Millennial buzzword, pertains to the completion of any mundane task attributed to grown-ups, i.e., doing your laundry, cooking a meal, not spending your hard-earned money on stuff like these tank tops. In a 2017 op-ed, WaPo contributor Jessica Grose explains she hates the term “because it’s a self-infantilizing rejection of female maturity in a culture that already has almost no love for grown-up women.” I don’t disagree with that sentiment, and while I’m not about to rock a “Wine. Because Adulting is Hard” t-shirt anytime soon, being an adult is, like, still really hard for me. But why? I need answers. And solutions. Going out in public in my sweatpants is not activism, it’s surrender. And I’m not ready to give up.
Life is comprised of rituals and routines. Habits. The cultivation of habits is a neurological process, and I genuinely feel like the synapses I needed to develop good habits never developed. My parents, barely adults themselves when they had me, never enforced consistent discipline or healthy habits. I ate chicken nuggies with sweet ‘n’ sour sauce and sipped Dr. Pepper all the live long day. I stayed up all night, supervised by the warm glow of the MTV blaring in my bedroom. Left a permanent imprint of my pudgy little body on the living room couch. My inner-mantra was “No parents! No rules!” So it’s not my fault, see? Because childhood. But like the produce currently wilting in my crisper, that excuse has an expiration date that has long since passed.
On November 16, 2016, in a deeply manic, post-election-holy-fucking-shit-the-world-is-on-fire state, I had a profound shower thought. In my formative years I fortified myself with garbage TV, garbage food, garbage drugs, garbage men. I was a garbage girl, and the world was dependent on me changing my ways. This epiphany also came with the realization that I was a messiah—not THE messiah, but a messiah—so it wasn’t entirely unshaky, but I think that part was just my higher self checking in to let me know that I mattered. Or it was God. Or David Bowie. But same difference, right? I don’t know, I’m still working out the kinks.
Since then, my world has been severely fucked with. Hospital stays, a diagnosis that was later retracted, getting on and getting off medication, depression and anxiety, joblessness, self-imposed isolation from friends and family. And through it all, I remain garbage.
But it’s not all bad. Some of the garbage I’m rather fond of. Like my love for all things irreverent including the work of the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters. Or the personal satisfaction that comes in intellectualizing dumpster fires like Vanderpump Rules or Bachelor in Paradise. But there’s a lot that needs to change. Or the world, my world at least, will continue its crash course to loserdom. So let this inaugural blog post be my clarion call. I’m taking out the trash! I’m going to take a deep dive into Lake Me and get to the bottom of why I can’t for the life of me develop good habits (hint: it’s probably a hopefully very treatable undiagnosed mental illness). I am going to stop listening to the chubby, disheveled little devil on my shoulder who tells me to give up every time something feels difficult or uncomfortable (her name is Trish and she’s a real bitch). I am no longer going to be an American Idle, sitting passively while the world, still ablaze, passes me by. I am not going to let my approaching maturity (hello, 40!) become an invisibility cloak. I’ve carved out this user-friendly little corner of the world wide web (thanks, Squarespace!) to make my voice known. And if it’s all shouting into the void, like most of the internet is, well that’s okay too.