sincerely, me

I feel so strongly connected to the data of my life. What happened when, when I wrote that thing, when that picture of me was taken. It's like, if I don't record it, I will lose grasp of the parts of my life that came before this moment, and I'll never be able to get it back. Anyway, here's the latest in my Notes app note called "Thoughts." Don't judge me too harshly, please, it's been a rough couple of years. I’ve been working on maintaining eye contact with attractive men. It is awkward, and I can’t wait to look away, but you know. They keep looking back. I can’t wait to die. Because even though it’s already July, I still feel every single day. I’m just waiting for either someone to hire me or for the level of frustration I can take to collide with my impulsivity, and I almost don’t care which happens first. Which probably means I’m closer to the second. I feel like such a waste. I am not interesting (no matter what Nikki says), I do not contribute a...

(This post was originally written in January 2024, but I guess I never actually published it. Sadly, I still mean every word.) I was thirteen when The Beautiful Letdown was released by Switchfoot. I remember listening to the CD through my wired headphones, watching the road while my dad drove my siblings and I the five or six hours to meet my mom who lived five states away. They would be asleep while I quietly learned all of the words, probably not understanding a single one. It was the year of my first actual potential boyfriend situation. He took me and my youngest sister on a long bike ride to a tunnel I'd never seen before. Our first “date” was a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert (I did not yet know most of them were dead), but mom and I watched from the grass, while he and his dad watched from their seats. We took him to the beach, where I received the worst sunburn of my life. I remember the teardrop tan line on my back that stuck around for years. He gave me a bracelet I still have and...

i've been so busy lately being sad about the way my job is changing and how much i want to leave it but i don't know if i have the courage or qualifications to do something else that i forgot to also be sad that my life and body don't measure up to what i'd like them to be. it's a good thing social media exists to remind me.

Over the last couple years, I started jotting down my random thoughts in a note in my phone. I'm not sure that I ever really intended to make something of them, but they are exactly suited to what this blog has been/become: a little bit too personal and self-degrading, but hopefully relatable. Before I share them with you, reader, I want to share something else. 119. That's the number of books I read last year. Can you believe it?? I can't. It'd been so long since I even tried to read, I forgot the experience of it. How sometimes you leave the world as you know it without knowing it, and coming to the end of a really good story is like waking up again. The secondhand joy that comes from a moment shared between the two love interests. Regaining your breath (and resting heart rate) after a particularly tense encounter with a murderer. It's incredible, and I hope never to stop doing this ever again. I started reading again in April 2021, and what really hooked me again...

I am feeling a lot. I am disappointed in myself for everything I am right now. I am lazy, unmotivated, unhappy, and boring. And bored. I don't know what to do about it. Depending on what you believe about the world, I should either make my own change or rely on God to fulfill His plan in me. I believe that God will enact His plan for my life, but what if His plan is to leave me this lump of a human? That doesn't sound right to me, really, though, if I'm honest, I don't know Him that well. I am feeling heartbroken. It's hard to put into words, especially via a blog that I know anyone might read. I spend a lot of time distracting myself from my problems, because I don't know how to solve them, and if I did, I don't have the confidence to do what it takes.  I want a new job, and I want it to be something that fulfills something other than my financial obligations. But I'm afraid to be less than what they're looking for, and what if I find something tha...

I am turning 30. I knew it would come eventually. I mean, as long as I continued living. Yet it's weird. When I was 23, there was a guy that, according to others and not the guy, liked me. At the time, he was 29, and I thought, nope, he's way too old. Sometimes I still find myself thinking that, like, oh, he's an adult, he's way too old for me, until I remember that I'm an adult, and I'm almost 30, and I'm getting kind of old. I think part of my dysfunctional thinking regarding age is that I still work at my college campus. The landmarks look the same and the students look the same, but I'm getting older. I don't feel older. I asked my grandma recently about her age, and she said that she still felt young, like her body was aging around her, but she felt the same as she had at 25. Age is just another thing we have absolutely no control over yet feel as if we should. We can get plastic surgery, follow diets that purportedly extend life, date younger...

I want to be held accountable for keeping up with this blog, so I need your help. Please, bug me if I break my promise. I promise to write on here once a year. I mean, it has to be an attainable goal, right? And once a year, clearly, is still a challenge for me. I read again my last real post . I meant to try to keep my promise. I was doing okay for a minute. Then something happened in my family, and I just couldn't imagine writing anything. What would I say? How could I come up with some pithy story to tell when it felt like something important might end? At least, that was my reason for the next few months. Then, everyone was fine, and I still wasn't writing. I think I fell into that funk: nothing worth telling is going on, I feel not great most of the time, what's the point? The point is that I'm not sure who I am anymore, which, ugh, is there a more cliché phrase in the history of the world? Maybe I'm just too focused on who I used to be. I used to read ...