Is now a good time to be a bitch?

I’m struggling with the fact that the only way I know how to start this piece is by first airing out my ambivalence about writing anything in the first place. I don’t want to write about how hard it is to write, but it’s a way to get myself going. It’s so difficult to know that you aren’t exactly where you’d like to be in your discipline with something you love to do—it takes time to get better (and practice.) As much as I know this in theory, it’s difficult to apply to myself. I wish that I was an amazing writer who wrote sentences that were smarter than me. Right now, I’m reading a book by Naomi Klein called Doppleganger. I’ve been enjoying it. I have also had countless moments already (and I’m not even that far into the book) where I’ve had to pause and reread the last page and a half after realizing I have no idea what she’s talking about and stopped paying attention at least two minutes before. The attention economy and its trouble are nothing new, but what I notice more is the envy I feel towards Klein for being such an amazing writer; I envy her ability to craft complex, heavy-worded sentences that grapple with volatile ideas. I also envy her for having written anything at all. I have, however, realized that there is nothing better to do in a moment of tortured envy than to practice doing the thing that you don’t feel like practicing.

Last night I had a dream that P. Diddy was chasing me all around the world. At one point I got caught stealing mac and cheese from the hot bar at a health food store. I told the person who caught me stealing that it was “for the baby;” I don’t remember if there was a baby or not. The self-checkout line was insanely long and I didn’t have time to wait because P. Diddy was chasing me all around the world. At the store, security guards stood by the doors to catch shoplifters, but they weren’t tall or menacing, they were just people who looked like they worked at a health food store. The woman who caught me stealing was a small, curly-haired middle-aged woman. I somehow was able to distract her with some mindless chit chat, and I don’t quite remember how, but when I escaped I soared through the sky—if I remember correctly, I did something along the lines of pole vaulting myself out of the situation. I remember some woods off in the distance and being in a shipping container, truck, or spaceship with someone who was my best friend and crying about how P. Diddy was going to find me. At some point, I was able to finally charge my phone and remembered that someone once told me if I was in danger to text or call the one person you trusted (do we only really trust one person in this life?) so I texted Lessa. I was crying a lot when I texted them and it felt like my sobs were translated into my message, like it was possible to type out violent tears in a completely palpable way. At another point I remember being in a secret room or vault in P. Diddy’s house and he either found me or was close to finding me.

What’s the point? I don’t know why I constantly have stress dreams and I don’t know why I wake up every day feeling like my neck is dislocated from a socket it doesn’t even have even though most nights I sleep on an overpriced pillow I purchased per the advice of my eastern European refugee physical therapist named Dagnija, who, when I met, surrounded and bolstered my entire body with fourteen different pillows on a massage table, then handed me a printout of shoulder exercises that looked like they were made (and printed) in 1975 and told me if laying down was how I was most comfortable then I should be laying down all the time.

Have I taken Dagnija’s advice? Sort of, except I can’t find that piece of paper anywhere. There are a few different items and objects that come in and out of my life as they please and I respect them for that, like the Adidas hat I found in my neighbor's trash in Allston ten years ago, which is the only hat that really looks good on me. There’s a way in which I practice a level of disconnect from these items that I believe prevents me from ever losing them—my philosophy is that if I act like I don’t care about them, they’ll always make their way back to me. Alternatively, if I care too much about something, I will lose it (at least that’s what my illogical [and paranoid] philosophy tells me.)

I’ve recently been reflecting on the past a little and thinking about how I went to college and how I thought I’d be able to get a job after college and how that’s just seriously not what’s happening for me. I’ve also been thinking about how going to UC Berkeley was just so-so. I think there are some things in (my) life that would be seriously fine if they never happened—i.e. my life would be exceptionally better now if my dad had never died, and I think my life could possibly be just about the same if I never had gone to UC Berkeley. But then again, isn’t everything in life that happens “supposed” to happen? I’m really not sure.

I guess I’m supposed to be telling stories here, but I’ve felt so radically disconnected from my own mind and creativity that the motivation has completely evaporated and I have nothing good to say. I’m extremely premenstrual, angry at the world, and scared that I’m a bitter and hardened person. I’m actually terrified of a million different things, the overarching one of which being my entire life changing and losing everything I love the most. Is that going to happen to me? Maybe. While we’re on the topic of my dad dying, I will say a permanent trauma has infected my brain which causes me to constantly compulsively think about the fact that anybody (especially my dog) could get cancer and die at any moment and life is just that cruel that it really could happen. Isn’t that fucking crazy? I think it is. I think it’s absolutely insane that life can spiral out of control with no warning whatsoever and all you can do is sit there and be like “okay.” What would Dagnija think?

I’m sorry for being depressed and depressing. I don’t even really think or know if I’m depressed, but I have days where I wake up and feel so crushed by the weight of existing that I feel like I’m going to throw up and cry and heave in panic. Some days I struggle so much that I can’t believe going into hiding until you feel better isn’t allowed. Sometimes I feel so bad that I can’t help but wonder if I should interrupt the person I’m talking to to say, “I can’t talk to you because the inside of my brain feels so horrible that I can’t think of a single thing to say.” I can’t believe I have to live in the world and make money to survive and I also can’t believe that right now that is my chief struggle on planet earth—survival. No one should have to live like this; I know it’s trite to say, but it’s the truth and the sentiment that dominates most of my thoughts on a day to day basis because the world we’re living in right now isn’t really doing much to help poor people survive. Then I think I might as well go to grad school because helping people might be the most important thing in the world. I didn’t have this problem when I was younger—I was just simply too bright eyed and bushy-tailed. To be honest when Trump got elected the first time I was still young enough that I didn’t really understand the magnitude of that and I don’t give a fuck if that makes you feel like having a heart attack (any time I say I don’t care what people think about something I say just know it means that I absolutely do.) But have some patience with me, will you? I grew up with fox news playing on a tiny television on top of my fridge during breakfast every morning. I told my mom to vote for Bernie Sanders and she didn’t even know who or what I was talking about. Now I don’t even talk to my mom and I think Bernie Sanders is pretty much just as much of an idiot as everyone else.

Last night I allowed myself the satisfaction of commenting in disagreement on another Substacker’s piece about how Sabrina Carpenter was “peddling pedophilia,” then I had a dream that someone commented on my remark claiming that that wasn’t what the poster was trying to say (even though it was). The most mundane thoughts creep their way into my dreams, all of which are filled with doubt. Even as I rest I can’t seem to get a break from the constant bombardment of questioning myself and my every decision, but for what it’s worth, I do think it’s a little humiliating to be a bitch to a random stranger on the internet who I think is at least five years younger than me. What can I say? Sometimes I feel like a bad person, or just a petty, unprocessed person; the exact kind of person I can’t stand and tolerate the least. I worry often about being a narcissist or just a miserable person who makes everyone else around me miserable with my misery. I know deep in my mind’s eye that this can’t possibly be true based on the wealth of data I have that proves otherwise, but when I feel bad it eats me up so much it seems like there isn’t a single good piece of me left. Anyways, is it a Karen move to comment on someone’s post being like “You’re wrong” when they say Sabrina Carpenter is “peddling pedophilia”? I just thought it was an audacious and alarmist claim and it struck a nerve with me, but as I was biking to work this morning I thought maybe I could’ve been more gentle, in a community college creative writing class critique kind of way. Would that have been better? Maybe, but the way I wrote my comment solicited enough anger in the original poster that she referred to me as “babe” in the first sentence of her retort, so I think there’s likely no going back from the waters I’ve belly-flopped into. Doing things like this feels equally humiliating to me as it would be if someone were ever in the middle of reading bad Google reviews and noticed that one of them was written by me, which is why I only ever write Google reviews in my head, because the one time I allowed myself to write a bad Google review after I paid too much money for some wine and spaghetti at a sub-par Italian restaurant in Fort Greene, LinkedIn notified me that the manager looked at my profile later that evening. I was horrified and deleted the review immediately. I spiraled for a few days about how he must have vengefully reviewed my LinkedIn profile and thought about how much of a shmuck I sounded like trying to sell myself as a “content developer” when really, I was just like him, some sad-sack restaurant worker with neck, back, pussy, and crack pain.

Speaking of pedophiles, something sinister and inexplicable is happening in my life: sometime within the last year, I was somehow added to an email subscription list for notifications from the town I grew up in which notifies me when predators move to a different address or are convicted of their crimes. Why is this happening to me? It feels like one of the most mind-bending, bizarre jokes, just like how I randomly started receiving text notifications about a public pool in Toluca Lake, California that I don’t recall signing up for. What is this hell we’re living in? How does God expect me to wistfully reflect on my childhood when I can’t get Randolph Alerts to leave me alone? I’m starting to think there are too many people in the world and thus too much of everything (this is a completely original thought that no one has ever proposed before). On TikTok, I recently went down a rabbit hole looking at the profile of someone who commented on one of my sister’s videos, and the person’s only posts were unmoving videos of their face with glittery filters and overly-sentimental top hits playing over them. What do these videos mean and what is the direction TikTok is taking us in? How did we get here? I don’t know, but I’m scared of everything that everything is capable of. Where does it end?

I’m done gabbing for the day. Thank you for reading this. I hope I get my period soon so I can feel less insane about how insane I feel.

Below is a playlist for you. My favorite thing about it is that it has no flow whatsoever and there’s one song on here that’s one of the more embarrassing things I’ve enjoyed this year: can you guess which one?

Xoxo,

Mikena