My Own Advice

I am told over the phone in a bedroom voice, I am the reason I am unhappy. I do not correct him. Lately, my life feels like one repetitive movement of taking all the silver from the cabinet to polish it, look at it, admire it, and then put it away without ever getting to use it. This metaphor most likely only makes sense if you are me right now.

I think about a girl in LA crying into her phone to borrow money. I try and count how many times I have stood in public and cried into a phone. We tend to make spectacles of ourselves at the worst of moments. Every day, at least once, I say out loud: I hope he doesn’t remember me like this.

The planets have moved into a new space, and it’s a transit that began when all of this began. And, I keep on reading my own advice. “We set things into motion before we even mean to.” I’m reaping the past efforts and failure of myself seven months ago. What is there then to say about me seven months from now? We often fail to foresee the person we will become, and how ourselves now will be held accountable.

How much are you actually showing up for yourself?

His bedroom voice is also sometimes the same thing as listening to a self-help book on tape in a bedroom you rent in your friend’s parents house in the summer in between jobs. I know what it is going to tell me, and still, I fail to listen.

I think there is a special place in purgatory for people that lack conviction.