I’ve read and heard from just about everyone that it gets better and everything is supposed to be brutal and confusing at the young and slightly embarrassing age of 20. Even Olivia Rodrigo wrote in her latest song, teenage dream, that ‘they all say it gets better the more you grow, but what if I don’t?’ And that’s how I feel right now. The worst part is I’m running this god damn show and I have to be the one to pick up the pieces, put my clothes away, and figure out how to be happy enough to make something of my life. I read something on here recently (I now cannot recall what it was) about how what we’re all really looking for is meaning and purpose. Something to live for, fight for, a way to understand this weird dance we do on earth. It isn’t a new idea, I’m sure you’ve heard it. This is what’s always brewing below the surface for me but is often clouded by the depression and denial that I will indeed keep living. It’s like swimming upstream. I want to make something beautiful of my life and yet I’m exhausted at the routines I have to do everyday just to feel okay. I suppose there’s a bit of a ways to go. Everyone says you can’t rush these things!!! But I just want to be better!??! I want to be at the part where I have my own apartment in new york city and a dependable job and write a weekly column (okay so i’ve been watching WAY too much sex and the city). On that subject, sex and the city has been saving me from my own nightly moping and wondering if anyone will ever love me again. Instead I watch the girls take on love in the city and wonder WHY carrie would ever choose someone like Big. I hate him.
Watching 1998’s sex and the city has also made me all the more nostalgic for a time in which I don’t live. I can’t help but feel like the advancement of technology has ruined the authenticity and natural flow of life in so many ways. Something about social media and having phones at our fingertips is so ugly. We live online just as much or maybe even MORE than we live in the present moment, unencumbered by distractions. It feels like such a loss. I want to write my phone number on somebody’s hand in a crowded bar and call my friends up on the landline after nights out. All of this accessibility and availability means everything is somehow less special. Having everything at our fingertips gives us too many options, too many photos, too many news updates, and too many distractions from what is here and now. You.
It’s a battle to find yourself in all of this noise. I’m so used to it I don’t know how to live without it. And I think that in some backwards way it helps us, momentarily, to have this constant buffer. Instead of being alone with our thoughts, feelings and bodies, we have phones and Netflix and instagram accounts to check up on. We don’t have to just be here if we don’t want to, and hell it’s a lot easier to check out than it is to sit with what is.
I keep deleting instagram in hopes that it will solve everything instantly, but it doesn’t. I've grown accustomed to distraction. I’m still trying to find the things that make life feel better, but I continue to remember and remember and remember that being on my phone is not one of those things.
In other news, here are the notes app gems from the last week or two.
Kisses, we’re in this one together.
Get off your high horse Stop the music and Look at what a Mess you’re making mixing up meaning with illicit affairs Posing in the bathroom like a fallen Star No one asks you how you are Not with eyes like that digging into their souls We are not what we think And the movie I stumbled into kicked me out And Called me crazy, too curated and never quite cautious so I spat in their faces Oh God, What is it all really about—
✯¸.•´*¨`*•✿ ✿•*`¨*`•.¸✯
Because I want to be loved I want to be loved I want to be loved. Held in the arms of something so otherworldly It puts me at ease Nothing will matter, No. I want to be loved. Moved by the molecular magic of my own breath Beating my heart like a drum and finding solace in that you, too, are here through and through
🗝️⋆。𖦹°‧★
April’s last petal Alone Alone Alone Alone Alone Alone again, an art form i can never quite master failing to muster up the right amount of ‘me first’ Instead I beg, I sit at your feet and I look at you and let you look at me, and we undress each other, but only for a moment because as soon as you are there you are gone. And then I wait, Alone Alone Alone again Bare skin in bedsheets A beckoning call from all evil who sells me short and sweetly seduces for pennies on the sidewalk Alone again— with Waves in my hair and a wound whose depth is unknown I rinse you off and realize how High i was Trying to find my way back to your gaze The only thing keeping me alive, But I’m choking on broken air and nothing is as nauseating as trading grace for a glimpse of what it might be like if you chose me Alas, Alone, Alone, Alone again. My phone a pity-driven problem Posing to be beautiful for boys who aren’t you but are so close to me calling it quits High again, high on the desire that shoots through their fingertips and touches me halfway across the planet Over an ocean and still I feel him like slow motion An old wish for love and an unwatered ‘what if?’ But night still falls to her bruised knees and deems me, alone alone alone, again. Even with eyeliner and beauty I pay for, I’m boring to them. Losing my mind and memories and dignity all for a chance to see my name drenched in a longing so loving it melts me and forgets you. I fall asleep screaming, alone Alone alone again and wake up tired and bruised.
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every single sentence is so real - you’re going to be okay, even if it doesn’t feel like it :)
as someone who’s 18, and wants to make something beautiful, and constantly deletes instagram, and watches way too much sex and the city — i feel you. it’s reading posts like this that makes me know there are completely worthwhile and meaningful uses for my phone, even if most of the time it just feels like a sound barrier between me and real life