Quarter Life Canvas: Scribbles from Chapter 25

Twenty-five thots from a 25y/o big girl

1. I made a friend this summer. They told me being with me feels so safe. so homely. it feels like sitting cross-legged and drinking water in a steel glass. I think about steel glasses every time I make new friends now.

2. Patience is the name of a liquid lipstick. I learned I don’t look terrible in every lipstick ever, I just never have the patience to allow it to dry and pop full color before I take it off and change it to something else. I am now understanding if I give my lipstick enough time, it will settle into what it’s truly supposed to be, and it might just be right for me.

3. Your growth will demand a willingness to be undone. To undo yourself, shed skin, and grow a new one, you have to be comfortable with being naked in public for a while.

   

4. Gossip is the sister sin of alcohol. The youngest daughter of the instant gratification with unseen prolonged detriment family. You think you take a few healthy jabs sometimes and the next you know you have lost the ability to socialize in its absence. Gossip will be a very fun and fleeting amusement until the momentary entertainment of judgment jails your curiosity, in a self-fulfilling sense of superiority.

   

5. That one evening when I got off early from work. Making a ramen bowl in my kitchen, smoking a fatty, listening to Amy Winehouse, and drinking kombucha. I look around and I see pieces of me all around. So this is it? This is my life. Stewing in borrowed ingredients, and cooked by my own hands.

   

6. That one psychedelic trip where I just saw eyes. Eyes as leaves of a tree, eyes mushrooming out of the terrain, eyes of a mountain in front of me, eyes like seven hundred tattoos on my skin. I didn’t know what I was to deduce from it. So I told myself it was the universe telling me it was watching over me. that I don’t always need to show what I’m doing. that I am already seen. That night I slept to Fiona Apple screaming in my ears on repeat.
   I move with the trees
   In the breeze
   I know that time is elastic
   And I know when I go
   All my particles disband and disperse
   And I'll be back in the pulse
   And I know none of this'll matter
   In the long run
   But I know a sound is still a sound
   Around no one

7. One summer evening when you’re having a terrible hair day (it’s always on a terrible hair day), you will bump into the love of your past life. They will have a stupid haircut and you will want to tell them that, but you don’t talk to each other like that anymore. You will not greet them because you promised you would never look into the eyes of self-destruction again. But you will yearn to catch a glimpse of their face when they’re looking elsewhere, oddly positive that in what seems like a fresh stubble, hides the answer to the most important question in the universe. “Do I still have feelings for them?” You will come back home and tell all your besties you don’t, and go to sleep watching 7 YouTube tarot readings titled “Does he still have feelings for you? 🦋🔮”

8. Cutting my hair will not change my life, I tell myself, as I sit in the salon chair for the 3rd time in a quarter. Am I incapable of growth? I ask myself. No, you just have an annoying ailment of trying to find metaphors in every silly moment of life.

   

9. I will write about him one day - that one boy, but I cannot write from a wound. So I wait, and wait for it to be a scar. But how delicate is a scar that it reopens a wound with just the stroke of a pen? Wayne Dyer said: “Don’t die with your music still inside you”, so I am desperate for him to be out of me before I die, but I am a girl too cool to be writing a song in red

10. You don’t have to be over it, or to be fixed, to live a life worth living.

11. I am not a storage container for everything that I have ever experienced or thought. Things will have to exit in order for something else to enter.

12. I am both an acquired and expiring taste.

    

13. You will write about the same thing over and over again. You will try really hard not to, but you can’t help it. These are things that want to be written by you. Some days, you will feel like you have become an ossified museum of yourself. But it’s okay. Like the rest of us, you are also waiting for the right people to walk in.

    

14. If you still have problems in your life after running 5K, then it must be a pretty serious problem.

15. They say that the taller you grow, the bigger your shadow gets. Meaning: as you expand, so do the aspects of yourself that you’re not fully conscious of.

    

16. When Martha Graham said there is a vitality, a life force, an energy..that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is or how valuable or how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

17. The more you create and put yourself out there, the more you will expose yourself to new people, things, knowledge, ideas, and events. When you’re presented with this larger spread of media, people, and opportunity, remember the point of a buffet isn’t gluttony, it’s optionality.

18. There will always be a certain class of men that will tell you you are great, without ever asking if you’ve been doing good. It would be in the best interest of you, and them both, for you to invisibilize them.

    

19. At some point in your independent adulthood, you will be not as deeply connected with your family, but still as deeply affected by them. The weirdest boy/girl of your life will walk in and leave, but your relationship with your parents will continue to be the most complex relationship for the rest of your life.

20. I owe it to my mother for showing me why I need to do something for no reason than - it needs to be done. I owe it to my father for showing me I need to do some things for no reason but joy.

21. Your trauma is not a dick-measuring contest. You do not have to prove yours is bigger than the other.

22. You do not have to be broken to be worthy of love.

23. It will always be okay to change your mind.

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