are you an angel?

• rewatch pride & prejudice (2005 or 1995, your pick)
• take a long shower & shave legs
• stare at face in mirror for a long time, reflect on changes that have occured in past year
• sara bareilles cd on repeat

• lying on the floor listening to music you liked fifteen years ago
• watch dust motes travel across the room in the late afternoon haze
• what would be different about my life if i had been a cheerleader in high school?
• what was the title of that book you read in the fourth grade?  you only remember the main character’s name and nothing about the plot.  you spend the next three hours googling and then you drop $60 for a first edition on ebay
• cup of tea, then another
• are you there god?

• take out five boxes of paperwork from the closet and spend the next three hours making small piles around your body on the floor
• write first chapter of novel
• cover wall in post it notes
• lists lists lists
• highlight everything
• now’s a good time to start that bullet journal
• must empty email inbox
• plan out next five years of life down to the month, week, day

• blast nsync while scrubbing out microwave
• rearrange living room four different ways
• today’s a good day to repaint your bedroom
• let’s research and plan a trip to san francisco
• develop new fashion style, must throw away all items of clothes that don’t work with it

• light candle, open windows, put on sweater
• reread old favorite book
• pet a cat
• listen to jewel cd

“I think that our younger self is so key to who we are and a heartbreaking thing to look at. I’m often struck by the damage I inflicted on my younger self. Why was I beating her up? I would never do that to you. I would never look at a child or a teenager, and say, “Hey, you’re broken. There’s something wrong with you.” You know? What an atrocious way that we treat ourselves. Especially women in this society. The amount of time wasted for a young woman wondering, “Am I fat? And is that a reason I should wanna be dead?” is so harrowing to consider. Just the wasted years of a lifetime. We live and we die and that’s it. I will say that finally now, at 39, I’m so relieved to be older. That we put so much preciousness on the teenage woman’s body and the 20-year-old woman’s body—fuck all of that. It’s so unfair and so minimizing to our true worth. We’re all in our own little weirdo fucking bodies with our own little weirdo faces and our own little weirdo ideas.”