You’re Gonna Die Alone (& Other Excellent News)

by Devrie Donalson

You’ll know what you need when you see it. Take what helps. Leave the rest.

Learning that the promised trade-off for rule-following was not actually promised at all revealed the constant current—slow, deep, and strong—that ran beneath everything I had done in my life. It was the beliefs that influenced every decision I made.

The truth is, very few of the ways we are convinced to sacrifice our wonderful and colorful desires in exchange for something secure actually end up leaving us with anything that looks like security. I can’t think of even one of those promises that really came through except maybe, like, not trying heroin. Not trying heroin still feels like solid advice.

I’ll choose a future full of color and hope and love and living, because the loss and fear and dying is guaranteed, and none of us make it out without a bent tag here or some matted fur there. If we want a kaleidoscope story instead of the black and gray resentment for the things we gave up and never got back, we have to reject the greater stories that argue Safety over Everything. We have to reject the story that following the rules is the only way to get out unscathed.

I know that I’m gathering things I call precious, and someday someone will swipe their fingers across the top and marvel at the dust before they carry them away.

The things we pack away wait for us to come back to them, unchanging while we carry on being human. We gather stories and heartbreaks, wins and losses, and we show up in garages as very different people than we were when we last decided what we thought was precious enough to save.

I do know that before it was painful, it was precious. Perhaps it can be both.

Restriction is the woman’s code. We are to get the smaller plate, have the smaller serving, and not ask for seconds. We are supposed to ask, “Is that fat-free?” And we’re supposed to say, “Oh no, I’m fine, I’m so full! Don’t worry about me!” We are not supposed to be first in line, or to take the first plate, and we are never to take the last slice of anything. So we learn to keep ourselves from indulgence, opulence, and decadence at all costs. No matter how overstuffed it may be, we are never to take from the plate of someone who has more than their share of something we might fancy for ourselves.

You have the entire world in your pocket, all cozy, pressed up against your butt, from the actual money to the global leaders you paid for, and the best you can do is build a rocket shaped like a ding-dong to dick-tickle outer space? Like, you really just-the-tipped it? You’re telling me that’s the height of the creative ceiling in there? A blue canvas onesie and a horny cowboy hat?

We should at least get some fucking entertainment to go along with the bottomless dread.

“Cryptocurrency” would just be what we call the fake money we pay men for their labor, and it would only be composed of tangible things like buttons and old sticks of gum we find in the purgatory of our purses. “But I’m rich!! I trade in crypto!” Oh yeah, big boy? Show me the buttons, then. Show me the fucking buttons.

So Billi-Boys, if you’re going to continue to be a collection of the most evil men to ever walk the planet, I hope you can at least step up the production value of this horror show. I want to be on the edge of my seat. I want to be vividly aware that my life is in the hands of a couple of egomaniacs who get to choose for all of humanity. I want to be constantly refreshing my phone, waiting for the tweet that says two of you are having a whip-it-out-and-measure-it contest again, and one of you resurrected a T. rex to bring to the fight. Jurassic Park–level recklessness is the bottom line. If you’re not peeling mosquitoes out of amber to vex your enemies and prove once and for all that everyone, even time, is your bitch, you’re not doing enough. You’re just not doing enough.

Beyond the glaringly obvious and disgusting bits, isn’t arguing that men are literally incapable of choosing their own thoughts and behaviors . . . reductive? Aren’t you being a little anti-man by arguing that they are all such unthinking, prehistoric gym socks that they can’t stop their weens from just, like, ending up in someone accidentally? Isn’t positing that they’re rocking nothing more than the shriveled dingle-brain of their Neanderthal cousins sloshing around in the ol’ noggin a distinctly man-hating take?

Anyone with compassion and empathy should be able to hear a statement about a group they are a part of that doesn’t necessarily apply to them, but that does apply statistically to the entire monolith, and understand that it is not personal, and it can still be true.

And when we find ourselves suffering under the pressure of the systems we built, there is no one to blame but us.

Then I got horny. I got horny for men. It is incredible how quickly this can ruin so much.

Turns out the most effective way to smother the fire of lust is to start the fire of a poorly shaven hoo-ha.

Life is not on the other side of a different body, and you don’t need to change before you can experience a brilliant life or a brilliant love.

You can’t put off living your only life in the hope that you’ll discover the secret to becoming good enough. If you put your life off until all of that comes true, you’ll be putting your life off until you’re dead.

Will enforcing the rules of acceptable womanhood as defined by men really give us the ability to walk through the night without wondering if we’ll make it home?

Let us be brave enough to embrace Change, wise enough to know when it’s time, and kind enough to let each other grow when we need to find new soil.

He was tall, half Scottish and half Irish (like when you get a swirl cone because you can’t choose between your two favorite flavors, but, like, man version),

We cannot arm-wrestle life into unfolding in tidy chapters.

Grief, as far as I understand, is an ever-changing, ever-present companion from the moment it fills the space left in your heart by someone you once built a place for.

But challenge is a drug, and I’m a junkie. I don’t know how much money it would take to pull me away from the lure of filling my life with higher and higher peaks to climb. I’m always outrunning something, or chasing something, and I don’t rest very well either way. I thrive under pressure, and I love the feeling of getting a gold star. If I’m not pushing my brain to try new and more challenging things, I feel like it’s just a little raisin in the making—crisping up in the sun. If I’m not moving, something wicked is coming my way, and I’ll also probably die of atrophy. Whether universe-given or self-destructively created, the scales tip too far, and I get overwhelmed. Overwhelmed enough to freeze while the responsibilities and promises I made start gathering like a heavy, pregnant storm cloud right over my head. No matter how I try, I can’t reach into it and pull down something solid to work on. It’s just foreboding mist, no structure or body, gathering and getting darker. Eventually, after enough threatening, it storms, and I never have an umbrella. There’s my sorry ass, caught in the rain that I brought on myself—not a piña colada in sight.

We are all at the mercy of the information we have.

Let’s say we’re living the dream of any girl who grew up during Nicholas Sparks’s chokehold-on-Hollywood era, and we’re about to The Notebook this shit into the afterlife, but without the dementia.

We’re all just little bottles of space stuff and blood and effort, and some days we turn out a bit more animal than celestial.