So Sad Today: Personal Essays
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Read between March 21 - March 27, 2024
3%
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I was born two weeks late, because I didn’t want to leave the womb. When they finally kicked me out, I was like, oh hell no. I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.
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An external attribution exists to make you feel shitty. It’s a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they’re always your own fault.
5%
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Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.
9%
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When you’re lonely and blacking out in strange places, you let other lonely people do what they want to you. You call it free love.
16%
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It’s not that I’m shutting you out when we have sex, I just need to fantasize about obese women caring for one another’s vaginas to have a good orgasm and you’re a midsize man: a love story.
16%
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Let’s pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.
17%
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Imagining that you are going to come back to me is my favorite way to spend the day: a love story.
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We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head: a love story.
27%
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I said that I was having a stomachache and could he bring me some Pepto. I think it was the only thing he ever bought for me. I still have the Pepto tablets. To me, they still seem romantic: pink, cherry flavor. To me they look like tiny valentines.
29%
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You’re so beautiful I want to throw a land mine into a wall of cinder blocks and paint your lips with the dust cloud.
30%
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I want to give you joy and love from this place so you can use it where you need it. It’s more powerful to use energy in a different realm from where you got it, like how pokemon level up way faster when they’re traded
31%
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What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can’t it just become something else?
31%
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I want to say: was i real to you? could i have been real to you? why wasn’t i? I want to say: when r u coming back to me in the way i want u?
31%
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When we think of our old lovers, and the people they are with now, we wonder what we did not have. We wonder collectively, as people, what other people have.
32%
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People have said that I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I’ve been told that the universe probably wants me here. Still, I choose to feel that I am being judged as a piece of shit by some cosmic arbiter.
33%
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I claim to believe my god exists, because I have experienced its presence many times. I have experienced god through other human beings who have helped me. While individuals have let me down, collectively I’ve always been able to find help. My god is a horizontal god who works sideways on earth rather than vertically from heaven down.
34%
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I think that we should all have our own gods, and whatever we believe exists does, in some way, exist.
42%
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I feel bad for judging people who have children. Recently I was at the Cheesecake Factory (which is one of my favorite restaurants and I feel bad about that) and I saw this very Cheesecake Factory–looking couple with their baby. I thought, Oh great, just what we need, another American. They looked happy. I felt like they were wrong.
45%
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I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own. I can’t count on the universe to sate my many holes: physical, emotional, spiritual. So I take matters into my own hands. I give myself little “doggy treats” for being alive. Each time I unwrap a new piece of nicotine gum and put it in my mouth (roughly every thirty minutes), I generate a sense of synthetic hope and potentiality.
57%
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I google some more and discover that Jennifer Aniston doesn’t do Botox. I am worse than Jennifer Aniston. I am worse than a lot of people.
57%
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that. I keep googling “Botox death” looking for new results. I also google “Botox flu,” “Botox soulless,” “plastic surgery disaster,” “what’s wrong with me,” “why,” and “how to love yourself.”
58%
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When I started tripping I was like, Why can’t people just be kind to one another? But what I really think I meant was, Why can’t I be kind to myself?
60%
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Me: like, how will i know who i am if i am not measuring myself against something outside me or whatev? it will all feel so bottomless and infinite. i’m ttly scared of the infinite.
62%
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Higher self: it seems like u r scared of containing multitudes, tbh Higher self: like, why does it have to be all or nothing? why r u just str8 up good or str8 up evil? what if u r a v loveable douchebag? what if u r a heavenly asshole? what if u r a destructive beautiful person? Me: idk Me: am i allowed 2 be good and evil at the same time? Higher self: look around, bb. that’s all there is.
68%
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IS FAKE LOVE BETTER THAN real love? Real love is responsibility, compromise, selflessness, being present, and all that shit. Fake love is magic, excitement, false hope, infatuation, and getting high off the potential that another person is going to save you from yourself.
68%
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You take a living, breathing human being and try to stuff them into the insatiable holes inside you. These holes are in no way shaped like that person (or any person). But you believe that this fantasy person will fill you, because he or she possesses all the imaginary qualities you seek in a lover. And how do you know that he or she possesses all of these qualities? You put them there.
73%
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Well, so what if it were all in my head? I’d still be suffering. Would I not deserve compassion and self-love? Intellectually I’m like, Yeah. But emotionally I’m like, No fucking way. Buck up, gurl.
73%
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Even writing the word self-love makes me feel stupid. Is anything more bullshit, kale-eating, juice-fasting contemporary American than the notion of self-love? “Be gentle with yourself, you deserve it.” Do I really?
88%
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What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.
97%
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The experience of being alive, its isness, maybe in relation to the future isn’tness of death or maybe independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes. Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die. I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt.
98%
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It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?
99%
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All I want from you is to be liked. Of course, that is a scared woman’s way of saying what I really want, which is to connect with you on a deep and true level while I am still on this earth, and maybe even after I am off it.