It's Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake

by Claire Christian

“That kid, she’s wild and she does whatever she wants. As a human, I love that about her, but as her parent...” He sighs, shaking his head before he smiles. “I hope she doesn’t lose that.” “She won’t. Look at you.” “Yeah, but we all lose it, Nons.

I am all for wild ambition but it’s just not me.

Just disappointed. My life is destined to be boring and predictable,

Doing this may disrupt the very comfortable fabric of my life. And that’s petrifying, because I’m very comfortable here. I know how things work. How I work. I’m happy being relatively unhappy.

when you catch yourself in an anxiety spiral, or negative spin, you need to recognize the thoughts that are false, or self-sabotaging bullshit, and reprimand them.

“I’m not going to ask you if you’re okay, because that’s shit. I’m just going to tell you that I love you and I’m here, and remind you to tell me whatever you need and I’ll do it,”

There is a hole in your heart, or your life, or however you want to look at it. That baby, she is a hole, which you’re never, ever gonna fill. You’re just gonna get better at living with the hole,”

Humans are so habitual. We like routine,” Lil says. “And then we get stuck. And we don’t like to interrogate our habits, or do anything that feels uncomfortable. But that’s where the good stuff is, in our discomfort.”

But there’s one relationship I’ve neglected my whole life: my relationship with myself. “I’m a shit partner,” I say out loud to myself. I would never tolerate the things I say to myself if someone else was saying them. I disregard my feelings. I don’t value my desires. I don’t nurture myself. I’m mean. Holy shit. Pleasure isn’t a person. It’s personal. And I need to work out what it looks like to me.

spent so much of my life wasting energy on people who treated me like shit. Real assholes. But the most devastating thing, once I’d done the fucking work to get rid of the assholes, was that I realized I was still left with one. Me. I was a real dick to myself for so long.

One person’s trauma doesn’t negate someone else’s feelings.

It’s scary when you realize that you don’t really have a backup plan, that you’ve been striving for one thing for so long you haven’t considered any alternatives.

“I mean, you’re always going to be missing out on something, we all are, that’s life, that’s making choices, I guess. We can’t actually have it all.” “Yes. I know. And we’ve been sold a fucking ridiculous tale that has led us to believe we can have it all. Fuck Instagram.”