I Choose Darkness

by Jenny Lawson

This is month 1,792 of living in a pandemic (I may have lost count), and sometimes you need all the twinkling lights and Star Wars ornaments you can get in your life.

If you hide everything behind the couch and then scream the name of your family member while you pull the gift out and launch it at them, it’s just as much of a surprise (possibly more if they’re not paying attention).

Thanksgiving is similar, except that I do actually have a dish that I cook that day. You mix a can of cranberry sauce with a can of mandarin oranges and eat it out of a cereal bowl while your family questions your life choices.

I am one of the small group of people who go to Halloween stores not for temporary plastic decorations but for actual interior design ideas.

The whole house is a delight. A dark, bizarre, slightly unsettling delight. Just like Halloween.

Looking back now, it seems strange that I spent so much of my childhood on alert for roving satanists and unmarked quicksand, neither of which ended up being nearly as much of a problem in my real life as I had been led to believe. This was a gentle and naive time before the internet, when all our information came from urban legends and terrifying local news reports.

Me: But I need to finish Netflix. My editor: Finish what on Netflix? Me: Just finish Netflix. All of it. I think I’m close. My editor: You can’t finish Netflix. Me: Well, that sounds like a challenge. Also, clearly you haven’t had the same pandemic I have.

This was the night I discovered that bored parents can be dangerous and that it is very hard to wash urine out of tennis shoes.

Angsty teen me threw away a lot of stuff that I wish I’d been a little more careful with, including rationality, perspective, and my virginity.