Inner Work + Growing/Glowing Up
Weddings, Lana, COVID, Crying, Financial Insecurity, and The View will be discussed.
I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting and a lot of inner work which is another way of saying that I am essentially working only twenty hours a week at a cafe in Orange County. I have been struggling with the future and how to fit into a future that is so bleak.
I took a two-week break to write the next 800 words because COVID really damaged any work ethic I had, if any. I’ve been thinking a lot about growing up lately and the way that we have to dissect certain parts of ourselves under a magnifying glass in order to evolve and grow. It seems like the only way to be successful these days is to be extremely hot but at the same time elephants could be extinct by 2025, so I’m just confused. How does Lady Gaga start a makeup brand knowing that it’s a bad thing… She even says in her first commercial about it: “The last thing the world needed was another beauty brand, well that’s too bad.” I cried at the beach and it made me feel like an adult because it felt so healthy to process emotions and let them out with mother ocean cradling me through every feeling that came up. It felt so much better to let out my emotions versus what I have done in the past which is get drunk and watch Four Weddings on TLC for six hours. However, I sure do love that too! I love crying and I love TLC.
However, there is something interesting to be said about the way the media imposes itself onto the vulnerable. Just kidding, imagine if I just started saying more unhinged existential statements without providing any proof or citations. However, the media does scam us and our loved ones every single day. In other news, I have never been to Fire Island. I haven’t been to Fire Island because I’ve been a barista for the last two to eighteen years, I’ve lost count at this point. Baristas can’t really take vacations alas we still do! I’m going to a wedding and a Lana concert this weekend and I have no money for any of it. I’m such an idiot and I will spend my last dollar on a joint and Lana tickets any day of the week. I always think to myself, Today I will be good and responsible. Today, I will not spend my last dollar on a pumpkin cream cold or make an impulsive decision to move across the country but I can never last more than five minutes. I am an ingenue? I have no idea what that means but I absolutely love literature and I am an English major for sure.
I’m so excited to see Lana Del Rey this weekend and I might shit, piss, and cry all at the same time. It’s crazy that we are alive at the same time as a musician as influential as Lana, a musician who can cause her fans to have active biohazards at her concerts. On TikTok, I saw that it was common for fan members to pass out at her shows. Actually, scratch that and reverse it. It was my twenty-year-old colleague who saw Lana Del Rey at Lalapalazoo and she told me that eight people passed out when Lana came on stage. I find that to be so magical and beautiful. Michael Jackson also caused people to pass out when he came on stage. I’m scared of that guy though so I don’t really want to think about him unfortunately. However, Lana is writing standards in 2023 that will go down in history and change music forever. I fucking love that bitch and I would kill for her. My dying wish would be to have one shift with her at the Waffle House.
The first concert I ever went to was Hilary Duff and the first intrusive thought I ever had was about throwing up in a crowd! I could look up what that specific phobia is called but I have never really cared too much about information.
I used to love the show, The View because it was a comfort and I found solace knowing that I had similar opinions to Whoopi Goldberg (A major news network herself).
I used to be addicted to the aesthetic of this mug:
Whenever I came home from school as a kid my mom would be watching either The View, Desperate Housewives, All My Children, Martha Stewart, or a documentary about Nostradamus predicting the end of the world in 2012. I’m not joking when I say that my mom used to watch documentaries about the world ending in 2012 for like 4 years straight. Me and my sister were prepared to die at one point. I was in my sister's bedroom on a cold night in March in Buffalo, NY and I said “Yeah, I don’t know if I’ll make it to Middle School, kinda sucks ya know? And she said: “Yeah, I don’t even know if I’ll make it to High School, how do you think I feel?” For the record, my sister is engaged and just bought a house while I am trying to justify doing a Lemonade Stand at 25 years old with my barista coworker. My sister is a Leo so she was always trying to one-up me. I’m a Leo rising so I can say that.
Let go and let god. I tell myself after screaming into my pillow for three hours because I didn’t ever get the internship with Jimmy Fallon that I applied to in 2018. In the interview, they asked me what my favorite game was that they did on the show. When I answered, I said, “The one where Drew Barrymore spins the wheel.” I totally could’ve elaborated but my brain was rotted back then and I had no interviewing skills as a 19-year-old. It was ridiculous that they wanted to see how well I knew the show when the job as an intern was all customer service. They were like “How much do you love Jimmy on a scale from 1-10?” They also asked what memories I have with the show to which I panicked and said “I grew up watching him.” But the show started in 2014 and this was 2019. That’s so fucking embarrassing. I used to be SO stupid and I think that we can never forget that as a society. I can’t blame myself though, my brain was still developing back then and still is even now. It actually won’t stop developing until my late twenties which means I am not responsible for anything that happened during my twenties or childhood.