Thank God for cats

The saviour of sad single girls everywhere

Lord Knows I Should be Doing Math Homework

My mom has repeatedly asked me if I’m depressed, my friends have gossiped talked about how weird it is that I don’t leave my room for days on end, and I’ve denied anything is wrong to everyone … and myself … mostly myself. I’m a terrible lier.

I have always been easily overwhelmed, indecisive, and most of all, a quitter - it’s great, I’ve made life easy for myself. I’ve tried ballet, gymnastics, swimming, hip-hop, cheerleading, and acrobatic dance over the course of 4 years; saxophone, flute, percussion, and vocals in 2 years (minus 4 summer months); emo, rasta, gutter punk, anarchist hipppy, angry hippy, quirky hipster (think Zoey Deschanel), care-free hippy, and pbr chugging hipster (if I were male, I’d have a beautiful beard and I would want to date me) in approximately a decade; photography, political science, sociology, ethics, and philosophy in 3 years; retail lackey, barista many times over, general labourer, nanny, and ei recipient over the past decade as well. I don’t have a good track record for ‘stick-to-it-ness.' The only constant is the cycle of beginning and ending-before-completion. 

I want to be the type of person who can reach goals, who masters something instead of becoming moderately well versed in it for a couple months, but my history makes me wary of that as a possibility. I have already failed so many things so many times that I have lost all faith in myself. Not to mention all the versions of hippy are still simmering in there and they really don’t want to give into the man and be concerned with monetary matters, man. 

I keep trying to come up with deep ideas about why I am so single lazy - maybe the standards I set for myself are so impossibly high that I set myself up for failure or there is an underlying chemical condition preventing me from reaching my goals - when, in actuality, I am probably just lazy … and I have terrible coping mechanisms often referred to as 'vices.' 

Alcohol was always my favourite vice - it’s social, I’m good at drinking copious amounts of it, it’s the vice of every trope I’ve ever romanticized, it often leads to some other choice vices and it’s just fun! But my want to get turnt is no longer, thusly, my socializing has taken a serious nose-dive. I’m trying to navigate the waters of mostly sobriety and maintain friendships that once thrived on too many dranks and singing along to Beyonce. I’ve always found the sheer number of friends I have to be overwhelming (boo-hoo, too many friends) but this transitionary phase is especially challenging - I simultaneously feel extremely sentimental and extremely selfish. My friends have been loving it - I cancel on them all the time so now they don’t even get affirmation for anything, just a line of 'maybes.’ I thought my being a shitty friend revoked my privileges as a friend but then one told me that I was acting just as selfishly as I ever have so at least I feel just as privileged as ever now [upward inflection].

The only thing I have ever been sure of in my life is that I want a family. Despite having been single my whole life, save a 10 month relationship but that’s only, like, 3.2% of my life, I don’t think I have ever known who I am as a entity singular and separate from those closest to me at the time. I have viewed the first half of my 20s as a sort of waiting period until I can begin my own family, looking for something to fill the time until I am a mother (and hopefully a wife) but that was stupid. I’ve also reached an age that enables me to look back and reflect on all the ways I have fucked up. I have all the hindsight, which is more than enough to say, “dissatisfied with life, Kate? You got us here, you massive screw up.”  I also have a sense of doom that if I don’t stop fucking up now my ego will not be fed and hell will be released upon myself. The perfect reaction: do absolutely nothing, fuck myself over more. Thanks anxiety! Thanks 26! Thanks Kate.