Friday, December 7, 2012

Recipe for an existential crisis

*Author's note--there is no delight in this post, so read on at your own peril. However, there is a quality music reference, so I didn't fully stray.

Make sure your paycheck that's owed to you for the last two months from your previous employer never gets sent to you, though said previous employer insists it's in the mail.
Get threatening texts that your phone is about to be shut off.
Don't pay your bills on time, because you have seven cents, literally in your checking and savings combined.
Avoid calls from any city that's not your own, Seattle, Newark, Manitowoc, because they are definitely about the bills that you aren't paying with the money you aren't making.
Don't bother thinking about your dreams because they seem to be spiraling downward into the toilet that is your life.
Look for work and find a job that is in your field of interest and you find very fulfilling but is only twelve hours a week while your other options of supplementing your never-ending pool of debt are waitressing or bagging groceries.
Feel desolate looking at your student loan bills creeping upwards of $80,000 with interest accruing daily and wonder why you paid for higher education just to serve beer and accidentally walk into the bathroom on someone doing a line of coke.
Don't go for a run because even though the endorphins would be good for you, the thought of putting on different clothes seems to be too much.
Lay in bed but don't distract yourself in any positive way, like reading quality books or looking at choice photography but instead think of all the ways in which your life is an abyss and feel markedly worse.
Continually switch your Pandora station because even the most folksy, mellow music isn't depressing enough to match your mood. Bob Dylan. You read once that if you're sad, don't listen to Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan it is.
Sleep in a bed with two of your sisters in a bedroom where you don't have a dresser and all your clothes are spilling out of bags and you can't find your underwear when you get out of the shower and your siblings steal your socks and you end up wearing the same three outfits every week rather than dig through the endless bags of chaos.
Take half a Xanax, but immediately fret that you should have taken a whole.
Wonder where all your positivity and pep went?
Acknowledge that when your most loved place sucker punched you in the groin when you were down and thoroughly made you question not only your belief in yourself, but your belief in everything, that it could be a rough road back to the top.

Aaaaand that outta do it.

Congratulations, you are now in the throes of an existential crisis.

**Additional author's note--okay, after writing this post I waited awhile before publishing as it seemed rather bleak and true enough it is. But since then, a very kind and incredible man whom I love dearly made me laugh, well amidst my tears, but he accomplished something noteworthy in my crisis nonetheless. So I take it back about the no delight. Life isn't all grim. I love and am loved. That's not to be discounted, even for the sake of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
Also I went ice skating today. So... there's that.