Everything’s Changing

“Everything’s chaaaaanging, when I turn around, all out of what I know, I’m a lone bob.”

-Avril Lavigne, Mobile

Note: Lyrics above brought to you by me, singing alone in the car to my Avril Lavigne CD from 2004. Not officially provided by Avril or her representatives.

I am twenty-four now, guys. We started this blog when I was nineteen. (I had some other half-baked intro ideas, but this fact just struck me, and I don’t quite know what to do with it so I’m just going to leave it here.)

I’m twenty-four, and everything is in flux. I feel too old to be so clueless, and too young to be so serious. The last few months have been a hurricane – except I’m starting to realize that the hurricane is just the world outside my apartment, and I haven’t really been outside alone before now.

New friends, old friends. Warm beginnings. Painful goodbyes. A wrinkled face with bushy eyebrows we’ll never get to see again, but maybe that’s what his disposable cameras were for all along.

Change came in bulk this season, my friends. But the good ol’ stuff keeps coming too. Like just now, Julie sent me a snapchat of a pair of knitting needles she just bought that look really, really phallic. (“What, are you knitting with penisia?”) These are the moments I really hope to remember.

If you’re hungry for some comfort in the middle of a change hurricane, here are a few tips from the field:

1. Listen to your favorite CD from 2004. (Remember how you thought that Jackie telling Ben you had a crush on him was going to bring about the end of days. Remember that it did not.)
2. Read a book that you “just stumbled across” in the self-help section.
3. Find a few great gems in that book. Write that shit down in your journal.
4. Find a line in the book that sounds a lot like “if you let [insert trauma here] stop you from being successful, you didn’t try hard enough” in that book. Remove from your bookshelf quietly.   
5. Call a friend you’ve been missing. Ask them to hang out. Set a date and a time.
6. Learn something new at work.
7. Read a book about WWII. (Hey, at least you’re not in WWII!)
8. Cry about things you can’t quite articulate. Cry loud and ugly.
9. Try doing a handstand. Your left arm is missing a bone now, but fuck it, why not.
10. Anchor yourself by helping someone else. If you have enough time for an existential crisis, you have enough time for a few hours of volunteering. (It doesn’t have to move mountains. Just show up.)