I was talking to my boyfriend yesterday on the phone. A long time ago, maybe last year, he said that if his life was a song, this would be the bridge–the melody is different, things are a little jumbled, it’s different. I felt that way too, about myself and my own life. A couple of weeks ago, maybe, I thought back on that thought and thought maybe I was wrong. Well, maybe it was the bridge, for a while. But without me knowing it, I was actually in the next song on the album. Yes, the album of my life. My boyfriend reflected that sentiment yesterday–he brought up that analogy and said now he’s in the last verse, and it’s time for the next song. Rehab has been good for him.

It’s been good for me, too, but in a different way–I feel alone, single in a way but not actually single–like the period after a breakup where you vow to work on yourself but don’t actually do that–but in this case, I actually have to, because I have no other option. I’ve been reading The Body Keeps The Score and doing yoga and calling my friends on the phone. I’ve been rehashing traumatic experiences in my head and getting needlessly angry early in the morning. I’ve been thinking, or ruminating, I should say, because the thoughts get me nowhere. Ruminate feels like rummage, because I’m rummaging through my brain and finding old, put-away thoughts and kind of scattering them everywhere and really just staring at them, but no. It comes from the Latin for chewing cud, and “ruminants” are goats and sheep and cattle and giraffes and deer, the animals that regurgitate the food from their stomachs and chew it some more. Ruminate, rummage, regurgitate. It’s all the same, really.

So now that I’ve firmly places myself in the same category as cows, I can tackle this “work on yourself” mentality more appropriately. What do I need? What do I want?

I’ve been thinking about buying an at-home neurofeedback therapy kit. I think it could be useful, but I wonder if this is just another extension of my buying-things addiction, which is a mild and not totally dangerous addiction to have.

I’ve been thinking about how you should really never want to achieve success, because it’s the antithesis to relatability. Or at least that’s how it’s perceived, from the outside. Plenty of people never succeed in the traditional meaning of the word, or at least “get famous” or what have you. So if you’re going to be the small margin of the people that do, you have to accept that you lost out on truly resonating with the wider public. That’s why, I guess, a lot of media misses the mark. It’s the scrappy stuff that’s really impactful. I could come up with a million examples of this, but I think the vast majority of people could come up with their own, so I won’t, mostly because I don’t feel like it right now. You could also take stories of relatability and contrast them to stories that inspire–you know, the despite-the-odds ones. I don’t feel like writing anymore today. I’m gonna go look at floor cushions on Etsy.