Take your pivoting, and your puzzles and your sourdough starter, and shove them up your ass. And then take your upbeat attitude and your side business selling homemade masks, and your righteous indignation, and shove that up your ass too. Take your meditations and your mantras and your Pollyanna memes and, yes, you guessed it. Shove ‘em up your ass. Let’s take all that crap, all that shit that we are using to keep ourselves sane, or so we think, and shove it up our collective asses. All of our distractions, and our work arounds and our endless walks. That’s what I’m doing. It’s all going up there. Good thing my ass has quadrupled in size since last year.
Because right now, I’m throwing a pity party. A big fucking pity party. A good old Dionysian feast. Everyone is welcome, wine is flowing, beers on tap and there are hor’s dourves as far as the eye can see (don’t worry, I’m having it catered).
I don’t know why pity parties get such a bad rap. Maybe it’s because you never know how many people will be showing up. Or maybe it’s because the decorations are so tacky. I don’t fucking know.
But the thing is, like all parties, a pity party will end. Eventually the guests make their way home to sleep it off, or pass out on your sofa, or pool table, or bathroom floor. You wake up in the morning, nursing your hangover, and pull out a garbage bag and start cleaning up. You wonder who got into your good scotch, how those footprints got on the ceiling, and why is the dog covered in glitter.
So please, come join me.
I hate this. I hate all of it. I hate the masks, and the mask culture. I hate social distancing; I hate hand sanitizer. I hate being afraid of walking the wrong way in a store. I hate that I can’t hug people, that I don’t know how to interact with people. I hate that I don’t know what the hell is going on, that I don’t know how many people I can hang out with so better to just not hang out at all. I hate that video is a poor replacement for live action. I hate pretending I’m on board with our new normal. I hate that I can’t comfort people around me, and that I’m terrified of making my immunocompromised friend sick, and I hate that I can’t hold her hand. I miss everything. Everything.
I know why we need to do this. I know I’m lucky. I know I’m privileged and that so many have it so much worse. But at this moment, I don’t really give a shit about that, at least not at my party. It’s my party, and I’m going to sit, and mope and sleep and cry and eat and allow myself to do all that for as long as I need to do all that.
And then, at some point, I will be done. I will have emptied my self-pity bladder. I will have made space in my being for optimism and light and happiness. Because honestly, that really is my natural state of being. I know it seems like it isn’t, but it really is. But when my self-pity bladder gets full, I need to empty it before it explodes. Because it will. And I will need a hazmat team to clean it up.
Alright. Party’s over. Hand me the broom.
Sharon
Just a girl, sitting quietly, releasing the pressure valve on her brain.