Life is most difficult for people who know what they want.
Plus some things I thought I wanted but I don't anymore.
Welcome back to On The Verge, a reader supported publication about finding wellness, then losing it and hopefully finding it again, and all the stuff that keeps me going along the way.
If you’re already a paid subscriber, then you get all the posts. Yay! If you’re an unpaid subscriber, then please enjoy the occasional public posts that I put out, and read the paid posts when they sometimes become available.
Thanks for bearing with me while I navigate what I call my cocoon phase of life, where I slowly fall apart and dissolve (waaaah) so that I emerge as a new, fully formed version of myself. More on this later.
To starting books then stopping them then starting again
I’m reading ‘Book of Goose’ by Yiyun Li, which I first picked up months ago. Within paragraphs I was hooked on the story of two French girls who learn about the world as they discover their place in it and the part they play in what happens to them. But, I was busy and often left it untouched in my bag or on my nightstand. After weeks, and a couple overdue notices, I returned it to the library for someone else to enjoy. I finally picked it up again last week and after starting it for the second time, I don’t want to put it down.
What strikes me most about this novel, and others I like, is the honesty of the characters, who are sometimes ugly and immoral. I enjoy books that touch on darkness without going into gore or horror, that illuminate the little evils that can exist in all of us.
Do you know what you want?
Sometimes I think I do and for a second my life feels easier. I can finally sit with the certainty of knowing what to do next. Making decisions and feeling good about them has historically been hard for me. I get stuck in the not knowing, of the infinite possibilities and the always looming opposite side of the coin. It’s the most confusing part of having OCD.
On the rare occasion that I do know what I want, it’s fleeting. I sit in my knowing until something in me suggests that I don’t actually know, because I couldn’t possibly be sure because nobody on this Earth is sure of anything and if they are, well they must be deluded.
In these moments when I do make decisions that eventually turn out to be the wrong ones, I hold on to hope that somewhere in the future, a version of myself that will appreciate this choice exists. I try to predict what future me will want because I don’t trust the present me. In the end, I pay for it. I guess the lesson that I have such a hard time learning is that I do know what I want but knowing what I want means I owe it to myself to choose it and sometimes that is the hardest part.
Things I wanted but then didn’t, Part 1
Starting with every pair of jeans I’ve ever owned. The jeans are easy. They look good on the model, they are under 200 bucks and they will arrive in less than a week. They are too big because ordering a size 23 seems obscene. Nobody is that small, I tell myself. Nobody is that small every day of the week. Even if I were that small, I would eventually stop being that small and then I would tumble out the top of my jeans, leading me to believe that I was not small, but actually large. There is nothing wrong with large but when you inhabit a smaller body and then all of a sudden it is less small, there is a shift in identity, of place and order. There is a shift in what I thought I knew and because it was once that way, I expect it to be always that way. My smallness, which I never notice when it is here, but only miss when it is not, becomes something that defines me. So I decide to get a 24 instead. I can live with a gap in the waist, a sag in the butt and some room in the thighs. I can live with the extra space that hides the real shape of my body, which to me looks quite like a prepubescent boy. I wear them so much that they stain with cooking oil and rip at the knees, turning the fashionable tears into gaping holes that expose my knobby and unshaven knees. They have been washed so many times that they are tighter in the waist and shorter at the ankle. Have I grown?, I ask myself. I don’t want them anymore.
But I do want these
I saw a picture of someone in a loose denim on denim outfit featuring a baggy jean with an oversized denim jacket and it looked so fresh. Officially moving into a baggier denim season of my life.

In other news…
I signed up for a breathwork challenge from The Being Portal and I did not do a single session. I really want to try it but am slightly freaking out about the possibility of having dangerous side effects like hyperventilating or passing out. So just like with meditation, breathwork will start out as an exposure.
I’ll leave you with this image of Phoebe Cates from Fast Times at Ridgemont High because it reeks of summer nostalgia. Is it weird she’s underage here?