Unquiet
Things

I often think of getting a chance to visit my younger self, and after she’s gotten over the simultaneous horror of how fat I have gotten, but how cool my nose ring is, here is what I would tell her:

Stop. Fucking. Around.

I know, I know – you think you’re buying yourself time, that if you just wait a little longer, the thing you’re dreading will somehow become easier or disappear entirely. Spoiler alert: it won’t. What you’re actually doing is choosing to suffer twice – once in the anticipation, and once when you finally have to do the thing anyway.

I spent so many years getting myself into the dumbest situations because I was procrastinating or avoiding something or lying about something I should have done and never did. The elaborate cover-ups, the increasingly ridiculous excuses, the way one small avoided task would snowball into this absurd comedy of errors that was infinitely worse than just handling the original thing.

Today, I had to make a series of phone calls I was dreading. Without getting too much into it, my boss made a companywide announcement that was going to affect our part-timers and that it would occur “sooner rather than later,” which means absolutely nothing and is not in any way useful or helpful. So I got to be the one to call each of them personally and clarify things, which included giving them an actual timeline. The doing of this was never not going to suck. And I did not want to do it.

My younger self would have spent days catastrophizing about these calls. She would have imagined every possible terrible reaction, rehearsed scripts that she’d never use, and probably would have “forgotten” to make them until the last possible moment, making everything infinitely more stressful for everyone involved.

Instead, I just… made the calls. They were fine. Some people were disappointed, some were understanding, most were just grateful to have actual information instead of corporate vagueness. The whole thing took maybe an hour, and then it was done.

The dread of doing it will hurt you more, and you don’t need to spend even more time hurting. Life is going to hand you plenty of genuine suffering – toxic relationships, bad breakups, family drama, health scares, financial stress, random bullshit that isn’t even your fault. Why volunteer for extra? Why choose to torment yourself over something you have to do anyway?

That’s it. That’s the wisdom. Stop volunteering for extra angst. The thing you’re avoiding isn’t going anywhere, but every day you spend dreading it is a day you’re choosing to feel like garbage for no good reason.

Do the fucking thing. Your future self will thank you. Also, one day, someone will think they have the right to tell you that they don’t want you to get a nose ring, and when they do, I want you to just cackle like a loon right to their face and tell them to FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF YOU NO GOOD PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER.