The beautiful, ordinary, everyday things

This evening I finished a beautifully haunting horror novel, and usually what this means is a late night of lying in bed trying to prevent my thoughts from wandering too deeply into the world the story has created in my mind. But not tonight. Instead, I am spending the night tending to my soul because I recently heard news of an old acquaintance and his ongoing poor thoughts of me.

I need to be liked. I have learned early on in life that to be liked is a matter not of frivolity but of survival. Popularity gives you opportunity. Unpopularity means loneliness and voicelessnsss and an unnameable negative reality. My default is to live in a world of dichotomies.

This, however, isn’t true to how life works. It’s messy and colourful and never stays within the lines. I know this, and I love this. I hate that the memory of animosity can steer me away from this understanding. I may be paraphrasing here but I believe Taylor Swift once said that basing your entire self-worth on whether or not people like you means that your self-worth will always be shattered. No one is universally beloved. Even the people who love you don’t like you all the time. The people I love I certainly don’t like all the time. The people who don’t like me don’t dislike me all the time either, unless they’re sole purpose in life is find derision in humanity - those people are luckily very rare. So my spending my night thinking about why this person doesn’t like be and questioning every flaw to find my Worst Quality seems a strange and unfruitful way to spend my time. I’d rather think about the book I just read. The stars. What the morning will bring. All the beautiful, ordinary, everyday things. Because that’s what life is really about, isn’t it?