“Make it stop,” you say to yourself. “What a joke,” you reply. You’re lucky to make anything start. What you want is an addiction. You’ve gone through recovery, made steps, accepted a higher power, even if that higher power is raising a goblet to the God of Rock. You can’t help it. Your pleasure is your pain. You are a responsible adult when you renounce what you love and make amends with what you tolerate. It’s all coming at you: the person you want even though your therapist says you shouldn’t, the things that are good but are not good for you, and vice versa. You are imbibing an alarming amount of kale. You love carbs but are avoiding them. You are dreaming of chips. Can you believe this is your life?
Or, the person you want is playing games with you, forgetting to show up, to return your message. You have become so used to that outgoing voicemail. That person sounds breathless, in a hurry, busy with someone more important than you. “Hi, it’s [redacted]. Please leave a message.” But then you don’t. You hang up, knowing that your number has shown up already. You don’t know what to say. Sometimes that voice is suspiciously calm, oddly professional, as if this person had a profession. All of these feelings have hijacked the part of you that is supposed to be your advocate. Where is your advocate? Do you need to hear the advocate’s voicemail, too?
Think of all you can’t stop, then multiply that times everything. The Trump was stopped but he seems in danger of coming back. You can’t control gas prices, the Fed, your flatlining salary, the people who want to punish you for not being someone else. You have failed to be someone else this whole time.