DAY TWO: SOMETHING YOU FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT

Ugh I feel strongly about a lot of stuff, but it's surprisingly hard to think of something specific if someone is actually asking me! So for now I'll go with something that I think a lot of people never really think about: You are not obligated to love and respect family members or former friends who treat you like garbage, and you are not selfish for cutting toxic people out of your life.

I'll try to keep this short and somewhat vague.

I've got some issues with my father, and I'm constantly being made to feel bad for not going out of my way to be more affectionate towards him. But I refuse to apologize for it. He has severely wounded me in many ways and put a lot of pressure on me that I was too young to handle, resulting in trauma that I am still working to recover from, and he has yet to offer me any kind of a proper apology. Very recently, he demonstrated in a public forum that he doesn't even realize what he's done wrong. And he intentionally humiliated me in front of his friends, only offering a backhanded/passive-aggressive "apology" after I roasted him in return. He's not a great guy, and that's putting it lightly.

He's been sick lately and may die. I'll be there if he asks for me, I've visited him in the hospital a couple of times (even though hospitals drain me of all physical energy and leave me tired for a week), and I don't go out of my way to be rude to him or anything like that (I'm even thinking of doing him a very nice favor without being asked). But I don't think I should suddenly have to forget all of his wrongs just because karma has come for him. I'm not about to crawl to him on my knees and praise him and tell him what a wonderful father he is and lament not having spent more time with him.

I'm not being bitter. I don't really hate him. I'm just done wasting my valuable time and energy on trying to earn love and respect from someone who will never be able to love anyone more than he loves himself. I had to learn the hard way that he is what he is and nothing I say or do will change him. So I take what little I can get, cut my losses, and walk away. I don't ever go out of my way to contact him.

If someone treats you like garbage, you have every right to walk away. You deserve to be happy. Don't let anyone make you feel bad about it.

DAY THREE: A BOOK YOU LOVE

I could literally scream from the mountaintops about how much I love Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel. It was so cathartic and so tender and so healing to me, so personal in so many ways, and I've reread it many times. It can still make me cry no matter how many times I read the same chapter over and over again. It's like the book was made personally for me. I honestly think that reading it is a really good way to understand me as a person.

I don't want to spoil the book too much (I could go ON AND ON), especially because one should be at least somewhat familiar with the podcast before reading it, but one of the main characters is a single mother with a teenage son. The son wants to meet his birth father. His mother struggles with trying not to be selfish in the fact that she doesn't want her son to love him. Diane, the mother, had to raise Josh, her son, on her own, and she earned Josh's love and loves him because she's been with him always. So it hurts her that Josh automatically loves and wants to be loved by a man he's never met. A man who abandoned her and couldn't be bothered to love Josh.

Eventually Josh meets his dad, and they realize he's responsible for all of the major plot points in the book. And Diane and Josh and the other MC get to put him in his place. Troy, the father, is such a shocking parallel to my own father and his flaws that it's like Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor literally crawled inside of my brain and collected every possible phrase that they knew would make me cry. So getting to see these characters decide that they don't need Troy in their lives, and moving on and being happy on their own, is SO IMPORTANT to me (I am LITERALLY CRYING RN WHY DOES THIS BOOK DO THIS TO ME).

Diane and Josh are both written with a level of sensitivity and honesty that I've never seen in fiction, and Diane is so much like my own single mother, who I love dearly. Seeing Diane treated so respectfully by the authors is just... wow. It's just wow. I'd ask my mom to read this book herself if it didn't involve so much surrealism.

I actually got to meet Joseph and Jeffrey at a book signing, where I watched as they signed my copy of the book, which I had already read six times. I had rehearsed a short version of the above rant so that they would know how much this book meant to me. But instead, I froze up at the awe and terror of meeting two of my idols and said NOTHING.

NOTHING AT ALL.

Oh, how I wish I wasn't so awkward.