DAY FOUR: BULLET YOUR WHOLE DAY

Get ready for a WHOLE LOTTA LITERALLY NOTHING WHOOP WHOOP Wednesday is almost always one of my off days from work.

• Woke up at around 2:30 PM (I tend to fall asleep no earlier than four in the morning).

• Got up, said hello to my family members, and took the dogs to our little fenced-in backyard, or "out for a walk". They're still not properly potty-trained even after three years (little dogs are notoriously stubborn about that and we're terrible disciplinarians), so they get a treat every time they use the bathroom outside, which is slowly working.

• Had burgers and fries (mom broke out the grill on our porch and we threw ourselves a little picnic). Family members ate with me and then dispersed for various activities (even the dogs), leaving me alone in the living room.

• Watched some random episodes of 20/20 (ABC), mostly the one about that student who got detained in North Korea. Mom vacuums the carpet upstairs in the background.

• Developed a sudden migraine, took some Advil liqui-gels. (I'm pretty much in pain all the time for various reasons and tend to carry painkillers on my person... I develop lots of headaches, probably the result of my being indoors and looking at screens all day without the glasses that I really should have because my eyesight is terrible. I also get carsick absurdly easily and my stomach hurts like all the time, so I probably have IBS or something? And then beyond that I have a bad upper back/right shoulder, bad knees, and absurdly wide and flat feet, all of which are more sources of pain.)

• Wandered around my kitchen in a fog, eating crackers and listening to music, completely unable to think.

• Fed the dogs dinner and took them for another walk, at which point I discovered that my sister had actually done something helpful for once and trimmed/removed all the overgrown weeds on the patio.

• Mom finished vacuuming and sat down on the sofa with me, where we watched more 20/20 and a random talk show special. The talk show special was about some woman who insists she's not a racist, but disapproves of her two daughters marrying black men. Both fiancées were present and my mom and I decided that we really liked one them. To quote my mom, "Wait, he's working to take care of four kids that aren't even his?! Most men don't take care of their own damn kids these days! That guy is a keeper! ...Really tall, too. He's cute."

• My brother appeared from the basement to play with the dogs and say hi. My sister showed up and said she had, in fact, been the one to mow the lawn. And, as I had suspected, it was because she wanted to throw a little graduation party. My mom gave her permission to have no more than ten people over as long as there was no alcohol or weed. My sister then sat with us for a little while and talked about her recent photo shoots before disappearing to collect some of her friends.

• I did nothing, by myself, for a while. Mostly just scrolled through my phone and watched random YouTube videos and replied to comments on my A03 account. I then made myself a jumbo cup of Kraft Mac and Cheese, and just as my sister showed up with some of her friends. I continue to do nothing for a while after that. (Some days my ADD/depression combo leaves me in a state of total mental fog and fatigue, and I can barely think about anything specific for more than ten seconds.)

• Rewatched some Voltron episodes to collect the screenshots needed for my reaction thingies, tried to think of some stuff to write... I already like the show enough that I would like to write for it at some point, and I think that some short canon-compliant oneshots would be a good way to do that. In particular, I kinda wanna write about (DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT ANY SPOILERS) Hunk teaching Allura and the mice to play charades and about those three hours where Hunk was asleep. Where, obviously, Keith told everybody he was part Galra. I saw a text post headcanon thing about the possibility of Lance accepting Keith immediately because he might not even be an American citizen and has probably experienced racism and xenophobia, and that's kind of an awesome idea. So I'd like to write a little story where Lance reassures Keith about it later and maybe go into Lance's backstory a little bit. I'll probably wait until I catch up with the the show to write anything, though. Netflix says that season six comes out June 15th!!

It's almost midnight as I'm still sitting on my sofa and writing this, which is technically a "day" even though I intend to be awake for several more hours. I'll probably try to get some writing done, maybe watch some YouTube videos or work on my VLD reaction posts now that I have some screenshots. This was an uneventful post, but I did warn you. ;)

DAY 5: THINGS YOU'D LIKE TO SAY TO AN EX

So here's the thing... I actually can't fulfill the requirements for this one because I've never had an ex. I have never been in a relationship. I've never been on a date. No one has ever asked me. And it's pretty sad, especially considering the fact that I'm a good decade older than what seems to be most of the people on this website (I'm 24). I can't type up any choice words for a person that doesn't exist.

So let's talk about my not-dating history instead!

I never had anybody crushing on me in middle school or high school. Not as far as I know, anyway. Since I went to a tiny private school my whole life, word travelled quickly. It was hard to keep a crush on somebody a secret. But somehow, I never got word of anyone liking me. That may not mean much, though— it was literally a rule of thumb in high school that if I knew about something, then literally everyone in the school knew. That's a fun little rule that I discovered by accident.

I also know for a fact that I was considered generally unattractive by the boys in my grade (I'm not even into boys these days, but we'll get to that later). We were in eighth grade (I think??) when the other girls and I discovered a composition notebook that the boys in our class had been keeping. They called it the "hottie guidebook", and inside they had collected pictures of each one of us and assigned us a rating on a scale of 1-10. I was assigned a negative four. NEGATIVE FOUR. My already really low self-esteem has never really recovered from that. The other girls were constantly trying to reassure me that I'm pretty, and that what other people thought didn't matter, but it didn't help. The damage was done. I'm now able to look back and say that the ranking was unfair, because I'm, like, a solid 3.5. It's just that I had always been the class' fat girl, which, I guess, automatically made me hideous.

I continued to not-date into high school. By senior year, most of my classmates were in serious long-term relationships. A couple of them have gotten married to one another. I never got asked to the Gala (our version of prom) and always went with my friends. I was really self-conscious and sad about this at first, but by the time I got to senior year, I was actually glad. Dating seemed like more work than it was really worth at that age, and I'd had to comfort my crying friends over dumb teenage boys way too many times to count. Being single gave me a lot more time for myself and my schoolwork.

Finally, we travelled to Costa Rica as a class. It was an incredible experience and I'd love to travel more in the future. Everyone bonded, and at one point we went up this mountainside and sat atop a hill. The air was really clear, and the view— you could literally see straight into Nicaragua.

That hilltop was strange. A lot of people cried. Something about it was surreal and made us feel like we were actually asleep. The best way that I can think to describe it is that it made things seem really... small. Being far away from your usual problems that you spend all your time thinking about puts them in perspective, especially when you're up on a mountain and looking down at the world and realizing, for the first time, just how tiny everything really is. Being away from your family for so long, and totally disconnected from your normal comfort zones, isolates who you really are. It was a strange feeling, both overwhelming and extremely calming at the same time.

I walked away from the rest of my classmates and sat down by myself and looked out at the tiny little world around me. I just sat there for about twenty minutes, just breathing and thinking. It was the first time, in my entire life, that I was really able to clear my head. It was the moment that I learned to just breathe, even if I haven't been able to achieve the same level of tranquility since. And it was in that brutally honest moment, one where my usual barriers were finally knocked down, that I suddenly squinted into the horizon as a single question floated through my head:

Holy fucking shit, am I GAY???

I can try and be as poetic about it as I want, but that's literally what happened. I had been ignoring and burying that revelation for so long that it had never consciously occurred to me! And I didn't accept it right then, either. I didn't properly come out until three years after I had graduated high school. Because I had spent my entire life in that tiny private Christian school, where we were literally taught that being gay is a sin.

And that's where I am now. I'm out of the closet, so I can finally look at the correct dating pool, but I'm still not looking for a relationship. I'm honestly really terrible at taking care of myself (mostly speaking in terms of hygiene and diet and exercise or lack thereof), so I know I'm not ready to throw myself into a commitment to provide anything for someone else. I also have no idea what I would want in a partner and am FUCKING TERRIFIED of the idea of breaking up or having fights with someone I used to love. I don't know that I'm emotionally mature enough to handle that.

I might get there eventually. I might not. I generally don't have any plans to get married or have children. Whatever happens, I've chosen not to worry about it anymore.