Encourage your hedonistic tendencies.
Be sweet and nice to yourself.

No wallowing in your shortcomings – or mine; I’m good enough for myself, and I don’t want you on my back. Walk your own blisters.

With what I read in the media (we’re too fat, too sweaty, too hairy, too unsophisticated, people, please, we go the way of Billie Holiday!) or the electrical jolts to the teeth I get from my colleagues in our torture chambers (and it qualifies as a torture chamber if you can’t get out of there – or can afford to.) I’m beaten into a path every day. I fold to desires and expectations, as surely as you do. Because we tend to run in packs, and we’re raised to work together – or work out our shortcomings by beating eachother around the head.

But don’t let giving in defeat you, because you can unfold and refold in a way that pleases you with its simplicity or irony, or just with your own bloodymindedness. You are not less free than you used to be, you’re not walking towards an event horizon of Einsteinian stillness. That’s just what the observers see. That’s not you, doesn’t have to be you.

You don’t have to babysit the telly so you can share the same ‘news’ your colleagues saw, and coddle them with your predictability. Offend their senses. Let them laugh their scandalised laughter at your living spirit, walk that line. The more you show, the less they’ll know what you’re really capable of.

See, I need to tell you this even though I still could be lying on the floor, rolling naked in the moonlight like a floppy earthworm dying in a puddle: I’ll gladly overshare my happiness just to be contrary. Contrary to the culture of complaint, the nepotism of not-good-enough, to beat back the fear we feed(back) ourselves.

I’m not immune to fear; only a woman planting trees in the wilderness would be. But I see it. And with my brains, with my ghost-hands, I am pushing back that fear by enjoying the good moments and sloughing through the bad, keeping my eyes on one of my most precious possessions: Tomorrow. Because as fun as living in the moment is, thank entropy there’s empires to ruin and stock markets to crash.