impacts

The answer to most of my security questions online is my first grade best friend’s middle name. I used to live in a suburb of Seattle called Puyallup before moving to California in fourth grade. After I moved we never spoke again but I still know her middle name.

There are people I don’t talk to anymore that have had such an impact on my life. I still wear a friend from 8th grade’s P.E. shirt to bed sometimes because we accidentally switched shirts at a sleepover and never ended up giving them back.

I still listen to a band that my very first boyfriend showed me, and it’s one of my favorites.

And I still make a crunchy tuna casserole that one of my elementary school friend’s mom showed me. Half of their casserole was made without peas because her dad didn’t like them but the rest of the family did. I wonder if they still do that.

Our lives are made up of so many people, and sometimes you keep pieces of them long after they have left your life.

At the same time, there are so many lives that you have left some kind of impact on like this. I wonder what parts of me are alive in someone else that I have no idea about.

honey/vinegar

Maybe he was actually that happy, or maybe his mama had taught him that you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar.

Junot Díaz

Everything that’s happened during these last few weeks feels like it doesn’t count; like I’m in some kind of limbo.

I can’t be upset at anyone for their actions during this time because I know how stressful everything is.

Too much time with family members, losing a job or being furloughed, and a lack of outlets and normalcy is affecting all of us.

I don’t blame you for not being nice to me, and I promise you I won’t try to get even or get bitter. I believe that things will get better for you and me and if we’re meant to be in each others’ lives in the future then maybe we will be. And I’ll even leave that part up to you.

I’m taking a long, much needed break from social media. Well, like an 80% break. I’ll log in to Snapchat and Instagram only once a day and if I did something worth sharing then maybe I’ll share it but I’m not going to take random selfies and then critique how I look in every single one. You know how people call diets “lifestyle choices?” That’s what I’m doing with social media. Cutting out 80% of the fatty bad parts and useless carbs and only choosing the good protein-y parts.

For my job, a big part of what I do is monitor Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and NextDoor on a loop. Then I go home and jump on Snapchat and Instagram and do the same thing but for myself and it feels like lately I can’t do anything (at work and personally) without sharing it online.

I am a finalist for a national award in my field, and instead of sharing it with everyone I know I just want it to be my experience. I want to selfishly wrap myself around my achievements and not invite anyone to know about them. The amount of pressure I’ve felt about this award for the past two weeks has been more than anything I’ve ever felt before. Whether I win it or not, I want to live in the moment.

I’ll still write, and I will upload here (thank you to everyone who reads this, I didn’t imagine we would get so far!), but I just don’t want to send any more pictures of myself to people.

I don’t want anybody to see me, to be proud of me, to be nice to me, to be mean to me, except for me.