Open Letter to lonely, slutty, depressive, types

Being happy is a full-time job.

The most concrete advice I can come up with to improve your emotional quality of life: stop having sex just to feel close to somebody, anybody. Stop having sex with people you don’t care about, and definitely stop having sex with people who don’t care about you. Stop having “casual” relationships when this is not actually what you want. Stop accommo-dating. It sucks. You can probably fuck yourself better than most of the people you’ve slept with in the past 10 months, and there are always more things to try. You can pour your heart into yourself, or your schoolwork or your writing. You can cuddle with a just-friends friend, or a pillow, or hold your own damn self until a good person with good intentions and compatible desires comes along. You can be patient. You must be patient.

You must learn to be happy right now and always. Let yourself cry. Cry as you write -- it’s ok. Let it flow out in words and drawings and sculptures and tears, scrub it off in the shower, beat it out with a belt, fuck it out with yourself. Fill your room with all the shittiness you feel and then buy some garbage bags and rent a dumpster and fill them with the shit until it’s cleared away. It’s ok to feel like crap, but not for more than a week. Really, not for more than an hour. But we’ll stick with a week to be safe. It will pass, and it will be ok. Sometimes this stuff takes time.

Let go of those projections. They are full of pain. Grab on to the moment, the thrill of typing fast as thoughts form and flow out moment by moment – it’s exhilarating! Actually, it’s almost like an orgasm only ongoing and you can return to it in many more places without causing a scene. Let the act of writing acknowledge your feelings and help you sweep them away. It’s a process. It will always be a process. There is no such place as “happy” so don’t treat “sad” like a destination. Emotions are clouds. They move. Even in the Pacific Northwest where it’s possible that the same cloud will stay overhead for 6 months, even those clouds move. Really, you do see the sun here at least once a week even in the dead of grey-sky season. And really, your life is like that too, no matter how much you let yourself forget it.

So live like you’re seeing the sun or about to see the sun or just saw the sun because you are, you will, you have. Because if you live like it’s always cloudy in Portland you will cheat yourself out of appreciating all the sunshine you do get. Obviously there’s sun here or it couldn’t be so damn green, right? Think of yourself as a plant, as resilient, as timeless. Think of yourself like a seed about to burst, bursting, putting down roots, bearing fruit. You are, you are, you ARE. And don’t you dare cheat yourself out of it!