100 Ways to Leave Yourself
8 min readOct 1, 2019
- Stay up too late.
- Smoke too much weed.
- Snooze your alarm again.
- Drink too much caffeine.
- Never read your “read later” list.
- Don’t exercise. Who needs to feel connected to their body?
- Don’t moisturize.
- Don’t stretch. You really should stretch.
- Work from home when you’re sick.
- Buy more shit you don’t really want.
- Give up on another writing project.
- Give up before even starting that other thing.
- Watch TV without really watching the TV (sacrilege).
- Don’t ask for what you want in bed.
- Don’t ask for what you want in the weekly office grocery order.
- Never stick to the schedule you make for yourself.
- Ignore the monthly budget you make for yourself.
- Be cold and withholding to your cats.
- Go a month without seeing your bedroom floor.
- Go months at a time without playing a musical instrument.
- Go months at a time without going to a standing room concert.
- Go months at a time without going to a comedy show, something you love, because you don’t want the stress of finding free parking, or of going alone.
- Go a year without washing your bras.
- Go a year without a dresser, keep your clothes in wire bins on the floor.
- Go a year without taking any selfies. Now you have no record of all the different hair colors & cuts you had over all that time. Good job.
- Go years without touching a sketchbook.
- Go years without touching a needle and thread.
- Just let all those bath bombs you got for Christmas expire. Drop one in a bath in July, soak in the fizz-less tub with a ball of goo.
- “Treat yourself” so often that it never really feels like treating yourself. Use your dad’s credit card 20% of the time and feel bad about it.
- Sit through a movie you hate, even though it cost you virtually nothing with AMC A-List. You know, if you had the gall to complain like a white woman you could get your money back for anything.
- Never ever ask for help carrying things that are too heavy. Pull a muscle in your back, pay for a Taskrabbit and watch him carry your mattress up the stairs in under 5 minutes instead of asking an acquaintance you don’t know like that yet. Pay for the full hour.
- Keep the tight jeans on.
- Blur your vision that way you can, so you don’t have to see what’s in front of you.
- Squeeze the shit out of every last clogged pore on your face, back, etc. Draw blood if you have to, get it all out. Give yourself a knot in your back from the reaching.
- Never get a massage.
- Spend hundreds of hours of your life tweezing your dark armpit hairs instead of reading books or making art or toppling the patriarchy or whatever.
- Buy a new lipstick every month and wear the same underwear you’ve had since eighth grade and never wash your car.
- Space out when the people you love speak to you. They’ll always be around. What?
- Spend time with the people who want to spend time with you because they want to spend time with you, even if you don’t like spending time with them. Tell yourself it’s your fault you’re not having a good time, look at them taking the time to pay attention to you and show you love, you should be grateful.
- See someone you could absolutely love? Romantically, platonically, unconditionally? RUN THE OTHER WAY.
- Don’t make time to reflect.
- Don’t go to any doctors. You have a lucky body, you’re fine.
- Don’t drink enough water even though you tell everyone to drink more water whenever they complain about any pain or discomfort or problem instead of saying I’m sorry, that must be so hard.
- Check how many people watched your Instagram story today, and who, for the 100th time.
- Hold everyone you love at arm’s length, if not much further.
- Wait until your registration expires to go to the DMV. Go seven times because it’s a lease and you changed states and every person tells you something different. No, your bank isn’t doing this right. No, the DMV isn’t doing this right. Cry in front of the lady on visit six because she said you still don’t have what you need and she isn’t personally wronging you but her tone really isn’t helping. You’re a dumb bitch who can’t take care of herself and you need to get your vehicle verified again because it’s been so long since the first time you went to the DMV.
- Never tend to your mild wounds. Neosporin who?
- Spend 12 minutes reading the same page of a book that you’re not really reading.
- Say “this is great” to the Uber driver even though it’s too cold.
- Say “I’m good” to the lady at Sephora who asks, “are you doing alright over here?” even though you can’t find the brand you’re looking for. There are too many people. Go home and order online. Waste packaging.
- Never ask yourself what you really want. What you really, really want, but also what you really want on the menu, or from Sephora.
- Reluctantly take on the role of…speaking for all people of color in the workplace and with your white friends even though you’re half white? Why don’t you have more POC friends? You must be racist and/or more comfortable being the figurative oppressed rather than oppressor.
- Hug people when you don’t want to because it’s easier than saying you don’t want to hug them.
- Befriend people in your creative field regardless of how much you really have in common with them. Feel alone.
- Shame yourself for not being close to your brothers.
- Be too afraid to shoot or edit anything because you’re afraid of being stared at for having a huge camera in public. You know nothing. It’s too late to learn now.
- Cut everyone off after the third date. You can’t pretend to be into it.
- Fry your brain on dating apps so hard you don’t want to date anyone at all.
- Forget to write it all down.
- Forget to take your vitamins.
- Forget to take pictures with friends.
- Forget when your last period was, or how it went. Be surprised every time you get cramps.
- Forget your first love. Make it more meaningless in your head every time you think about it.
- Never go to synagogue, you’re not Jewish enough for them. Celebrate the High Holy Days alone, by diet but not by prayer. Forget how all the prayers go.
- Forget to save all your art projects from college. They won’t be useful for you in the future.
- Especially the blue jello brick in the college walk you were so proud of. Don’t even take a good picture of that one, you’ll just have to excitedly drunkenly explain it to people at a party who don’t give a fuck.
- Shit talk every younger version of yourself who lives inside you.
- Look away when you make eye contact with yourself in the mirror.
- Look too hard when you make eye contact with yourself in the mirror. Who the fuck is that? Is there anyone in there?
- Perhaps overthink it and realize you can’t remember the last time you recognized yourself in the mirror.
- Wait a year to go back to therapy, even though you promised your old therapist who you didn’t love that you would find someone new right away.
- Once you find a new therapist, spend your first 35 sessions prattling on about misleading inconsequential things because you’re too scared to talk about what you really need to talk about, even in this safe space that you are paying for by the hour at sliding scale cost.
- Masturbate when you don’t want to.
- Go on dates with boys whose pictures aren’t even mildly attractive to you.
- Use toilet paper and old Chipotle napkins for tissues instead of tissues.
- Fuck a bunch of people you don’t really care about.
- Convince yourself you have an STD when you get rejected by a boy you hardly knew. He was cute though and he never smelled bad.
- Anxious-Postmates enough sushi to prompt two pairs of chopsticks instead of one. Extra ginger please! Feel guilty for spending so much money on one meal as you eat it.
- Don’t scoop the litter.
- Don’t read any of the books that you love to spend your money on.
- Don’t bother maintaining your friendships. You don’t need anyone and you’d just be annoying them anyway.
- Don’t wear sunscreen even though you yell at everyone to wear sunscreen, just cause you’re a little darker than most of your friends. When’s the last time you got all your moles checked?
- Live for a semester in an off-campus frat house. Find ketchup, raw eggs and flour in your shower one day. Find vomit in your sink another. Quite possibly some period blood smeared on your bedroom doorframe. And your spaghetti pot full of piss downstairs right next to the downstairs bathroom that’s always locked even though that’s where the parties are because why?
- Go that whole semester without vacuuming the carpet.
- Go grocery shopping at 1am on a Saturday night to avoid said off-campus frat house parties. Drunk girls are unbearable when you’re sober and you’re not invited anywhere else.
- Give him your address before you’ve even met him.
- Hold your breath instead of telling him his smells bad.
- Let him talk you into buying Plan B even though you’re on the pill because he doesn’t trust you when you say you’ll “take care of it” if anything actually happened. “Wait, what do you mean you’ll take care of it?” Never mind that he paid for it and insisted on buying the name brand (what even is the difference) and judged you for buying three packs of Extra gum. It’s not your fault he couldn’t get you wet and subsequently broke the condom.
- Sit on the floor instead of a chair. I hear this one’s a bisexual trait, so maybe it’s fine.
- Sleep on the literal ground when your father and brothers refuse to share any of the FOUR double beds in your hotel rooms. Attempt to make them all as miserable as you with guilt for the rest of the weekend.
- Shame yourself for not understanding your sexuality. You’re supposed to just know.
- Shame yourself for not having questioned your gender sooner.
- Go down an online shopping black hole.
- Go down a YouTube black hole.
- Go down a Netflix black hole.
- Go down a Hulu black hole.
- Go down a Sims 4 black hole.
- Download a tap game, go hard.
- Downplay and belittle all of your accomplishments. You finished something, but you didn’t give it your all. You got an A, but maybe your professor gives those away. It was an independent project, there was no one for them to compare you to. You never put your whole heart into your art. You watch too much TV to be successful or happy.
- Oh yeah, be too afraid to chase your dreams or whatever.
