Stuck between a rock and an especially crazy place.

Graffiti tells me what to do, daily. Drop Acid. Take Back Your Life. Get Fucked. Find Bliss. My parents tell me to 'just get your degree over with', 'keep your head on a a swivel', 'don't go out after dark', and of course my favorite--'snap out of it'. Care to elaborate, you assholes?

Dropping acid and getting fucked, maybe a simple task, but tell me how to find bliss--how to snap out of it and into something better; into a mind space where I'm safe and people are trustworthy, lacking ulterior motives, and sleep comes easy. Where I can figure out how to forgive myself for the incredibly stupid, selfish, scarily impulsive things I've done. Where finances and debt don't plague me. Where my future doesn't look like a Fun House of distorted mirrors and mazes. Show me. Write me a fucking technical guide on how to get there, draw a map, point in the general direction, do something that resembles actual guidance, don't tell me what to fucking do as if you're the omniscient lord of happiness, like a lazy fortune cookie slip writer with a penchant for fragmented sentences.

I need [to] change.

If the phoenix never incinerated, it would just be this big, dumb bird that flew around being vaguely content with its life like a suburban dad who moonlights as an assistant manager of Arby's or something. It would be diluted to be just as commonplace as it stands as a tattoo choice among the lost mob of 20-somethings. And that's just fucking silly. 

I don't even know what to want.

I misplaced my keys, so my landlord came up to unlock my door last night when I got home from work. I'm pretty sure it's protocol to just unlatch the door and walk away. But he swung my door wide open and took a moment to peer in at my apartment. "Welcome to my home: empty, just like my life." I said, trying to make myself feel more at ease with a socially off-color thing to say, as usual.

I need a couch.

I always think 'I'll move, and things will change. I'll change.' And even though on a conscious level, I know how deluded that is, it still seems like a totally plausible thing to manifest, effortlessly so.

It's been a couple months since I found big enough ovaries to take myself off my medication. The side effects were getting out of hand: I was acting out my nightmares in my sleep. Which, as it turns out, is a little traumatizing. {Not to mention, combining alcohol and a high dosage of an SSRI is really dangerous and ill-advised, just trust me on that one.} Ever since the lovely withdrawal process has abated, I've been trying to pretend I'm still the same (emotionally) dulled down version of myself as I was when I was medicated, but that's made pretty clearly falsified when I find myself crying in the men's section of Target, fondling black XXL t-shirts.

Or when a wasted two person voucher for a [potentially] romantic trip down the coast by train appears sandwiched between a neglected stack of old mail. A love note encouraging me to not give up on my writing is dug out of a box by my cats. My half finished study abroad application to Rome. My unopened graduation invitations. The list is endless, as the universe seems to be having fun reminding me of my past year of self-sabotage and non-committal life-style. I really need to change. Before the complacency buries me alive in little pieces of What Could Have Been's. That's no way to live.

I want my old life back. But I know that's not going to happen. So I have to make a new one. But like I said, I don't even know what to want. I'm at an impasse. A really uncomfortable impasse.

So now what?

"You couldn't pay me to be 24 again."
"Well, they're not paying me at all."
(Girls, season one.)