Hi! I’m a Neurotic Mess.

That moment when you find yourself back in the same place you were in approximately four years before? Yeah, I’ve been there. We all have. In fact, I’m beginning to think we’ll perpetually be there. There, that place you thought you’d left in the past until you realize that the past probably doesn’t exist as much as you had hoped it would. This whole “leaving things in the past” is really fucking hard when things wont just stay there, there, in the past. Same shit, different clothes. At least, I’m not wearing tube tops anymore, there’s hope in that at the very least. (Sidenote – Nobody looks good in a fucking tube top unless you weigh negative pounds because yeah, you were right and yes, your friends did lie because you do, in fact, look like a sausage casing…)

Yeah, I know it’s stupid, but it’s sort of the truth, there’s that moment (or in my case, the many moments) when you realize as much as you thought you’d grown, you’re still that same 20-year-old amateur who forgot to pay her energy bill, who walked out of the house in two different shoes, who thought it’d be possible to using a curling iron without burning the shit out of her neck. I like to think with each year I’ve grown less and less reckless but it’s those times when I catch myself putting my designer shoe-clad foot in my mouth or getting myself into yet another adventurous (read: stupid) situation that I realize that sometimes it’s just going to feel like where I am is where I’ll always be. That moment when frustration and deeply engrained bad habits collide and come back to royally fuck you over, where so much as a stubbed toe might ignite a tantrum turned quarter-life crisis meltdown where you start to say really dumb shit like, “Maybe there’s still time to dye my hair hot pink like my 12-year-old self promised I’d always do as soon as I moved out!” And of course, when you quickly realize that you’d be flattering yourself if you thought you could ever be one of those girls who could pull off hot pink hair (given your skin’s undertones and the lack of complementing colors in your current wardrobe) even more sadness ensues.

Every day is a battle with your past, and the worst losses come when you realize you never became the person you always promised yourself you would be years ago. When I was younger, all I wanted was to grow and get my life together and just generally get shit done. And every time I revert back to my old, sometimes careless often pathetically frustrating self, I cant help but feel an ounce of defeat swell inside of me.

There are just some things I accept about myself, that probably aren’t going to change as I grow older, like for instance, that nothing makes me more “sad-mad” than Sarah Maclachlan’s ASPCA commercials…and thinly sliced squash parading itself as a spaghetti substitute… because really, that shit’s just fucked up. There are just some things that I’m going to have to live with—like that I will always be the girl who gets lost whenever I drive somewhere for the first time, and then I will miss the exit and have to get off at the next one and be 5 miles off-track; like that I will just constantly be a victim of my own clumsy, which contrary to popular Rom-Com examples, is not in fact endearing or charming at all, but really and literally, is just a pain in the fucking ass; like that I will just always forget to do things because I was too busy wondering how to rearrange the furniture in my apartment, because I’m just frivolous like that sometimes.

After accepting all of this (reluctantly I’ll have you know) I’m not yet far enough into this be able to offer some kind of lesson learned. So I’ll leave you with this, each day is a day we decide whether or not we’re okay with our own individual pasts. Some days the past seeps in more than others, in the old standbys and favorite flavors and in the random phonecalls from ex-boyfriends forgotten but never forgiven and in the stupid habits you cant seem to kick (sometimes the ex-boyfriend and the bad habits you cant seem to kick tend to overlap…just sayin’).

I don’t know, maybe who I was is all I’ll ever be, or who I am is only a filtered and watered-down version of who I was. Either way, as punishing as those grounding moments where you realize you haven’t evolved as much as you thought you had, they are still valuable. They are reminders… of who you were, who you’re still trying to become and how long it’ll be before you get there.