Diary of Surrender, Week 8: Dispatches from the Void of Inevitability

I have nothing left to say, but my heroes do.

Photo by alex pixel on Unsplash

I’m writing a diary about my year of giving up, although I may give up on this too. Who knows? You can read about why I’m giving up here, and the previous week of saying fuck it here. (The term “week” is used loosely).

Pro-tip: do not give yourself a year-long writing assignment that requires you to publish regularly, ideally weekly. And if you do end up doing something that dumb and ambitious, don’t make the assignment about giving up, because at some point there will be nothing left to say. At week eight of this endeavor, that’s where I find myself: no pithy insights on giving up. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. All epiphanies run out of steam at some point.

I could give you a straightforward report on my progress in giving up on being skinny, but that’s not interesting. I’m at a relatively healthy equilibrium between hikes, hot yoga classes, and mini chocolate peanut butter cups. But see? That’s boring.

And it’s fine, I guess. I recently looked at my double chin in the wrong mirror, and thought I looked like a bullfrog. I got upset, and then remembered that I had given up on love anyway, so it was okay to look like a bullfrog.

Giving up on love is going okay too. I saw MAGA Man in Dallas recently, and we’ve settled into a mutual level of lazy-river comfort. We both know that we can never be each other’s person, but we allow ourselves to have some fun with each other anyway, once in a while, until one of us floats off into some other, more permanent, more logical romantic situation.

Sometimes I worry that my new bullfrog look will keep him from wanting to see me again, and then I remember that this lazy-river ride is ending at some point anyway, so there’s no reason to worry about it. It either ends sooner or much later, maybe the bullfrog chin will be the reason or maybe it will be because we get sick of each other or maybe it will be because an asteroid slams into earth. The reason it ends doesn’t matter, but it’s inevitable that it will, so I need to cut myself a break on the bullfrog problem.

Other than those two updates, there is nothing else to say about my giving-up…