Diary of Surrender, Week Two: Magical Thinking is Screwing Me Up
It’s a hard habit to break.
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 my first week of saying fuck it here. Further disclosure: the term “week” is used loosely.
On December 31, 2021, I spent the day in bed. It was cold and dark in Los Angeles, as if the final day of 2021 was the last bag of groceries you have to bring in from the car. I just couldn’t do it.
Fish didn’t get a walk, and I ate leftovers mindlessly out of the refrigerator. I felt bad about this, but tried to remind myself that I had made a vow to give up, stop striving. Eating leftover turkey meatloaf in my sweats aligned with this goal.
On January 1, 2022 I had a lapse: I went on a date. I promised myself not to do this anymore, because I have an increasingly calcified belief that I am too old, too jowly, too chubby to find anyone. And then if I did find anyone, Fish would just make sure they could never sleep over anyway, if my snoring didn’t scare them away first.
I’d like to say that I don’t know why I went, but I do know why. I had an episode of magical thinking, I had a delusion that all signs pointed to some otherworldly force pushing me to go. The…
