I’m 42 today – too old to listen to Sky Ferriera too young to be waiting for results from a rheumatologist. But here we are. And everything feels, to quote Ms. Ferriera, embarrassing. Like pull the covers over my head and lose myself in a Golden Girls crosstitch embarrassing. Why is this what I’m bringing into my Bea Arthur years?
Maybe it’s because if you search this blog, you will find actual painstaking diatribes on the agony of choosing the most sustainable plates for a two-year-old’s birthday party. Perhaps a valiant effort? More likely in vein and steeped in the privilege of once believing my little shopping dilemmas mattered before succumbing to the realization that wildfires would burn regardless of the toilet paper I chose. Everything’s embarrassing and all we have is our increasingly fragile vote.
Sometimes I think about how I finally got over the stigma of joining an MLM to feel like I could invest in a really groundbreaking clean beauty company but then found that many of its most vocal consultants were anti-vaccine insurrectionists and I’m scared that if I tout the benefits of mineral sunscreen people will think I’m devout QANON. Everything’s embarrassing and Beautycounter is having a sale.
When I exit on the left side of PATCO I sometimes think about how I shaped my identity around raising children in Philadelphia and then became the poster girl for “white flight” as I crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge and settled in an idyllic, sleepy town. Everything’s embarrassing and I’m the only one wearing a mask.
An anxious parent yields an anxious child, and all the kale smoothies in the world won’t protect them from becoming a person who can’t control their thoughts, words, or actions. Everything’s embarrassing and no one is laughing, son.
And, of course, I was naive enough to believe the states would be united in the fight against a MONSTER VIRUS but we were too far gone. Everything’s embarrassing and I can’t stop thinking about 618,000 deaths and countless disabilities when there is a life-saving vaccine that half of us won’t take.
Everything’s embarrassing and I just want to eat dinner at 5 p.m.
Everything’s embarrassing and I just want the leafblowers to stop.
Everything’s embarrassing but I’m not embarrassed about who and how I love, owning my mistakes, trying to do better, and holding it all together by a thread.
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