Pretty Lynne Writes

She sits down with her coffee in the morning and makes a list.

Weed garden, do dishes, get groceries, get your shit together, the list says. The list represents all of the things she will do when she is fully recovered. 

When she tells you it has been a hard couple of years, she is not kidding. It’s harder than anyone else can understand, even if you knew all of the details. It’s the kind of thing you can only comprehend if you experience it yourself. 

It has been a fucking hard couple of years, she thinks. She has spent some time trying to explain it to people. Some of them don’t seem to think it’s a big deal, and she piles on the evidence like she needs to convince them, like she is presenting a case to an unseen jury. Sometimes, she is the one she’s trying to convince. 

From the outside, she looks like she’s doing great. She goes to work, does her hobbies, goes out with friends, does normal things. She’s often happy. She sure looks happy to you. She’s funny (BE FUNNY). In fact, sometimes she’s hilarious. 

But there are times when she feels the swell of tears in her chest and she isn’t sure why they are coming. She just has to sit and cry somewhere. 

Everyone feels this way sometimes, she knows; it doesn’t need to be a big deal. She doesn’t really let anyone know that it happens. 

Shouldn’t this be over, she thinks? Shouldn’t she be past all of it? She is told frequently how well she is doing, how evolved she is, how well she’s handling everything. Which actually makes it harder to admit that she often feels overwhelmed and tender. The tenderness shows up at the weirdest times, and takes her by surprise.

She is extraordinarily hard on herself because she expected to be better by now. She was supposed to have her glow-up by now, to join the gym and meet new people and find new hobbies and just generally be different. Better. Healed, as the TikTokers say. 

She spends a bit of time thinking about herself in terms of metaphor. She is a pupa in a chrysalis state. She is waiting for her wings to unfold. This is a cliché, she knows. 

But she forgets sometimes that the pupa has to develop into the butterfly over time. It doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process. And no matter how much the pupa wants to rush it and get out there to feed on milkweed, if it tries to before its wings are mature, it will fall on its proverbial face. You can berate it for not having its shit together all you want, but that doesn’t mean the transition speeds up. 

And the transition takes place in an increasingly transparent shell. The pupa doesn’t feel ashamed of becoming, doesn’t pretend to be a butterfly before it’s ready. 

So. She sets down the pencil and tries to just drink her coffee instead. She decides that today is a day to be kind to herself. She decides to rest.