It Is My Birthday.

It is my birthday. Here’s everything I learned since the last time I thought about how quickly the sands of time are slipping through my chonky little fingers.

1. First of all, I remain very beautiful and brave.

2. When you say things like, “What are they gonna do? Fire me????” you have to be equipped for them to…do that.

3. Whenever I’m convinced that an emotional problem I’m having isn’t about my mother, it’s actually super about my mother. The less I think it’s about my mother the more it’s about my mother. I’m not telling my mother this — she’s already has main character syndrome.

4. All this time, I was friends with only one unabashed Zionist! (And three, slightly more abashed ones.)

5. I’d rather go to your $30-a-ticket amateur ballet recital in Queens than literally any free, accessible event where I risk speaking to a media reporter.

6. Under my belt, now, is a full year without dieting, without wearing an Apple Watch, without tracking my macros or weighing in or thinking about calorie content. I exercised the way I wanted, when I wanted to. I’m stronger. My clothes mostly still fit. Some of them don’t. That’s fine. It wasn’t so bad to just buy new jeans. Maybe you, too, should just buy new jeans.

7. Every single dessert recipe that uses Greek yogurt is fucking disgusting. The Hague, which I hear has not been very busy lately, will consider my case on this.

8. I don’t really like dogs unless they have a human name.

9. It was an admirable attempt, by me, to try to set up some boundaries between myself and my family, in the same way it might be admirable of me to lift a car over my head or run a single mile. Impossible things are often admirable.

10. Everyone IS mad at me and they DO hate me and they ARE talking about me behind my back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

11. Just because you do drugs for fun doesn’t mean you won’t still get old enough for the words “heart health” to start to mean something to you.

12. It was a bad year. My heart kept breaking. I kept waiting for relief, from someone or something else, but it never came. It felt like my house was on fire, and I was burning inside while also tasked with saving myself. My consciousness split into both victim and defender. I just wanted to sleep in the flames.

13. I can always find a way to feel despair. It’s so accessible. It’s always right there.

14. I can always find a way to feel relief. I can build it. I’ve done it before.

15. There’s no one else coming.

16. It’s just me.

17. Everyone, even the people I love, are just visitors in my garden. And yet, it’s been so easy to abandon myself. Why did I do that? For most of my last year, I looked at myself from the outside in, confused by how shabbily I treated me: But, I thought I loved her?

18. What a relief it is to be with myself in my competency, to have rescued myself, to be back in my own custody.

19. Because, after all—

20. I remain very beautiful and brave.

I wrote about the stupid-rich for Mother Jones, which is now online. I’ve also got a new column up at Hazlitt, a brief meditation on media cuts and my (relative) unemployment. Conversely, there are even more Scamfluencers episodes for you if you need to catch up.

If you want to get me a birthday gift, demand a ceasefire from your representatives. Happy Aquarius Season, Aquarius Age, and Aquarius New Moon. Everyone’s gonna have a terrible time except for meeeeeeeeee!!!!