Susan Sheffield Miller

I don’t possess a fear of failure, or a fear of death. I’ve let my optimism bankrupt me, like I’m buying too many lottery tickets because I just KNOW that someday I’ll win. I need to shift my blind enthusiasm and self-love towards coveting a fear of failure and having self-motivation. So I’m going to use that, YOU, as my motivation going forward.

I don’t want to be like that high school football player who still talks about the glory days and can’t move on in life. I expect things to be handed to me when I know they won’t be, but that doesn’t stop me from sitting around and waiting. Sure, I like to drink just as much as any other young person, but drinking should be a reward to celebrate your accomplishments, and not a crutch for when your life isn’t going as planned. I’m at the point in my life where I don’t know what the hell

Social media has once again rendered me slightly apathetic; I’ve gone dark passing behind the moon in my seasonal orbit. Social media is supposed to connect people, but more-and-more I feel like I am an extraterrestrial who is enrolled in the study of cultural anthropology via Instagram. But I’ve found ways to placate these fears by avoiding social media—one of my triggers. Like, talking to real people in person (not on social media or text.)

And in those daunting hours, days, months of treatment we often can’t see the light because we’re literally confined indoors to our homes and hospitals under the stale fluorescence of fake lighting and saccharin enthusiasm. I realized that my new normal—crushing exhaustion as I would draw on my eyebrows every morning and glue on fake eyelashes just so I could look halfway decent and avoid sneers and stares if I even dared to venture into the outside world–would not be my forever normal. The girl on the right is proof that as time passes and people pass judgement, you’ll learn to care a little less about those things. She is proof that you can and should do whatever the hell makes you happy because by the time you’ve caught up to the girl on the right, you’ll have earned every ounce of that happiness.