Chelsea Fagan

I cannot help but wonder who exactly they’re taking these photos for, as I know for a fact that my own manic clicking was never truly for my own benefit.

You make one wrong move, you get labeled some kind of social pariah prude, impotent beta male, insufferable cheapskate, or hula hoop-vagina’d slut, and it’s terrifying. Of course it’s wrong. Of course it’s unfair.

You can take up to three hours to watch a 30-minute episode because you keep wandering over to Wikipedia to read about Hitler for a little bit, and no one can tell you that it is ruining their precious viewing experience.

X amount of people have gotten engaged, X amount are still single, am I normal? It’s a very embarrassing, base train of thought, and I always talk myself out of it in a few minutes.

We give men a lot of shit for how much they focus on sex, and that undoubtedly has more than a few grains of truth to it, but it’s time to own up to the kind of chillingly graphic sex talk that occurs after a few drinks at a table full of women.

We know that looks aren’t important, but we still dress a certain way for a job interview or a date. It isn’t important, but it is.

It’s a time when people can still hold onto each other like moss on a particularly sturdy rock, but they always feel the current of life in general pulling at them to do something more.

Oh, yeah, of course I know that you were at that party I wasn’t invited to last weekend… I spent a full 45 minutes looking at the pictures one by one as they appeared on my news feed, becoming increasingly indignant and self-conscious as the clock ticked by.

And even more tragically, all of the things that we are able to appreciate about the lives of others, because we might not have them ourselves, are the things that are most easy to take for granted.

Reaching the regrettable phase of drunkenness in which the human body actively rejects all liquids which are not liquor, therefore ensuring that we will pass out about two sips into the liter of water we were trying to drink before passing out.

“What’s wrong with a quiet night at home?” you can hear yourself asking, but it’s never pleasant to imagine that your need is a pathological one. “Sometimes you just want to have fun!” Right?

There is an undeniable aspect of moving up when someone passes away. We are forced, regardless of how ready we might be, to move into a place of understanding and responsibility that used to be reserved for someone older than us.

And letting the world convince you that feeling good about yourself is cocky or shallow is a game you can never win.

Not even three full scrolls into my journey, I was visually assaulted by a 500×500 GIF of anal sex.

I think that people start caring about us when we stop caring about them, as sick as it is. We move up and down in these odd games of power, and learn quickly that while some people are dependent on our approval, others are completely unconcerned with our opinion of them.

It’s a kind of pressure to have this Perfect Evening — the one where you looked like the birthday girl, all laughs and clinking glasses and flashing cameras — that can never really be lived up to.

We all do this. We all allow ourselves to get caught up in the pain of feeling slighted, in the jealousy of someone’s achievements, in the moral judgments to be made on actions that don’t affect us in the least.

Being cheated on makes you look at more questions than you would ever have willingly asked yourself.