“Thanks for lunch,” I say when she steps up onto the bottom step.She offers me a nod in response.
“Your dinner is in the microwave. Night,” she whispers. With that, I hear her light footsteps as she heads up the stairs to her room.
I run a hand through my hair, messing up the gel. I open the microwave, and as she said, there’s a plate of food in there. I hit the one-minute button and get myself another glass of water while it heats up.
I open the fridge, and there’s a lot more food in there than I remember there being yesterday, or even this morning.I check the pantry, and there’s food in there, too.
I pick up one of the boxes and scrunch my nose. I don’t even know what half the words are, but it claims to be organic and all that shit.
Don’t get me wrong; I work out and live a fairly active and healthy lifestyle. But I'm fine with a steak and a potato, too.
Most of the time, I just eat out, or don’t eat at all because I’m so engrossed in whatever case I’m working on that I forget.
The microwave beeps. I toss the fruit bar back into its box, closing the pantry door before going back over to the microwave.When I pull it out, I’m met with an array of colors. She made some kind of stuffed red and orange peppers with ground meat, rice, and other veggies. It smells amazing.
I drink my water and set my plate on the counter before going back to the fridge to grab a beer.
I eat in silence like I do most nights, but I notice something in the corner over by the toaster.
A candle, wax still melted, as if it had just recently been put out. And now that I think about it, there was a fairly fruity smell in the air. It wasn’t bad. I’m just glad that she remembered to blow it out.I don’t mind it, I like it a lot more than I should, and for whatever reason, there’s a small smile on my face as I put my dishes away and make my way to bed.
5
SLOANE
~MAY~
Istare at my meal prep plan for the week, wondering how I got to this point.How did my life get to this very moment?
I often ask myself if I had found this version of myself earlier in life,would I have ended up being the person I am today?
Did I need to experience the bullying?
Was I meant to never be loved by anyone?
Did I need to learn how to thrive alone, because there would never be anyone there to hold me when it really mattered?
I’ll never know.
Maybe if I had just heeded the advice of those around me when I was younger, I wouldn’t be so alone. Maybe my parents would care about my existence. Maybe I wouldn’t seek the validation of those on the internet. Maybe I’d love myself without the expectation of a certain number of likes behind it.
I look down at the app on my phone and wonder what it would be like to go back to a time when I didn’t have to count my calories. If I ever just trust myself to eat what I want.
I know that right now, that’s not an option for me, so I cut up some more veggies and add them to the chicken and rice bowls that I’m prepping for this week’s lunches.
I love the dopamine hit after a video gets lots of likes, but that fades fast because I then have to analyze it, making sure I keep the momentum going for every video after.
It’s stupid as hell, and I know this. I’m self-aware about how fucking stupid it is for me to let something like this dictate my happiness. But when you go from getting no attention at all to receiving hundreds of affirmations in every single video, it’s hard not to take all of them to heart.
I’ve always been a people pleaser. I know it stems from the need to make my parents happy, to make them proud of me, like they are of Kaden and Lottie.
I don’t know what I ever did to make them hate me so much, but I know I will never make my kids feel that way, no matter who they are as individuals, what they like, or who they become. Because no one deserves to feel the way I do inside.
After meal prep, I grab my notebook and do an analysis of last month’s content.
It’s the beginning of May now, and I’ve been here for almost two weeks, which is crazy.
Since I feel like I’m doing nothing, I’ve been posting a lot more this month. Instead of once a day, I have been posting two, sometimes even three or four times a day. People seem to beloving it, but I’m not sure how sustainable this is. Burnout could be a problem.
