My friend needs help.
by ludakristenDoes taking care of oneself require skill?
I’m asking for a friend, because she’s caught in this perpetual cycle of self-hatred and self-acceptance. Sometimes she wakes up and she looks in the mirror and she smiles at herself and thinks not bad kiddo and then an hour later, after she’s scarfed down two plates of waffles covered in whipped cream and chocolate sauce, she feels like life is no longer worth living.
She sits a lot. She’s sitting all day long, actually – in the car, at her desk, in the car again, on her couch, Indian-style on the floor while she dangles things in front of her cats. This is her life. A series of seats.
She smokes, too. She was in Canada two weekends ago and she bought a pack of cigarettes. Have you ever bought cigarettes in Canada? It’s terrifying shit. There was this giant picture of a grisly-looking eyeball on the cigarette pack with a scary-looking font yelling RISK OF BLINDNESS! at her. Undeterred (but maybe pissing herself a little bit, I can’t remember) she ripped open that pack of cigarettes and found the most horrible picture of a skinny bald person and the scary font yelling at her again: THIS IS WHAT DYING OF LUNG CANCER LOOKS LIKE.
So she lit up a cigarette to calm her nerves.
I don’t know if there’s any one skill she needs to work on that will fix her up and make her give a shit. I imagine some combination of work ethic and dedication would help, but those aren’t really skills so much as they are characteristics or personality traits – traits that she is sorely lacking.
Maybe I’ll tell her to wait it out, keep on keepin’ on or whatever, and hope that one day some revolutionary new medical procedures will be developed and a hot young state-of-the-art doctor will hook her up with a new pair of lungs and a new knee and, if there’s some sort of buy-two-get-one-free deal, a set of washboard abs?
Never say never.
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