we all need to fucking relax

That’s the title of my imaginary self-help book: We All Need to Fucking Relax.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which we size ourselves up, superimposing our own trajectories against imaginary (yet deeply felt) graphs of medians and modes, measuring our own progress like nightmare parents plotting baby’s every drool and gurgle against Known Milestones.

(Probably the real cause of autism is all those nervous parents staring at Junior wishing he had sorted out tummy time 6.25 days sooner. Honestly, I’m too retarded about children to even construct a viable metaphor, here. What I’m trying to tell you is that each of us is a unique special snowflake who will roll on our bellies when we damn well please. Or when the barefoot photographer at the Sears Portrait Studio tells us to do so.)

I wonder if the “Am I measuring up?” mentality has something to do with age. If the twenties are the me decade—and for me, at least, that stretch of my life was just sheer Tyra Banks-level solipsism—then maybe the thirties are about understanding other people…insofar as they relate to me. Maybe at some point deep in the forties I’ll be capable of a paradigm that is not me-centric.

It’s interesting, because, on one hand, I’m not too worried about Keeping Up with the Joneses. Nor are my friends, because obviously that kind of thing is gross. Yet, to illustrate the kind of thing I’m talking about, I can tell you I have taken serious self-inventory, like GRE-level psychic Cosmo quizzes, about whether or not I’m a sociopath because I’m one of maybe three ladies I know in my age group who isn’t married. Such is the weird, powerful experience of being an outsider in your own demographic.

I worry about lots of other things, too. What are my professional goals? Do I save enough money? Should I start driving again so people stop thinking I’m epileptic, an alcoholic, and/or agoraphobic? Do I read enough books? Is it weird to be so uninterested in home ownership? Does not liking children mean I’m missing some sort of lady chip? Does calling it a “lady chip” make me a She-Dexter?

Here’s the thing: this excruciating (and endless) exercise in compare-and-contrast is, ostensibly, about figuring out, you know, how you’re doing. Just in general. But I think it actually preempts and prevents any real reflection about your life as it’s lived. Are you worrying about the right things? Are you measuring up to your own standards? Because, listen, if the twenties taught me anything, it’s that what really matters most is what you, your own self, thinks.

There are no milestones. There are no norms. There is no median and there is no mode.

There is only me. And you.