- Fascism
- Climate change
- Being autistic
- Reading The Guardian at 7 AM with a cup of coffee and no solid food in your system
- Seeing your neighbor watching you as you recycle
- Suddenly remembering how much German neighbors love to find you doing something incorrectly and frantically resorting your trash
- Spending 3 hours every day (starting at 7:30 AM) trying to understand the difference between the Akkusativ and Dativ grammatical cases in German
- Being from Louisiana but not living there any more. Instead, you live in Germany, where no one dances unless it’s in a sanctioned dancing location (like a club), no one talks to strangers, and everyone gives you lectures about how racist your home state is (then promptly launches into an explanation about how terrifying they find your current neighborhood but it’s totally, definitely not because it has the largest Arab population in Germany, and it definitely is just because they just think its dirty and has “bad vibes”).
- Having endometriosis and adenomyosis and taking daily hormone replacement therapy for these diseases, which gives you the fun experience of replicating early pregnancy, except it never ends
- Being too high off your chronic-pain marijuana prescription at a book club and insisting to everyone you think the book is set in the afterlife (it’s not)
- Watching people that are both hotter and smarter than you speak eloquently on Instagram about ideas you barely understand, even though you have a PhD, which starts to make you wonder if you are a master manipulator and convinced your university to grant you a doctorate even though you’re both incredibly dumb and a hideous ghoul.
- Getting deeply into dream interpretation because you can’t afford therapy, but you really need to figure out the meaning of this dream you keep having where you trick the barista at your favorite coffee shop into a Twilight marathon by inviting them over for dinner and then locking your door. At one point they try to leave, and you just sit on them. The internet offers no clear explanations into what this dream reveals about your past traumas or your general psyche/wellbeing.
- Having a nightmare where you accidentally overhear your husband, best friend, and mom talking about what a weirdo and freak you are (but not in a good way) in your favorite coffee shop near your apartment in Berlin– the one with giant pink umbrellas outside that you can never remember the actual name of and just call “the pink umbrella cafe.” And then when you’re waiting for your oat milk cappuccino, you can hear them talking at length about how they find every second with you excruciating and how perhaps they should see if they can commit you permanently to one of those old-timey asylums where they perform shock therapy and lobotomies. You secretly hope the asylum is by the sea.
franciscab