I Am Sad And I Want A Neon Green Thong But I Can’t Get Out Of Bed

a stream of consciousness essay

I was sad in my room, a tear dramatically rolling down my cheek while I scrolled on my better-than-average Instagram reels, and the only coherent thought I could piece together was that I wanted to go to Primark and buy a neon thong, because I don’t own any thongs, but I was too tired to actually do it. I’ve had this thought multiple times, though today was an extra macabre day. I think I was sleep deprived, but I could’ve also been mildly ill, and mentally my mind was a woman. Temperamental, tempestuous, bi-polar and altogether unsure of herself. That is how I feel viewed sometimes. It’s based in reality but sometimes I think I wield it on the wrong people. I feel trapped in by my own mind and then the words of my father’s girlfriend come ringing through, about how we girls invent this whole patriarchal scheme against us, and really, it only hurts us. Great. Why do I so desperately want a thong at a time like this. Neon brat-green, or a basic lacy slut-hot pink, or black to match the rest of my clothes? Why do I so desperately want a thong? Maybe I’m giving meaning to a dumb impulse, but I think when I feel alien in my thoughts I want to feel sexy and simply desirable, almost as if I can objectify myself until my brain fades into the background. Objectify the thoughts away. I want at least something about me to fit into society. I made some protein pasta with a tofu-red cabbage-cashew sauce earlier. It was a pretty lilac colour but the more I ate, the more disgusting it became and it sits half-eaten on my kitchen counter right now, drying up, the parpadelle going literally brown. I don’t like this world we are living in now, I don’t like the internet. At it’s inception, it must have seemed so cool, this search bar where you type in a word or a sentence and you’d have access to the most information humans have ever had access to, in all of history. I could just imagine the little computer nerds in their navy blue t-shirts, hearts beating in excitement. I wonder if the creators, the engineers behind it all, ever dreamed of the monster it would become, those modern late-stage Frankensteins. Did they ever hypothesise what it could become on their lunch breaks? I fought with my friend today. Well, not exactly a fight. I don’t fully know why I burst, I was really tired, he was inconsiderate and I got triggered by my early senior school experiences, so then I started wondering if it was really that big of a deal or if I just got in my head about it, but I hate doubting myself and my reasoning in arguments, it makes me feel stupid and small, like a child again. But I don’t want to push my friends away over silly things like my own overthinking. But I don’t want to undervalue my experiences in favour of appeasing others and making excuses for them. But my mind is so contradictory sometimes there’s a double agent in there, double-crossing every thought until its foundations are washed out from under it and if someone were to inspect my brain with a microscope, I’d cringe and curl up into a ball. Maybe I need to go back to therapy. I’ve thought this every now and then for over a year, yet there’s nothing necessarily wrong with my life right now, nothing tangible being done to me like when I was younger. So where’s the reasoning for me to go speak to an expensive stranger, will it actually fix anything I don’t already have to work through on my own? Plus, every time I think I should be heading on down back to therapy, a few hours or days later, I feel better again and I brush the idea aside—what do I need that for? But right, right now I can’t bring myself to do that.

I am a 20-year-old student, I've been writing for years but lately I've been writing mini essays when I've felt overwhelmed as putting it all down on the page helps me. I hope I can provide others with solace through our shared experience and a little bit of (dark) humour.