Frontal Lobe: Fully Loaded
Attempting to stay my ennui-by-way-of-existential-dread by writing a show and tell about my favorite things.
![Jare of Easttown on X: "my brain is so thoroughly broken that i just recreated the beyonce meme of her looking at herself on my zoom background https://t.co/ZpuFsDAsrn" / X Jare of Easttown on X: "my brain is so thoroughly broken that i just recreated the beyonce meme of her looking at herself on my zoom background https://t.co/ZpuFsDAsrn" / X](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F61a19bb2-3183-434c-a7a7-993a4fb7cd99_567x417.jpeg)
I turned 25 in July, which, among other things means I am no longer in the 18-24 demographic, my frontal lobe is supposedly fully formed, and I have less than 365 days to date Leonardo DiCaprio before I’m completely wiped out of the running. Anyone over 30 will roll their eyes but I do feel old now – or at the very least older. I don’t know if the pandemic aged me or what but on my 25th birthday I felt existential dread and mortality. I do not feel a general, genial sense of vibrant youthfulness and I don’t think I have since I was 19. I feel like a sack of crackling joints and depression. Maybe I am going through what the philosopher Hilary Duff called a Metamorphosis; I’m not sure. But the one shining beacon of hope right now is that I do know what I like.
When I was little, it was really hard for me to make a decision about anything. For a long time I didn’t have a favorite color, it felt like pink was thrust upon me as the only girl in a house full of boys. I didn’t have a favorite show, I watched too much television to choose just one thing. I slept with 10-15 stuffed animals crowded around my twin bed every single night because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (yes, I am a people pleaser even with inanimate objects!!!! This is an illness). If something was my favorite it was because I deeply connected with it, I had no other option but to choose it as my favorite. Batman? I respected the fact that he had no superpowers but was still a superhero. Nick Jonas? Was I supposed resist falling deeply in love with those puppy dog eyes and perfect curly hair??? It almost felt illegal to not.
This changed in high school; I don’t know if it was the casual trauma of adolescence or what but I started taking baby steps toward choosing favorites. I remember the first time I firmly declared my favorite color was mustard yellow. I was waiting for my dad to pick me up after a school event and I sat with a classmate talking. I just blurted it out. “My favorite color is mustard yellow.” I didn’t know what I wanted him to do with that information, but it did feel kind of cathartic to get it out there. It’s very silly, but it was the first step in me being intentional about who I am.
I never felt confident about who I was and I was always desperate (and sometimes still am) to find out how I am perceived by others. I don’t even know what I’ll do with the information once I get it and I’m not even looking for a specific set of answers, I just want to know.
But during the pandemic, when I had all the time in the world but none of it could be spent with people, I made a conscious choice to start deciding who I am instead of begging people to tell me. I think it would be pathetic for me to not have this figured out by now. I think I didn’t have a lot of declarative favorites when I was little because I was new to the world; I hadn’t experienced anything yet.
People’s experiences shape who they are, what they like, how they react to everything. I’ve had an adequate amount of experiences in love, life, and loss; I think it would be an insult to myself if I didn’t have anything to show for it at this point. So, lets start with music! Without further ado, this is a list of songs that encapsulates Who I Am.
The theme song
I recently came across this TikTok by Infinity Song, a New York-based soft rock band.
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The band, a group of black 20-something siblings are running around New York to their song Haters Anthem. Now, I can’t explain the euphoria this song brought on for me. The instrumentals are amazing, but the lyrics are really where it’s at. “I love the way it feels to be a hater” they open. It turns nihilistic: “just to wake up every morning and never ever rise to the occasion or even hold up under pressure, but we all know that it doesn’t even matter…” Momo, one of the band’s members, explains in a TikTok that she wrote the song in a “deep depressive episode and an extended state of self-loathing.”
In my mind, the song isn’t about being a mean girl or not like other girls, it’s about how mean you are to yourself and knowing something has to change. Sometimes, that catalyst for change comes from seeing how broken unwilling to change someone else is and saying “yeesh, at least I’m not them.” It’s a bit cruel but when you’re crawling through the depths of clinical depression, it’s just what happens.
…But also, it is fun to be a hater!!! Talking shit with your friends, critiquing a celebrities outfit, secretly sneering at your manager with your work bestie for no other reason outside of the fact that they showed up for work that day. I think a little hating in private is healthy, it satiates a healthy ego. Sometimes I catch myself being a hater. I say “oop!” and keep it pushing. The idea that you always have to be a nice, kind person is exhausting and transparently fake. It’s a common observation that the “be kind” discourse leaders usually just happen to have been childhood bullies.
If you don’t talk shit, it’s probably because you don’t have anyone to talk shit with, no one you’ve been in the trenches with, and if that’s the case, I feel bad for you. If someone offered me the money to pay off my student debt but at the expense of never being a hater again, I would gleefully skip away, penniless as I ever was.
10 years ago, I would say my theme song was If I Ever Feel Better by Phoenix, but let’s just call that season 1. Now, at 25, Haters Anthem makes me feel truly seen.
The anthem
When I hear Seven Up shout “The Aphilliates, nigga, pay attention!” I stand up and salute. I remember the first time I heard Nicki Minaj’s Itty Bitty Piggy: I was 13, and after spending a few months being obsessed with Your Love, my friend Arielle told me to watch the music video for Itty Bitty Piggy. As soon as I got home, I dropped my pink backpack in my pink room, opened my pink dresser, pulled out my pink iPod touch, sat down on my pink bed, and tapped into YouTube. This sounds silly to admit now, but Nicki Minaj is the reason I started calling myself a feminist. The grace and power she exuded in the Your Love video (I just watched it again. It’s so corny I could barely stand it) was a strong juxtaposition from the Queens hood confidence of Itty Bitty Piggy. I was in awe.
I grew up strictly listening to Radio Disney and oldies. Nicki Minaj was a huge departure from that and the first “grown up” music I listened to. Her music opened the door to my once-limited pop culture consumption. It was bound to happen, but Nicki was the reason.
She could do anything, wear anything, say anything and it came out perfect. Whenever I need to be hyped up, to feel like the boss, I turn on Itty Bitty Piggy, whenever I want to feel catharsis, I turn on Itty Bitty Piggy, whenever I need to remember who I am, I turn on Itty Bitty Piggy. Whenever I buy my own private island and the announcer asks its inhabitants to rise for the national anthem, everyone will put their hands over their hearts, open their mouths and hearts in unison, and rap “I was on the plane with Dwayne.”
The favorite song
This one is pretty self-explanatory and there’s not a lot of poeticism to be had here so I’ll just come out with it: my favorite song is Shake It Off by Mariah Carey. It came on the radio all the time when I was in elementary school so there’s definitely an element of nostalgia. But in 2020 I was talking to one of my best friends about how I needed to be more decisive. How I needed to be more declarative and my first step was making my mind up about my favorite song. But the song itself also plays into that.
Carey is singing about a breakup, yes, but she’s singing about how she has no qualms about it. It’s simply something she has to do. “I gotta shake you off” she coos suavely while another clearer, confident layer of vocals comes in “'Cause the loving ain't the same/And you keep on playing games like you know I'm here to stay.” For me, this song doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships, this is about your shitty job, your terrible friend, or yes, that dusty man you’ve been entertaining. In a world where it feels like you have so little power, where looming anxiety makes it feel like every decision, big or small is life or death, inaction is so much easier than doing anything. But at some point, it just becomes inconvenient. You have to shake it off, move on!
When Kim Cattrall said “I don't want to be in a situation for even an hour where I'm not enjoying myself” the internet memed the shit out of it. But what she says before and after is so important.
The tragedies in my life continue to shape me. Now I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself. I want to choose who I spend time with personally and professionally. It’s my life.
We don’t have control over a lot, my trauma girlies know this intimately!!!! But we have more control than we think. Quit your job! Dump him! Say no! Say yes! Shake it off. Live your life, make decisions for you. You deserve it.
Wanting to know how people perceive you essentially wanting people to tell YOU about YOURSELF blew my mind.