Lately, I’m really tired of myself. I think it a lot: Oh, you’re exhausting. And I feel like it’s sort of stretching into the silly things I post here and the things I say in conversations. I don’t want to write about my picture-perfect life (because it isn’t), or about DIY ideas to make your world more beautiful (because I don’t know how to Do It Myself). I don’t want to catalog things to buy, because I haven’t got the money to buy them. And I can’t share recipes for artfully-made food, because dinner is thrown together—albeit with love. Mine is a messy life, and sometimes a hectic one, but it hums with love and comfort and it is nice. I wonder if maybe it’s all of us, the Millenials, or whatever. Maybe that’s why I don’t have a job or a dog or an ironing board or a 401(k). I don’t even have a bed, and everything feels too uncertain to spend the couple hundred bucks for a place to lay my weary head.

Maybe we’re all in this together, but the thing is, I’m closer to thirty than twenty, and most of my friends have diamonds on their fingers and they wear matching accessories and have jobs and they take a taxi when they want to. It feels like I’m alone in this, and it feels like I’ll always be sort of a mess. When I was a teenager, I was sure my twenties were when things would come together for me. I would be confident, I was certain, and pretty and happy and successful. Now, I’m figuring those things will come in my thirties (oh god oh god). I rely on stupid reports that say women are in their peak around age thirty-two. That will be me, I’m sure, but then again, it all sort of seems like bullshit.

The good news is that I don’t think it matters to me. I’m not much for jewelry and I couldn’t handle a china set or a puppy or a baby right now, or maybe ever. I just want to be happy and feel content in the decisions I make and the things I do, and maybe my happy is different from others’. I want to get to a place where it feels like that’s okay.

The little stupid things that make up my life right now are simple, but nice: picking raspberries in the garden, shivering beside the Pacific ocean, playing bingo on Mondays, watching movies, reading books. That’s sort of mostly it, and I try to feel satisfied with it all because I think this is it, for a while.