I link up with Lisa-Jo on Fridays for a writing flash mob…throwing caution to the wind and gathering to share what a few minutes of free writing can buy. 

Today’s topic: AGAIN

GO.

I’m tucked away in the corner where my back can be to the wall and I’ve got a great vantage point of the room. Straight ahead of me is a hipster couple in their early 20s enjoying bread bowls and pastries. Just past them are the group of three friends who’ve been laid back in their chairs and laughing in between every sip of their coffee/tea/water, respectively.

Next to them is either a mother/adult daughter or mentor/mentee combination — I’m leaning toward mentor and mentee by how engrossed in conversation they are, and how it seems like quite a deep discussion and the mentee is picking absently at her bread while studying each word that comes out of the other woman’s mouth.

Then I notice how the adult daughter/mentee is wearing tight-fitting yoga pants a cool shirt and I wish I had her body. And one of the girls in the group of friends has amazing bangs and I’m not sure I could ever pull that off. I watch the hipster 20-something eat her pastry and her bread bowl and get annoyed at my apple and low-carb salad because I don’t have her metabolism. I wish I looked as good in a hat as another woman I hadn’t noticed until this very second and then her…a tall brunette walks by tall and poised, and there’s just no way I will ever be that graceful or look so poised.

And there it goes again, the broken record stuck on repeat of self-loathing. The never-enough, always-too-much, quit-pretending number one hit that is so ingrained, so comfortable, so normal to me that it takes at least half an hour of it replaying in my mind for me to even recognize it.

And by then it’s too late.

In that moment the three miles I ran earlier in the day doesn’t matter. The healthy food choices I’ve made for the past month doesn’t matter. The increase in energy and amazing sleep doesn’t matter. All I can focus on is I’m not enough, I’m not doing enough, I’ll never be enough and the cycle repeats again and again and again.

I hate that song. It’s a stupid, redundant, uncreative, overplayed, wore-out, dead wrong, untrue, lie-filled, ear-deafenting tune and I hate it. How did it get to be so popular? I never requested the stupid song, not even one time. And yet is just shows up uninvited and barrels its way into my subconscious and like hypnosis causes me to act and react without my knowledge.

I need strength to break the record in two and throw the pieces over the edge because this? This tango-samba-two-step? It isn’t working anymore. There’s no room for it in my playlist of gratefulness or my playlist of joy or my playlist of goals. It’s outdated and archaic and on vinyl and no one uses that anymore. So in order to drown it out I crank up the song of Enough and it blares through the speakers of Redemption and fills my mind with notes of Beautiful. (<=tweet that)

Because that’s the truth.

STOP.

*I’m pretty sure I went over five minutes. I kept getting super-distracted by amazing people-watching.