So I’mma be straight with myself here on IQE. Because this is MY midlife crisis and I want to use it to learn about myself, the way I respond to circumstances, the way I behave and the actions I take to enhance my time here on this planet.
Like everyone else, I have deeply rooted belief systems that were built way back in my childhood. It has taken the loss of Free Bread to learn a lot of these things. I learn the most when I suffer great loss. Like I learned to quit smoking cigarettes!! Because suddenly there’s nothing there but memories and space. In any event I have one memory that stands out, one that always comes back, one that has haunted me for decades. It’s juicy, like a tomato being thrown against your forehead.
I had just started 6th grade at Edgewood Middle School and my class of 70-80 kids was, in the blink of a summer, suddenly 400. It couldn’t have been more than the second week into school when during lunch recess I was pantsed by my elementary school friend since we were 6 years old, Jill. Everyone saw, we were all outside in a contained area. People pointed and laughed because it was funny. And then I made a tiny foghorn to record the incident in detail and to sound loudly and clearly, for many decades to come, “YOU ARE NOT POPULAR.”
I like trying new things, always have, so I’ve done my share of drugs and I take a lot of risks. Ive blown through jobs, schools, industries and towns full of people. I just keep moving forward. That’s my problem. I can’t fucking stand still. I have a lot of trouble keeping friendships in the digital age, social media is very triggering for me and I think it’s because of that thing above. I’m unpopular. Sometimes I’m not sure why I don’t like something when it’s popular – is it because I don’t like popular things because popular things don’t like me or is it that I know myself really well and I most assuradely will not like it. I have good instincts most of the time. Doesn’t make me popular. In fact, usually it makes me more unpopular.
One of the things that I have recently learned is that I more than likely have AdHd. If you go down the list of steps of things that people with AdHd do and say and think, I can tick all of those boxes, and so suddenly a lot of things start to make much more sense. Like maybe if I had aDhD see I can’t even remember the D capitalization thing when I was a kid it would make sense that I was a weirdo to other kids which would make sense that they would want to pants me. Now whether or not I forgive jill for said pantsing is not the issue. The issue is that the fog horn is still loud and clear and horning its way all up in my business all the time. it says
You are not popular, so nothing you do will will catch on becuase people think you’re weird and don’t care about you.
-forghorn
you will fail because you’re not popular enough to be successful and successful people are popular and you are not popular and nobody cares.
-foghorn
So you can see why instagram and facebook was hard. Free Bread as a business did ok because it was a product, not me. Somehow the Product was sort of popular, but not popular enough to get an investor or a man to shoot his gold dipped weiner money load injection into it. And this shit mattters in CPG. So it’s all these lessons that we’re constantly being taught- the popular pretty girls are the successful girls. THe ones with the babies and the long straight hair. So many babies and popular girls with long straight hair.
I QUIT EVERYTHING 