12 More Ways To Be Born From Your Own Ashes

1. Put that box of letters in the corner of your vision. Readily accessible and potentially deadly. You keep them there because you want to read them again some day. You won't ever read them because you want to meet your future selves, instead of checking in on past pretenders.


2. Be uncertain. Use words like 'vague' and 'mildly'. Spell your name with a silent 'kinda' and make sure your password includes a lowercase 'sorta'.

3. Commit yourself to nothing that occurs in the distant future. You do not have the right. Your future selves are almost unknowable and won't appreciate being tested.


4. Be proud of how bad you are at things. Let pride put you to work. And celebrate when 'bad' evolves into 'interesting', evolves into 'fascinating'. Try not to grieve too hard when you reach the so-called 'good' that you used to crave.

5. Stop pretending to be a protagonist. They're not real. And if they were, they'd be really fucking boring.


6. Deliberately get lost (at least, once a fortnight)

7. Do something you know you'll regret, just for the satisfaction of looking in the mirror and saying "I told you so". Then get back at yourself by finding all the reasons to do it again but better.


8. Constantly remind yourself that laughing and crying are the same bodily reaction to a minor technicality. You cry when the universe is proven true. You laugh when it's unmasked as a charlatan. Either way, tension releases and you look like a human for once.

9. Acknowledge that you might be killed by a bus tomorrow. Take this as an excuse to live life as if buses won't be invented for another hundred years.


10. Call yourself out on your bullshit. Don't wait for your friends to do it. They think you're pretty cool, which is why they suck at being friends. Real friends are unstable doofuses that love you because they see themselves in you.

11. Consider the possibility that 'Happiness' was invented by dictionaries. 'Happy' is enough. You don't need 'Ness'. He's just a Nintendo character.

12. Be excited to live an unimportant life. Important people are destined to eventually become trivia questions and souvenir bobble-heads. The unimportant few who revel in their insignificance; they live on in bedtime stories told to their descendants' great grandchildren.