This is a Lilith Rant.
An exile story.
And before we go any further, let me be clear… just because my words sound righteous does not mean this ends in redemption.
I don’t believe the redemption arc to be as interesting as I once thought it was.
Or maybe it’s that I’ve started to suspect it’s the least interesting part of anything.
Either way, I should apologize though.
The word “exile” is a bit dramatic.
Painfully so.
Not nearly as intentional as it sounds.
It just came out like that.
(as most of my word vomit does…)
So here we are.
Which feels appropriate, really, I think.
Because nothing about life is clean or cynical.
Just cyclical.
Which is why I don’t buy redemption. I don’t trust stories that insist everything will swell into some luminous supermoon ending.
Anyone who’s ever sat alone with their mind after midnight knows better.
Do not mistake me, life is wonderful and chaotic and full of accidental magic.
But frankly I find it dull to live for the parts that resolve themselves into glossy, cardboard Hallmark moments.
Very flattening.
Anyway!
All I mean by this is that yesterday I quit my job as a server after 3 days.
I was bored.
A Cinderella Story
Now, before you pull the privilege card, which fine, I’ll allow (because fair)…
Let me clarify, my concept of boredom.
When I say bored, I mean words like small.
And I think that distinction matters, because boredom is an emotion, smallness isn’t.
It’s very somatic to me.
My spine shortens.
My neck folds.
My mind shrivels about a decade ahead of schedule.
But also, before I lose you…!!!
I know it’s not that deep.
And rightfully so, because life is big.
A big deal, really.
It’s kinda all we have.
And so I refuse to waste any more of the time I have in this bigness by shrinking myself to scrape up leftover breadcrumbs and sticky beer dribble off the plastic wood of table 72, smiling like some bar top Cinderella.
Except here the glass slipper isn’t a shoe.
It’s like, my life?
On Size and Time
The strangest thing about smallness is how it distorts time.
Minutes expand, hours drag, and 3 days can feel like an entire season of Stranger Things in the Upside Down, with no Eleven blasting through walls and snapping mouth breathers necks to save you.
Which is why I’ve now decided to make decisions faster than my mind can process me making them, you know?
Everyone like talks about self worth, but no one talks about its correlation to time.
The actual time it takes to accumulate the courage to tell the entire world “fuck off, I pick me.”
The time you lose staying in rooms you know you’ve outgrown out of politeness or worse, avoidance.
The time you waste grasping at air for clarity, trying to stomach something your gut already said no to.
God, time moves so fucking fast.
So fast it slips out of your hands without you noticing.
And then suddenly you wake up and 4 years have collapsed into a single moment… your whole orbit spinning too quickly, faster than your nervous system can possibly metabolize.
And then you’re just like “shit.”
Because society doesn’t measure time in sunsets or humor.
It measures time in constructs.
Marriage, mortgages, milestones, promotions, children, etc.
Like a pre-destined checklist.
We all know it’s bullshit, this isn’t new or novel so I won’t pretend it is.
But we keep participating because it’s an efficient way to move through American life without asking too many questions, and moreover it doesn’t suck…
Until the moment comes when you realize you’re standing at the intersection of size and time.
(insert dad’s flashy red mid-life sports car moment here)
But I know myself.
And the truth is nothing has aged me faster than choosing safety over instinct.
When I make decisions with my gut, it doesn’t matter if they’re wrong or right, because somehow it all lands perfectly in some nonsensical, cinematic way.
For example, my gut decisions over the past two years didn’t pan out exactly the way I imagined, but through a chain of questionable impulses, delicious downfalls, stupid luck, and straight up love… I wound up in last year Italy and now Hawaii.
And though I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, I know that where I am now is right.
So I’ve started measuring time differently.
Not by accomplishments (though obvi I want more of that).
Not by consistency (though I certainly need more of that)
But by how quickly I can capture time before it captures me.
And that practice (aka deciding) is starting to sharpen my sense of worth more than meditation or journaling ever could.
Some things do require reflection, sure.
Of course.
But most things?
Most things truly do not fucking matter.
Are You Bored?
Perhaps all of this sounds self indulgent to you…
All of this me talking about myself.
Of all my circling, my reasoning, my attempts to shape my thoughts before they shape me?
But if that’s all you see, then I have to wonder…
Is it really boredom, or does something in you feel smaller when someone else refuses to shrink?
I ask because I know that feeling too.
But that’s the secret about “self indulgence” we hate to magnify.
It’s just a woman choosing her own interior life first in a world that prefers she borrow one.
And my power, like yours (though you refuse to believe it) is born in contradiction, not perfection.
Which is probably why I thought I’d be fine serving tables in paradise.
Because isn’t that the contradiction?
To move to Hawaii at age 30 for bigness while agreeing to shrink in small, habitual ways.
To desire beauty while tolerating what is beneath it.
To chase magic and then settle for nacho cheese on a sticky table?
So on day 3 I decided to alchemize that contradiction to power, even if that meant I quit.
Effective immediately.
I understand that pissed in my managers’ cheerios.
(Note: some guy said this to me once, that I peed in his cheerios and I thought it was so gross... so much so that, naturally, I haven’t stopped saying it since. Ha!)
She surely let me know.
And I get it… shifts needed covering, people do be scrambling, holiday season is upon us, time is money.
Honestly FAIR.
I handled that whole situation start to finish so wrong lol.
Don’ think I’m made of stone… my chest tingled with the guilt of doing something “unprofessional.”
But, I just can’t let myself fucking care anymore.
Because if the “right thing” is to wait three months before quitting, you’ve just forfeited almost 100 days (nearly 500 working hours) of YOUR life to make a STRANGER’S path smoother when it directly contradicts your own.
I am no slave to a system.
No trivia night is thrilling enough to sacrifice my open doors on this island.
And realistically, restaurants survive earthquakes and coke binges… they’ll survive me. Forget me by Tuesday, even!
Plus, they should be happy I’ve given them some lore to gossip.
It’s okay to be a dick if people are nice to you.
It’s okay to feel bad about that (or not).
And it’s okay to also say “fuck being the good girl.”
I dare you to act in bad behavior if that behavior is your truth.
It is better to act on your truth poorly than to live someone else’s perfectly.
Nothing kills a woman faster than shrinking.
The Bhagavad Gita
I’ve been reading the Bhagavad Gita as it’s a book recommended for my yoga teacher training, and they explain karma in a way that i think is pretty cool.
Karma = action.
Not cosmic punishment.
It is not “what goes around comes around.”
Just what you do… physically, mentally, emotionally.
Then there’s also this thing called “karmaphala” which is a Sanskrit term for the fruit of your actions.
The result… applause, failure, money, reaction, fame, fall-out, etc.
And according to the Gita, this is where suffering begins.
So in my own tiny saga, karma was walking out of that bar saying, “I refuse to die in this ugly branded aloha tee cleaning your drunken dribbles.”
Karmaphala is the guilt tightening in my chest after sending that email…
The expectation that they’d understand, and that I’d feel good. That something magical (delusional) would come out of it and that they’d write back saying, “Becca, you were right! You’re far too gifted for this. A genius, in fact. Please return and accept your rightful place as VP of Marketing.”
But if we listen to the Gita’s bluntness…
Perhaps it is true that I am not Kanye (and thank god 4 that), and we are not responsible for the result of what comes from this impulse.
And in that grounded place, we are following action without attachment to outcomes, what they call “nishkama karma.”
So that’s what I’m trying.
Doing what feels true to me and letting everyone else deal with their own drama.
And I think in that, we don’t just find intersection of size and time…
We find the whole damn point of life itself.
There really is no one right way to move through it.
So fuck it.
Be the problem.
