How to be a burden

I keep making lists. Perhaps I might even follow through on some of them

Jaki, toki pona glyph for disease, something unclean, obscene or repulsive

1. Be told to overcome yourself. Be told to overcome yourself so much you meet up with your self in the parking lot but both of you are too tired to do any overcoming so you just sit down on the curb and talk.

2. In a stroke of genius give up on overcoming entirely. Give up on the concept of overcoming. The things that do not kill you break you more.

3. Read all about how you are not at all a burden because what about worth and what about community and what if you are a great artist or storyteller and what if you are loved.

4. You are a great storyteller. Tell them a story about how wrong they are.

5. In a tapestry of goals hard-wired to the ideals of permanence and growth, find better ones. Blast some music on your sinking ship and dance while the deck holds. If you forget what words are tomorrow at least you sang today.

6. Be a disappointment. The expectations on your shoulders are not wings.

7. Be an inconvenience, by which I mean occupy the space of you and not of the expectations. By which I mean ask for help, and then do it again. Make it known when things are too much and that no means no and that I can't means I can't even when it technically means I could but it would hurt so much it could not possibly be worth it.

8. Sleep and cry. Have days which are mostly sleeping and crying. Have days which are painting one bad painting, singing one on-repeat song.

9. Have days, however they come.

10. In the choice between being a burden and not at all a burden becomes the greatest thing to be.