Hot Potato

“I need some advice,” she says to me.

“You’ve come to the right place,” I reply, drinking directly from the bottle of Cabernet after shoving a handful of Cheetos in my mouth.

Clearly.

Even when I feel like a complete basket case myself, I somehow carry the ability to guide others through the bumps in their journey. The problem is my incapacity to follow my own guidance and I find myself stuck in a pothole over which I instructed everyone else to leap.

Is that weakness?

Sometimes I think it might be physically impossible to take our own advice. It’s like something that goes against our nature. We couldn’t possibly take something we already have.

We’re all just passing around the same advice like an endless game of hot potato.

“Shit! I don’t want this! Here—you! Take this advice!”

And where will we all be when the music stops?

You know, for someone who is quick to advise reaching out to others and even wrote a novel with this concept as a central theme, I sure do a damn good job of closing myself off.

Maybe that’s my adult rationality overflowing. I tell myself the things that bother me are invalid or silly, and that there are those with far greater problems. I twist reality until I believe keeping pain inside is strength. So, I bottle it up and don’t reach out. Then I’m a warm bottle of soda that comes closer and closer to explosion with every shake until one day I blow my top in a cosmic meltdown, spraying everyone in the vicinity with the stickiness inside me.

Let me pass you this hot potato of advice before the music cuts and I’m stuck with it in my sweaty palms.

Adulting does not mean sealing away your emotions nor hiding them from the people closest to you. Never be afraid of your feelings, and reach out to those around you for help. The moments following an emotional detonation bring unimaginable relief as my emotions fizz out around me.

Maybe I’d do better to gradually release the carbonation inside me instead of waiting to burst.

That would be real adulting.

But this potato is in your hands, now.

No pass backs.

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