1. Try to ignore the tiny panic attack that’s telling you the rest of your day is deemed ruined and unproductive.

2. Smoke a cigarette even though you had just insisted one hour ago that you were quitting. Smoke one more and pretend like it never happened.

3. Play an angry but empowering song. Don’t add self-loathing to the mix by singing along.

4. Read. Read something funny, despite your inability to focus. Read the same paragraph over and over until you finally absorb it.

5. Shot of whiskey. Just one to take the edge off. Not two or four to physically manipulate your body into thinking you’re over it.

6. Meditate for a few minutes. Sit. Breathe. Imagine a tiny little ninja in your brain karate chopping every thought that enters besides BREATHE, INHALE, and EXHALE.

7. Chocolate? Or not, to avoid the hours of gluttony that will inevitably follow.

8. Write this article.

9. Distract yourself by worrying that this article is completely pointless.

10. Distract yourself further by worrying that everything you write is completely pointless. Remember that you’re 22 and you’re waiting tables and you didn’t go to college and you’ve decided that you’re never going to college and you’re still in Pittsburgh and you might never write that screenplay that’s supposed to MAKE IT and change your life and find an army of people who are just like you and become best friends with Susan Sarandon and Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig even though they’re decades older than you and still look better than you and you’d stay unaffected and incredibly grounded in the face of your newfound celebrity and take care of your Dad and all of the people who have taken care of you and live a humble life and donate most of your money to better causes than your own ego.

11. Realize that you’re alive. And you’re healthy. And your soul is bursting. Persistent. And that you’re only given what you can handle which means that that girl your age with cancer that’s been writing about it on Thought Catalog is a fucking rockstar and if she reads this, you’d want her to know that she’s a gorgeous warrior and you think of her lately when you start feeling bad for yourself because while her body was getting weaker, her grace was making you stronger.

12. Remember that you were born into an unkind world and it is your responsibility to make it a little less so. And you haven’t been doing such a great job thus far so buck up, kid, and get going.

11. Stay unsatisfied but never ungrateful because it’s the only thing that will push you to reconstruct yourself and your life.

12. Thank your boyfriend for inadvertently birthing your most recent catharsis by making you angry in the first place over something entirely unrelated and seemingly unimportant now.

13. Thank God for letting you see it, just a little bit, where you’d stand only a few steps beyond the selfishness of your daily life.

14. Keep going. 

image – Shutterstock