If you want to live the life you were meant to live, you have to own who you are—strengths, weakness, vulnerabilities, and all. You have to choose to be you every single day instead of letting other people’s opinions or ideas dictate the choices you make. In partnership with Taco Bell and their Feed The Stories program, we’re bringing you authentic stories by some of Thought Catalog’s most promising writers who stand out as individuals committed to living life to the absolute fullest.
1. You secretly think you’re a detective. You trust no one. You give a lot of side eye and take a lot of mental notes about people.
2. You’re simultaneously aware, however, that you would be a terrible detective. You would definitely forget to put gloves on before examining a crime scene and you can’t even look at actual blood without feeling queasy.
3. You will never fully grasp why people don’t just call the police whenever something’s wrong.
4. You would never go jogging early in the morning because that’s the time of day when dead bodies are always found.
5. You have a very strong opinion about which Law & Order is the best (SVU, end of discussion).
6. You’ve warned yourself a million times not to watch an episode of Law & Order: SVU right before you go to sleep, but you keep doing it anyway.
7. You have absolutely no problem suspending all disbelief to watch Ice T crack yet another tricky case.
8. You’re 99% sure you could get away with murder. Not that you would ever try—but if it came down to it, you would never get caught. Forensics can suck it.
9. You’re constantly spotting actors on the big screen who got their start portraying a serial killer on an episode of CSI.
10. Investigation Discovery is your holy grail. You can’t watch anything else on cable.
11. You’re fluent in the format of how every show unfolds. So when the detective thinks they’ve found the perp, you immediately check how much time is left in the hour. Twenty-five minutes? Not the right guy!
12. You regularly use terms like “perp” and “evidentiary support” without thinking twice.
13. One of your bucket list items is to play one of the characters in a murder reenactment scene.
14. You often wonder whether you’d be as helpful as the bartenders and taxi drivers who always give detailed replies to police inquiries related to customers they served or passengers they drove weeks before who’ve since gone missing.
15. Before you get into your car alone in a dark parking lot, you always check the back seat first.
16. The wife was murdered? It’s the husband and he has a mistress, obvs.
17. You’ve definitely practiced your mug shot expression in the mirror—just in case things take a turn for the worse and you’re arrested one day (under fall pretenses, most likely). 