Today is the third or maybe even fourth day in a row that an invisible entity is squeezing my heart. I used to get my heart squeezed a lot but then I didn’t for a while and now it’s getting squeezed again. Is my heart a stressball for someone I can’t see? Please stop stressballing my heart, please.

Right now I’m at the top of a relatively small tower, which I accidentally built after a really huge tower fell down. Even though this tower isn’t as tall as the last one, I can still see pretty much every bad possibility in every direction, which isn’t that reassuring but at least the enemy is visible.

At the same time, when I look out the window and down at the ground, I can see colourful creatures excitedly attacking my tower with pickaxes. Even though I don’t like having my tower attacked, I quite like the little clinking sounds. One of them looks up and smiles at me. I smile back and wave because I’m agreeable like that.

“OWWWW!” The Tower says. “Stop pickaxing me. It hurts bad.”

“Haha, sorry,” says one of the creatures.

I hear myself say it’ll be over soon.

Whose side am I on again?

I think about how I keep seeing highly reputable sources saying that I’m about to have my Villain Era, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. From what I can tell, it pretty much just means being assertive and having boundaries after not doing that for a long time/forever. And as long as I feel I’ve done my best in the circumstances at the time, that’s what matters—no matter what anyone else thinks.

The reality is sometimes your best feels clumsy, messy, or even bad, but oftentimes that was still your best. When you work on yourself and grow and improve, it’s okay to expect the world to react to you as that new version and not the old one––you earned it. Some people might not realise right away, but as someone who is someone used to say: “Teach people how to treat you.”

It’s pouring rain right now.

Lightning is about to strike!

Soon I will be falling down and up at the same time. Hopefully when I land I’ll hit my head, and certain things will wake up dead. Then all the little creatures can drop their pickaxes in the rubble and help me stand up and dust myself off.

It’s actually nice being on the open ground as the sun comes out. Once you step over bits of your old self and out of the mess, you can walk through the flowers and into an exciting unknown.

Because the unknown SHOULD be exciting, not terrifying.

The End