When I was in college, the apartment below mine had someone stabbed in it right before I moved in. You could still see dried bloodstains on the wooden stairs for years after but beggars can’t be choosers. It was all I could afford and in modern day times where it costs all you make just to live in a tiny one bedroom apartment that you share with multiple strangers, sometimes food is a second thought. I would usually make a meal that only takes three ingredients and you can season it pretty much however you please. Every time I serve it to someone now I get heaps of compliments even though its probably the easiest meal I could ever make and it makes tons of servings. I call it my College Bug meal. I used to make that meal out of desperation and overwhelming depression. I would hyperfixate on the fact that I needed to eat even though nothing sounded good so I would tell myself anything is good as long as I’m eating but then I didn’t want to eat junk/just anything because Trauma so I would try to cook but then anything that took longer than 10 minutes of prep time was simply too big of a task… and so the cycle goes. It was exhausting. And all of this before the most major task of all…grocery shopping. I hated grocery shopping back then and I still despise it now. So how to deal with the dilemma of accomplishing seemingly overwhelming but necessary tasks?

Quests.

If you had any kind of childhood you wished to escape from you probably played dress up. Now I never wanted to be the princess (except for Ariel because mermaids are cool obviously) but I did dress up as a knight or a ninja or a hero, etc. I was absolutely obsessed with mythology (still am) and Greek mythology was a big one. (To be honest what little girl growing up wasn’t obsessed with mythology? But I digress). I mean the Odyssey is a perfect allegory for the journey through life. I wanted to be a badass who stabs the villain and maybe saves the princess…if I felt like it. I wanted to be my own hero with my own quest. But while having an invisible enemy back then meant I just had to expand my imagination, my invisible arch nemesis today is all too real and a lot more difficult.

We all know quests, a hero sets out on a journey to accomplish a formidable and theoretically impossible task and they encounter all manner of things on the way. Well, I started viewing my journeys to the grocery store as quests and it has served me quite well. If I couldn’t find the item I was looking for or the store was simply too busy for me (hello social anxiety) it was just a test I must pass in my pursuit of sustenance. I use the model for quests for others things in my life as well. My husband and I were having trouble locating a post office in the building where he works so it became “the Quest for the Office of Letters”. Chores are simply trials in my “Quest for a Peaceful Domicile”. It gets really fun when you think of yourself as the hero of your own journey and it is a mindset I try to keep close at hand when I feel inadequate.

Since I’ve moved I haven’t made any new friends but that is a quest of mine. But perhaps I can encounter someone on the quest I intend to undertake this week; “the Quest for the Finest Thrift Shop”. Being my own hero doesn’t make the frightening entities disappear, but I do feel emboldened to fight anyway. After all, the hero always prevails.

Love, Bug