how to tell if you're in a waverly sm novel

(after The Toast)

Jenny Holzer at the New York Botanical Gardens

• You have lost something vital, impossible to live without. You are somehow still living without it.

• You find yourself in an unfamiliar city.

• Reality is broken.

• You have just met someone who, despite your superficial differences, speaks your language more fluently than anyone ever has. You have never felt this way about another person before. If only you could communicate your affections without withering in shame.

• You are chronically, perhaps terminally online.

• In all things, omens.

• You lie down on your dust-soaked carpet and wait to decompose.

• You are hiding your despair behind a mask of hyperefficiency and composure. Alternately, the only thing more disastrous than your ongoing mental health crisis is your bedroom.

• You are miserably attuned to the ambient, everyday violence of living.

• The only real antagonists are people who refuse to act in sympathy with those unlike themselves, and (by extension) imperialist capitalism.

• You are so, so tired, all the time.

• There are forces at work which are far more powerful than you, and you cannot understand or know them. At best, they do not care about you. You do not have it in you to quietly let them win.

• You and your body are continually at odds.

• The terrible thing that is happening to you is hardly surprising, given the way of the world.

• Your trauma is played out on a cosmic scale, your alienation writ large on the fabric of reality itself. You may or may not be trapped inside a metaphor, or a Jenny Holzer truism.

• Within recent memory, you have made at least one major interpersonal mistake.

• You are in the process of telling somebody a story.

• Under suffocating pressure, you waver, but you do what you have to do.