What I want is a vacation from myself. I’ve tried exercise, meditation, sex, and food. I wait for the desire to plan a wedding or have a kid or buy a house and when those things don’t take hold or are plainly untenable, I get my aura read. I open a trillion tabs of internet and drink it in. I gorge on studies about magnets that make you think differently and begin researching the properties of crystals. I don’t think about any of it as self-help because that’s way too pathetic, certainly more than the itchy meh I feel. I want to hurl my brain into outer space; it’s real, real quiet there, the ultimate holiday of feeling small. But because I’m not pregnant and don’t have cancer, I just want to do drugs again.

Drug days are like sick days. You only get so many a year. Or maybe they’re like viable eggs. You’re loaded with them as a kid and then somewhere in your late-30s you have, like, nine left. I don’t believe in much but I believe in the mysticism of drugs. And the sacred places your thoughts go when you recalibrate and feel accurately insignificant. I’m checked out of work, people, and organized religion. I want something, though. I want ecstasy.

Eat, Pray, Roll