Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

Get up, go out into the world, and do awesome shit.

I visualize myself winning the Olympic Pentathlon, inventing a phone that can be controlled by brain waves, or doing the laundry. I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

I have always been a softie, and I fight it with every fiber of my being. Sadly, my being's fibers need to hit the gym.

If you haven't noticed yet, working sucks. Unless you are a racecar driver or an astronaut or Beyonce, working is completely and utterly devoid of awesome. It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon. If you ever needed to ruin someone's fun, I mean really poop a party, just move things to the workplace. Fun terminated.

Real success and accomplishment, at whatever it is you are passionate about, requires real work. Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet, wipe the rivulets of watery drool from your face, and do it again, like an obstinate toddler running against the wall with his head in a bucket.

A bra was not for little kids who dreamed of being astronauts. What are you gonna do with boobs in space? Unless they are currency for some far-flung civilization, all they’re going to do is interfere with proper oxygen flow inside your space suit.

Young people are swaddled in delusion. You think you are more awesome than you are, the world more interested in you than it is, your countenance more dazzling, your ideas more captivating, and that LeBron James was just a natural talent recruited from a neighborhood pickup game. You don’t want to practice, you don’t see the value in sacrifice, and you are convinced there is some vast comedy conspiracy to keep you from buying your first Bentley and dating a model by the time you are twenty-five. Wow. You are a douche.

Because a rebel is just a guy who doesn’t have the good sense to go the same way the crowd is going, and the composure to act like that was his idea all along.

I believe fully that if you want to do something, you just go do it. You can sit around, think about it, waiting until things are perfect, wringing your hands, dithering and hesitating and slowly twisting your panties into a perfect little fisherman’s knot. Or you can get up off your lazy fucking ass and do something. What’s the worst that can happen?

But you never know what you can create if you put your heart into it unreservedly, and never let anyone else make you feel as if you don’t belong. Because a rebel is just a guy who doesn’t have the good sense to go the same way the crowd is going, and the composure to act like that was his idea all along.

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.”—BUDDHA “Mean girls suck.”—AISHA TYLER

doesn’t teach. Winning rewards. You can only really learn from failure. And in the end, after you have taken a prolonged physical and psychological beating that would destroy a lesser man or woman, you will understand that success is not the absence of failure, but rather the presence of not quitting when you do fail. To win, you need to fail, and fail hard.

How can you not tweet? How else will people know what you ate for breakfast or what you are listening to on Spotify or what your gamerscore is? Ridiculous. Not tweeting is not an option. I am a dolt for even suggesting it.

The Internet is where stupid goes to find stupider so it doesn’t have to feel so stupid.

I was not a cute teenager. I was not graceful, bubbly, or precocious. I did not cheerlead, work on the yearbook, organize spirit rallies, or plan dance-offs between opposing gangs of sexy brooding outsiders.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

But no matter, because we as a nation now take every tweet, every offhanded Facebook comment, or shotgun aside as the gospel truth of a person’s sense of the world, when in reality most are typed late at night when people are intoxicated or sleep-deprived or just got in a terrible fight with their spouse.

I spent most of my seventh grade summer dehydrated, green-tongued, and smelling like a Malaysian whorehouse.

I was still very much a kid but, suddenly, I had the body of a teenager. This is like waking up one day and finding out that your golden retriever puppy shoots lasers from its adorable puppy eyes. Someone is bound to get hurt.

When I arrived there, looking like a mad scientist had tried to flay me open like a tiny Frankenstein, my mother freaked out in appropriate fashion.

Members of the Geek culture will tell you they are critical to promoting a sense of brother- and sisterhood, responsibility, civic-mindedness, and philanthropy. Mainly they are just ways for people to feel like they belong, for other people to feel like they don’t belong, and for other other people (girls, and a few boys) to flirt with guys and gain access to mass quantities of free beer.

Hard work is far more valuable than talent. The world is littered with brilliant, talented, lazy nobodies. Almost the entire workforce of Starbucks is populated by a bunch of geniuses that “nobody gets, man.” If you have talent and you don’t have the stones to get up every day and perfect that talent, accept criticism, look at yourself honestly, suck on the hard lozenge of failure, and try to constantly and consistently improve, well then, you don’t have shit.

I’ll tell you what else fucks with a kid’s optimism and sense of stability: when your parents fight all the time. That shit can really suck. Listening to your parents yell, or cry, or stomp off in anger, or worse, that deafening silence that falls over a home when the two biggest residents aren’t speaking to each other, and only reply in jagged monotone when the kids ask for seconds or beg to be excused from the dinner table—that is damaging

When we are crushing on someone, they are a swirling blur of dimples and crooked smiles, hair flips and skateboard tricks.

wanted to be like her, and I would stop at nothing. Nothing at all, including sneaking into her closet and wearing her clothes like some tiny, creepy serial killer.

But if you really want something, you don’t punch it in the face. You stick with it until you stop wanting to hit it and start wanting to hug it, and then kiss it, and finally make sweet, sweet love to it that will leave you both in a shivering puddle of tears. Until then, it’s absolutely fine to fake it ‘till you make it. Jump in with both feet. “Act as if.” Just remember you’ve got to actually put in the hours, and do the real, hard work of “becoming as if.

Stark and egregious errors, the truly epic failures, forge character. They burnish your edges and make you the person you are.