My recent dreams come with vivid background music.  A few weeks back I dreamt that my friend Kari and I were on our way to meet B at the movies, and Ani DiFranco’s “32 Flavors” was playing on the car stereo.  We both sang along for the whole song, in real-time.  The other night Mike Doughty’s “Rising Sign”* was playing in the background while something or other dreamlike happened, I can’t remember what.  But the song was very real.

Two days ago someone wrote me an e-mail that contained the following sentence: “Nostalgia, for me, is as deadly as heroin.”  When I read this, I knew exactly what it meant.  Too often I become so mired in my own past that nothing happening presently is as good/bad as what happened before.  It’s dangerous in the sense that it prevents me from enjoying what’s happening presently, and renders me unable to view what happened before in an accurate light.

When I am thus mired (or mired in any swamp of negative thought as I’ve been lately), it becomes important to remember the following things:

I am not what my friends think of me.

I am not what I think my friends might think of me.

I am not my friends.

I am not my ex-boyfriends.

I am not my boyfriend.

I am not what anyone I used to know used to think of me or thinks of me now.

I am not anyone I used to know.

I am not the way I look.

I am not how much I weigh.

I am not what anyone says about me.

*Which I’m now playing on repeat, and I don’t know why.