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I
HELLO, MR. BRIGHT SIDE
(ELLE)
I’m going to be brutally honest.
I have a track record of making bad decisions.
Usually, I don’t mind it. There’s always something right side up in upside down.
One door opens, another closes.
You know how it goes.
Like when I was five, and I decided to make a net trap out of sticks, yarn, and cheese to catch the raccoon in our yard. Sure, I wound up with two spitting-mad raccoons, my mother shrieking, and my dad lecturing me for an hour about rabies while he freed the little beasts from a safe distance with a rake.
But I learned that I loved being a little spontaneous—pretty important for a lifelong love affair with the arts.
Or maybe when I was twelve and I asked a classmate, Kenny Purdue, to the Sadie Hawkins dance. He laughed, called me a zombie vampire bitch, and threw mud on my dress.
He also taught me how to tell which boys suck real fast.
Plus, the fact that splattered earth tones look pretty cool on fabric.
Oh, and my gothy phase in high school?
I’m a master at pairing contrasts. I had to do something with the anemia and pale skin. Fashion forward, always.
I think I’m still looking for the bright side in the fact that I chose to go to art school and graduated just in time to be replaced by an AI algorithm that can whip up a masterpiece in a fraction of the time it would take any human. Luckily, it hasn’t totally stopped me from finding freelance work as a children’s illustrator with my uniquely human imperfections—so it can’t be all bad, right?
Right?
Like I said, I can find the good in any situation.
Even the tattooed stoner rock star wannabe I dated in college because I forgot how to tell which boys suck, a guy who cheated on me with two of my friends, taught me a valuable lesson. I don’t need a boyfriend, or friends with grabby hands.
That was also the first time I tried painting angry.
It landed me an exhibit in a New York art gallery. The perfect dot on my résumé to keep the freelance work rolling in for the last few years.
So, sure.
I’ve made gallons of lemonade out of my weight in lemons.
Right now, though, I’m having a hard time finding the good in a cross-country flight when we’re not even done boarding and my eyes are aching with the spangly white flashers again.
That’s what I call them before the headache from hell hits.
This time, it started in the terminal at JFK before my red-eye flight.
So much noise and motion, all of it bouncing off high ceilings. Just a dull throbbing behind my eyes, but it’s the only warning I get that I need to hydrate and lie down in a cool, dark place to head things off before the pain turns volcanic.
But I didn’t have that option today.
Not when I had to slog through security, check in, and run to my gate just in time for the boarding call. By the time I got on the plane, my head was spinning.
Now, as I wedge through the aisle and try not to gag, and the sounds of someone’s upset, teething baby pierce my skull like an ice pick, I wonder why I didn’t just book a train.
