I had a migraine harshin’ my vibe all day, so this will probably be on the short side but the point of it all, I’m still going strong on Camp Nano goals so, I can’t stop now. Day 24: Camp Nano project, question of the day.

What is your biggest regret?

Source: I don’t know

Everything I do is a biggest regret moment, so with that in mind, just know that I know it’s all trivial but try telling my brain that at 3am. However. My biggest regret in the last 12 months has got to be going all LA on a neighbor here, but not intentionally but, okay look. We had just moved here from The Valley. I love The Valley and everything about it; let me preface this. And where we lived in the valley (Encino) we had across the living room window neighbors that were The Worst. And the woman that lived there was… not of the societal norms of the mental health scale and I’m not saying this to be a horrible person (I am horrible for tons of other reasons), I just don’t know how else to describe her without going INTO IT. She would decide on a whim that you were the devil, reasons unknown, and then actively make your life misery. Like, conspiracy level misery where you’re gaslit into buying skunk spray to spray into their a/c unit in the middle of the night misery. I’ll write a whole book on THAT one day. Her husband was an ex-gang member. He was harmless and nice and the only thing that annoyed me about him was the loud parties he threw with all his gang banger friends outside of my bedroom window every other night.

Last summer, we had just moved away from this and come here in our new home and our new life, and this nice woman and her nice husband with their nice kid are outside of my front yard playing frisbee and the frisbee hit my window and I went FULL ON LA on them and skunk eyed them out my front window like I had a point to PROVE. It was a gut reaction. I’ve spoken to her since, moths later, and she brought the frisbee thing up to me and apologized for it. And if I didn’t feel like a jerk before, well, hahah.

This is Colorado. Everyone here waves at you, yells “Hello!” to you across the parking lot, I’m not used to this. You do NOT make eye contact with strangers in LA and you don’t flag them down to say “Hello!” unless you’re trying to get them to go to your “fun church!” or you’re about to mug them.

And I was so excited to meet this woman and make friends! But now she’s scared of me. I know it. I see it. She avoids me, they don’t play in front of my house anymore, except the one time a month or so ago when she was playing frisbee again with her kid in front of my house and I was taking a picture of her belly out my window to show my mom that I thought maybe she was pregnant??? and I was caught taking the pictures and now I’m the crazy one.

How do I fix this? How do you retrain yourself to trust other people enough to small talk because this sounds like the absolute worst to me, to be fair.

Whatever, I don’t need her. I made some mom friends these past couple weeks at my kid’s swim lessons and we talk about childbirth and perimenopause symptoms so you know, I’m still cool. I’m young. I’m hip.

I’m not. I’m shaking the broom at youngsters on my lawn, let’s call it for what it is.

It didn’t have to be this way.