Dear Amber034

I have something real to say. You ready?

Grow the fuck up.

Put on your big girl panties and make a black coffee and stop bitching.

Your job doesn’t suck. Your job is actually a really good one and in the current recession, you need to feel at least a measure of gratitude about that. What sucks is your attitude. The world doesn’t owe you happiness my sweetheart. You need to go out there and find your own.

Now I wasn’t serious about the black coffee, But I am serious about growing up. Being an adult is hard. It’s not supposed to be easy and happiness can sometimes be a luxury. But it’s not impossible to achieve. You need to decide what you want out of life, instant gratification or a future?

My advice: tick it out for six months. If you still feel miserable after that, time to start looking around. But use the time to at least learn some skills and give your CV some meat.

Sincerely

Oprah D

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I’m not a therapist.

I’m not even a school counsellor.

To be honest, I don’t really care about the worlds problems. I just like to watch people. So I guess I just got good at deciphering things.

It started young, probably junior school. If some people were having some fight, the kind that only preschool girls can have which is to say it was literally over nothing. I would be a mediator, and I’d get them speaking again.

Not that I’d put that on my CV or anything.

Then in high school I just became that guy you know? People gravitated towards me, and spill their woes into my ear. I don’t think it’s because I’m gay, but because I’m just not judgmental. Actually, I'm pretty judgmental, but I'm an equal opportunity judge. Guy girl or something in between, my advice was always honest. I mean, if you came up to me and told me you once stabbed a man to death in self-defense, I’d find that interesting but not necessarily off putting.

I was a sort of receptacle for peoples hard-to-say-or-keep secrets. Taking up Wicca but mom goes to church every Sunday? Tell Michael. Want to run away from home cos dad is beating on you? Secretly dating your teacher? Parents getting divorced and can’t deal? Wrote your last term paper high as a kite? You get the picture.

In high school, I was kind of everyone’s friend and no ones. It wasn’t that I didn’t fit in, I just didn’t care about status the same way everyone else did. So I didn’t really have friends, I had customers. I didn’t get paid, of course, unless you count secrets as currency. Which I don’t.

I did care though. I wanted to help people when they gave me their sad stories. It hurt like hell when they went and did the stupid thing anyway. Sleep with your best friend’s girl, cheat on the test, and go back to your shitty boyfriend. It killed me. I got hurt a lot.

It sort of carried on into adulthood. Roanne, my bestie, used to say people took advantage of me, and I knew she was right, but I liked being needed.

Then...everything changed. 

She and her husband Richard died, leaving me with a godchild. And well, I couldn’t be everyone’s anymore.

I went through a bitter phase then. I stopped caring about people. I wasn’t a bitch, but I was done with peoples sad stories. I had my own, after all. A 6 month-old kid at twenty two? College was cancelled, needed a job, my young, reckless party-going life was officially over. Really, I had very little time for other people’s drama. And if they tried to bring it to my door, I got very blunt. My priorities were me, and my little girl, Ada.

And if it's not clear, I am very single, not even ready to mingle. Parenthood can do that to a guy.

From then on, I became a different sort of confidant. I called people on their shit, and I really didn’t care if it made me unpopular. If people couldn’t handle me, I had enough to fill my life, I didn’t need to pander to folks who couldn’t take the truth.

Quite honestly, fuck ‘em. ‘Sorry, not sorry’, became my new motto.

When you have student debt, a teacher’s salary and a kid, you learn not to give a fuck about the little things. Or little people.

But it did earn me a reputation. So it sort of started like that.