1. The phone numbers of people that never, ever call you or text you first, and often don’t even respond when you text them.
2. Mean or uncomfortable exchanges with people — either in your text or internet history — that you occasionally go over and re-read because they make you feel angry and terrible all over again.
3. Subscriptions to online stores that you can’t afford, and which send you tons of emails and texts about the sales you should not be spending money on.
4. Bitterness over the things that your friends or coworkers have, that you might not be able to afford or have time for.
5. Expectations about having “the perfect” significant other, or someone who is going to make you feel better about yourself/fix your problems in a way you’re not able to do on your own.
6. Facebook friendships with exes that you have no interest in talking to again, and only keep around so you can occasionally stalk their new significant other.
7. Facebook friendships with people you don’t really know, don’t care about, and who post ridiculous things that always make you roll your eyes.
8. The idea that you have to keep up with all of your friends professionally, even if you don’t want the same things or have the same backgrounds, just so that you can impress them on social media or at parties.
9. Roommates who don’t respect your personal space.
10. Subscriptions to magazines that make you feel ugly, fat, poor, and unstylish.
11. Friends who only like to hang out with you or keep their plans when it involves drinking and spending a lot of money, and who otherwise aren’t that interested in being around you or hearing what you have to say.
12. A sense of entitlement about the amount of material things you think you deserve in life, especially when it’s much, much more than you need to be safe and comfortable.
13. Desire for name-brand and the latest version of everything, even when the generic brand or off-brand is just as good, or when you could get the item at an outlet store as long as you were willing to wait a season.
14. Pictures of you where you think that you look so much better in, and that you torture yourself with by looking at every day when you are feeling particularly ugly.
15. All of the old clothes and accessories that you no longer wear or use, which just clutter up your closet, and could easily be donated to people who would actually use them.
16. Junk food that you know you’re going to binge-eat if you keep in your cabinet or refrigerator.
17. People who constantly make weird comments about superficial things that make you feel really self-conscious.
18. The idea that you need to go to a coffee shop on the way to work every morning to get breakfast/coffee, when you could just as easily take two minutes to prepare things yourself most days and save hundreds or thousands of dollars a year.
19. Shame over the amount of debt you are living with.
20. Memories of the time that you label “the best time of your life,” which makes you consciously feel as though everything else you do won’t compare or will just be part of an overall downward slope.
21. Old medicine from when you had a minor surgery or dental procedure, which you will now just take recreationally even though you know that’s a terrible idea.
22. Resentment for your friends who are in happy relationships, because part of you feels like them having love success somehow means that there is less hope out there for you.
23. The idea that the amount of work you can do is directly correlated with how much time you spend at the office or how long you spend working at home. (A work-life balance, or being able to do more work in an efficient amount of time, is way more important than putting in overly long hours.)
24. Family members who make you feel terribly about yourself, who contribute nothing to your life, and whose only connection to you is genetics at this point.
25. Love for people who will never love you back, no matter how much energy you devote to caring about them and wondering what they’re doing at this moment.
