I sound like I’m full of shit when I talk about the internet- how I choose to throw flowers instead of the popular sharp words. I’m faced with blankness, often, after I string some sentence together with a heart-soft fondness, telling people about the nature of how I feel about this thing. “We grew up together”. “This is a love story, I think”. “I’m honored”.
And, I recognize that most of this will always be seen as a weird quirk, or me trying to seem spacey or interesting— but I’ve had this haircut long enough to know that will always be my reality when I choose to speak seriously.
I was at a St. Patrick’s Day party the other night, and I just couldn’t stop. “I love the internet”. “I love the internet”. “I love the internet”, beaming out, eyes like fucking stars, after every gap in conversation, like a girl with a crush waiting for an opportunity to get a little hit. I know the repetitiveness is annoying, but I’ve never really had a concern about being annoying or sounding like a broken record. If you felt this massive amount of thanks, you wouldn’t be able to shut up about it either.
Our bond is built on give-and-take. It begs me to contribute; to create, write, and speak, and I feed it in loops of oversharing, posts, anecdotes, and girl shit. Sometimes I refer to it as a tool, sometimes I call it a space, and on my best super-smart-girl days, I can speak on it as an energy.
When I started this blog two years ago, I was feeling a lot less optimistic about our relationship—more selfish, maybe even hungry for its approval. Tapping on those bad reflexes; chasing virality, posting without the heart, scrolling for opportunity. I regret. This lack of respect only left me with sour-sour-sour awful nostalgia, sending me to bed with dreams written in red YouTube annotation pop-up text, with words about how it used to be. The constant thoughts of how secret it all used to feel made me feel a little crazy. Remembering a younger us; sneaking my computer into my room, making my feet so silent on the carpet just so I could grab another taste of the knowyourmeme.com comment section, or an Azumanga Daioh gif.
And though I don’t have a word for that feeling, I know I’ve found it again here.
This blog has known me as many different people. It started as exercise in humor. People still tell me that they think my writing is sooo funny and I recognize that it is, but the thesis that surrounds I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT has changed a little during these past two years. I’ve lived. I’ve died. I’ve been curious. Broken-hearted. Self-obsessed. Self-hating. Horny. Indifferent. A woman. A girl.
I’ve changed more than a bit. Now I come to here to reflect, still funny sometimes, but mostly eager to dissect. The practice of self-documentation is a practice that is always subject to change, just like the landscape of the internet. Things change, adapting happens, but the internet and I always find a way back— this is what my blog is really about.
Thank you to everyone who has kept up and read I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT over the past two years. It has been an honor existing here.
I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT 4 ever.
Here are my notes from March:
Had a sad/funny thought about the things I’ll probably end up leaving my kids. I don’t have any kids, but I do think about having a family a lot these days. Every morning I wake up and look at the hentai painting I swiped from Facebook Marketplace a few months ago, it’s basically positioned at the foot of my bed. Anime girls with giant boobs, with guns and a dog. My first handful of thoughts in the morning always include something about it. When I saw the listing for it I was instantly ready to drop whatever money I could to have it in my home. I was even ready to offer a little more for it to properly stake my claim, but the piece was actually done by a friend of a friend (x), and he offered to drop it off to me free of charge, and my dad hung it for me without question. I wonder— “Will my children want this?”, “What will this say about their mother?”, “Could this be a heirloom?”, “I hope it will be an heirloom”…
I think I can smoke cigarettes because Clairo smokes cigarettes, but I am not Clairo, and I don’t know who her esthetician is.
I find that it’s very lonely doing the things you’re supposed to do. Being true to yourself sometimes looks like sitting in your room alone. Being true to yourself is usually advertised as a colorful experience, but I think that sometimes you have to indulge in the black and white to truly stay grounded in the self. I know I could fly myself to the moon if I wanted, abandon it all in the name of pleasure seeking, but I don’t think that’s who I am all the time. I’ve been learning a lot about self-control, and how it doesn’t always feel amazing to practice; sometimes it feels like an inner fight. Truthfully, there is a large part of me that truly believes that I am evil, and staying grounded in healthy principles feels more like fighting some otherworldly darkness than making a simple choice. There are so many things I want to do, I just shouldn’t do them all. I’m supposed to be lonely in my head some days, I’m supposed to be bored. I take the quiet parts for granted a lot; I forget that they shape me too.
My struggles with food have reached a new, better point. I don’t know the true stages of eating disorder recovery, but I’m definitely in a newer phase: embarrassment and annoyance. The act of eating at times is still tough for me, I think once a body adjusts to mistreatment, it’s hard to trick it back into normalcy. Few tricks get past my body. I do find that eating in areas where I’m distracted helps things go down easier. Some days, every single bite I take feels like an active choice, and it makes me feel so juvenile, like I would fare better if I were strapped to a highchair and made to believe that a spoon was an airplane. I see stupid rage bait on Reels, which I think I would’ve made me feel a little upset if I weren’t so ready to leave this part of my life behind, though it does make me angry at the creators of content like this, people with eating disorders are usually painted as stupid creatures, when truthfully you have to be very smart to attempt to beat these things. I’ve been gaining weight, and my hair has been growing back slowly. My progress makes me feel a lot like a person. For a while, there I was just floating. Taking Advil to help put aside a headache. Blown over by everything all the time. I don’t see any romance in being fragile; I never did, but I have the most sympathy for those who are sick enough to think that way. When it comes time to eat, I usually feel extremely peeved. My inner monologue only seems to exist when I’m chewing. Though I don’t put my hands together, I do pray—to fight this curse and make my body feel like a body again. All I want to do is live.
People often think women are doing things by mistake, and this is one of the only things I learned during my time in college.
I’m always remembering Hot Chelle Rae’s string of hits in weather that doesn’t support them. It’s the worst. It’s 40 degrees, and I’m thinking about Tonight Tonight and how I’d love to hear it on a rooftop somewhere far into the summer. March has a funny way of reminding you about all of the things you forget about in the when it was warm: the last gasp stuff, the crucial details, the shit that almost made it onto the bucket list. I roll over in my bed after turning off the heater before sleep with a fantasy about meeting the whites of my friend’s eyes, somewhere late and dark, laughing about that line we all love about a strange tattoo that looks like Zach Galifianakis. (x)
I hope that I can come to a place with myself where I feel like my personality doesn’t have to do all the heavy lifting. I know it’s wrong to want to be pretty, but I don’t tell myself a lot of lies, and I know that feeling pretty is something that I want. Around this time last year, I finally felt like I was, but something has slipped. Pretty is a feeling. It has less to do with the physical than I originally thought. The psychological things I’m unhappy with do contribute, but the way I feel about myself is a much larger part of the whole. It’s hard to strive for things I might not be, but I’ve always believed in trying. These days, I mostly feel hideous, always hoping my words will be enough to make me a little shiny. I have faith that I’ll find my way back to pretty, but for now, I am here.
My friend K (x) had a birthday party. It was Miami-themed. The first house party of spring. Wall-to-wall with Brooklyn somebodies and internet darlings. I love the first few parties of the season, watching people slip out of the winter and figure out how to exist without a coat on. I like feeling myself do this, too. Before loosening up and dancing, I mostly stood in the corner with a few of my friends outside on the patio, talking about flirting instead of actually doing it. For most of the party, I tried to gather enough courage to speak to someone directly across the room. I’ve found it increasingly difficult to be bold these days, but that’s what parties like these are for. It’s important to work that reflex of teenage awkwardness. It’s important to have your knees locked by something hormone-induced. It’s important to say something stupid. And, obviously, it’s important to dance.
I don’t know why I didn’t take it seriously when people told me, “Your friends are your family in your 20s.” Now that I find myself living that sentiment, I’m surprised it never hit hard. Especially since I’m single with no prospects, my heart is reserved only for those who know me platonically. The timeline I’m on right now has been making beautiful shapes. I’m watching my friends become friends and form relationships that I have nothing to do with. I walk around feeling like I’m caught in a net, not one that traps or bothers me, but a net bound together by the bonds that are taking form right in front of me. My friends Max (x) and Ian (x) were my ushers at my most recent performance. On their trip to get me a few things before the show, they made this video. Heart on full.
I was interviewed in GQ UK (x) about my performance there in February.
I was sent to Baltimore toward the end of March on a bit of a bizarre mission. A follower of mine asked if I wanted to hop on an Amtrak and visit the Ulysses Hotel; apparently, she worked for them, and I famously have blind trust. All she wanted was a few posts, and who am I to protest a free trip? I asked, “Can I bring Taryn (x)? Maybe she can take photos of me in the rooms?” Immediate yes. Neither of us has spent much time there, but the trip wasn’t really about seeing the sights. She and I joke a lot that our lives are way too eventful, that every day requires a mandatory five-hour debrief. So we figured taking 48 hours away—swapping our beloved city for another—would do us some good. We went to the aquarium (which we got a million texts about—it was great, but we both think people are obsessed with it in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense), ate incredible meals, struggled to sleep because apparently I snore, and got locked inside a cemetery for roughly 30 minutes.
Had my last performance of I SAID WHAT I SAID last night. I’ve done this performance almost every 2-weeks since the year began. The experience has been beautiful and maddening. Though I’m not exactly eager to pick this piece of work back up again, I’m sure I will return to it sometime during 2026. There was a pretty magic in the air this time around. Pre-show, I was surrounded by friends, people who offered to work for free to help me pull off my biggest show yet. I step away from I SAID WHAT I SAID, knowing that I am the luckiest girl in the world. Most of the show centers around my relationship to love, and after last night, I am certain that there is no lack of it in mine.
This month ends on my fire escape. I’m having a party later at a bar in my neighborhood to celebrate I SAID WHAT I SAID and two years of I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT. Originally, I thought throwing a party like that was a very self-centered thing to do, but I didn’t end up having a birthday party last year because I was sick with the flu, so I think it’s okay. I’ve been sitting out here writing for most of the day. Earlier, it was unusually beautiful, and now it’s the same gray I’ve grown accustomed to. I’m excited for the weather to get warmer, and I’m looking forward to more house parties and unexpected trips. Life is beautiful, I guess. Thank you always for reading.
xoxoxoxoxo
-Mackenzie
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.