I can’t stop thinking about this stupid moment from last week and how much it still pisses me off. I was in the library, the big one downtown with the huge reading room, trying to cram for this certification exam. Finals week for all the college kids, so the place was absolutely packed, every table full of people hunched over laptops, total silence except for the occasional keyboard click. I’d been there since about nine that morning, just powering through, barely looked up, and I guess I hadn’t eaten since coffee and a bagel at 7 AM. Which, in hindsight, is ridiculous, I’m 25, not some starving student anymore, I can afford to eat, so why do I still pull these stupid all-nighters like I'm trying to prove something? Anyway, it got to about 2 PM and my stomach just decided to stage a full-blown rebellion. Not a gentle rumble, you know? This was like a guttural, prehistoric GROWL that absolutely echoed in the dead silence of the room. I swear it felt like it lasted a full five seconds. The kind of sound that makes you involuntarily clench your whole body. And of course, because it’s a shared table, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, looks up. Not just a quick glance, but a full, slow turn of their heads, eyes narrowing, like I’d just disrupted a sacred ritual. The girl across from me, she actually recoiled a little, like I was some kind of beast about to devour her textbook. Is that weird? Does everyone feel this level of mortification when something like that happens? Because I felt like I wanted to crawl under the table and just cease to exist. I mean, I know it's not a big deal, intellectually. It's a natural bodily function, whatever. But it felt so amplified by the silence, by the sheer number of judging eyes. I just froze for a second, then went bright red, picked up my backpack, and practically ran out of there without even packing up my books properly. Left my half-empty coffee, my notes, everything. And then I just walked around the block for twenty minutes, fuming. Fuming at myself for not eating, for being so easily embarrassed, for letting a bunch of snot-nosed undergrads make me feel like I committed some heinous crime. It’s absurd, really. But the feeling just stuck. And then it just snowballed into all this other stuff. How I’m always cutting corners, always trying to stretch every dollar even though I make a decent salary now. It's like this scarcity mindset from college still grips me, even when I'm out of that situation. My rent is astronomical, obviously, but still. Am I just wired this way now? Is this what adulthood is? Constantly feeling like you're one bad decision away from being back to instant noodles and wondering if you can skip a meal? Like, I have friends who just… go out to eat without thinking about it. Buy lunch. Get a coffee without calculating the monthly cost. I still can’t shake the feeling that I'm not allowed to do that, even when I absolutely can. And it just makes me so IRRITATED. Mostly at myself, I guess. For still being this person, this anxious, slightly-too-frugal person who can't even eat a proper lunch without causing a scene.