Bad Habits

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• April 15, 2025

The week ends. The week begins. Your phone, which is your most loyal companion and the demon on your shoulder, tells you how much time you spent looking at your phone last week. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusted with yourself. You wonder what you could have accomplished putting that time into ANYTHING else. And yet. You quickly fall into the bad habit of scrolling social media, creature comfort games, bad news, bad news, bad news, worse news.

Some nights, it’s fine. It’s fine smoking weed before a movie, or drinking with friends. But other nights, you know, it’s a bad habit. You’re numbing some dark part of yourself to feel better. Feel better about the state of things. Feel a semblance of hope. Feel better about the world. Feel better about all the things you’ve no control over. Feel better about yourself. Walking the line between a playful vice and bad habit.

You start writing something, and don’t finish it. Start something new. Ignoring the deadlines of the things that NEED to be finished. How did I fall into the trap of what so many failed writers do? Bad habits.

Sleeping too little or too much. Rotating sleepless nights with ten hour binge sleeps. Your body thanks you after the rest. But your brain remains in this fog. Is this a symptom of depression? Or is depression a symptom of this bad habit? Couldn’t both be true?

It’s a bad habit to pay any attention to the negative voices. The ones that tell you it’s over. The ones that fill you with doubt. The ones that isolate you. From your loved ones. From nature. From your inner child. You know they’re not right. You know it… but on some level, you don’t think they’ll fully wrong.

Anxiety has you biting your nails without even realizing. Yuck! What a bad habit. One that started young, in school years, and never went away. Often, you can gauge just how much stress you are under my looking at your finger tips. Chewed up like the bone of teething dog, you know adjustments need to be made. If this leads to getting sick, you lay in bed, with a fever, swearing you’ll change your ways just to be healthy again. Swearing it. It lasts a few days, but promises to yourself are challenged by the comforts of the habits.

Hunching over the computer, your back as curved as a crescent moon that is waning away from the light, you know bad posture is a bad habit. When you do the work. Put the phone down. Detox. Force yourself to finish something you’ve started instead of allowing your boredom to start something else you won’t see the end to. When you’re able to manage the sleep, get outside and let the sunshine keep the vampire voices at bay, allow your nails to grow— you think everything will fall into place. Even if it’s short lived. Is all hope false hope. Is hope a bad habit. Like being in love with someone betrothed to another, thinking they will one day be with you instead. Have a drink to turn the hope into joy. Even for a little while.

Rinse and repeat. Life can’t be happy all the time. And if that’s true, then surely life can’t be sad all the time. You read something like that on an instagram post from someone who’s trying to be inspirational. But surely, they are home scrolling, giving into their bad habits.