Laughing at Green Juice

I’ve been trying to do a variety of things to better myself since my mental health took a whooping nose dive exactly around January of last year. While I have been on a rollercoaster of good and bad depression days over the last ten years, something inside of me must have broke. While I’ve made a tremendous amount of progress on my mental health, I’ve now been trying to focus on my physical health because I seem to be in the right mental frame to at least make more of an attempt. And maybe those attempts have been trying to go on walks or do yoga every day, I’ve oddly noticed how content and (dare I say) happy I’ve been. With that, I’ve been in quite a reflective mood lately, and most of the memories that I thought at the time strange are actually extremely funny to me.

Over the weekend I drove back down to my mother’s house to retrieve my W2 and gather random items to help decorate the house I recently moved into. The most exciting thing that I landed upon was a Nutribullet that I had bought back in 2020 when COVID was first making its way to the States. Now I must say I pride myself on being part of the green juice trend before it made its way to TikTok in all of its oversaturated chalky glory. I had brought my Nutribullet with me to upstate New York where I would work odd hours for the next 3 months where it was extremely hard to get a proper meal in—if you had to imagine the diet of a blue-collar worker it is most of the time way worse than you think. Fortunately for myself, I decided to spend all of my hard

Snapchat proof of early-morning green juice

-earned dough on copious amounts of fresh-cut fruits and shove all of that into the largest cup my Nutribullet came with. The most important part of this is knowing that I bought more fruit than I needed in the span of a week. A lot of it would essentially begin to ferment and explode in its little containers if you opened the refrigerator too fast. I was like a confetti cannon of fruit that my cousins were not fond of. This led to one fateful evening when I decided to open a juice I had made a day or two prior but had not drank yet. For the life of me I could not twist off the top of my bottle, standing helplessly in the living room where my two cousins chose to ignore my struggle. Without a warning to anyone, an explosion of green liquid shot across the room drenching myself in the process. Both of my cousins had mixed looks of confusion and disappointment, wondering what the hell I had just done. After a small moment of silence, my cousin Will said,  “I thought you opened a champagne bottle”.

I think of this moment today as I walk back to my car on an uncharacteristically warm day. I happened to be wearing the neon work shirt I don almost every day during the summer, which was stained with pomegranate juice as I joyfully spent 15 minutes prior plucking seeds out from an alien-like membrane. It most definitely looked like an odd sight to the crossing guard to see me laughing to myself about the mentioned memory as I walked by her with a Nutribullet in my hands. So as I sit here with my fizzy green juice, I’ve learned to savor these small moments of unbridled joy. It’s the small things that I believe help to better ourselves. Because if laughing my ass off from a dumb memory isn’t healing, then I don’t know what is.