Since the famous Parks and Recs episode of 2011, the mantra of ‘Treat Yo Self’ has become the mantra that I live by. Being a freshman in high school, the saying didn’t really alter much for me besides going home and slacking off on homework. This year though, it has totally flipped my otherwise boring college life, and not for the better.
December 31, 2017. The clock was about 20 minutes from midnight. My friends and I turned on the Parks and Rec episode ‘Pawnee Ranger’ and entered into the new year by clinking champagne at the exact moment Tom and Donna exclaimed ‘TREAT YO SELF!’ It was totally staged, but totally awesome. Since that fateful night, I have taken the cute little whim and gone crazy! I also coincidentally started serving at a restaurant on the beach and was making more money than my broke stay-at-home college self ever made. I started eating out every night at a new restaurant, swiping my credit card like crazy, and making frequent target runs. Oh God, the Target runs were bad. This magical dream continued into driving to Miami and my cross-country trip to Boston, and then into Canada for a few weeks. It was great. Summer was in full swing and I had nothing to do but work and shop.
Then it happened. The restaurant closed. My lavish lifestyle came to a crashing halt a mere two weeks after I came home from Canada. The worst part was I knew before I left that the restaurant was closing for renovations and I did nothing to prep. I went on shopping sprees in Canada, ate out all the time, and swiped that card like crazy. Luckily even with my impending doom, I had a small second job that I did mostly for fun. It was nowhere near enough to float this lifestyle I had been enjoying but it could keep me alive. When my last day of serving came to an end, I walked out with a sense of flatness and disappointment in myself.
Life is not over now. I still have an income, and luckily the restaurant will reopen. The part that sucks is that I have nothing to show for the hard work I was putting in over the summer. The moral of this story is: don’t be like me. Treating yourself is not about wildly spending your whole paychecks on literal crap. Treating yourself is about working hard and saving, and giving yourself a reward every now and then. The message I missed from that whole episode is that that treating yourself is a treat not a lifestyle.
HCXOXO, Jamie Tremblay