Hypothetically, say this last Tuesday found you wearing roughly 70 bajillion layers, sitting in front of the panda habitat at the Denver Zoo, and alternating between licking a softserve icecream cone, (chocolate and vanilla swirl), and wiping snot on your new chartreuse chevron scarf.
 
Hypothetically, say you spent five hours at this zoo, alone, looking into the mostly-empty enclosures and sitting on your hands to make sure they didn’t fall off from frostbite, which would be highly unlikely, but not impossible, trying to smile politely at the other people who were at the zoo in the middle of the day during the (most) dead of winter, and wishing a stranger would come up and start a movie-worthy conversation.
 
“You okay, Love?” they’d ask.
 
And you’d smile in a way that made you somehow both charming and vulnerable.
 
Then you’d probably fall in love with the stranger and get married and also find pirate treasure and live in a giant tree house like the Swiss Family Robinson, except instead of kids you’d just adopt designer shoes and spend a lot of time tanning and eating chocolate truffles off of Brad Pitt’s sculpted abs like some people eat sushi off of nude models.
 
But I digress.
 
And hypothetically, let’s say your best friend of 7 years got your text that was just one of those slanty-faced emoticons that convey more about apathy and stress and struggle than a whole slew of expletives, took the afternoon off work, and found you with the gorillas, your right palm pressed melodramatically against the glass as you watched the big one, (who weirdly reminded you of your grandpa), picking fruit slices out of a giant plastic ball.
 
:-/
 
And then, let’s say, you got all weepy. Because fighting for what you want all the time can be exhausting. Because sometimes you feel like everyone is doing better than you–doing more than you, every second of every day, and you’re behind the fucking 8 ball like Indiana Jones, streaking through your to-do list but never getting rid of that crushing sense of needing to do more. Play bigger. Get better.
 
These feelings, these urges, to build and grow and improve and thrive, are what set your eyes alight. Those urges are what encourage you to try harder, work smarter, blah blah blah.
 
But they’re also what make you get nose goop all over the collar of your peacoat while openly crying in public, rambling about every stress that has ever existed in the history of the motherloving world, only take time to gulp big breaths of air in order to continue the tirade of people getting sick and deadlines looming and projects bubbling and momentum building and giraffe’s being, like, *gulp of air* such beautiful, beautiful creatures.
 
And that’s when your hypothetical friend who is a hypothetical manager for a high-end lingerie company leaned over the railing, took a big whiff of the giraffe stench, and said, “Look. At the end of the day, it’s all just bras and panties.”
 

It’s all just bras and panties.

 
It’s all just little details. It’s all just white noise. It’s all just clutter that distracts you from living.
 
Your shoulders relaxed, and then it was just the two of you, looking at the dead grass as women with strollers full of babies strolled by, (and you totally realized that’s probably why they’re called strollers), the only sounds coming from the sloppy chewing of the giraffe with his huge purple tongue and your sporadic sniffles.
 
The stress. The overwhelm. The emails. The ideas. The sleepless nights. The personal bullshit. The things that feel like OH, HOLY SHIT, THE END OF THE WORLD, are just little details.
 
So, hypothetically, next time you want to crawl into a cave somewhere in New Zealand, pull a rock over the opening and cram fistfuls of marshmallows into your face, just remember to take things a little less seriously. To breathe just a little bit deeper. And remember that at the end of the day?
 

It’s all just little scraps of lace that go up your buttcrack.

What tricks do you have for calming the hell down when you feel like screaming bloody murder into a pillow and punching your mailman? Let it rip in the comments, so collectively, we can all EXHALE.