You're organic

Every Saturday morning, the park down the street turns into a farmers market. People line up for produce grown on small farms outside the city — no chemicals, no shortcuts. Just food that actually came from the ground. I stop at one of the stalls. The vegetables still have dirt on them. The fruit sits in wooden crates, unpolished, unsorted. Nothing here is trying to look good. It just is.

I imagine walking home with a paper bag full of this and already feel better about myself.

But then a thought: does eating this make me organic?

Because I've been soaking in pesticides my whole life. Not the kind you wash off. The kind that seeps in slowly — other people's opinions, the need to compare, the habit of measuring myself against everyone around me. Envy. Competition. The steady accumulation of who I was told to be. The version of me that existed before all of that — the one who made things just because, who didn't look sideways at anyone, who had instincts that were actually his own — that version has been dissolving for a long time. Quietly. Without me noticing.

A cold-pressed juice from Erewhon isn't going to fix that. Neither is the organic spinach.

You're organic. Remember?