Social media would have you believe that you need a rose gold gun to chase silly wabbits, or that you can only conduct dastardly plans from the comforts of a spacious, Scandinavian-inspired lab. But none of that is real. Neither are you, technically, but we’ll get to that later.
Here are some tips for how to give yourself the love your two-dimensional heart deserves.
Practice acceptance. Instead of trying to avoid having an anvil dropped on your head, make peace with the inevitability of it happening. What if you tried welcoming the weight of the anvil this time?
Recognize patterns. Before racing off the edge of a cliff after your victim, consider the last time you did it. How long were you suspended in mid-air? How bad did plummeting to the bottom of the canyon feel? Did you bounce off a lot of branches repeatedly on the way down? Stop doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Cut toxic people and places out of your life. Why do you keep chasing your adversaries into the desert? What are you trying to prove? Maybe what you should actually do is stop engaging with anyone who forces you to run directly into a cactus and get covered in cactus spines.
Make gratitude a part of your everyday routine. Did your plans for world domination get foiled at the last-minute again? Great. What was your favorite part of concocting the plan? What was the moment you were sure it was going to work out? Hold on to that memory and forget about when the power went out just as you were about to push the big red button.
Get some perspective. Maybe you keep walking into rakes because you’re trying to distract yourself from a bigger rake called Life.
Establish boundaries. It’s okay to cancel on a high-speed chase that ends with your car getting bombed with a wad of ACME dynamite if it’s cutting into personal time. Your sworn enemy, and the dynamite that ultimately thwarts you, will still be there tomorrow.
Shake up your routine. Have you tried switching things up lately? Don’t be afraid to tie your damsel to a new train track once in a while. Ask the conductor if he’d mind honking the horn a bit different as he barrels toward your victim. Wax your mustache into a new shape, why not?
Recognize signs. You know when a piano falls on your head and you open your mouth and it’s full of keys? Maybe one is the “key” to unlocking your hidden desires. Try unlocking some doors with it! Doesn’t work? Hm. Probably the wrong key. Try again.
Redefine what success means to you. If you keep failing to capture and kill your sworn enemy, maybe that’s the wrong goal. Maybe success is actually just about having the drive and charisma to appear in a series of episodic chases that end in debilitating failure in the first place.
Know your limits. If all else fails, remember that at the end of the day, you’re just a digitally-rendered avatar of religious morality used to keep impressionable children in line and imbue them with a lingering schadenfreude that will guide them to become good little capitalists.
There, now. Don’t you feel better?