A hang-up is like a tangerine you keep in your jacket pocket and forget about - it starts innocently, then one day you squash it against a door handle and suddenly your whole life reeks.
I'm sitting at breakfast in the morning, peeling a tangerine like a surgeon afraid their patient will die on the table, wondering why I feel like everyone else has already seen right through me. That white fiber that stays on the tangerine even when you think it's clean, that's exactly what my self-confidence looks like - I try to get rid of it and something is still hanging off the edge.
Everyone tells you that hang-ups are normal, that everyone has them, as if they were handing you a tangerine that someone already peeled halfway, expecting you to say thank you. Thanks a lot, really comforting. I walk through the world feeling like that guy who brings a bag of cheap tangerines to a party instead of beer and everyone lowkey notices. If I were a fruit, I'd be that one soft tangerine at the bottom of the bag that already looks half like an orange and half like an apology - technically edible, practically nobody wants to risk it.
What gets me most is that a tangerine has written on it how much it weighs and where it's from, it has its whole background on a small oval sticker, and I'm standing next to it without any certification that I'm an okay person. A tangerine has an origin story; I just have anxiety and a half-life of doubt about as long as the walk from the couch to the fridge. Considering that this tangerine traveled half the planet to end up in Lidl for a few crowns and still seems more confident than me at a job interview, I'm probably doing something wrong on a fundamental level.
The plot twist comes when you finally peel that tangerine all in one piece, that flex that only happens once a year, and instead of joy, you start wondering if you deserve it and if it wasn't just an accident. That's a hang-up in a nutshell - you accomplish something that nine out of ten people mess up, you're holding proof that you function, and your brain classifies it as a system glitch. Meanwhile, the tangerine lies on the table separated into segments like some motivational poster made of zero calories of self-confidence.
And the point of it all? Spaghetti, I mean tangerines, can be eaten even with that white fiber, no one has ever died from it, and your hang-up is just a feeling that someone is watching you peel fruit at five in the morning. No one is watching you. Everyone is busy dealing with their own tangerines.
