Woe! Your parents have betrayed you once again: they call your favorite 100 gecs songs “noise” that needs to be “turned off,” they go to bed by 10:00pm, they can’t wait for the inevitable post-presidency Biden memoir to drop, or they liken buying you medium toothbrushes to buying you cigarettes (they’re too harsh on your gums). If you managed to ignore it before, you’ve finally come to realize that your parents are indeed normies. It hurts, but lucky for you, I am more than willing to share some proven strategies to accept your parents for who they really are.

An excellent way to start this process of radical acceptance is by letting all of your thoughts flow out of your troubled mind and into the soothing lines of an acrostic poem (if an acrostic poem isn’t your style, try finger painting). I often find that a good acrostic poem is a sure way to reflect on my parent’s peculiarly mainstream lifestyle, plus it’s good for the skin! Make sure that your masterpiece leaves no part of your feelings towards your parents’ norminess unturned; indeed the furthest extremities of your cogitations should, and must be, recorded. After creating your exhaustive collection of poetry,  present it to your parents. They may be a bit unreceptive to reading what is probably more than thirty acrostic (and largely profane) poems. Offer to read the poems to them. They will probably respond saying something like “Reese, stop. I’m trying to sleep. What’s going on?” It’s 10:15pm—you should have known better. But they never did understand, did they. They didn’t even compliment your conspicuously luminous skin.

So the acrostic poems didn’t go as planned. You never ended up getting to vent have the transformative heart-to-heart that you wanted. God, you just want to scream out every little normie moment your parents have ever had. But instead of doing that, consider this instead: don’t. Your parents may be normies, but they don’t deserve to be punished like that. Here’s what you ought to do if your lugubriously honest and thematically dazzling acrostic poems weren’t received with the dignity they demanded. Imagine your thoughts towards your parents’ norminess (they are almost certainly angry thoughts) as a pile laying on the floor. Now imagine a bottle. Stuff the thoughts into a bottle. Stuff more thoughts into another bottle. Keep bottling. Now put all those bottles into an imaginary box, and put the box in the furthest, most cobwebbed corner of your mind. Look! No more pesky thoughts and feelings! You and your parents can now live as happily as before you got that stick-and-poke tattoo a couple of summers ago. Enjoy the new you! Your skin looks amazing!