You are good enough. You are worthy of love and respect. You are covered in, and in fact pretty much made of dust. You are inhospitable to human life. And that’s what makes you beautiful.
And you just wrote one paragraph of your therapy-mandated self-affirmation letter. Good for you! Nailed it. Boss planet. You’re well on your way to completing this week’s assignment for Dr. Charon’s “Learning To Love Yourself” seminar for celestial bodies. Finish this, and you can go back to your regularly scheduled sit-and-spin. Or, orbit-and-spin, as you like to call it, cause you’re so dang funny. You’re a boss Or-Bit-ch. See? Another one of your classic MARS PUNS.
And orbit-and-spin, that’s another thing you’re good at! You hurtle through space at a speed of 53,979 miles per hour. That doesn’t just happen. I mean, it sort of does, but… it’s complex gravitational forces and balance that you’ve maintained for over 4 billion years. Not once have you hurtled completely out of orbit and crashed into another planet, destroying you both. Sure, you’re clumsy, with your avalanches and your dust storms. But you have never destroyed two planets in one go, by tripping slightly out of your orbit. That’s what I call SPIN CLASS! Right? Nailed it. 100. straight fire.
And you know what else you’ve never done? Hosted an ecosystem so fragile that one organism can completely mess it up in less than 6 million years. You’re consistent. You’re still standing. You fit into the same size atmosphere you’ve always fit into. You’re killing it, Mars. Boss bitch. Big ups.
But let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Elephants. Well, mammals. Well, anything that resides on earth. Well, earth.
Recently, you’ve been beating yourself up because you’re feeling guilty.
Your buddy earth wants you to be hospitable to their forms of life. Earth wants you to have lots of a specific kind of water. Earth needs it. Earth is counting on you. But Earth is your friend, Earth is not your project.
But you’re beating yourself up about this. You’re mad that your air is wrong, your soil is arrid, your poles are frozen. You used to be proud of that arrid soil and that crystallized oxygen! You wore outfits specifically designed to show it off! And not just because earth needs to offload some of its pests, you’re feeling guilty.
You think you need to be more like Earth. But a friend who asks you to change yourself is… well, is being a silly billy, I’d say.
And sure, Earth won’t stop writing weird fan fiction and producing fan films and fan comics and game about “terraforming” and “colonizing” you. It’s flattering, if not a sudden and strange alteration to your geologically-long relationship. It’s a bit like Earth is MARVIN in on your martian autonomy. Maybe earth should give you some SPACE. Like, on average like 225 million kilometers. But, emotionally.
And perhaps, yes, earth is doomed without you. Oops. But it’s not your job to save anyone, and the fact that you even want to save them means that you’ve got a good heart. A good core. Of iron, nickel, and sulfur.
Mars: you’re great. You are a vast and complicated world made of amazing compounds and climates and trajectories. Even if you aren’t the savior of Earth and all its parasites.
And you’ll always be great. One of the great things about you is your sense of wonder. Venus says your thoughts are boring and dense, but she’s an air-head (or at least a gas head, am I right?) haha, you ROCK, mars. Oh man, a double!
Where were we? Oh yeah. sometimes you wonder about what’s the point of it all. It feels lonely, being lusted over by Earth, being bullied by Venus for billions of years. You feel like you’re doing something wrong. Like somehow you’ve lost the point.
Well, the point is probably about something like friendship. Realistically, it’s about hurtling through space until the heat death of the universe. But also, friendship. About your buddies, Phobos and Deimos, who do truly like you, even though they’d have to say that anyway cause they’re your moons. You should get better at accepting their compliments. They aren’t just your sidekicks - they’ve got gravity, too.
It’s about Earth and Jupiter, your needy neighbors, who like you a lot, even if they keep asking you for stuff. Even about Venus, who’s just jealous that Earth’s so obsessed with your similarity in size and gravity.
Maybe the point is also a little about about finding some of your own happiness, and your own meaning, and your own part of this void. You’re great at that.
You have the exact amount of water that’s right for you. You are the perfect color, and the perfect moistness. Your craters are shapely and your poles are frigid, you hot hot cold planet.
And you love yourself too, good work. You’re even good at therapy. Love, Mars.
