It really shouldn’t hurt to heal from something the world refuses to see as anything but my own selfish teenage angst. I hear people talk about the most horrendous things like rape and violence in the same words I use to describe my survival semester, and I cannot help but feel guilty. I reassure myself with flowery quotes about how feeling is brave and my heart’s aching is legitimate, yet I always find myself writing this same spiel of prose about how so many have it worse off than me, yet I must complain to prompt my own healing. Yet all of this does me no good. I was walking through Minneapolis this morning behind a group of cackling dancer girls who reminded me of characters I saw last semester on campus. I felt an urge to shove my ribcage in, pluck out my heart, throw it on the sidewalk beneath my feet and punt the wretched thing into an adjacent ally, since tiny things like strangers’ similarity shouldn’t be enough to get me to feel such a painful longing. I need to write this book, but I don’t feel smart enough to be an intellectual about this, and I don’t feel strong enough to turn this into anything worthy of being called art. I keep feeling like an improvement until the smallest things reduce me to a sobbing pile of mush. And the things I sought comfort in seem to be disintegrating in my mind. I am in a purgatory for pathetic souls who cannot move on. It’s nearly summer, and I’m still scared to give myself over to this project, especially since instances that others with worse backgrounds can merely shrug off still propel me back to the times when I felt my very weakest. It’s an educated guess that I probably won’t be able to do this, yet I cannot let that stop me. I’m scared, and because I’m scared, I’m resorting to the idea that I ought to scare away those who may hurt me. I cannot live like this- I still feel the same thing as I did in Chicago, where my soul sees all the wrong I do and tries to stop me, yet my autopilot for survival simply will not listen. That’s why I need to write this, even if it only makes sense to me.
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