I have lived my life trying to be, oh, so many things. An intellectual. I just found a list on Facebook that said, if you have read at least ten percent of these books, you are well-read! I have read 34% of those books.

And yes, I know I just mixed types of annotation. Let me be. I’m talking here.

I spent my life trying to be so many things to so many people. And in the end, I think I was really nothing at all. I have been bat mitzvahed and baptized. I have taken the Buddhist precepts and I got a quarter of the way through witch school. I have more than explored my spirituality.

I have been celibate and I have worked at a sex toy shop and I have been I have been everything I could think of. And I thought that was being free.

Now I find I am angry. I find the one thing I was underneath it all was angry. I find that I have been an angry person, all along only I have taken it out against myself as self-destructiveness and I have taken it out against those I loved by keeping myself away. I walked away from Judaism because whiteness rejected me and I walked away from spiritual life because patriarchy rejected me, and. I taught myself my life was all about rejection when I am the one who never learned how to properly reject anybody. How to call people on their bullshit or insist on being treated better. Instead, I just leave.

It’s not the worst sort of solution. A way to keep myself safe without making anyone else upset. If you’re me and you were raised to keep everyone else safe before yourself, it works out perfectly.

Unless somebody actually cares about you. Then maybe, not so great.

I wanted to go skydiving and rocky mountain climbing. I wanted to see the Northern Lights and the Grand Canyon. I wanted to live a little, while I still could. Because this thing has been ticking away inside of me. I figured it would kill me one day. I figured there was nothing I could do but keep running. Hope by the time it caught up to me, I was ready.

No one is ever ready to die. Or to face the fact of death. Or whatever it is that is happening inside my body. Nobody.

If the world was ending. If my world was ending. He’s the only person I would want near me. It simplifies things, death does. Forces you to get clarity.

If he was dying, I would crawl into his bed like a dog and not leave. I would stay there for days and weeks and months and years. Loyal like I was inside. Loyal like I was where I would not let him see.

If the world was ending. I would say, save his life before mine.

That’s the problem, see. Is he didn’t really do that for me. Is nobody in my whole life has ever done that for me. And that’s why I am so angry.

Is I turned myself into a sacrifice to save everyone I love from my own anger, from ever knowing me, from having to see my ugly, from having to deal with the pain they caused me. And no one is grateful. No one appreciates my sacrifice. Maybe no one was even missing me.

I wanted to see myself as some kind of hero. That’s what I was trying to be. But instead I guess I’ve just become the girl who leaves.