The older I get, the more fragmented my life feels.  As if with each passing change I am living a new life and cauterizing the old.  As if each time we are taking the person I am in that moment and sealing her in with the past where she belongs.  I end up with these pieces of myself, a frozen abstraction of who I was and where I went and who I loved and how I dreamt and they are all so disconnected, too disconnected.  I can’t hold onto it all, and they don’t hold onto each other.  There just isn’t enough room.  So I start letting things go, or they start slipping away, and then eventually these pieces just become lives that I used to know.  Lives that happened to someone that I used to know.

I still can’t figure out whether this is the way it’s supposed to be.

me: im so hungry

evan: eat your fingers

[five minutes later]

evan: dont eat your fingers btw
it was a joke

me: lol evan

evan: only because i care
about your digit count
9.5 is not good

me: please
if i were to eat my fingers
i would do it right
and take the whole goddamn pinky

evan: doubtful
you would go nub by nub!

me: no!
you underestimate how hungry i am

evan: if you are ever in such situation
get in touch w me after
and tell me how it goes
imma bet you nibble

me: i am not a nibbler

evan: when people eat themselves due to starvation do they take entire limbs or small bites
fruitless google search

me: i think they like
cut off entire limbs
right?

evan: google turns up with eating disorders
not happy

I started reading her blog because it was shown to me on a whim.  A boy had a crush, and he wanted me to understand.  And I continued because there was something about her writing, the way she viewed the world, that I found so eerily familiar.  I am so constantly confounded by how differently minds work - objectively, I know of these differences, yet each time it is shown to me a little part of me feels that I have fully never learned it before.  And then here we were, with this girl that I knew vaguely but not really at all, and it felt so invasive to not stop reading except - these were my thoughts and my fears and my wants and my dreams, voiced by her with the very candidness I have never been able to muster.  It surprised me, and then it consoled me.

Sometimes I am struck by this feeling that happiness is right around the corner.  Like if I stretched out a little and really reached for it, I could touch it with my fingertips.  I think, in these moments, that I need only be a little better to deserve it.  A little smarter, a little kinder, a little thinner, a little prettier, a little more accomplished and disciplined and worldly.  And I suppose this is what all of us think in some way or the other when we strive to be better versions of ourselves - that being better will bring us something more, something better.

So when I stumble upon a girl like this - a girl who is, by all meanings of the words, beautiful and intelligent and well put together but also warm and humble and open - and she writes about not being good enough - it makes me think firstly that being better might not be enough.  And then secondly, that maybe this is the way it’s meant to be.  Maybe happiness is that bone perpetually dangled in front of a dog, leading us to push ourselves and reinvent ourselves and perfect ourselves.  And maybe at the end of it all, we’ll find that it was never quite so out of our reach as we imagined to begin with.  

Maybe, just maybe, we’ve had it all along.