i feel like i'm relatively more mentally healthful than most people, more sensitive and sympathetic and self-aware. but i come here because no one can hear me when i talk. so i pay someone for an hour of their time so that someone has to listen to me when i talk. because ___ couldn't hear me when i expressed myself to the extent that me crying after sex became normal, right, and she thinks it's some kind of catharsis when really i'm just too strung out on whatever my brain chemistry is doing to not have angst pouring out of my face, and she thinks it's like an expression of trauma,  but the way my trauma comes out is fuck you not i'm sad. and _____ did the same, they all have some predetermined framework in their heads of what they think their lives should be like, and they're wondering why they can't just shove me in the box marked "girlfriend" when they never fucking asked me if i even liked that word at all. and then there's just the years of miasma with _, just fucking stagnation incarnate, all the ways i wasted the best parts of me in glorifying something i wasn't and couldn't ever have been just because both of us were too fucked up to say this shit is real fucked, this is never going to go right, but i'm too self-serving to even have noticed that when i was younger, too hooked on the possibility that someone would consistently say they love me and maybe actually stick around, i can't see my own hands in front of my face, he's both the forest and the trees. and the fact that i still feel lost? if i still feel completely and totally ungrounded and unwitnessed and alone and without family and without community? is that a peeling off of the assumptions i had about what love should be like? or is it a peeling off of the assumption i make when i say i think i'm relatively mentally healthful? why can't someone who fucked me for eight years recognize my needs? but everything is simultaneously too late and too early, you know, like i've fucked up so incredibly badly so many times, and i'm carrying around baggage that's not even mine now just because someone told me i had to, and maybe if i keep doing what people say then they will think there is some value in having me around. and i keep picking these paths sort of objectively, thinking that could make sense for me, outlining the strategic reasons why some decision about my geography or identity or profession or politics should make sense, but it's all totally objective, i'm just trying suits of armor on, one at a time, and none of them are actually mine. i stand next to people until i blend in and they think i've been that the whole time but really i'm already casting around for someone else to stand next to. like i'm gonna find any way of being authentic inside of that strategy. but  you tell me what i'm supposed to do, people want to be seen, they want to be heard, so i just stand next to them and say you're right, you're right, you're absolutely right, and then they think i love them? i don't love anyone but myself and i'm not convinced that sentence will ever turn false. how the fuck can any of these motherfuckers say they love anyone else when they are all self interested? and so am i, so why would i be different? except for that i look at what they're calling love and see the narrative they've built and laid themselves into neatly, and i'm not a character in a story, i don't have a single trajectory, i'm never going to stop experiencing cognitive dissonance, but if they never do, is that what makes it real? if when they say i love you, they're not simultaneously reaching for the car keys, is that what makes it real? because i know well enough to control my hands and my mouth and my facial expressions when i make promises like that, but it doesn't mean i meant it with my head or my heart. and he's gonna turn around to some girl with half my IQ, half my potential, half my talent, half my baggage and say yes, that's what he wants. that's exactly what he wants. why would that not be what he wants? why would that not be what anyone wants? if you could pick that, over me, of course you'd never pick me, and neither would i. there is nothing beautiful about being fucked up inside. there is nothing desirable about being the kind of person who writes extended blog entries to their therapist declaring that they don't know how to love anyone. so i will just never be enough, for that. small enough or accomplished enough. i will always have too much to say and too much to show for it, and also too little preferences and too little dedication. i am tired and i hate all of my exes.