The Dilemma Of It All

reflection — Sunday, September 21st 2025

Today is Lizzy McAlpine’s birthday. It’s one of my minor holidays of major importance, not just for her birthday but because of the Earth, Wind, and Fire song. Auspicious since 2023, 9.21 skyrocketed in value when I found out it was my favorite artist’s birthday to join the Ides of March and Valentine’s Day among my borderline holiday podium.

I felt the need to mention that, because it is relevant to today’s calendrical context, even if it’s not relevant to what I want to say here.

I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m alone. I’m not alone, and I am alive, and I’m not isolated or all that depressed or hopeless or out of my mind. Things are going well. Things with school and things with people and things with my brain. Better than last year, at least. Better than this summer. Better, thank God, than April. I don’t want everything I have to be gone. I wouldn’t trade all the blessings for relief from all the pain, because really, it’s not that much pain and it’s not as bad as I remember it being before, and I don’t want the silence back. I don’t want the silence of my room or the loudness of my thoughts.

But sometimes it’s so tempting to just hit the self-destruct button. That, believe it or not, is easier said than done. I know that. That’s why I won’t pursue it.

But every time I do something wrong, every time I reveal that I am not as perfect as I’ve been told I should be, I get the urge to make everything worse, all at once. Run away. It’s easier, the picture of exile in my mind, than the climbing back up the hill that follows a slip-up. I don’t want to admit guilt. Isn’t my existence itself proof enough that I am guilty? I don’t want to admit that I am stupid. And mean. And a fucking idiot. And bad at talking to people. And bad at relationships. And bad at seeming normal and humble and not using the word “effervescent” in an introductory conversation.

I am stupid sometimes. And mean. And a lot of things. I am sorry. I am thoroughly flawed, deep in my body where my soul lives and right below the surface of my skin where my heartbeat pulses.

And I don’t know what the assumption was, about me. Why do I act like it’s a shock to say that I’m not perfect? I swear I never thought I was. But I feel like people want me to be. Not everyone, of course, because most people are reasonable, and more importantly, don’t care. But next time I’m in class and I hear about John Bowlby and attachment theory, I might just start yelling, or pulling my hair out, or telling everyone in the whole world that I hate them and it’s their fault I came out this way, and I’ll throw my desk across the room and break a window.

Just to prove something.

I will self-destruct, just to prove something.

I will burn every bridge out of my city of prosaic contentment and poetic catastrophe, just to prove something.

I will hurt the people I love, not because I love them, but because I hate them for loving me.

Just to prove something.

That is where my mind goes; that is the thought process belonging to an overworked neuron in my brain somewhere, hoping that eventually I won’t pull the trigger on the goddamn action potential of doom and despair and self-destruct again.

I’m better than I was. I’m not as good as I’m going to be. I exist, and it’s important that I exist. Yes, everyone should be the most important person in their own life. Yes, I start to get a headache when I try to zoom out too far and imagine whether that’s fair. It’s selfish, to be sure. But sometimes that’s the only way.

Being selfish isn’t one of the ways I prove something. If anything, I fake altruism to prove that I’m a better martyr than the next girl you’d find, that my tremulous exhaustion and pain-colored cries are more beautiful than whatever golden sunset you’d find on the other side of that hill I’m falling down, further and further, because by now there’s no point in going back up.

But I’ll be selfish. I’ll tell you that I’m not okay even though I know your patience is already straining under the pressure of my nonstop complications. I’ll tell you the truth (the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) when you ask me something, and I’ll take you at your word as my equal. I’ll stop performing for an imaginary audience whose derision in response to my best has weathered away my ability to trust anyone, or anything. I’ll love you, for as long as you’ll let me, and I won’t run away or self-deprecate, or lose myself in the fantasy that being fundamentally broken is better than being honestly flawed. I will try to be selfish, and I will try to be what you need. You are what I need.