I wanted my friends to think I was cooler and just like them. I wanted the boy I liked to know that I liked him, without actually saying anything (because that one time I said something, it was humiliating. Never again.) I wanted people to think I was important, because when I tried to stand onstage and use someone else’s words, well, that was too successful and a personal, internal failure. Hashtag, jealousy. I wanted to write because I had something beautiful to say, and I knew that I could alight my prose better than the words organized in other things I’d read; was this a self-devised competition? (Maybe.) Then, I wrote some more because I hated my career and situation and wanted things to change – and they did change. I wrote at work, I wrote at home, I wrote to seem significant, and then I wrote to communicate what I was too scared to say, because metaphor and observations are easy when one is frightened. I wrote when I needed time, when I wanted to feel meaningful, I wrote when I wanted to be different. I wrote because I wanted people to like me.

I wanted to keep writing and then suddenly, I didn’t know where the words went.

It became a chase, brain versus keyboard. The hands were willingly placed, and started to spew epileptic garbage. Self-indulgent nonsense, occasionally broken with something blindingly coherent. But only on occasion. I wanted to be who I thought I was, and thought other people would like, because other people are, obviously, important. Then no one actually cared. Then the words were gone and the crowds were gone and there was no way I was trying the stage again because I’m too old for that shit.

So I’m holding the mirror now, not a pen or a pencil or a typewriter, yet, ironically, trying to write something that will make no sense to anyone, anyway, anywhere. But it doesn’t matter. It really does not and should not matter. Because this is all I am. And that is all I want to be.