But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, which is a thing that tends to happen when you have no idea what you’re doing and also you’re trying to write a whole fucking book. Apparently writing a book takes a very long time and is not something you can just wait and do the night before it’s due, no matter how often it worked in college, ’cause a book is a whole lot longer than those papers you wrote in college, and also nobody is spending money to buy your college paper from the bargain bin at Target, which is where I assume everybody will buy this book.

Whew. Where was I? Oh yes.

The truth is, I’m very bad at growing up, and I always have been. And, like all problems in life, it’s most likely my family’s fault, or at least it’s easiest to just blame it all on them.

Like many babies, I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I don’t technically blame my mother outright, but I do have questions. Sure, it’s a perfectly normal thing that happens during labor—it happens in something like one in three childbirths—and most people don’t even think twice about it. But in my case, I can’t help but wonder whether, on some subconscious level, my mother’s body knew exactly what it was doing and simply refused to let go, intent on keeping me in the womb until I became an elderly man and died. Or worse, it was trying to kill me before I had a chance to grow up and write a book that painted her as some kind of overprotective gestapo. Whatever the reason, I survived the attack, blue-faced and bloated, able to breathe on my own. And that was perhaps the first and only time I did anything by myself.

I went on to spend an inordinate amount of my childhood bashfully attached to my mother’s pelvis, mostly out of social anxiety, but also because I was raised, from an early age, to fear anything that posed even the mildest of threats. In my mother’s worldview, no danger was too small or insignificant to ignore, and my older brother and I were taught to mistrust basically anything that spoke, breathed, or moved.