Anyway. I’m not here to defend my own creative decisions as correct or better than where someone else might have taken the story but I just … I thought it would be interesting to explore. Trust me, I want them to end up happy together as much as you do, and I’m going to do my damnedest to get us there. I’m just not sure … how yet.

That’s life though, right? You get thrown a curveball and you hope that you’ll be able to catch it, but sometimes it just smacks you in the face. The most important thing is that you don’t let it knock you out.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. It has been a very stressful day/week/year and you guys don’t need to hear about my personal drama. I’m going to go eat my weight in Ben & Jerry’s and watch Drag Race and pretend like my world didn’t get completely spun upside down last week.

MARCH 1ST, 2017

I wish I had kept this journal strictly about dreams and that I was writing in it now because today has been some awful dream and not real life. But I didn’t and I’m not and it’s not. This isn’t a nightmare that I’ve stumbled onto, it isn’t someone else’s head that I’m trapped in. It’s real life and it is total garbage.

I knew it. I mean, no, not really, I didn’t KNOW know it, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to tell anyone about Atypicals and my dreamdiving and just … everything. But I also knew that it wasn’t okay to keep dating Emily, get more serious with her, and NOT tell her about this stuff. I also just—I wanted to be myself with her! Like I hoped I could be with my family, like I was with Damien before he turned out to be a completely different person than I thought.

I’ll admit, maybe I could have picked a better time and place to tell her. I should have taken her to the Common, re-created our first date, found a quiet spot where I could have told her privately, but she wouldn’t feel trapped or ambushed, could instead focus on asking me questions, giving me the benefit of the doubt. I should have made her feel safe. I should have bought her coffee so she could tear at the corners of the cardboard sleeve like she loves doing whenever she’s distracted or anxious.