They’re both right—we’re a family and we’re here for you when your IRL family is the source of stress. Whatever you need.

thatsahumanperson

Thanks, all. That means a lot. We’re telling my sister this morning—she’s the only one who doesn’t know yet and I’m hoping that maybe this’ll be the thing that brings us closer together but … yeah. It really helps to know that, whatever happens, you’re here.

OCTOBER 8TH, 2016

Things keep falling apart just when I think they might finally, finally be coming together.

When we were kids, Aaron and I had a hamster, Mr. Wiggles. Mr. Wiggles was very small and very cute and very, very dumb. We would put food in a corner of his cage and it would take him, like, forty minutes to find it. But, like all hamsters, Mr. Wiggles really loved his hamster wheel. He would spend hours on that thing. Honestly, I’m shocked it didn’t kill him. No animal should move that constantly, and this is coming from someone who tried to spend all of sixth grade on her rollerblades.

Round and round he would go, his tiny little feet pumping as hard as they possibly could. But it was so weird—sometimes he wouldn’t scurry along, moving the hamster wheel in a consistent motion. Sometimes, he would push in these short and fast bursts, his paws working furiously for a few seconds until he screeched to a halt. It was like he was trying to escape. Like he was expecting the bursts of running to propel him forward past the curve of the wheel. But it never did. And if he went too fast, stopped too suddenly, sometimes he would get thrown off the wheel.

That’s how I feel. Like any ground I gain is hard-won through intense running, before I’m flung from my path completely.

And what … what a completely and absolutely useless metaphor that is. Here I am talking about hamster wheels and ground I’ve gained like I have ANY control over what’s happening at all, like these things aren’t just happening TO me, like anything I do makes one tiny jot of goddamned difference.

Everything is falling to pieces around me and I feel like I have no other choice but to fall to pieces with it.

There’s a reason that my dad came and picked me up from the AM yesterday. While I was doing my … my exit interview, or whatever, he was getting checked on. Because while I was gone these past two weeks, things started to go very, very wrong.

When I came down to the kitchen this morning—at the shockingly reasonable hour of nine—I found my parents and Aaron already at the kitchen table. Each of their heads snapped up to look at me, surprised at my presence, like they’d gotten used to my absence over the past two weeks.