I don't know, but perhaps ambivalence is as good a reason as any to move in a certain direction. Last night I sobbed like a child and cried, I want to be a baby! But in some ways I am, the way - pardon this cheesy metaphor - a tree wears every stage of its past in its rings. There's no need to flinch from growth, from "generativity": from the next stage. There are sweet compensations in everything. I want, not to wear progeny like an accessory as the tabloids seem to try to frame it as, but to learn. Sheer curiosity and the biological instinct, and the type of love that I myself have degraded, out of pain and confusion, with my words and my impatience. This love gave me lessons, I think, in loving without expectation for return, though I always raged against it.

I am filled with doubts about myself but I'd like to let nature take its course. Who knows what is empty rhetoric, and who knows what the real selfishness is? I want to learn to be selfless, but is the desire itself not greed? I want to become grounded and to sharpen my values, not be a tyrant and/or a wreck: but there is no guarantee.

I also want to get a job, to give me more perspective. To meet others from all kinds of walks of life. I start to feel sorry for myself, often, but the truth is, I would rather be over-frazzled, than empty and lonely; I would rather choose struggles and challenges that stretch me a little thin and make me lose myself a little and have barely enough time for a shower, but feel a kinship with other people, than to bask endlessly in effete individualism. Or so I think. I'm not going to say I'm mature for my age, because I doubt that's true, but I've certainly been through enough to make myself wonder why I would possibly need more uninterrupted "youth," to ask what the benefit is in the ability for a rambling space of recklessness. Have I not drank cup after cup of straight whiskey and laid across a strange bathroom floor, crying and laughing? Have I not made a fool of myself, chasing this boy & that boy, straining to transmute (wc?) to meat? I don't want to live off welfare. I want to get further education and to work hard. Yes, I like my privacy and my free time, but I keep coming to this point, and I have brought myself to it. No one forced it upon me. Nothing is idyllic. I am from a broken home but I never planned to sentence myself to isolation, and I never, ever wanted to be single. Yes, there is a beauty in it, in Virginia Woolf, the wild castle of herself. Yes, I am terrified of submitting to normalcy, but I won't know until I get there.

I told my old friend, my old boyfriend, my steady post who carried my couches and my grief so many times, E., and it's as bad as I expected. He thinks I have no head, that I have done something horrible, that I will be stranded. Good lord. Perhaps he is right.