How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

by Lane Moore

you could fix your relationship with them if you wanted to, if you would just do the right thing, whatever that is, only God knows, but you should die trying. My favorite response whenever

my brain is so hardwired to kill myself to let someone else live, someone who is actually not dying at all, and give them the blood I need to survive when they’ve at no point suggested they needed so much as a drop, that I pour mine out into their veins, and since they absolutely did not need it, it overflows, dripping onto the floor, helping no one.

I often fear it’s too late, as if there were a sign-up deadline for intimacy and friends and family and I just kept missing it.

But that’s the thing about teenage girls: Whether you’re the heaviest or the thinnest, the most striking or the most plain, the world has effectively convinced you you’re hideous. So, uh, you have that in common, though you won’t know that until years later.

For years, I’d think that surely my family had to be right about me because they knew me best, they knew the truth: that I was nothing and no one and I was bad and horrible and should’ve been a baby in a dumpster, good riddance.

People have these entire worlds, entire histories inside of them, with thousands of knots tied by people you’ll probably never meet and will never know, so your helping to untie them is just not a thing.

That I wished I could be like her. She was cold, she got a blanket. She was thirsty, she got water. She had to pee, she didn’t wait two hours until she was in physical pain and couldn’t hold it anymore, which I’ve always done and only recently realized was weird when I told a friend, “Yeah, I’ve had to pee for, like, two hours,” and they said simply, “Why???”