Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

My misery seemed to come from knowing I was not good enough to warrant the objectively lucky life I had been given.

There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead. Oh, don’t laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak.

I was not without value, but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once.

(What could people be expected to tolerate of me? How much of what I needed could I reasonably demand?) (Nothing, nothing, nothing.)

I didn’t ask love of him. I didn’t want him to look in my direction and see me; for there was no thing I could say, with confidence, was me.

I slept for twelve hours straight, as I often did when I first came home, as though recovering from having to be alive on my own all year round.

There is no truce to be made with my body; if I make one, I know it will only be negated by a new enemy in time. What is the point?

It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.

How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely,

I would love to have one moment of want in my life when I am sure what I’m feeling is all my own and nothing to do with men, with what has happened with men in the past, with what they have said about me and my body, what thoughts they have put in my head without me even knowing.

Strange to know you’ll never again be with the kind of person who made you love first, their imprint inescapable.

Nobody who loves me from now on will ever know, really know, really believe, that I was a beautiful child once.