everything and everything and everything wrong

yes, i'm getting therapy as soon as i get to michigan

August 16, 2025

I don't want to imagine this scenario: I'm now a ghost and I'm surveying everything I left behind. I'd probably start with my room and lament that I didn't get to wear my blue porcelain dress or listen to my Ma Vlast CD, signed by Semyon Bychkov himself in the Czech Philharmonic. I'd probably stare at the pile of old clothes by my bed and try to kick it around like I'm destroying some sort of aged sandcastle that hasn't fully caved into a dune. I'd try to open my diaries and diaries of unsent letters and disappointments and metaphors of inexplicable confusion and, perhaps, pain, just to find that I am no longer material and therefore have no more agency over the physical world. I'd likely feel a fear. There's too much in those diaries. It's like a detonator of sorts: the moment it reaches the wrong hands, I need no longer exist; if ghosts could die of embarrassment, then embarrassment would be my second death. It's not a scandal that would ruin my posthumous reputation; it's probably how I'm just a nesting doll that looks fine on the outside, but open me up layer by layer, age by age, diary by diary, and do a dendrochronologic analysis on me, you'll find each layer within me scarred and knotted and roughened by my own doing.

I've tried collecting my flaws as if I were catching insects that have slipped into my room: I'm anxious as fuck. I swing from over-confident to insecure just to learn that they're the same pendulum. I feel a burning fear every time I open my wallet, knowing that I'll have to make up for the difference in my job, which starts in a month, or knowing that others will make more than me, and that in turn starts a spiral in which I suddenly understand why billionaires just want more and more and more. I feel twinges of greed eating at me, and I don't want to. Sometimes it feels like I can never earn enough, especially when I don't consistently work. When I'm living at home and off my parents' dime, in a sense, I feel guilty about staying here and taking up space. I graduated from a women's college and I still feel boy-crazy (agh). Residual insecurity from my past, that I'd set this life of non-STEM up for myself and therefore I might go absolutely broke, or that I should have pursued something ostensibly "harder" (anyone who says that STEM is harder than humanities should go away and never speak to me again). I'm a mess! I'm constantly a bit of mess (I like my room messy because being meticulously orderly is such a bother), but being in transition of these life stages feels like I'm deconstructing every bone in my body and somehow trusting that I can put it back together again when there are extra, new pieces in the mix.