To Admire

success, yes, in this family, in this posse of women, a lot does rest on the wrangling of menfolk in order to become housewives and have babies. 

Now, you all would clearly take me for a liar if I said I had no such interest in these things. I want babies. I would love to have the luxury to be a housewife. (Or really, if I were a full-time housewife, it would be more a way of me very much avoiding my own potential harm/success/risktaking; I am very acutely aware of this as my own personal weakness and lack of courage.) But—so— I very much desire to have my own space, and a loving partner to create it with and beside me, and I have a strong affection for lovely linen closets and spice cabinets and baked treats and little… feets. 

but attaining this sort of “success”—of marriage and house and children, as these are things I do want for myself (I want to reiterate these are not my universal ideals to which i judge the “success” of others by)—it is absolutely terrifying.

sometimes I feel so bad and so unworthy I went to melt through the floor, become the dirt, I am mud, I am dead and forgotten and taken for granted. I want to fail fully so badly that I am physically out of this futile toil waste and consumption so many call “life”. i want to be disgusting to you. 

the last thing I want, in my utter fear and lack of courage, is to feel important to someone else. Being wanted to someone else, as through a partner’s love, is, I don’t know if you realize this, a most terrifying responsibility. My heart may be broken or defunct or lost, but I dearly do not want you to hurt if I become physically or emotionally unavailable to you, and that is an impossibility. If I lack the confidence that I will ever really, truly feel meaningfully better and lastingly purposeful, my attempts at personal improvement will fall hollow to me. I can only dissapoint and drag down and sleep.

And children? Oh lord, oh children. How even more terrifying. Another obliging force, to persist because one’s own children must need them. It feels like a very sad trap. A very sad trap for everyone. 

i think my brain is obviously in peril right now, and so I should go to bed