Girl,

I see myself in mirrors and want to die. I see myself in true images and want to die. I am told I am not what I thought I am and want, etc.

By candlelight, coming to an understanding. You think you are nice but you are not. You think you are beautiful, you think you are a girl, not. 

Crying, and lacking pen and paper, you write on your arm:

YOU MUST ASSERT YOURSELF AGAINST THE EROSION OF DIGNITY!

Amended, after some dramatic thought:  YOU MUST ASSERT YOURSELF AGAINST THE EROSION OF DIGNITY AND SELF!

I am a nobody in nothingland. I am a nothing in nobodyland. My hair is frizzy. There is no God in this place.

Beside girls who are more successfully girl, I feel like a man. I play the role, I open doors, I put down my card. I lower my voice. I want to remove half my flesh from my body. I will place it on the scale, where it will swing in imbalance against a bird. I won’t see it settle.

When I feel I am a girl, or I want to be one, the opposite. My voice rises. I care how I smell. Still I feel my failures at it; I am sick at the effortless beauty of others, the way E. tucks her hair behind her ear, the way A. tilts her head. I want to crawl into their bodies. 

My most made-up self recalls someone’s ordinary. Every morning is an unmonstering. 

I want my smile to be something of importance to someone. I desire platitudes. I want to be loved by virtue of being in a room, the way some girls are, have always been. I have not been girl enough for this. Each day my tenuous hold on it slips.

I am who I am. This is what you say. Martel, Ian Hoolihan. 

Some days I feel I am falling very far and very fast, and that whatever sense of self I had has been effaced, violently, as though sanded. It stings. I grasp at anything, even the most ridiculous and unfounded, things I know barely to be true about myself, if only to hold them as barriers to my colonization. 

I take a long walk to nowhere. When it rains I imagine the artifice sloughing off, leaving the self, which is nothing, or else it is the self sloughing off, which also leaves nothing.

Rituals keep me sane. I write nonsense. I kiss my cat. I sleep so as not to think.

To be told who you are to yourself, which is not what you had known yourself to be, is as bad as seeing an image of yourself which was not how you imagined yourself to look. There is nothing to do for this. You cannot start again. You consign yourself to certain mediocrities. 

It is nice to dramatize yourself. It is wonderful to make a spectacle. 

Be alive! More than that, be happy for it. In whatever state you are. My god. It is all you can do.