I can never quite trust myself. I can never trust that the decisions I make are the right ones. And the thing is, I make each decision so cautiously, so aware, so researched, yet it comes down to my speculative emotions, time and time again. And so I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust that my gut isn’t lying. I guess I’m just not sure if what I’m feeling is my own real-life gut, screaming as my brain tries to decipher it, or some made-up gut that exists only in the flashing neurons of my imagination. I still am not sure which is which. Which is my brain, my stream of never ending thoughts that together have made up an entire other world separate from reality, or my pure reality itself, outside of flashing neurons? It seems as though I’ve created two separate worlds I must choose between- the world of who I am, and the world of who I want to be. And I’m not really sure which world I should be catering to- the ever reaching dream of who I want to be, or the everyday existence and factual reality of who I am. And really, I believe that that is one of the most pressing questions of societal existence: Do we strive to be something better, although it may stray from “who we are”? Or do we becoming fully “who we are” and accept our faults and weaknesses and discomforts thus failing to strive for something better, because it might really just be more fantasy than reality?

And the thing is, I feel that even in how I worded those two questions, the answer has been made painstakingly clear. But the other thing is, I don’t always agree with that position. I don’t always agree with myself. I’m flakey, I move back and forth between opinions and ideals and hopes. I move around and through and jump over various hoops of burning fire. One day I’m this, the next I’m that. And so where do I fit? How do I make these grotesque decisions- like where to go to college, or exactly how I want to define my own sexuality, when every day I hold a different ideal for my life? And perhaps that is where the problem lies, as I expect to mesh myself into an ideal of life- a series of events and circumstances, instead of allowing a series of events and circumstances to mesh into myself. I expect for myself to enter a world that I have predetermined, instead of predetermining myself, and allowing a world to form around me.

These are the questions I grapple with. The questions that sting me in the dark hours of the night, while my parents sit out in the mosquito infested backyard with vaguely familiar strangers who grapple privately their own unique and equally valid questions less than ten feet from where we rest our heads and conceive our children.