relative poverty and life

I don't have the answers.

I'm the girl lying on her stomach on the carpet at two in the morning with the room dark but for the glowing screen of her laptop, the girl making herself sick with chocolate chips she doesn't really want—and definitely shouldn't be consuming—by the handful as if her life depends on it, the girl staying up far too late because her brain won't shut down to allow for sleep, and I don't have the answers. Not for my own rampant insecurities, not for the drama and dilemmas of my dearest friends.

Not for anything.

Anything.

Which makes it ironic, I suppose, that right now I am content as I've not been for years, content even though nights still mean nightmares and panic still grips me on a daily basis. Ironic, too, that it took sitting alone in my cousin's apartment in Brooklyn, holding company with coffee and the distant noise of a less-than-stellar neighbourhood and my own thoughts, to realise the absurdity of running from a place where I truly feel safe merely to satisfy my subconscious desire to prove that I can live life dangling from a shoestring and still be someone, still outdo everyone around me. Competition is engrained deeply in my soul, and it seems as if I am only just learning to relinquish the need to create an image of perfection behind which to hide, because oh, I'm not perfect, not perfect at all, and, for me, to be imperfect is to be despicable, most of all to myself.

Instinctively I count the ways I fail, cataloguing every mistake of the day, every instance in which I am awkward, uncertain, unintelligent, unperceptive, clumsy. I count the veins on my hands, the scars on my body, the pounds on my hips, the flab on my middle, the unidentifiable fungus creeping slowly round my fingernail beds, the times my knees creak (which is just about every time I make use of them), the extra calories that enter my mouth, the uncouth gurgling of my stomach, the inelegant hook of my nose. I count the conversations in which I respond carelessly or inappropriately or even with less wit than the situation earned, count the sneezes that can't be suppressed, the games in which I am obviously incompetent. Guessing games are the bane of my existence, because I hate taking risks that involve people seeing me make stupid choices, and I hate being wrong.

Well, guess what.

I'm wrong, and I don't have the answers.

Any of them.

My life is a cycle of falling flat on my face and picking myself up long enough to wipe the blood from my elbows and knees and nose before going down again, and the bandaids never stay in place so I'm always bleeding. Awkwardness runs in my veins, and there are days when my choices are, occasionally by necessity but mostly because of sheer stupidity, less than wise. More than enough people have told me time and again that I am smart, poised, well-read, intelligent, but I know better: I'm an ignorant girl-turned-woman who vascillates between spewing hyper foolishness and keeping her mouth shut in order to avoid further abject humiliation, who takes one minute less than forever to solve puzzles in the simplest levels of Portal, and who smiles with her gums and either stutters or speaks too quickly. I choke on food or water or air on a daily basis. Speaking of water, I slurp my drinks, and occasionally dribble liquid when I tilt the cup at the wrong angle and overshoot my mouth. I never remember pertinent facts about history or literature or people and can't banter spontaneously to save my life, mostly because I'm too busy taking life seriously to roll with anything so lighthearted as verbal slap battles, and dancing is so far out of my league as to be near impossible, for as much as I love to move to a good beat.

And guess what.

That's okay.

The weight of all I'm not tries to crush me on a near hourly basis, but it's so good to be back, to be here, that bearing that weight is becoming easier, and what formerly seemed unthinkable is slowly become reality: I can live with myself. Even now, alone in the darkened house with my nauseated stomach and headache and disappointment over not having completed yesterday's easy to-do list and a host of other quantifiable failures—even now, with my emotions screaming you detestable piece of crap—I can make the choice to relinquish the vicious self-condemnation that destroys the joy of every happy moment, that tears me apart when the distraction of the people around me is suspended.

I don't have the answers to my own problems, and I don't have the answers to anyone else's, and that's okay. Because right now letting go of the need to have every question resolved and every flaw eliminated is enough.

Because some nights it is enough to be content to be alive.