I have functioned on passion and panic and fury for an incredibly long time. I don’t pretend like anything I’ve been through has been worse than what anyone else has been through, but either my insight or will power were so lacking that it took a literal battle—a bloody, irate battle—to pull myself away from death’s door. That was a long time ago. I’m considerably better adjusted, but I’ve been clutching to the rage that saved me so many times before for almost ten years. And I don’t really need it anymore. I just can’t stop fighting. I have a sort of sick, seething pride for besting the beast that almost fucking killed me, and now my inability to just…to just let it go…is tainting all of my relationships. It’s tainting my personality.

Part of my shit, my pathological, mendacious bullshit is that I have an immensely powerful narcissistic streak. I can’t for the life of me figure out why people don’t like me. I think I’m pretty and smart and funny, so why the fuck aren’t people getting that? It makes me furious at them. And then when somebody checks my ego I’m so deflated that I feel like I’m falling, falling, falling back into the place that required a really intense outpouring of wrath to escape from it. But the truth is, people don’t like that. I don’t like that.

There’s only been one person I’ve ever met that I felt understood my complexities. He was complex in a very similar way, in a very fierce, extraordinary way. And when it was all said and done, when I moved out of that city and he just kind of dissolved from my life, I heard from him again. Misery loves company, right? Well, I think we both discovered that we really, really didn’t like each other. We were similar in the same horrible, unlikable ways. I think about him now, sometimes, and I tell myself that I was so right to leave him in the fucking filthy dust to be the morose little petulant child that he was. And I was. I was right. But I wish I’d had the prescience or the wisdom to realize that I would become—or worse, that I already was—just fucking like him. People don’t like me for the same reason that I don’t like him. Really simply put, he’s a god damn pain in my ass. But I think more accurately, he felt entitled to other people’s affections, often without any work on his part. He was what he was and people should love him for it. What a self-important ass.

And I’m the same fucking way. I have no idea how to let go of the rage that fuels everything that I do. I’m not even sure where it came from. I’m forever grateful that it rescued me so many years ago. But I gotta let it go.