So I was gonna post this on Monday. And then…I didn’t. I dunno, yo. Twenty years ago I was locked up for being a suicidal teenager! Apparently I’m a bit weepy about it.

On how we form identity. I am queer, I am gender-fucked, I am an omnisexual loner with a serious literary kink for emotional intensity, but before all of those things, I was mad.

Twenty years is a long damn time. I wish I could talk to that kid. Not to say it gets better—I would have spat in the face of anyone who told me that—but to say keep doing what you’re doing and when you can, in the moments when you have the energy, try to trust the stories and the characters and the drive. Because that’s how you’ll survive.

Straight out to my invisible community of functional fuck-ups, the kids who took showers with the doors open and ate lousy hospital food. The kids who played volleyball on a sheltered roof at Alta Bates Hospital, Herrick Campus, in 1995. We were never meant to survive, but we did, and I’m so fucking glad we did, some of us by the skin of our teeth. I still miss the voices of those who did not.