In classic me fashion, I've been spending the weekend thinking about a lot of things that I privately fear are just kind of trivial in the grand scheme of things.

I've been reading a lot lately - just finished Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, on Jaymie's recommendation. It didn't affect me the same way that The Namesake or Lucky did, but I did close it upon finishing and wonder why my chest felt so tight. It's a memoir, but the events in it are so unbelievable that I could barely accept the idea that a family like hers existed. My world view is so limited, even as I feel like I've spent the past two years learning about different kinds of people, and I just have this incredible thirst to know more, and more.

I suppose this is what I've been missing out on by not reading for years.

Seriously though - my weekend has consisted of a date with someone whom I just think is fantastic in so many ways, yet for a couple reasons my conscience is telling me to just... take... it... easy...; a Manhattan Saturday - brunch with my newest friend, reading, working on my song, a movie with the boy I had been so enraptured with just several weeks ago but I am now trying to know in a completely different light, then drinks in Brooklyn with my roommate and a socially awkward and relatively un-smooth 37-year-old to whom I gave a false name and an expired email address; then today I spent in solitude, running errands and baking, then finishing up The Glass Castle. It's past midnight now and I'm reflecting back and feeling like I need to cry - some kind of release that's not sad, but more... weighty.

I think I spend so much time fighting my instincts of who I am that most times I end up feeling very confused. I feel selfish when wanting to live for myself, misunderstood when trying to express my thoughts. I'm always folding back on myself when I wonder if I should just release that anxiety and just exist. I know that I am a good person, I know that I care deeply, and I know that I'm strong in the face of most adversity.

But the thing about having read Walls's book is that I'm not sure that what I've faced is really adversity. You know? Relatively speaking, how self-indulgent is an eating disorder when there are kids like Jeannette Walls and her brothers and sisters who go days without eating because their parents are too free-spirited and self-centered to make sacrifices to provide for them? My brother is gay, which is fairly innocuous when compared to a father who will steal your life savings to feed his alcoholism, or a mother who will hoard a diamond ring for aesthetic purposes rather than pawn it to feed and clothe her family.

But you know... that's not my life. And I know how lucky I am to have the things that I do. I guess when you look at it from a more removed stance, we're all kind of in our little orbs. We shouldn't spend time bellyaching about what I have that you don't have, or vice versa. Jeannette Walls didn't have a lot of things as a child that I fortunately did... but she also had things then, and now, that I didn't, and don't, and yearn for. We are who we've turned out to be. I'm not going to apologize for what I have, but that shouldn't stop me from wanting more.

This is turning out much longer than expected, but the main point that I had sort of been fussing around with before, that led me to want to write something, is that really what I've learned in the past few weeks is that what I want more than anything else is love. It's what I so fear losing, from friends, family, men - and what I expend the most energy trying to gain for myself. I can't explain it much further than that, at this point. It sort of bothers me that it all boils down to love, but I really don't think I should or can fight it anymore. I am who I am - this is what I'm about, you know?