In one year I will be a commissioned officer in the US Army. It frightens me and drives me that people will trust me with their lives, the well-being of their families, and the safety of our future will be placed on my shoulders. I am worried that I won’t be able to bring everyone home and that some daughter or son will have to grow up without their father or mother. The stress has led me to drink and I am worried that I may become an alcoholic. I hope that I can live up to all the expectations that have been placed on me and that I can be a role model for others.
My name is Tali. I am 21. A recently discovered gay woman. What I have been working on recently is not knowing things. I realize that inherently fucks with this project and for that I am sorry. I have spent my life thinking I had myself and the world all figured out. I don’t. For the first time in my life I can say that I feel emotional and personal growth. No intellectual bullshit. Real fucking emotion. The type that you have to lay in bed, cry on the street corner, and fuck random people to process. The type that oozes from your conscience, subconscious, and heart all at the same time. My name is Tali I just broke up with my first love and for the first time in a long time, I feel like a raw, real human being should. Open-ended, beautiful, unknowing, and entranced by the delicious ambiguity of NOT KNOWING.
I will not fit those shoes I am expected to wear. I will not and refuse to be like my father. I will not keep abusing drugs like he, and I will stand on my own two feet and become something so unexpected. This face may be a resemblance to his, but my actions will not.
This is what I engrave into my brain everyday so I don’t go back to picking up the familiar pleasure. It’s hard and I have slipped and no one knows, but I will make it.
I have absolutely no desire to do the things I’m expected to do. My ideals are utterly foreign to everyone around me. I want to stop; I want to quit, but what kind of person would that make me? I’d be letting everyone down, and I’d probably just be ruining myself in the end. So I keep going. Further and further away from where I want to be, until eventually I’ll end up empty and hopeless and broken. And everyone will say, “There, see? It’s better this way isn’t it?” My worst nightmare is that there will come a day when I finally reply, “Yeah… I suppose it is, after all.”