Making Amends

Dear Reader,

It has been a long time since we last spoke. Much has changed, but much remains the same. I feel different, like when I skipped kindergarten in 2010. I feel special, misunderstood, and finally free to be myself. I remain undefined by circumstance and freed by the passage of time. 45 days ago, I felt like a shell of myself. Now, I feel like the world is my oyster.

What happened in the last 45 days? Hmm…I’ll save that for another book. What I can say is that I decided to take my life back into my own hands. Any and all responsibility I’ve had, has been recentered, to a responsibility to my own wellbeing. Meaning, I dropped the act and finally focused on the self and the body. Rest, tears, pleasure, and a dopamine detox. It’s been unobstructed, unorthodox, and highly unusual.

For me, and many of us, life has been weird since October of 2025. My grandma died. She was a complicated woman. I was alone in London, studying abroad, in a relationship, yet so isolated. I broke ties, made up many lies, and decided everything was fine. Nothing, at all, was okay. I just wanted it to be okay. Now, everything is, actually O.K. I miss many things about how I was before those days, but I can simultaneously recognize that I was not living in any version of the present. Not as a gift, a current moment, or a wonderful reminder of being alive. I spent each day, spinning myself into more chaos. Not through any particular act, but a myriad of small value-sacrificing actions. They accumulated into one painful 21st birthday, with a full room and a speech.

I told my friends, that night, to watch out for one another. I feel, in many ways, that I failed to ask that they watch out for me. In the words of everyone ever, check in on your strong friends. We are strong, for you, but absent, for us. I made it through the night, went off to LA to be with my artistic, kind, and generous cousins. I saw the ways that joy was inscribed in my DNA, and left feeling like I had to do more for myself. But, I had to go back to Harvard and figure it out in a place I had left for 5 months. It did not go well. I was afraid to stick to that promise and see everything as I knew it radically change.

My return was grand and celebratory. Then, it became small and unimportant. Everyone has careers to build, assignments to complete, and people to sleep with. I cared about all, and none of the above, simultaneously. I wanted to be on top, but lacked an actual interest in the material life I had built. I felt empty, without my grandma. I seldom visited her, after an episode she had my sophomore year. I always thought she would see me walk across that stage. She will not. Ain’t that some shit.

Do not bank on the future to make you happy. It will do, as all things you lean on, and crack under the pressure. I cracked under my own pressure. You cracked under yours. So it goes.

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These words, this address, is to remind you of my last essay’s thesis. “The Ordinary Circulation of Disaster.” The definition I leaned on, for that essay, was “an unfavorable aspect of a planet or star.” Your unfavorable aspects will return, you star, and someday define you. It is up to you, each time, to address or re-associate those aspects. For me, my trauma, time and time again, I have deemed unfavorable. It remains real no matter how you connotate the event(s). I had chosen to isolate my grief as unique, my assaults as one of a kind, my betrayals as original. They are Shakespearean on their best days, and not that big of a deal on their worst. I am literally just human, and sometimes a star of the planet. My magnitude, my aspects, my favorabilities, are determined by myself. I see them now as neutral.

I will come across obstacles. I will face my truths and lies, over and over again. And, I will do it alone, first. That is what responsibility is about. My community can support me insofar as I allow it. My victories will define me insofar as I hold them true. My failures will fade into the distance each second of each day. The sunset is the moonrise. The moonset is the sunrise.

For now, I am focused on making amends to my kindergarten self. Those 3 months I had to skip naptime, shoving my hands in my pants, and supposedly “masturbating” in front of my entire class. Yes, I did that, so I have been told. So it goes. I assume I was just day dreaming and didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew it felt good. When I was found out for my oddities, I was sent into small white rooms and tested, interviewed, and assessed. They said I could go the 3rd grade. Imagine how much I would have lost in following their demands. My difference resulted in leaving Ms. Danzing and meeting Mrs. Wertz class, where I would come to meet three of my dear friends. If you are reading this, hi guys.

Then, I felt so ashamed to be who I was. I felt the need to organize others’ backpacks and desks, to prove I was useful. I would not raise my hand until I was positive I had the right answer. I let everyone else learn the lessons through trial and error, but I was already obsessed with perfection. That weight carried me from 1st to 16th grade. It ends here, now, in one post to 8,000 people. I believe I will make good on this promise.

So, here is my commitment to you, dear reader: I will stop organizing the backpacks. I will stop waiting until I am certain before I raise my hand. I will stop performing usefulness as a substitute for presence. The girl who skipped kindergarten did not know she was carrying a weight that would take sixteen more years to set down. I am setting it down now, in front of you, because that is the only way I know how to do anything real.

THIRDSPACE has always been about the in-between. The place that is neither here nor there, neither who you were nor who you are becoming. I have been living in that space for 45 days and counting. It is not comfortable. It is not glamorous. But it is honest, and honesty is the only currency I have left that I actually believe in. So I am spending it here, with you.

I do not know what comes next. I used to know, or at least perform knowing, which amounts to the same lie. What I do know is that the sunset is the moonrise. What I do know is that I am not a shell. What I do know is that my kindergarten self was not wrong, just early. She was dreaming in the middle of the day, unbothered, in her own world, which is actually where I plan to live from now on.

MD

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Editor’s Note:

This piece expanded as it was being written. Memory, appetite, shame, education, and inheritance often fold into one another. Rather than discipline it back into a single register, I let the work remain cumulative. Enter where you can and stay as long as you’re able.