An exchange was made: we will love you and take care of you as long as you agree to the narrative that you are ours.

Here’s the thing: you made it. You are an adult now and you can shelter and feed yourself. Your most fundamental needs are taken cared of: you have food and water.

Love is a different matter. If others love you because you have agreed not to be yourself, that is, clearly, something other. It’s confusion and dishonesty and heartbreak.

If you feel you can’t tell your story because you are going to hurt those you love, you are already hurting them because you have given them a false you.

Let them see you and then they can decide if they love you. If they don’t, you are free. You no longer have to try to please people who don’t even care that much about you. You’ll survive. There are so many people on this planet, even with COVID. Find others.

The bigger, more important question is do you love yourself? If you are so busy trying to be taken cared of, trying to be adopted even though you are old enough to drink alcohol and drive a car, you are ripping off those who love as you are refusing to give them the experience of knowing a real person. Mostly you are ripping yourself off—you may never experience what it is like to be truly human if so much of your energy is going into being someone else. Someone worthy of love.

If you are not worthy of love as you are, naked before the sun and the moon and the earth that you will one day become, then why even bother getting out of bed in the morning? You might as well lie there and rot.

You tell your story so you can hear your own voice sing the song of you. You Whitman yourself to delight and truth just because you can. A guitar doesn’t try to sound like a flute for obvious reasons.

So, sweet, dear, lovely friend of mine, keep writing.

The flowers in the yard outside show up and bloom because that’s their job. We have so much to learn from them.