I can feel the gnawing restlessness inside of me like a loaded gun.

I look up flights to Thailand on company time and wonder if I could get away with threatening to quit again. The key to threatening to quit is that you have to really mean that shit.

I wonder if a different job could restore my motivation or if I'm already too far gone. I fantasize about the simplicity of being a barista. I hated being a barista.

Is this what a quarter-life crisis feels like? I'm not going to run a marathon, so that just leaves grad school... or maybe psychedelics? I google "GMAT Practice Test".

I talked to another backpacker at a bar a few weeks ago. We'd both returned from our trips at the beginning of November, but he referred to it as "about 6 months ago" and I felt my stomach drop.

My Dad just got back from a solo camping trip in Iceland. He said he realized he travels very differently alone, he never stops moving. I say flatly, "Because of the voices," and he says, "Exactly, I think I can outrun them- mostly I can."

Every afternoon, I have to close the blinds by my desk so the glare of the sun doesn't obscure my three computer screens. Every day, it feels like an affront to God.

Dear Future Me,

Happy Birthday my love!

How does 24 feel? We just turned 23, it felt, much as 22 did, rather inconsequential. I'm really not sure how 24 will feel but, by the time I read this next, I will.

In a therapy session a week or two ago, Dr. Deger remarked that I hadn’t spoken about feeling like a character, like I was performing for an audience, or living for the memoir in some time. I hadn’t realized it, but she was right- somewhere between 20 and 23, I started to feel at home in my own mind.

22 was a big year for me. Around July, I developed a gnawing restlessness that ate away at my inhibitions until I bought a plane ticket, told my boss I was leaving, and flew halfway across the world alone with little more planning than a list of cities I wanted to see.

I needed to go, needed to do something drastic, something the person I wanted to be would do. I wasn’t particularly excited, I barely even wanted to go, I was scared, and I gave myself so damn much permission to be miserable. I needed almost none of it. The growing pains I fretted over barely ever came and I realized, eventually, that I’d probably been the person I wanted to be the whole time. I saw myself, for basically the first time, as someone capable of taking the jump, of making new friends, of feeling free, vibrant, and so fucking full of life and joy.

I remember, vividly, sitting on a beach, on the island of Paros, Greece, with a 30-year-old Australian man I’d met in my hostel the night before and rented an ATV with the following morning. It wasn’t his first time doing a big trip like mine, and when I told him I didn’t know how I’d go back to my old life after experiencing how much more the world could offer me, He said “I reckon it’ll be easier than you think”. That’s the thing about Austrailians, they’re always reckoning something. I realized then that that possibility was far scarier to me.

When I came back home, it was November, it was grey all the time and I spent my mornings staring at brake lights on the highway and my Outlook inbox instead of pounding cigarettes and drinking cappuccinos. I fell into a heavy bout of depression. I felt as though I’d gone halfway around the world to figure out a better way of being and then came back an unchanged person to an unchanged life.

I don’t think that was totally wrong. When you run away from your life, it has a way of catching right back up to you as soon as you stop running. Then the real work starts. If 22 was a year of discovering my capacity for joy and what is required to achieve it, I hope for 23 to be the year of clawing my way toward a life I don’t need to run from.

I’ve considered whether I need to give you some tough love or give you full grace and compassion but I’m a bit late to writing this letter and I’m already a month and a half into 23- I don’t think I need to give you either. What I will give you instead is my trust. I have already watched myself become more intentional with my time and my energy. The motivation is coming more easily because I am no longer aiming to do things for the sake of doing them but because they are aligned with what I want and need. I’m not trying to change myself anymore, I’m just trying to change my life around myself.

My only hope for you is that the life around you on your 24th birthday is even one modicum more aligned with your happiest self. But if it isn’t, that’s okay too. If I know one thing about you, I know that you are, beneath it all, a relentlessly optimistic and resilient person.

I love you relentlessly and I know that by the time you read this letter, you’ll love you even more.

What they don’t tell you about celebrating your sobriety date is that it has a strange tendency to coincide with the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.

There is a me from before it happened and a me from after.

And when I look at her I feel a tremendous sense of guilt.

Because I didn’t save her.

I couldn’t save her.

She needed me and I wasn’t there.

In every other universe, I died that day.

In every other universe, my father came home from work 5 minutes later and five minutes later was too late.

In every other universe, my father came home to a corpse.

By most accounts, I shouldn’t be alive today.

By the rest, it’s a miracle that I’m alive today.

And sometimes, when I tell people about this, they ask what I’m doing with my second chance at life.

And that’s just about the cruelest question I can imagine asking someone who was nearly killed in their pursuit of a memoir-worthy life.

I can't believe I let myself get old and fat. I can feel my value in the sexual marketplace plummeting with every year older I get.

And people tell me it's a good thing to no longer attract predatory men but what they don't seem to understand is that that's fucking all of them.

They all want to fuck teenagers.

And my desirability to older, richer, more powerful men felt like a lifeline.

It doesn't really matter that I'm only 21 and only a size 4. I have grown in more ways than one. I am heavier now in more ways than one.

And I will never get my youth back because I traded it away in exchange for inconsequential men pretending to listen to me. Pretending to see me as more than a fleshlight.

But my older, fatter body is proof that I survived. That I learned how to grocery shop and cook. That I choose the anti-depressants that worked over the ones that killed my appetite.

And maybe that isn't any better, maybe it just is.

You can tell that you’re losing him and find yourself wondering why.

Not because you can’t think of a reason but because you can think of too many.

Is it because you were too needy? Too selfish? Too inconvenient? Is it because he’s too busy?

You conclude that it’s probably because you broke up with him six months ago.

one day you're 16, panicking because the other kids at school are sending around a video of you passed out drunk on the floor at a party a few weeks earlier

then you're 17, snorting cocaine with the hundred bill your grandma gave for christmas

then you're 18, posting porn you've titled something like "tiny blonde teen tries anal"

then you're 19, fucking your boss, happy because he's the first man to treat you like a person

then you're 20, writing a LinkedIn blog about some advancement in digital marketing that you don't really understand

you're 20, celebrating three years sober

you're 20, crying while unloading the dishwasher in your new apartment at midnight

you're 20, and people are still telling you to enjoy your youth

you're 20, and you don't know what they mean

you're 20, and your youth was never yours, just something for men to commodify

you're 20, and your youth never felt like something to enjoy, just a string of horrible things, most of them self-inflicted

you're 20, and everything is ok now but you're still not

It’s strange, really.

You spend your teenage years thinking you’ll be face down, dead in a ditch before you get the right to vote.

And then one day, you wake up and you’re 20.

You’ve got most of a college education, job offers on the table, and a good friend or two.

You realize that you’re boring now and that you’re probably going to turn out ok.

Your life probably won’t turn out as incredible as you imagined as a child or as tragic as you expected when you were 17.

Time moves much faster and nothing of real consequence happens anymore.

Your life is no longer littered with overdoses and psych ward stints.

Back then, you were falling apart while the world carried on without you.

But now, the world is falling down around you while you carry on making coffee and dodging rubble on your way to work.

you hope that someday it will hurt enough to make you up and change your whole life but it doesn't work like that.

the banal drudgery eats away at you bit by bit until any energy you have left becomes a precious commodity that must be reserved for tasks like frying an egg or brushing your teeth.

it's then that you whisper to yourself "I cannot leave my parents a corpse" over and over again until it echos in your head.

My best client right now is a young, attractive, coked-out, wall street millionaire who pays a dollar per message for the dubious luxury of speaking to me.

It's funny, or maybe sad, but his life looks exactly like what I dreamed of when I was sixteen years old.

I don't know for certain which one of us is most unhappy but I have the creeping suspicion that it's him.

He's still racing against the clock, gambling that the expensive drugs and meaningless sex can prop him up, just for long enough to make his millions. It's not a race that can be won.

I know he'd fly me out to New York and I could live out my debaucherous teenage fantasies in brilliant technicolor but I already know the glorious freedom of losing that race.

I used to be so jealous of people for whom the drugs kept working but, I'm not anymore.

No addict gets sober before their world falls down around them, and in AA they say "I wish you all the pain necessary".

I went through hell, hard and fast and young, it looked like self-destruction, overdoses, and suicide attempts but, it was a blessing.

I'm the lucky one.

All the worst moments of my life run through my head

Like scenes from a Tarantino flick

Detached, impersonal, shocking but, entertaining

This one is no different

Moments of consciousness come and go

When I strain against the fog

Of fentanyl and propofol

I find myself in a hospital bed

I’m gasping for air

And with every breath

A deep pain envelopes my chest

Both from my bleeding lungs and bruised ribs

Ribs bruised by my Father’s hands

Not in violence

But, in a desperate attempt to resuscitate the daughter

that he found blue and unconscious, lying on her bedroom floor

On the first day that I begin to come to

In the intensive care unit

I must’ve asked a dozen nurses, a dozen times each

What had happened to me

Most nurses say that they don’t know

That my lungs are just very sick

A few tell me that I overdosed

They ask if I was trying to kill myself

It’s a reasonable question

This isn’t my first time in this hospital

In fact, it’s my third time so far this year

It is, however, my first time outside the psych ward

I can’t answer the question

I don’t know

I don’t remember taking any drugs

I don’t even remember who I am

My nurses explain patiently

That I’ve been in a coma for the past week

I don’t believe them until I look at my fingernails

They’re longer than they’ve ever been before

I’ve never been so miserable as in those first few days

After I woke up in the hospital

My mind isn’t working

And neither is my body

I can’t think

Or eat, or walk, or breathe

Or speak above a raspy whisper

I’m barely a person anymore

I beg the nurses to restart the propofol drip

To let me slip back into the

Omnipresent nothingness of a coma

They refuse

The nurses tell me that I’ll make a full recovery

I just have to fight

Fight for what?

I can’t remember any life before this

When my begging for sedation goes unmet

I will myself to die

I tell the nurses that I don’t want to live

If living is like this

They call for a psychiatrist

He’s a condescending, pretentious man

Who does a poor job of feigning sympathy

He asks me why I would say something so morbid

I tell him that he’d want to die to

If he woke up in a hospital bed

With no memory

And a completely non-functioning body

I don’t want to fight

I don’t care if I survive

I don’t have any option

But to lay in my bed and keep breathing

So that’s what I do

I fight, not because I’m afraid to lose my life

But because I have absolutely nothing else to do

They’re not going to let me die

I learn days later

Why they thought I tried to kill myself

The boy who’d given me the pills told my father

that I must’ve made an attempt because he’d rejected me

I didn’t remember enough to say for certain that he was wrong

But the feeling in the pit of my stomach

Told me that he was trying to absolve himself of guilt

For giving me laced pills and leaving me for dead

After I learned that he had said such a thing

I refused to die

I fought for my life

With all the fury of a woman scorned