Retroactive social anxiety is canceled.

If I’ve recently made a mistake, no I haven’t. What even is a mistake.

Depend on me to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people. Depend on me to laugh too loudly and too soon, and to make myself look like a child. I’d rather be like a child. I miss running barefoot through the grass.

I wasn’t trying to flirt, I was just matching your energy. If I was trying to flirt, you wouldn’t know.

I am devastatingly transparent and sincere, and I want to help. Why are you cringing? Don’t you have anything better to do? The planet is on fire, Karen.

I move through this world in my own way, and it my own time. Y’all will just have forgive me, and go on loving me anyway.

I am, all at once, not loud enough and too intense. The gaps between my words are a half beat too long. Sometimes my speech is jumbled when I talk about the things that matter to me, or when I don’t understand.

I am objectively wrong all the time, and it’s just as frustrating for me as it is for you. One more irritated sigh out of any of you, one more impatient glance at the clock on the wall, and I swear to God I’m going to explode.

I am so tired of translating. It’s exhausting. Finding people I don’t have to translate for doesn’t happen often, and the people I don’t have to translate for are usually the ones who are also perpetually tired.

I no longer want to be responsible for the ways I am misunderstood.

If I have legitimately said or done something that made you feel upset, fucking – tell me what happened, so that I can understand. Once I know, I will do my best to stop. The last thing that I ever want to do is hurt anyone.

But I can’t read your mind. I can’t know if I’ve done something wrong and exactly what to do about it without ever having been told.

My shoulders are not wide enough. Please go easy on me.

My face is sliced open, healing from a hundred tiny open wounds that never soothe me. My body trips over itself constantly, and never could manage the monkey bars on the playground at school.

This is the bag of bones I was born into, and this is the bag of bones that will rest in my grave.