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09/17/2025

1:53AM

i'm officially twenty-two years old today. i don't feel much of a difference, really. i don't celebrate birthdays, my family never has, so for me, it's just like any other day. i think it also doesn't help that i haven't slept yet, and it's early in the morning, so it still feels like nighttime on the sixteenth for me. it's strange to think that i'll be twenty-three in twelve months, but right now, i think i'm alright with this. today was a bit of a slower day than i would have liked—i spent most of it feeling weak, and i don't think i've been eating enough lately, but otherwise, it was alright. it started out good, at least.

my dogs are doing good. bow's itchy spots are healing up well from when he scratched himself too much, and cosmo's doing perfectly fine, as usual. she spends every day of her life relaxing. a few days ago, i spotted two gray hairs on the back of her neck, which is so strange, since it didn't feel like that much time had passed since we got her as a young dog... she wasn't exactly a puppy, we were told she was around a year old at the time, but there's no telling for sure. i get the feeling that whoever owned her previous to the man that we got her from wasn't very kind or attentive to her. she still has this nervousness in her eyes whenever she looks at people, and she's very submissive, but over the years she's gotten a lot happier. it's also strange that we got her years ago, now. 2021 doesn't feel like that long ago at all.

i suppose, a mix of the pandemic and the strange circumstances i was living in at that point meant that time went by really quickly. whenever i think back to what i was doing every day, from 2020 to 2023, it becomes really clear to me that i wasn't in a lucid state of mind... everything from that era looks blurry to me now, probably because i was living on survival instinct, sleeping through the days just to get to tomorrow quickly. it truly was a depressing way to live, and i haven't had to exist in that way since moving across the country. looking back on it, my memories from that desert appear almost dreamlike.

there are some things that i regret, of course, but more than that, there are things that i thought i would regret at the time, but now that i've matured a little bit, i've realized that i hadn't really done anything wrong in those situations. i used to imagine a life where things could be better, as if my taking a different action or making a choice sooner than i had would have guaranteed happiness, but now, i find myself thinking, "my life would be so much worse right now if i'd done that thing that i regretted not doing two years ago." isn't that strange? i think it is.

now that i'm a few years separated from the chaos, i'm able to reassure myself that none of what happened was a consequence of my own mistakes. the story that played out back then was one that had been written decades before i was even born, and so the course of my entire life at that point was little more than a footnote in the lives of the people who targeted me. i was one of the grandchildren, one of the cousins, an anonymous face, the byproduct of being raised away from the familial cult that had formed there. the only thing that i got out of it was a deeper appreciation for my mother for leaving it all behind when she did. she was twenty-one when she left, and i'm twenty-two now, so i think back on her life and wonder, did she have any idea that her daughter would see her family from an outsider's perspective?

to me, her parents are her parents, but my father's mother is my grandmother, and his sister is my aunt. my mother's family never truly claimed me, but i can't feel bad about something like that, because i never claimed them, either. until 2020, they were distant figures, but living near them during the pandemic put their entire lives in greater focus. i was seventeen when i understood, for the first time, why my mother never liked to visit. i was eighteen when i decided that those who deemed me worthless weren't deciding my worth, but their own. i don't say that to be cruel or vindictive in any way, only to be realistic. how can i place value on someone who sees my entire life as nothing? it would be illogical, and irresponsible, to put any stock on the opinions of someone like that.

today, these were the types of things that i was thinking about. what i wish i'd said back then, and what i'm glad i didn't say now... before i knew it, the pain that i felt back then melted away, as well as the anger, and the pity, too. my life is so much simpler now. there are times when i get lonely, of course, but never for very long.

overall, i think that i'm happy.