Sometimes I wonder why I behave the way I do. It feels as though the choose-your-own-adventure story of my life is becoming limited to a shrinking number of options, all of which are little more than different ways of looking at a slow journey towards obscurity and death. I’m a very negative person, and I don’t know that I believe that anything I do while on earth is going to make all that much of a difference in the long run. So I may as well enjoy it while I’m here.

Except that I don’t. I make a point of not enjoying it, really. I cling to vaguely puritanical views on drugs and alcohol, like I’m expecting my ongoing sobriety to count for something eventually. Like the world might end at any moment now, but that the intoxicated people aren’t going to make the cut. (Which would make for an interesting twist on the Left Behind series of books. And they could sell them at hardcore shows instead of in Christian bookstores. I hope someone’s writing this down.)

But I really don’t think that I’d have it any other way. It has become such a part of my identity that I don’t know any other way of being: I increasingly see taking pleasure in drugs or alcohol as a weakness, and so this whole straight edge thing has become ingrained into who I am. But I don’t even know that I ever believed in any one principle that led me here; I was just scared of what I had seen drugs do to my friends and I decided not to do them. Now, though, it has transformed into something else, something that makes me think a bit differently (or even less?) of a person that uses drugs regularly, even the recreational ones that we’re all supposed to have accepted as all right by now.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

And sex. I sometimes wonder if I’m hoping that by putting it off for long enough, I might never have to deal with it at all. I feel awkward about physical contact in general and guilty about the most vague of sexual contact. Part of me still sees sex as something messy, not as something that a person would do with someone she loves. Things start to feel dangerous when they move beyond a simple crush, and unrequited love feels so much safer. Lately I’ve found myself infatuated only with people that I know I could never be with: people I’ve never even met, but whose writing I love, or people who live far enough away for it to feel safe.

All this to say that it’s strange to find that the people whose writing best reflects the way I feel about life almost always seem to live in a way so far removed from the way I live that it makes me wonder how I ended up this way.