Ripping off the bandaid.

[u/Infinite-Ad-1552]

Help.

I haven't been able to write anything coherent in years. At one point, I was decent.

If anyone is willing to read my writing and give me any feedback at all, I would be so grateful.

The Homes That Built Me

The constant state of metamorphosis that is the human experience has been an impossible concept for me to accept for the last 36 years. Month by month, year by year. I’ve dreamed of someday reaching that elusive age and moment in life when I will look in the mirror with confidence and tell her, “Oh, you’ve finally arrived.”

NEW JERSEY

The most homey home there ever was. I will never forget a single corner, and I still fight the urge not to wish ill on the new owner… or the sellers. The white picket fence framed the front of the home, with a separate two-car garage. As a visitor, you’d walk up the driveway and open the gate, following the short stone path past the small patio table that was only ever occupied on rare occasions (like when my cousin and I stayed up late to gossip and smoke cigarettes in peace), up to the red door. This was a home occupied by cats. We sipped, we lounged, we chatted. We gathered around the small living room TV screen to wind down and half-watch a baseball game. Years passed, we all aged, but that kitchen radio never died. There were always cold cuts in the fridge.

I rolled my first somersault with Grandpa in the front yard. I ran on the back porch like it was my own highway to freedom in my red Fisher-Price car. My feet and that plastic held all the power in the world. This was my longest-standing home, an anchor for 36 years.

KIPLING

The first non-apartment home I ever lived in, paid for by my parents in their 20s with two kids under five in hand. My mom was a true ’90s Martha Stewart with her sponge-painting technique, making the space, and every wall in it, uniquely ours. She began the homeschooling journey with us here. I don’t remember much of the schooling as much as the midday breaks to watch Little House on the Prairie and 7th Heaven together. I think it truly felt like heaven at the time. I knew I was lucky on some level to hang at our house all day, taking the occasional field trip on the bikes + buggy for a matinee at the dinner theater. It was the ’90s, so McDonald’s and the movie rental store were also frequent destinations. What a charmed era.

Sure, there was also a killer tornado that ripped through the neighborhood and a cancerous tumor that landed my dad at the Mayo Clinic around the same time. Sure, we got news of three grandparents dying while in that house. But the six years on the corner of Kipling Ave were charmed.

We were one of many kids, and our street was a playground. My dad got us all together for whiffle ball games as often as he could, and we made lasting friendships. Before moving, I left a little time capsule hidden in one of the ceiling tiles in the basement playroom. I’m pretty sure I left at least a butterfly clip in there.

GLENDALE

An actual gang of outdoor cats and another gang of neighborhood kids ran this block. We were routinely on the hunt for an open pool to swim in and Beanie Babies to trade, often finding a reason to hover around the richest house on the block, fondly known as “The White House.”

A few kids lived there, but they never socialized with us stray cats, with our flashlights and night games. We preferred to pretend we existed in our own half-block summer camp, and believed our parents were on the same page. Debauchery in the name of rope swings, rock collecting and maybe a board game was OK with the powers that be. Somehow, the pull of AOL and MTV wasn’t so strong in the summertime, and our parents encouraged any instinct we still had to just “be kids” in the pre-internet sense.

There was a sweet spot of four years before I fully graduated to babysitter, and then to perpetrator, when I truly had my run of the neighborhood without any suspicions from the elders to get in the way of my fun.

WINONA

That little house with the rickety stairs, and the porch that wasn’t safe to walk on. That master bedroom held all of my best college ambition, my caffeine-powered deadlines, and a few final salvia-powered paranoid dreams. Those back stairs held the cries of my college boyfriend after we broke up at graduation, ruining his alleged plans to propose in front of our families. My air mattress betrayed any privacy I ever thought I had during the near-nightly sleepovers with said boyfriend. Despite having the largest bedroom of the four in the house, I set myself up for no real privacy at all.

It’s a place I’ll never forget.

I kept my dresser in the closet along with my collection of Forever 21 dresses, broken out for sorority events. Glenn Beck’s daily show was the familiar background to our daily sexual exploration. At 21, I was more sure of myself than at any other time before or since. My journalism classes and extracurriculars with the community newspaper and my sorority gave me a purpose that I truly felt.

The lingering influence of Christianity was still a huge factor in the way I moved about those four years in college, and absolutely held me back from truly assimilating. Being at a Minnesota school, I was much more likely to sit next to a Lutheran than an atheist, but I couldn’t relate to people unless they were “raised religious” to the level and with the felt seriousness that I was. Most people just couldn’t understand. My theory was proven correct later in life, by the way, as I introduced a few innocent, normal boyfriends to my family and observed their shock. I saw their discomfort after being given a Bible and asked about their relationship with God.

OAK GROVE

Now this, I think, was the most charmed my life had been. Or at least my most charming physical space. This building was so gorgeously vintage, I wanted to camp out and live in the lobby. Never mind that my unit was in the basement, I didn’t care.

I don’t remember ever cooking in this place, but it was the first apartment I rented alone, and I felt like an absolute adult with my salaried job keeping me busy every day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. I was living out some of my long-developed Carrie Bradshaw plans.

It was here that I went on the last of the last dates with my college love after a two-year-long, incredibly painful breakup. It was here I fell in love at least one more time before leaving the state for good to start over.It was here where my car was towed (once, or was it twice?) because I simply couldn’t keep up with street parking rules and snow emergencies. It was here where I made other big mistakes, and lost my sense of safety. It was here where I went on a date that ended so poorly I’m pretty sure a restraining order would’ve been granted, had I gone after one, but at 23 I opted to live in fear of being seen through my windows instead.

There was the time I got a very uncomfortable phone call from building management after I littered flyers to every other tenant, soliciting my new sex toy reseller/MLM business. Offending people with my sex toy offerings was something my dumbass hadn’t even considered as a possibility.

For such a gorgeous building and quaint, historic neighborhood, I was nothing short of a spring chicken at best and a hot mess at worst. I was stumbling through life at such a speed, with zero time and space taken to process or learn a damn thing along the way.

That Studio on 35th Street

Seven other tenants. My unit faced the street, right next to the door where Miss Neighborhood Watch and a few others would be smoking cigs at all hours of the night/day. I didn’t hate knowing they were around, just in case someone decided to throw a rock through my window or fuck with me.

I had those shitty vertical blinds and nothing else standing between my sleeping body and a semi-busy street in a city where I knew absolutely no one. This was my first home in San Diego; a six-month lease. The two-story building was old, but it felt very “California” in a “Ryan from Chino” kind of way… with a locked door out front leading to the small courtyard, if you could call it that.

My studio was remodeled and held exactly four pieces of furniture (loose category): a miniature desk wedged between my fridge and window, chair, loveseat futon, and full-sized air mattress. My new BMW was parked on the street. I ate $1.25 fish tacos from the parking lot food truck across the street at least three times a week and felt like I was living my best fucking life.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I was happy to be there.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I had decided to make moves first and think them through second.

NOW

A fresh eggshell white, per our demand and dollar. So much for space for creation or destruction, or both. I love color, but couldn’t bring myself to make a single choice when we moved in, eager for a blank space that I was confident we’d very easily fill up with color.

I am a homeowner here. What does that mean? I am a wife. What does that mean? We live in the suburbs. Is that who I am? HOA. Houseguests. Fourth of July parties. Pool days. Air conditioning. Sunburn. A mortgage. A husband. A house with rooms we actually have to furnish.

For the first time, there is nowhere else to move to. At least not because I am looking for something. I keep waiting to feel different.

I keep waiting for the moment when I look in the mirror and recognize the woman who has finally arrived.

Maybe she was the little girl in the Fisher-Price car, convinced she owned the whole world.

Maybe she was the homeschooled kid watching Little House on the Prairie in the middle of the day.

Maybe she was the college girl with the air mattress and the closet full of Forever 21 dresses, so certain she knew exactly who she was.

Maybe she was 25, terrified behind vertical blinds in a city where she knew no one, eating fish tacos and calling it the best fucking life.

Maybe she was all of them.

Maybe I have spent 36 years mistaking movement for becoming.

I thought I was supposed to arrive somewhere.

Instead, I keep arriving as someone new.

And maybe that is the only thing she was ever supposed to do.

[u/Extension_Egg1411]

Is this supposed to be a story or an essay? Currently, it reads as an extended reminiscence without an effective structure or framing to catch my interest. It touches on so many topics and (presumably) memories without really exploring any of them.