feeling totally normal about the moment Gideon realizes she spent her whole childhood thinking she had done something to deserve contempt and shame, when everyone was actually horrified by her ability to survive her own infantcide, the sheer grotesqueness of “it shouldn’t be alive, but it is.”
no parallels whatsoever between myself and the butch lesbian who grew up haunted by some unnamed failure that turned out to be just their existing in the first place. none in the slightest.









