Don't be alarmed. This letter is eighty percent meta — just hair-twirling metastasizing philosophizing about writing an open letter instead of a simple email. It is less than twenty percent fan mail.

If I was both an incredibly black and white thinker and calling myself "incredibly honest," I'd want to start by saying it was your writing that kicked off how I'm currently feeling re: everything. This means I am very disconcerted. In a good way. Like,

1. What the fuck is reality, seriously 2. I was so damn myopic till I read what you wrote.

Thankfully though, black and white thinking tends to dissolve when it hits the page, and what I believe to be real when I like the idea of calling myself "incredibly honest" is not necessarily congruent with, uh, what is real.

So, putting aside the desire to call myself "incredibly honest," here is what is real: I'm changing. This may have something to do with what I've been reading both on or off the internet. It could be something my partner did or said. It could be the passage of time, or it may have something to do with the current and long-past states of the world, or just basic physics; solar flares doing one thing, gravity another, particles flying through space.

In the end, as things go, the truth is that things happen, and we will never know what exactly kicked them off. Minds, simpletons they are, latch onto one thing or another they perceived during the time they recall the kick-off having taken place — which in itself doesn't necessarily align with the truth — and forevermore equate correlation with causation, and that is how belief systems, protocols, rules, and even laws are born, and maybe some of them are based in truth — physics — but others will never amount to anything more than conjecture, forever misused somewhere on the spectrum of unconsciousness to avoid the cognitive dissonance that modern humans can bear only as much as vampires tolerate sunlight.

Why an open letter? The idea of writing to you personally, without a potential audience to hold me accountable, feels like overstepping. Not that the contents of a private message would necessarily cross a boundary, but even with my limited experience with online audiences, I imagine it's a little off-putting when someone you don't know writes you a very long letter that is mostly auto-therapy and could have comprised three sentences. Like so, for example:

Hey! Just want to let you know that your post had a gigantic impact on me. I know it's way too soon to claim "you changed my life," etc. so I won't, but at the very least I can say that the way you expressed yourself in that piece seems to have changed my outlook on life itself — if only for a couple days. So, thank you so much for writing it.

Yes, that would probably be valid and you would have been thanked nicely, if this were purely about that. But it isn't, and three sentences will not suffice, because the topmost reason I am writing you is to self-witness, to perceive my own perception, to watch its evolution, the journey from there to here, and then, even above that, to cement it within my own consciousness.

· · ·

It's crazy how still I become while I'm writing like this, something that started out "having a point," which it does — to a point — while, really, serving largely as a scratching post for my consciousness. The more time I spend alone with the piece, the calmer my mind becomes, the more I realize nothing I worry about outside of this state matters as much as I tend to think it does, the more at home I feel within and without, the more perfect things become, right here, now, and fuck, is this Nirvana?

· · ·

I remember when I first started writing the above. I was sincerely trying to thank you, but all my mind let me talk about amounted to a long apology about writing you at all. The Nirvana bit was real. Everything was real, even the gratitude.

· · ·

The trouble with the idea of expressing my gratitude to certain writers — directly to them — is that, I think, I get the feeling I owe them something. I am only allowed to be openly grateful if I am also making the best — with evidence! numbers! — of whatever it is they gave me. I must earn my thanks. But that's old news. My brain thinks I must earn everything, even life.

I think the problem is, knowing that anyone else in the world does what I do, and while it is, time and again, relieving, inspiring, deep-think-provoking, and some other good things, at the same time, it makes me so fucking nervous. My mind will not shut up with the comparisons. You show me what's possible... and you show me what's possible. I can be myself, and I must be myself.

How often I have entertained these thoughts.

I remember Kindergarten. The incredulity. I am me, and other people are what they call "me." How does this work?

· · ·

The trouble with writing, writing down my black and white thinking, my imperfect thinking, my whatever and extremely uninteresting thinking, is that as soon as my consciousness is aware of just one person on the other end, it morphs into a large eraser, a fine-pored sponge of indescribable proportions. A mop, a swiffer, a vacuum cleaner exclusively designed to ensure that whatever it is I am expressing is immediately neutralized. Words on a page put there by me are not real. I am not real. The expression of a thing rendering it unnecessary.

Thank you, Vonnegut, no thank you. If I pitied the reader, I would not write. Or I would write, and I would strike all the pointlessness about writing and still writing and not pitying the reader, and then I would start over, ad infinitum, and nothing would happen. Sometimes I think that's the point. Maybe the point is that I currently have nothing to say. Maybe, I should be writing, deleting, writing, deleting. This is what writers have always done, but with paper, a quill, a trash can, a corner.

The trouble with writing on machines is that it is too easy to delete, too easy to re-write, too easy to treat the words as disposable, too easy to feed them to another machine that tells you you need to stop feeding the hedgehog, and much, much too easy to pity the reader. This is also the great thing with machines. Writing and deleting and writing and deleting are fantastic ways to learn that truly, perhaps just right now there is nothing worth saying. Yet, I am saying something.

I am aware this sounds dramatic and self-pitying, dear reader, and I am sorry about that, but I find it difficult to believe you exist, the same way I don't quite believe there is a god. Who is there to pity when nobody is reading? Just me.

· · ·

Thank you, dear writer. I wish I could tell you that you changed my life, but I am afraid of disturbing you, of being a cliché, of being a fangirl, of being a girl, of seeing myself as lesser than you, of you seeing me as lesser than you. I know you don't, but I would, at least for a spell. And I know I would get over it sooner rather than later.

You need to know you changed my life. Let me tell you.