draft #7: reasons i did this, not an exhaustive list (i forgot about this and have said it all before in better ways but i am sort of glad i made a list and that i am publishing it after that post about being called rational)

• because i felt like i was sent to the hospital and lost control of my story and wanted it back
• because my ex-boyfriend was always telling me i wasn’t open. as my therapist said, “well, i guess you showed him” 
• because when i lost him, after losing my boyfriend of 10 years, i felt like i lost almost all of my institutional memory. this is it 
• because i found that tumblring about what happened transformed my feelings almost instantly; no matter how bad i felt i all of a sudden felt…less bad or even happy 
• because i love adventures, especially adventures that involve my not leaving bed (professionally creepy, feeling thrills, let’s see what happens if i do this thing, etc.)  
• because archiving, confessional culture, feminist art, narcissism, affect, and tumblr are what i write about 
• because i am happy to keep other peoples’ secrets, but i find it nearly impossible to keep my own 
• because i really believe in feminist truth-telling 
• because i really believe in following terrifying feelings 
• because i think my ex is a wimp 
• because i spent a year and a half trying to explain things to him that he both willfully and just totally idiotically didn’t get and once you start trying to explain it’s hard to stop 
• because i had time 
• because fuck that guy
• because i can and i know other people can’t, which makes it more imperative, maybe this means that eventually they can, which is maybe the same as feminist truth-telling
• because i know better and it still happened 
• because—if i am remembering this correctly and i haven’t talked to my father about this since it happened—my ex-boyfriend gave my father a list of nicer, long-term mental hospitals i could stay in and told him that i have “a dark side” as though i am just a crazy girl that needs to be put away instead of someone that had a drug interaction and that he terrorized during that interaction 
• because there’s a crazy girl narrative, which i respect, but that’s not this narrative and there are and therefore should be other narratives 
• because i theorize everything
• because i like feeling like part of several feminist legacies (incarceration, personal writing, narcissism, etc.) 
• because i am putting myself back together, tumblr fragment by tumblr fragment 
• because it’s fun 
• because i can only understand things by writing about them 
• because i’m not really a narcissist (though i’ll still say i am), but i am a slight exhibitionist 
• because it’s more fun given that he would never think i was that much of a narcissist, or an exhibitionist, which is only one of the many things he did not even begin to get, which i think drove him crazy, because he is a total control freak 
• because i am not a control freak and i am interested in unpredictability 
• because it makes it okay
• because i had to fucking give up my valuables and they would only let me keep $5 and it wasn’t in quarters and i didn’t have enough quarters to call anyone and you had to get up really early, when that woman first started screaming, and go ask a nurse if they had change, and if you got there any later you would not get quarters and you spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how you would call your parents and whether you could use feminine wiles—while you looked the worst you have ever looked save for that bad spell in 1989—to get a nurse to tell you if they had talked to your parents and when they were coming
• did i mention fuck that guy? 
• that’s not the main reason, though