SLIVER - by Grace John

I am the one people come to. This is not a complaint. I am good at it and I chose it, or it chose me early enough that the difference stopped mattering.What I have is a great deal to give. I have never been short of that. I can carry other people for long stretches without setting them down, and I do it well, and they do not have to ask twice.The trouble is the other direction.I said I was not okay once. I said it plainly, in the ordinary words, the way you are supposed to. I was told I was overreacting. Not cruelly. That is the part I keep returning to. It was said the way you correct a child about the weather, and I took the correction, and I adjusted my sense of what my own pain was worth.So I stopped saying it. Not as a decision. It simply became easier not to, and then it became the arrangement, and then it became me.There is a sum I do without meaning to. Everything out, almost nothing in, and the small amount that comes back arrives feeling like something I owe for. Somebody is kind to me and I want to return it immediately, the same day, with interest. I do not know how to just hold it. I have had no practice at holding it.A few people get through. I want that in here, because it would be a lie to say I have locked the door. It is only that the door has a cost. They have to prove themselves first, over time, without knowing that is what they are doing, and most people do not stay long enough to be tested. Those who did are still here. I would not know how to tell them what it took for them to get in.And the arithmetic is not hard to see from the outside. If I can give this much and receive so little, then either the world is badly arranged or I am not the sort of thing that gets given to. I have generally gone with the second, because the second requires nothing from anyone else.That is the ache. Not sharp. Not new. Something with no event attached to it, that is simply there when I am not busy, and I have been busy for years.I am told this is a thing that can change. I do not fully believe it. But I have noticed that I am writing it down, which is closer to saying it out loud than I have got in a long time.I am also good enough to be loved. I cannot say that yet without the sentence feeling borrowed. I am putting it here anyway, in my own handwriting, where I can find it later.

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