Ooc: I don't have much battery and relaying this might take longer than I can really manage rn, but here goes:

I care. I've always cared. I've always been serious. I've always beaten myself up for not being perfect because I had it drilled into me that little imperfections signal that you don't care. Well, I care.

I was raised by two loving, broken parents who both cared in the most different ways imaginable.

My dad cares. He spent the first eleven years of my life with brutal cluster headaches; there might have been one day a month when they didn't pound him into oblivion. He never missed a day of work, he always smiled when he was with us, and he ate as much excedrin and drank as much gin and spent as much time clutching a pillow to his face as he possibly could. He cared so much he gave away his gun. And, at 45, after he had his wisdom teeth taken out and he stopped smoking and for some possibly unrelated reason the headaches went away, he still cared. If he had known that the headaches would last so long, he wouldn't be here anymore. But he didn't know. And he cared, probably too much for his own good. I saw how much he cared. I wanted to care like that.

My mom cares. She's the most in-your-face, overbearingly hospitable person I have ever seen. She cares until she is blue in the face. She cares until she cries. She doesn't read much, she didn't go to college, she doesn't pick up abstract things quickly. But she cares about people. She remembers what you wore the eighth time she saw you twelve years ago and she knows your phone number and your birthday and what kind of cake she is going to bring to you and she has a dumb little extra verse of the birthday song that she's going to tailor to what she knows about you. She cares so much she breaks down crying twice a week because nobody cares as much as she does. She cares about putting on a show. She didn't get much love from the members in her family that everyone liked, and she got all the love and attention in the world from the ones everyone hated. She loved her philandering father and her difficult grandmother. She cares about why the cheap cuts taste good. She cares about making people feel loved. She cares.

Well, I care, too. I had my second panic attack when I was 18 ans I stopped being editor-in-chief of my high school paper and realized I was going to die and that I had already had my first love and it was gone and I didn't know why. I had my first panic attack when all my schools rejected me because I had Ivy League test scores and Ivy League extracurriculars and community college grades and I had nowhere to go and nothing to become. I had these panic attacks because I had made a habit of trying not to care. But I did care. I did care and I spent half my life wondering why I thought I could get away with pretending that I didn't.

I am a dry-heaving perfectionist. I care about making people laugh. I care about being Lrrr. I look forward to sharing oddball takes here. I care about my career and my family and the songs that I hardly share with anyone. I care about my friends who I haven't seen in years and the ones who died and the ones who are too busy for me and the ones who are too ill to remember that I care about them. I care so much. I care that trying my hardest, my actual God damn hardest, only got me to the number two spot in my law school class. I care that my voice doesn't sound the way it does in my head. I care that I can't find bandmates or that I don't recognize people from twenty years ago or that I missed a joke. I care all the time.

About once a month, I completely implode. The caring becomes too much. I cannot physically keep it up, and I break, and I curse myself until I feel better. My internal dialogue is so totally toxic and hateful that I sometimes just call myself an idiot or a failure or a loser, out loud, out of the blue, for no actual fucking reason. It'll be a good day. And I'll see a bag of doritos that reminds me of the school picnic when I was ten where I inadvertently stole chips from an actually pretty greedy person who just had a massive plate of doritos that I mistook for community doritos, and they yelled at me, and I'll tell myself that the world would be better if I never lived. Just, matter-of-factly, "You're the universe mistakenly experiencing itself. You're metaphysical neuralgia. You should not live. Let's get Cheetos instead." I don't have any desire to harm myself. It's the Lrrr in me, contemptuous of my human weakness and my inherent, necessary, good and normal imperfections. I try to care them away, and I can't.

When I have adequately abased myself, I care again. I care about things I can never fix or can never be or can never do. I care so much that I can't go to my favorite coffee spot because it reminds me of breaking up with a delightful person for no more reason than an inchoate ick--I went in thinking that I would say "I love you" for the first time, and instead I rambled about death and Circa Survive lyrics and said I didn't want my feelings to get stronger only for going to college in different states to destroy them, and I never saw or heard from her ever again. I care so much that I can't eat candy apples because an ex-girlfriend threw one at me when our peace talks soured and she said all of the things that she wished she had said when I was still her shitty boyfriend, and she watched me cry the cry that she deserved, and she called me worthless, and then a few years later she had me come to her place for avocado toast and we wished each other good lives and much happiness and never spoke again. I can't take photos because that's what my best friend did before he lost his mind, and he always had a camera on him, and before he went full jar-pissing Howard Hughes on everyone he would only communicate with his pictures, and now he doesn't even do that. I can't drink because I associate it with my dad, fucked to death on gin martinis and headache meds, suffering as quietly as he could, digging clover out of the lawn with a screwdriver, and I didn't want that kind of pain.

I can't do so many things because I care entirely too much, and I care too much to forgive myself for my mistakes (or, y'know, for having been a normalish straight cis human white dude for 35 years). I have not been willing to let the past go because I am scared that, without that metastatic, in-my-bones-and lymph-nodes level of caring, I won't recognize myself; I won't care when I need to again, and something will go wrong, and the lights will go out, and the ice cream will melt, and I'll be sitting somehow more friendless and alone than I am now, play-acting as a minor character from a problematic cartoon for little pops of joy and validation.

I care about all of this, and I will care if it goes away. I like it here. I appreciate all of your toots and boosts and comments and likes (fuck, do I like getting likes). I care about (let's be honest, most, but not all of) you fine people.

Tl;dr: human ghostwriter is feeling wistful and not sleepy, and it's too late for him to vacuum.