Translation Is An Act Of Betrayal And I Feel That Very Deeply Every Time I Translate My Own Book Tbh - Tumblr Posts

Truth is... I cannot live with my own heart

It was just that... there was so much loneliness in adult life, so much loss. If she thought about it, Annie could make a whole timeline of her life with the things she had lost as she grew up:

At first, she lost things she didn't care about anyway, like clothes, shoes, and jewelry. Then, she lost toys and blankets and beds as she grew a bit older. Then, she lost friends—both sides forced to separate because of changes in their parents' lives (Annie believed that was why there was so much rebellion in adolescence: nothing but a desperate struggle for a bit of control so that the losses weren't so many, so extensive, so painful, to make things stop disappearing just for a second).

Then, suddenly, people were no longer so kind, so lenient. Suddenly, an adventure was just a trip, Christmas was just another celebration, songs became a little less magical—things started to become duller, less bright than they once had been to her childish eyes, things were no longer a mystery to be discovered. Suddenly, the people who had always been around her started to disappear, leaving only an irreparable void inside her.

But for Annie, the most devastating loss of adulthood was what everyone seemed to call so confidently independence, though to Annie it just sounded like loneliness; it was the belief that because she was an adult now, she should know what to do with all those feelings, with all those emotions, with all those sensations and those situations, with all that life that she didn't fully understand; it was the dichotomy between placing the responsibility of being an adult on her shoulders, but doubting her ability to be one competently with every step she took.

But more than all that, it was the complete and desperate loneliness of being left alone with her own emotions as if they were a messy room she needed to clean up, but that only kept getting messier no matter how much she tried. Alone because other people had their own messy rooms to clean up and Annie could no longer depend on them. There was so much loneliness in being an adult—no more mother's lap for you, because if you need help, it's because you're not ready. No more hands to support you while you walk, no more training wheels while you ride, no more of everything you took for granted yesterday.

Annie was only twenty-one years old, but she was already tired—no, exhausted—of adult life, because it was too many losses from all sides, it was too much emptiness, and it made her understand why adults accepted any desperate form of love that came their way just so they wouldn't have to face that life, that world, with the awareness of that loneliness.