Jenny Zhang

All I had wanted for so long was to be part of a family that wasn’t mine. To have an excuse to love mine less, an excuse to run away instead of staying so close all the time.

I worried about a world where my existence barely mattered. A world where I did not exist at all. Maybe that was the world I was headed to. Maybe that was the world I deserved

I worried about how I was seen, who I was seen with, and what kind of abysmal creature other people thought I was—these fears disfigured me though the damage was invisible to my parents, whom I could never compete with as they were always a hundred times more worried, more fearful, more occupied than I could ever be.