This essay is part II of a series. Read Part I here.

“The 29-year-old urge to burn your life to the ground” is something I posted on Threads back in May. I have little recollection of posting this because I have relatively little recollection of anything that happened this year after roughly mid-January because that’s roughly around the time I started losing my goddamn mind. But the time stamp suggests I fired this missive off the day before the psychiatric evaluation that would ultimately and mercifully grant me mental health leave from work.

Incidentally, this ended up being one of the more successful things I’ve ever posted on any social media platform. Which isn’t saying much, considering I’ve never been particularly successful in any social anything. But while eight thousand or so likes is nothing to write home about, it did make me think.

Not so much about why the post seemed to resonate—I’m aware that my fellow 29-year-olds and I are in Saturn Return territory—but about how hard it is to jump from a building that’s not on fire. So hard, in fact, that sometimes you might even fantasize about dropping the match yourself just for an excuse to get out.

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I talk about wanting to “fake my own death and start a new life in the woods” often enough that if I ever do wind up dead under sudden or mysterious circumstances, anyone who knows me well enough will probably suspect I’m faking it—that I’ve finally just tossed my phone in a gutter and fled upstate or decamped to a seaside shack in the Rockaways (which is not the woods).

As far as I can recall, this is something I started saying in high school, right around the time I started dating. Because that’s right around the time I started navigating the million little shards of glass you step on daily when you’re trying to tiptoe around the fickle fragility of a man’s affections—right around the time you start second-guessing every step lest you tread the wrong floorboard and he suddenly remembers he’s in love with his ex or forgets you exist or realizes you’re just not the one and you never were and you never will be.

All that work, all that tiptoeing and looking the other way and quietly ripping glass from your feet every night to keep it all from slipping through your fingers. All that just for him to wake up one morning and pull the plug as casually as if he accidentally knocked it out of the socket in his sleep. Trust me, it’s enough to make a girl want to fake her own death and start a new life in the woods (or the Rockaways, which is not the woods).

In retrospect, it has occurred to me that this may have been some proto-version of the suicidal ideation I’d eventually graduate into: Suicidal Ideation Lite, if you will. A flirtation with the fantasy of permanently vacating my life that didn’t have to involve actual death.

Because I didn’t want to die or cease to exist. I didn’t even want to be someone else, really. I just wanted to be somewhere else, in a different life where I wouldn’t have to answer for myself and whatever flaws and failures and feelings I didn’t want to face. I just wanted to transplant myself into a world where I wouldn’t have to show up to the first day of junior year wearing the public humiliation of heartbreak like a scarlet H. Where it would be easier to pretend that none of this was happening, or at least that none of it was happening to me. Because if no one else knew about it, if no one knew me, then maybe it would all just disappear.

If a girl fakes her own death and starts a new life in the woods where there’s no one around to see her fall, does it still hurt as bad?

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Two years ago, an essay I wrote about a then-recently released Taylor Swift song got picked up by a Swiftie fan account on the app formerly known as Twitter, where it got a lot more attention than it ever did on [MY EMPL*Y*R’S NAME REDACTED] dot com, because internet Standoms (particularly of the Swiftie variety) hold far more …

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