Sometimes I condemn the person I am, the circumstances I have been subject to, the inevitability of things I dread. I used to take pride in being different and strange and abnormal--but I realise now that there are real, biological reasons for the majority's hate for unnaturalness.

How I wish I weren't genophobic or tokophobic. It'd save me all these misgiving. We all know, some way, that life exists for itself--to reproduce, only concerned as far as the next generation. The pounding dogma of life--the viruses destroying to create themselves, the mayfly in his first and last flight-dance, the baby cuckoo murdering the unhatched wren.

Does being unable, unwilling, to have sex and to give birth make me any less of a human being?

Then it's emotional too, because never mind how my future will look--will I ever be a wife? Will I ever let myself? Will I ever let myself burden a man that way?