I need to get my story straight.

Is this my battle to fight? Is it yours? Who gets to decide what's important and what isn't, or for that matter, what is entirely inconsequential? You hand me my priorities, you ask me to abide by them, and you want me to make you proud. You want a good daughter, wife, mother, sister, woman. You want me to free my thought, but only enough so I can give my unborn children a "good" upbringing, but you warn me not to go astray.
You define my rules, you tell me at the end of it all that I belong to a place and, because I have to return, I mustn't become too much of a stranger. Wisdom comes with age, they tell me every time. They tell me I don't know enough, I haven't seen enough. Here you are, they say, here is you in black and white. You will be nothing more, and nothing less, and we will love you for it.
Then there's them. They told me I could sleep with whoever I want, because it's my body. That I could parade around naked if I wanted to. That I could get fucked up and fucked and wake up in the morning and not regret it in the least. That you can discover your sexual identity if you step out of your heteronormative prisons. That we are social constructs, that nothing exists beyond our perceptions and the limits that define us. That I owe so much to this world, but not to the people who told me I had to be this or that, so I could flip them off and go on. Free giant fuck yous, and then some for the road. All the while I listened, bemused, interested, never entirely sure. Case studies, all of us to each other.
I get emails from the Feminist Collective, and wonder if I'll ever end up going, if I'll ever fight for the rights they think I should have, but probably don't.
I don't know where to begin that conversation, because I already have another set of rights, from another place and another time.

At the end of it, there's nothing but guilt. A little bit of disgust about my strange existential crisis, which fuels another one. Cycle away dear mind, you have nothing to lose.