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This is not new.  I am not trying to work out what I believe, I am finally writing it down.  It was eventually going to turn into a soapbox about (gay) marriage, which I believe to be inextricably linked to language, and any discussion of language eventually comes down to this,

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I have been thinking about this alternate me, the girl who didn't break up with Andrew between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1998.  She is only meaningful if by "didn't break up with Andrew," I don't mean "broke up with him a week or two later."  She would have to stay with him for months longer, maybe a year, maybe two, for there to be any noticeable difference.  She would need to be someone who could stay.  She would have needed to lessen the pressure to leave.

I remember very few specific fights.  Instead I think of the conflict between us in broader terms: the difference between what each of us wanted me to be.  Pressure from him was always in the direction of isolation and dependence, but also towards a certain look, a certain demeanor.  So this girl who stayed, she would have tried harder to have that look, that demeanor.  She would have isolated herself from her friends.  She would have really tried, and not just gone through the motions of considering, a transfer to a school in San Diego.

And when she finally left him, a year or two later, in San Diego, she would have had no support system, no friends of her own, working towards a college degree she didn't want, for a life she wasn't suited for.  She would be twenty years old.

The summer after I turned twenty, I had everything I wanted.  I had a boyfriend I loved, friends I loved, I had praise and success and creativity and drive and I didn't have to work very hard for any of it.  And I was abjectly miserable.  The misery was nothing new, but for the first time I realized that I had nothing to blame.  There was nothing I could fix to make myself happy.  I didn't know how to be happy.  And so I ended up sobbing on a street corner in Rome, without the motivation to move in any direction, to help or hurt myself.  Just enough to sit there, unmoving and unhappy.  When I got home, I started taking anti-depressants.  I think they saved my life.  They gave me something else that I could fix—my brain itself—which didn't work right on its own, but with the right additions, could be persuaded to.

At twenty years old, she would have had plenty of things in her life to fix.  And so she might have spent another few years fixing them.  She might still be fixing them.