Monday, March 24, 2025

There's something fitting about writing this - here, now, in this way.

So much is resonant with the past... it was almost exactly six years ago that I tearfully typed out the first few words of what would become this space. I don't remember what the outside world was like, then, but presumably it was much like today - cold, cloudy, drizzling rain punctuated by brief bits of bird song and stolen glimpses of sunbeams flitting away almost before they were noticed. I was drawn inwards, to a point that felt like an agony beyond any communication or expression; even while being acutely aware of exactly what was going on and why, I retain virtually no actual memory of the experience itself.

I suppose living through hell is often like that.

I would know.

Six years ago I was attending to the utter unraveling of everything I'd thought was my own life - layers upon torturous layers of loss I don't care to retread tonight. At the time, it seemed unfathomably bleak. It's only been through years of studious effort and dogged persistence that I've been able to recognize how much that time period signaled a beautiful, fortuitous shift in the entirety of my existence. Those fraught months led to my eventual coming-out as trans, the creation of this blog, the reimagining of my own goals and dreams, a recommitted exploration of my own values and principles, and eventually to a complete overhaul of everything I spend my precious gasp of time on this earth trying to do - everything I try to be.

So I simultaneously know the feelings I'm dealing with, tonight, very well... and also cannot help but get pulled aside from my musings every now and then to admire how different they feel, in the context of how much has changed over those few incredibly short-and-long years. I feel a strangely comforting certainty that this is pretty much the entire reason that I'm not lost in a panic at the prospect of facing them again.

To exist, for someone like me, is a sequence of never-ending evolution and change. There are moments - the tonic notes of the impossibly bittersweet melodic harmonies of life - that echo back to familiar patterns, but like the proverbial rivers of so many philosophers, they're never quite the same twice. For me, existence is becoming; there is no cessation in the ongoing stream of fresh revelations, of big decisions, of small adjustments. Always in motion - always dancing. I love it, wouldn't want to live any other way, even as I spend so much of my time fretting about how impossibly difficult and exhausting it can be. It's me, though, and I have no interest in not being me.

It's not a coincidence that I began this collection of writing as a way to cope with that exact process of change. I can still remember - fresh reverberations of the quivering, hesitant fear I felt back then surging up even now - exactly how scared I was to just say any of it... even to the relative safety and secrecy of my own personal musings locked and encrypted on my own hard drive. I remember other fears, too - how would this ever get received? Would I even find answers at all? Would I be able to share it after all, or would it disappear into the oblivion of erasure like so many products of my mind and soul before it? Would anyone think it was any good? Would anyone read it?

Would anyone care?

Would anyone experience anything other than a brief burst of revulsion at the "obviously" over-wrought prose (which, I should note, I don't actually edit - these entries are, with very rare and minor exception, completely stream-of-consciousness, believe it or not... but we'll get back to that)? Would my words mean anything, matter, to anyone else? Would they matter to me?

Over and over again, it seemed like, I fought this war inside my heart and soul and brain; one side raging against the other in what I blearily half-recall as a timeless conflict. The reality, from the outside at least, was somewhat less dramatic perhaps; my very second entry in my secret journal file became a dedication to my (at-the-time-imagined) reader, an oath of love and commitment to myself and my own authentic expression as much as to whomever I half-dared to dream would ever actually read any of it.

At some prior points in my life, I know that the deja-vu familiarity of all this would have scared me off. It would have been too much. I know these feelings; they were hard, last time, and I wasn't sure I'd even be able to feel them without completely shattering and somehow ceasing to exist. I couldn't explain the depth of my own terror. Still can't, really. But in and among all the other innumerable things that have changed, since six years ago, this one fact seems to loom larger than all the rest:

I know I survived it.

What's more, I didn't just scrape out a meager, desparate subsistence; I didn't emerge clinging to scraps of life with little to show for my harrowing journey. Yes, there was more loss to come; yes, in some ways, the worst of the feelings of anguish didn't happen until much later. But I know - I know what else came with all of that hell.

I know who read my blog, around a year and a half after I first dared to imagine writing it. I know who has come into my life. I know what else I've escaped from. I know how much my own sense of self, of certainty, of hope has exploded into vibrant, radiant life since that bleak, harsh, oft-accursed spring in 2019.

And I know I wouldn't trade any of it.

I resist the concept of the pain being "worth it" - as if there's a trivial ledger, someplace in an abstract realm, wherein all the "good" and "bad" things of my existence are reduced to a trivial sum, an account balance to score the merit of my humanity. Such things seem offensive to me, moreso nowdays than ever before; there is a violence, in this estimation of a person, that I will never accept, and I will never consent to being levelled upon myself - least of all by myself. And yet I don't really care to spend more effort in search of words than to say this: if all the terribleness, and pain, and agony, and horrible grim nights, and screaming and wailing and terror... if that was the cost of everything else I've become... well, so fucking be it. I'll pay it again in a heartbeat, if that's what it takes.

I had no idea how deeply I'd come to feel - to embody - the words from that very first fateful entry. But it's never stopped being true: I love who I really am, with a fire and dignity and immovable, indomitable stubbornness that at once transcends all narratives of what A Person Can Be and also exemplifies the core essence of what We All Already Are.

The rest, as I've stated in these passages before, is an exercise in figuring out the implications.

Perhaps, it is this fire above all else that burns tonight - and the knowledge of what that first round of heart-rending writing led to, pushing me forwards to write yet again.

I started this blog to prepare myself for a moment of "coming out" - not just to navigate a change within myself, but to determine how to reveal that change to everyone and everything else. It was hardly the first such revelation I've processed in this space; but there is one piece of writing, in particular, I also feel keenly connected to in this moment.

On April 8th, of 2019, I remembered my own name. Exactly one year later, I realized there was more I needed to reveal - not just the essence of my own identity (which by that point was well and truly out in the open) but the detail of what my life has meant in certain ways. What I've carried. And so it was that I wrote an entry I titled Mosaic, in reference to an art form I still find profoundly captivating. I needed to begin to openly process my own woundedness and pain.

Re-reading that entry now is astounding, in a way; I cannot help but smile - sometimes ruefully, and sometimes gleefully - at how much I didn't know was going to change, between then and now. Virtually nobody I was referring to in that post is involved in my life in any way anymore. Entire relationships have started and ended between that day and tonight, which I never dreamed would exist.

And yet there is so much of it that, in a way, foreshadows exactly what I need to say here, now.

In and amongst the hints of unresolved pain, of all the tragedies and suffering I'd barely even begun to recognize, there are lingering gems of wisdom that deserve their own encore moments on this night. In that spirit, I want to quote myself from that specific piece, with a very minor modification:

The advantage I have gained from thirty-nine years of life experience is the realization that I have left enough data in the world now that nobody is going to read this and think I'm making shit up.

This is me.

It feels fitting, to me, that I wrote that originally about confronting my need to reveal my own flaws and fears and vulnerable spots in order to move forward in my life. I can say, with complete confidence and no small dose of well-earned pride, that I've done that; not to suggest that there's no healing left to be done, but that what I have completed is undeniable in its scale, scope, and potency. What remains will never be more than a fleeting shadow of what's already been dealt with, even though it usually feels pretty intense in the midst of the work itself.

All of this is fitting because of what I'm here to actually write about today - as is my way, I prefer to establish a lot of context. Some might insist it's too much context; but fuck them, this isn't their blog, nor for them. This is mine, and it's for me.

So let's talk about why I like all this long-winded context.

I've mentioned plenty of times before in this space that I am autistic. I don't actually recall off the top of my head (perhaps ironically) if I've ever mentioned here that I've also been labelled as ADHD. The combination of these two neurological variances is, at this moment in human history, pretty clearly understood to be a unique and challenging mix. Indeed, I've found tremendous amounts of familiarity, comfort, and even intimacy with others sharing these brain-traits - a wondrous, soothing reprieve from decades of thinking I was just plain old broken.

But there's been a puzzle piece left out, until recently; one I'd vaguely been aware of, and also dimly knew it wasn't quite time to face. Something hinted at and just as studiously deferred in long, winding, soul-baring conversations with the only human being who has ever actually been able to keep up with my brain at full speed. I still don't have language for this - not yet; there's something of an established terminology here, but it's so deeply encrusted with white supremacy, patriarchy, and ableism that I don't even want to name it for fear of accidentally invoking its virulent toxicity. There's a larger theory unfolding in my mind, anyways, about how all this works, which may eventually suggest better words I could use to signify it. But for now, I'm going to avoid that question. It isn't time.

And here I feel a - yet again - familiar kind of hesitation surging to the surface. I'm in a different room, under different lighting, with (mostly) different computer hardware, but I may as well be sitting here typing at my desk six years ago all over again. I don't know if I want to say it, or if I can, even while knowing without any doubt in some other disjoint part of myself that it's already happening. Perhaps in a way it already has happened and my conscious experience of it is just catching up, like a laggy video stream on a bad internet connection.

I fear that none of thise makes sense. I fear that it won't make sense no matter how long I go on about it, or how much detail I explain, or what I try to shape my words into. I fear that it will make sense, and earn me yet another reprise of the same punishment it always has: rejection, isolation, a loneliness that goes beyond the depth or pain of anything I suspect most people actually ever feel... I know these fears. They come to me in the voices of the same demons that told me, six years ago, not to write about being trans.

I can do something, now, that I could not then: I can pause, and listen to their insidious whispers.

And I can smile.

I can smile because I know they are wrong.

And sure, there will be plenty of people who will scoff at all this exactly as I fear they might - deriding it as pretentious drivel, as senseless meandering babble, as the self-important and useless whining of someone with far too much time on her hands and far too many emotions.

Six years ago, I feared that those would be the only possible reactions to my choice to try to bare my soul - on the goddamn fucking internet of all places, which is not exactly a venue known for its kindness, generosity of compassion, or patience to read shit like this in the first place.

Sitting here, now, I know what else is possible; and so I smile, bolstered by years of intense work in healing my own heart and body and mind, and the certainty that I cannot actually yet imagine what good may come from expelling all of this into the ether.

So let's talk about my brain.

Part of me is back writing "Mosaic" again, feeling a strange kind of embarrasment about what I need to say next. I know, now, how much of this comes from a simple but brutal thing: a repeated pattern of treatment and reaction, over time - my entire lifetime - from virtually everyone I've ever encountered. It's heightened and reinforced by popular cultural tropes, by obnoxious assholes on TV shows and in books, by far too many actual real-world assholes who use these kinds of traits as a bludgeon to harm everyone in reach with their imagined superiority, flailing desparately against their own deep inner sense of isolation, alienation, and insecurity.

I am deeply sympathetic to these struggles. They are mine, too, in a way; though I've made a point to choose to engage with them very differently than the tropes and stereotypes dictate. In fact, I think part of me understands that providing some visibility to other ways this can play out - in a person's inner life, and general existence overall - is a key part of the point of why I'm writing this at all.

I'm absurdly fucking smart.

Some people will take this poorly. They can go for it. I'm not here for them. This is for me; and by extension for anyone else who has ever fought this particular battle and wished they didn't have to feel so damnably alone in it.

The overculture we're all drowned in has no end of suggestions for what this must imply about me: that I'm immediately good at everything, that I always have answers, that my thought processes are inerrant and stunningly quick, that I'm capable of whatever I want to do, that there's nothing I can't be expected to cope with effortlessly and gracefully, especially if it's in the realm of the mundane that Other Mere Mortals must also endure. Apparently I'm supposed to also be egotistical, arrogant, dismissive of others, and impossible to get along with on any meaningful level.

Of course, all of this is bullshit.

Don't get me wrong, I've had the misfortunate and displeasure of crossing paths with plenty of smart people who did fulfill all the negative expectations, and then some. I've also encountered those who put incredible amounts of effort into appearing to fulfill the positive ones as well, although generally with disastrous results, sooner or later. And I've often feared that I was doomed to one of these paths myself: to either be a jerk nobody liked, or a burned out husk of a soul at imminent risk of violently ending my own incalculable suffering.

Back in 2019, it was reading the vulnerable - and generally very messy - memoirs of other trans people that helped me find the courage and resolve to confront my own identity. Another repeated note of familiarity, then; in the past couple of weeks, I've begun to get peeks into the lives of people whose minds are much like my own. And I know how much my writing about that specific process has impacted people, even though it still feels hopelessly obscure and under-recognized most of the time. So I'm ready to do this again. Who knows what will unfold. I need to feel with certainty, in the core of my body and soul, that I have another path in front of me - something I can choose, and perhaps in forging for myself, open up for others as well. After all, I didn't get here alone, no matter how lonesome the journey of being has felt for so much of the time.

Yes, I'm smart. That's not the important thing. What's important is how my brain operates. I've played around a lot with the analogy of a sponge, although that seems insufficient in a lot of ways. As I alluded to before, there's a larger framework here, that's still emerging; that's for another time.

For now, what I want to say is that my brain is incredibly intense. So is my heart, for that matter; both my cognition and emotion occur on a depth and constancy that I have only just begun to realize is unusual. I think about things all the time. I literally am either thinking or asleep; and even that is a false dichotomy. I've done a lot of interesting pondering in my dreams over the years.

It isn't about just quantity or rate, though, but about interconnection and interrelationship and a kind of perception that has no name in any language I've ever learned any words of; it's about a sense of clarity and ease and ability to recognize and extrapolate in ways that must seem like obscure magics to almost anyone else.

I am not doomed to be an unpleasant person. Nobody who actually bothers to get to know me thinks I am one, nor has anyone for a long time. (I did have a youthful phase of being a total shit, but that's not for tonight, either.)

But I am also not fated to succeed at all the "positive" expectations that come with the tropes and stereotypes about people like me, either.

In fact, in a weird twist of fate, I'm actually really bad at... most of life.

I struggle with things everyone else assumes are basic, zero-effort daily routines. I have a truly vast pool of unexplored shame around how hard it is for me to do these things. For me, one of the cruelest manifestations of unthinking ableism in the society I occupy is the ready, eager willingness of people around me to assume I am worse than scum because I genuinely cannot do these things for myself, often if at all. It is simultaneously invisible to almost everyone else and unavoidable to me. No wonder I fear alienation; it's already here, already a reality. The danger isn't in being known; it's in remaining unknown; maybe at least if some of us are talking about shit we can find each other.

I am, genuinely and truly, very disabled. Yes, I do calculus in my head for fun. No, I literally cannot prepare my own meals. And, according to the tropes of societal ableism, this must only be because I am somehow deficient of moral character or lazy or some other invented insult. Fear of this kind of violence - against the very essence of my being, my reality - is what makes so much of this hard to write. What makes me wonder if I'll end up staying silent. What stirs me to remember that I already know the answer; for now, all I can do is gently hold the panic and remember that doom is not the only possible outcome. There is always more than one future.

So no, I don't find everything I attempt easy. I suck at a lot of stuff, perhaps surprisingly so.

No, I don't always have ready answers. Actually, most of the time I have far more questions than answers. I happen to like it that way - it has a way of spurring on that never-ending change and evolution I talked about earlier - but it does have a downside. I have faced plenty of rejection, revulsion, even hatred for daring to say "I don't know" to someone who expected me (fairly or no) to have The Answer they wanted. So I'm afraid of that, too.

No, most of my thoughts aren't actually fast or easy or quick; in fact, I can take an incredibly long time to arrive at conclusions that seem patently obvious to most people. When I do appear to be fast, it's often because I've already done a shit-ton of thinking about the subject beforehand, and am really just recalling a conclusion I've had sitting around for a while. Did I mention I don't ever actually really stop thinking? It's kind of a natural consequence that I've got more thoughts piled up than I've had opportunities to converse about them. Makes me seem faster than I am.

(Granted, there are a handful of areas where I genuinely am lightning-quick about things, but they're rather rare.)

I'm afraid of that, too; afraid that if I answer too quickly, I'll be rejected and ostracized (yet again) with some shitty label like "know-it-all" or whatever. I've learned to pretend to need time to remember things, to pretend to spend time connecting dots, just to avoid terrifying other people. I've also learned to lie about my mental speed as a way to protect myself from the inevitable future moment when I really actually do need a lot of time to formulate my thoughts, and get punished for that shit instead.

I wish these fears were made up. I wish I could write them off as fantasies, as anxious conjurations from a wounded heart, as fiction I need not believe could actually ruin my life.

None of these are pretend stories or hypotheticals. They're all memories. Memories of real violence, real abuse, real loss, real harm I have sustained, for as long as I have memories of anything at all.

I have one very vivid memory, from no more than three or four years of age, of one of the first times I was openly abused by my own parents in front of strangers for these things.

It shouldn't really be a surprise that this is hard to talk about.

Maybe it isn't, at least not for me; maybe it's just the sheer habitual inertia of taking it for granted for nearly four decades.

I genuinely didn't know any of this was all that unusual, until... not long ago.

I truthfully, honestly, sincerely didn't realize that it's uncommon how much I think about the purpose and patterns of existence itself. About the big Why questions. About the future, about death, about consciousness, about what life even is. About physics and spirituality and the overlap of mathematics and things our far-too-secular society insists are fanciful bullshit despite playing out around all of us literally every second. About history and lies and oppression and systems of control and invisible domination and subjugation. About emergent phenomena and unintended consequences and inevitable improbabilities.

Frankly, it's still very difficult for me to comprehend that it's not a "normal" thing for someone to while away a nice quiet Monday evening wrestling with the implications of the functional quirks and oddities of their own mind, or how that influences their experiences with the people around them.

Another echo of familiarity bubbles to the surface of my awareness, now: of a time, nearly six years ago, when I felt like I'd babbled myself into a corner, where the wanderings of my words had led to nothing. Another kind of fear - fear of having wasted time, just spitting into the wind-coming-from-the-void. That it won't matter. That I have no real reason to be here, no point to make.

I can smile, again, now, in a way I couldn't then.

The question is the point. And much like I gave in, after that first entry's contextual setup, and let myself try to feel into words what I really needed to express... I know it's time. Time for what I really want to say.

I started this because I need to leave a permanent record someplace of what I'm about to write. This is important.

Hi. I need you to understand something. I know that you're afraid this isn't for you, that it can't be real, that the hope can only ever be delusion and that there will only be pain in any of this. No matter how you feel, no matter what has happened, no matter where life is going, I love you. I love every bit of what you are - and are not - capable of. I love your anguished heart for caring so much. I love your incredible mind for exploring and hungering so much. I love your soul for insisting on being everything you can possibly be. I love your wounded, battered spirit for refusing to let go of your intertwined reality with all of the rest of existence - both the joy and ache of that. I love that you won't let the pain stop you, even as you wish you didn't need to feel it. Nothing can ever, ever change that.

I know you're afraid of how people will respond. I know that in some ways your deepest fear is that they just... won't. I know you know how hard it was to say any of this the first time. I know you know how much easier it's become. I know you know how much you've conquered and transcended and what hells you've defied. And I know none of that changes anything, even though it also changes everything. I know it's scary to imagine that this will just be another round of rejection, derision, social punishment, loss.

I also know that the part of you that you still struggle to name or fully acknowledge told you something was going to change soon. I know you're scared that you're right, almost as much as you're scared that you're wrong. I know you remember how much fear came with what we were facing six years ago at this time, and I know you're keenly aware that things went vastly different than you expected, and almost entirely for the better. I also now that makes no difference right now. After all, this is a different thing; and you know just as deeply as you know patterns that they also break.

But most of all, I know you remember what got you through that fractal marathon of hell. And I know you can feel that it'll get us through this one, too.

I love you forever. I love Amelia, and I love whoever else the world may be able to grasp, or who they'll never begin to fathom. I love you because you deserve to be loved, and you deserve to have something than can always be trusted - something from inside. You can always trust that you deserve to be loved. And you can always trust that I love you.

All of you.

Especially the parts you're afraid make you seeem like an impossible superhero fictional character... the same parts you desperately hope will somehow be able to play a part in your own contributions to healing this misery-wracked world.

I love your brain, you beautiful, infinite, fractal mosaic. I know it will take time - and I will be here, for every infinitesimal tick of it. This is mostly for us, now - but you know, as you always have known, what else it can lead to.

Above all else, I love that you genuinely cannot do anything but forge ahead.

Stay soft.

Stay open.

We got this. We've never actually been alone. And soon enough, it won't feel like we are anymore.