Thoughts on the perils and desires of sharing creatively. Wanting to recapture something that feeds my soul and a way of expressing it, too, the fullness of it. Anger and delight, childish simple joy and a sense of injustice that needs standing up to. Wanting most of all to bring back music, imagination, but on a sustainable budget, and protect my process and momentum so this doesn’t keep happening. Creators need care, and kindness, and protection. Creators are endangered. Creations are delicate, fetal, tender, easily murdered by careless hands and ‘tough love.’ I want to love again, but more safely than before, because I can’t take more reckless abandonment and ‘friendly’ fire.

One year ago I learned I was autistic. It’s time I used what I’ve learned to reduce harm in this still very much not ‘post-COVID’ world. Everything has changed, I’m raw and alone, but there’s a fuzzy floppy dog to listen to me talk myself through the pain. And I am still alive.

It’s futile!

If nothing I do matters, and every day is pretty much Groundhog Day, then what matters to me? I felt like I was making more progress with a podcast than a journal. I was more creative, more inclined to share, listened more to what I was saying. The trick is to not think about what anyone listening might think or do. And feel safe enough, unmonitored enough that it doesn’t matter what I do or say, because this is for me. What a concept: a trans dude, or anyone, doing something just for themselves, that isn’t about what other people think or feel. Me doing that. And rejecting any attempts to put me back in a people-pleasing servile place. No one owns me. I’m not a pleaser; that is not what I do.

It’s like therapy, or a confessional. Trying to process things in words without being interrupted or derailed. Sometimes talking to a dog isn’t enough. I hope, whoever you are, you get through what you’re going through. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness amidst the chaos, or life will be violent, and all will be lost.

Sometimes my heart hurts too much to sing, to make music. Sometimes my feet hurt too much to walk. Sometimes all I try to ease the pain doesn’t work, and life takes more than it puts back. Sometimes I can’t think of a damn thing that would make it better that I can actually do with what I have, internally and externally. I don’t know what would make it easier. I don’t believe in people right now. Humans… not living up to the hype for me. Taking more than putting back. Why should I bother? And I think: this is how we all got this way. We weren’t good enough, so we gave up trying. We couldn’t take it anymore, so we stopped giving. The promise of love was an illusion, the price for something broken too high, so we stopped shopping and tried to invent for ourselves something that, even if it didn’t work, was not a result of someone else’s failure, and not a humiliation shared. Letting myself down induces less helpless despair than letting others down, and being let down by others. I’m still alive. This is the best I can do right now.

Starting over from scratch, a new life, a new world, but the same damn world disorder as before. A little bit louder, and a little bit worse. Rambling ruminations on the continuing saga of a struggle for a survivor to continue to survive navigating systems designed by those who don’t need them and base expectations on resources scarce and inaccessible to the most needy. Winging it, as usual, with a little light music