Thank you for coming to see what this is about. I am so thankful for your choice to take time from your day to look at my journey and explore this platform with me.
I am rebuilding and repairing my life. For the last 7-10 years (it’s hard to know when it starts sometimes) I have been surviving.
And you know what that is like.
I wish you didn’t, I wish you didn’t know what I meant when I told you that I have been only focused on survival. I wish I was reporting from some strange land where you didn’t know its landscape so well. I wish you didn’t know the fear and isolation and frailty of clinging to an edge with such ferocity that you neglect and abandon other parts of your life.
I am so thankful for how strong and resilient (mostly, against my will 😂) I am, and I don’t want to discount anything that version of me has done. When life has shown over and over again that it wants me stomped into the ground, there was a little piece of me that brushed it off, melted down, cried my eyes out, spit the teeth out, and kept going.
But each time of doing that bore a cost also. Friends. Hobbies. Careers. Health. I lost so much but I also found out who I am.
I am someone who strangely could hope and feel love and respect for people and it didn’t matter how bad it got. I don’t blame you for not being in my place right now and I don’t blame me either (we will get to why in another post, I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes). It didn’t matter that I maybe wanted to fight someone in the street, because I also wanted to know that they came from a loving home, living a dignified life, and a life where they had access to everything they needed. We were still going to fight but I didn’t lose the part of me that also wanted justice.
This was part of me I was always ashamed of. The part that saw me in every person I hated and the part of me that kept believing in relationships that were full of restorative love and safety even though I wasn’t really familiar with being in one. I never knew that those abilities were special and something that could make me stronger. I always saw them as some flagrant weakness.
I fought that part of me because what I knew of strength was that it was cold, thoughtless, selfish, poisonous, and hard. But as much as I ever tried to be that, the me that’s still here stuck around. I hadn’t known real strength yet. I needed to look harder.
I think it’s important to be appreciative to who we were to make it here. Because sometimes we treat that survival-self like it’s some kind of pathology and in reality it’s what we needed to be to make it.
So I am thankful.
I’m also done with that.
During this journey, I am going to need help. And this is where you come in.
Here is a list of the kind of help I need:
Cheering me on
Saving space for my feelings
Connecting me with resources you have experience with (please don’t give me generic or unspecific information about help because I don’t have time to spin my wheels in unproven directions with all of the responsibilities on my plate)
Sharing your own life experiences or thoughts about things that I may be stuck on
Sharing my journey with people you think it might help. (We all need to heal and repair and sometimes seeing other people get through it can serve as hope or encouragement or simply just the knowledge you aren’t alone.
In return, on this journey, you will get accountability, updates, lessons learned, moments of frivolous humor, art, sometimes important recipes that have helped me make it through, basically, I have adhd and autism and this is gonna be as vast and varied as my thoughts and ideas and experiences.
Part of what I will need is also monetary help. I know we have always been told that’s so filthy to say aloud. But the harsh reality of life is that life costs money and improving lives costs money. And it can be one time donations or recurring gifts. If you choose a specific bill to pay, I will send you the payment confirmation directly.
Community support is one of the strongest things we can do to show solidarity and support to people we can’t help in person. I know this because I have done it and experienced it.
There will be a published budget and information about how that can be improved.