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Time Capsule of Unfamilliar Time

This blog is an unexpected time capsule of who I was before I knew myself.

A lot can change in ten years, and a lot did.

But a lot also didn't.

There are things I thought I'd have achieved by now, places I expected to have been, skills I anticipated I'd have mastered. A lot of the dead air of daily life that I used to spend pursuing a path I believed I was leading has been filled up with grief.

I expected to have become someone, and instead I've spent half a decade re-evaluating everything I once knew about myself. Choices feel more perilous than they once did. Opportunities are more suspect. Trust is now the hardest thing to give away.

I'm more exhausted than I once was. Not just from age (39 isn't all that old) but from the repetition of disappointment in promises, institutions, repeating cycles.

I am more disillusioned and apathetic than ever before about the constant demand to prove worth to be worthy of living.

It was easier to find my place in the world when I didn't have to question it. Being a cishet white girl came with a free pre-approved narrative of identity and personhood. Being a trans autistic guy with ADHD is a slog uphill. (Whiteness is still a free pass.)

Life was easier when my place in the world wasn't in question. I used to take a lot more at face value.

The decision fatigue of staying safe and alive in the world is enough to burn anyone out.

Finding places to carve out growth and wonder is a fight.

I am tired. But I am not giving up. 

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