It’s just astounding how much more sense everything makes when I know who I am. Just the whole world. Every thought I have ever had. Every problem I’ve faced. The way I want to talk to people. The way I understand that things work. There’s this universal sort of clarity now.

These last few months I keep getting comments on this striking confidence that people see in me. And I don’t know about that, but there is a clarity that I’ve never known. I’m not even sure I know what confidence is, but so much uncertainty seems to have abruptly fallen away.

And where I’m no longer uncertain, things just are the way they are. I’m autistic, yo. If a thing is true, I accept it as true and it doesn’t occur to me to mess around. I’m not sure I even know the social codes around playing coy with stuff that’s evident to me. Why lie?

I’m still this dysfunctional bundle of nerves and everything scares me, and I don’t know how to do the most basic things—and even if I do know, I’m not well enough to do them most of the time. But, like. For once I know who I am. And I get why the problems I have are my problems. And there’s so much that now I know I don’t have to worry about anymore—like, it turns out that dynamic doesn’t actually apply to me. It’s someone else’s garbage; why should I care? Okay, call me a “little gothic steam-punk diva,” sure. But this isn’t a front. I’m not making some kind of a statement. This is just me being comfortable for once.

And yet, well, it seems like me no longer being terrified and confused, and just existing in a way that makes me feel like I’m finally alive, is seen as this audacious act. Is it really that astonishing for me not to hate myself? I mean, I’ve done that. It sucks. I didn’t deserve it. Moving on.

I just find it so amazing to be me. I’ve never known this kind of a feeling. I’ve never known the security of a love like this. I’ve never felt like anyone has cared about me in the way I’ve begun to discover in myself.

I’ve never been this grounded in a sense of truth. It all connects.

• 

• 

• 

I don’t know how, but I want to share this. I think I always have, what fragments I’ve been able to scrape together despite the undertow I’ve been thrashing against most of my life. Truth and love are kind of the same thing to my mind. Intimacy and sincerity. All these fragments; all these dumb articles over all these years. Every little fascination in every work of expression. Every dumb little thread on social media. Every meaningful conversation. It’s all a piecework. Trying to condense, organize, pass on what love I can scavenge.

I feel like I’ve always kept so little of that for myself. Like I didn’t deserve any of it. The best I could do was filter it, annotate it, and hand it off to people who would likely still be alive tomorrow and maybe could use the love for something better than I would ever know.

And that’s always important. But, there’s also truth in me. I just never got to see it. And oh God, it just about overwhelms me. I not only deserve it; I’m a part of it. Like, the truth is the substance of my very being, and it’s so amazing. And it all ties in with all I’ve seen.

And I just.

I want other people to know this. Not necessarily to know me, because whatever. But to know this dynamic in themselves. To build their own relationships to the truth. To everything that ties us together. To know this kind of a love. And for them in turn to pass it on.

How else are we ever going to survive?

I feel like, it’s worth being alive if being alive means being honest. And I don’t know how to not do that, and also to keep going. And I feel like this is the most important thing in the world; the thing I’ve always been building toward.

Is that confidence? I don’t know. That word sounds like some kind of a social game. Some power thing. I don’t really get that nonsense. Truth is truth. It is what it is. The hard thing is just finding it. Once you do, it is a force of its own. I don’t see what my feelings have to do with it.

Anyway. Tomorrow I get to download some more alien proteins. Gimme a couple weeks and I’ll be ready to jazz.

…

Or more likely, to continue to sit in my apartment, doing next to nothing as usual. But, I will possess a renewed—and possibly newly informed—potential to jazz.

So hey.