Sunday, November 22nd, 2020

I try to say things, usually, to the widest audience I can - to the largest set of people who may be able to hear something from it all.

This one needs to be a little more focused.

This is for my trans sisters.

I don’t know your name, or where you live, or what you look like, or how old you are.

But I know that none of those things can change what I want to tell you.

I don’t know what you’ve been through, or what you’re dealing with now, or what else is to come in the future.

But I know the path you’re walking.

Maybe you’ve spent longer on this road than I have, or maybe you’re not even sure this is your journey. I can’t know any of that.

But I know the fear, the hesitation, the uncertainty, the frustration, the exhaustion, the pain and senseless hurt of it all.

I can’t promise you it will get better, but I can promise you that it’s worth trying.

The world is not ready for us. We are beyond the scope of what most of the humans on this planet are prepared to understand. It is getting better, and there are so many fighting to ensure that things continue to improve.

For right now, though, it’s beyond tough.

We are questioned. Doubted. Dismissed. Erased.

Or worse.

I know what it feels like to not want to open my own front door, because I can’t bear having to endure the looks of disgust and confusion from my own neighbors.

I know what it feels like to watch people’s behavior towards me change - from professional, courteous, respectful - to condescending, rude, uncaring, even cruel… all for revealing the truth that I am in fact a woman.

I know the pain of watching people decide they no longer wish to treat me like a person because I’m not like them.

I know the confusion and the frustration of watching those people suddenly becoming defensive, making up excuses, even attempting outright gaslighting to cover their own sexist behavior, all the while denying that anything is even happening.

I know what it’s like to be told to calm down because I dared to care about something.

I know what it’s like to be told I am a monster, a predator, not even a person.

I know what it’s like to be mocked, scorned, and treated like a melodramatic child for having the sheer audacity to ask someone to respect my identity.

I know what it’s like to be treated that way because someone else in the room stood up for me when I could not.

I know what it’s like to be told that my experiences can’t be real, or valid, that it’s all my imagination and I’m trying too hard to be someone I’m not.

My sister, I hope you do not know these things, and I hope you never will; but I cannot promise you that.

Chances are, you will face some or all of these, and more.

Chances are, you will find yourself out on the frontier of human experience, with only scattered hints of what is going on - grasping, much as I have, for anything and everything that feels like certainty and solidarity in the world.

I know it may not be much, but I hope this finds you, and I hope it adds something to the map we must all create.

For us. For each other. For those walking this road now, so that someday those who follow after us may be a little bit less lost.

Some people will travel with us, even though this journey is not their own. They are rare and precious. Find them. Thank them. Tell them to find others to go with us all.

I can’t tell you how this journey ends; I barely know much of it, myself, and my route will be different than yours - in some big ways, and in some small ways too.

I can, however, tell you this:

You are worth it.

Travel forward, if and when you can.

Take a rest, when you need to - for as long as you need to.

Find and cherish those who can travel with you, even if it is only for a very short time.

The pain is real. The uncertainty is real. The hardship and the fear and the exhaustion are real.

No one else can tell us who we are.

No one else can tell us how we feel.

If this is your journey - whether you’re barely even thinking about planting a foot onto this road, or many years along the path - you know something that no one else can know.

You know who you are, somewhere; it may be deeply buried, it may be hidden, and it may take extraordinary time and effort to make sense of it all. It may be hard for anyone else to see, and it may earn you mistreatment for showing it.

Trust yourself.

It won’t always make sense. Sometimes it will genuinely be senseless. It’s hard, out here, on the frontiers of human experience.

Stick together. And, if you can, leave signposts for the next set of travelers.

Invitation

As often happens when I sit down to write, I am not entirely certain what it is I need to say here tonight.

This isn't to say I'm not sure what to talk about - I simply haven't transferred the imagery in my mind and heart into words yet. It's part of the way thinking works for me. All I know for sure, right now, is there is a lot to be said.

My heart is both tired and very alive. There is much work to be done, in this world, but I feel that we have a chance to get that work done. The election in the United States this past week was draining and - in many ways - a deeply unsettling experience. To know that so many still see the world in certain ways, that so many are still profoundly mired in damaging ideas and attitudes, that divisiveness remains such an effective weapon of oppression even just within this country is difficult to watch.

In a sense, though, it is a source of a kind of dark hope, for me.

My profession involves engineering. To solve a problem, you have to know what you're trying to solve. The scale of troubles afflicting the world today is immense - but at least we have a sense of what needs to change. The clearer our understanding of what is still broken, the more effectively we can go about fixing it.

Human connection has always been the strongest antidote to any form of evil: neglect, oppression, abuse, mistrust, abandonment... connection is what gives us, as a species, the resilience we've needed in order to survive. Connection is what helps specific people feel valued, supported, loved - it gives us purpose and meaning.

This past year has afforded me many chances for deep contemplation. The more I ponder, the more I am struck by the contrast between some of the more timeless wisdom of our species, and the attitudes that are prevalent in the world today.

There is dark hope in this, too.

The importance of connectivity is far from lost. Our truest, deepest reality - that we all share a single ball of rock in space - is increasingly impossible to ignore. The very engines of capitalist, expansionist, colonialist horror that led to the current "global economy" and planet-scale interaction of people in general have given us no choice but to acknowledge that we're all in this together - just as we always were.

We can no longer, collectively, hide from our truths - neither the pleasant ones, nor the ones that give rise to our greatest fears.

It very well may be that this world will eventually be undone by our greed, our unchecked obsession with "individuality" and personal aggrandizement, our self-centered and short-sighted refusal to consider anything but ourselves and our in-groups.

Or this may simply be the exact level of dire warning we all need to hear in order to actually listen.

I hear the retorts - echoed to me in actual conversations I've been involved in, and parroted by millions of concerned people in similar discussions across the globe: "But there is too much to change; too many things going wrong and too much momentum; too many people and not enough time..."

Interesting, if true, but I fail to see how that could possibly matter.

Change does not happen suddenly, nor easily - this is true of every part of our universe. To transform solid metal into a liquid can be done... with the investment of immense energy. To transform a minuscule seed into a towering tree can be done... with the investment of many, many years. To heal a culture, mend a species, guide an entire planet into an unprecedented level of flourishing is certainly not out of reach; it simply requires sufficient effort.

So how do we get that effort to happen?

Ice doesn't melt all at once. The surface thaws first - the area closest to a warmer temperature. If the temperature difference is high enough, the transformation is quick - but proximity is important. The sun is millions of times hotter than it would need to be to melt ice, and yet we experience winters on this planet wherein ice and frozen water persist for weeks or months at a time... all because of a small shift in proximity to the sun itself, brought about by the tilt of our planet's axis.

On a human level, much as in physics, proximity can lead to friction. It can also be a deeply necessary ingredient for connection. But for people, proximity doesn't need to mean being in the same place: technology can give us closeness in ways that were impossible even a decade ago, to people thousands of miles away. Few things have underscored the possibilities of this like the past year of global pandemic effects.

I will not change the attitudes of bigots via the words in this blog. I will not undo the horrors of racism, of ableism, of sexism, of binarist gender oppression, or much of anything else, really - not by myself, and not by what I write here.

So what's the point?

The point is that I have chosen my fuel, and I have chosen to use that fuel where I can. I won't change the world, here, and I don't have to.

All this project needs to do is give someone hope. All this writing needs to accomplish is to help someone think of something they haven't quite thought of before. All I need for my vulnerability, my angst, my public exposure to lead to is someone having permission to be themselves in a way they couldn't before they arrived here. All this ever was meant to accomplish was for someone to read something here, and decide to keep on going with whatever it was they're meant to be doing - or perhaps to change gears and do something else that they should be doing instead.

Every tiny nudge, every tweak in the right direction, moves us all closer to where we all desperately want to go - a world where we can all live safely, happily, and where we can thrive together.

Any time the words here bring someone a little bit of energy, or joy, or a new perspective, or reassurance, or hope, or motivation, or comfort - that's success.

Any time someone leaves these entries thinking a little harder, looking for ways to do something of their own, even if it feels tiny and insignificant - that's success.

A solitary molecule of water has no hope of doing much of anything on the scale of an entire world; and yet linked together, those same molecules make up a massively vital component of all life here. The difference is a matter of connection.

On my own, I'd never dream to change much of anything. Our world is conditioned to believe the lie of the lone heroic figure, the genius in the garage, the writer with a vision, the solitary inspiration. Against that overwhelming deluge of mistruth, it would be easy to lose all hope of accomplishing anything meaningful in life.

I'm here to tell you to disbelieve that story. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Nobody ever acts truly alone. There is no such thing as isolation. There is no such thing as an individual - we are all intertwined in each others' worlds in ways far more numerous than the world around us is set up to let us see.

You're reading this - which means you have access to some kind of technology, either directly or because someone transferred these words from the internet into a format you could access. People made that happen. Someone helped make the wires, the electronic devices, the software that allowed it all to exist. Someone grew the food that helped those people do their jobs. All those people were once children - a process that, by the very nature of our species, requires still more people to have been connected.

Nothing we do occurs in isolation; and so if we use our connectivity to our advantage, we can gradually stop being disconnected, disaffected, ineffectual molecules of water floating around as a vaporous gas. We can condense, coalesce, join a larger body of connection and become a surging, roaring tide.

It's raining outside, right now, as I write. That water didn't just happen to show up in the puddles on the ground, or the streams and rivers and lakes nearby, or the oceans a ways beyond that. Pick a molecule in any of those puddles: an hour ago, it was in a cloud.

What got it down here was connecting - to a dust particle, to other water, anything and everything sufficient to cause it to condense into a droplet and begin to plummet. It fell into that puddle because of gravity: the natural force of everything attempting to connect to everything else.

Gravity can be taken for granted, invisible in more than just a literal way. It can be inconvenient. It can even be terrifying.

It can also be used to amazing, profound, and hard-to-believe effect, if you know how. Knowledge of gravity got people onto our planet's moon, and our inventions billions of miles into space.

What would happen to rain, if the molecules of water one day decided they were too scared to drop down to earth?

What would happen to our species, if we all decide that we can't possibly fix any of this?

Maybe the formula, the cliche, is to ask the inverse question; to try to inspire by asking everyone to do some small part.

But even that isn't really the answer, as far as I can tell.

I see a different path for this world: some of us will respond, will take action, will readjust, will engage, will persist. It isn't the goal for any one specific person or even group of people to change it all, or even fix a large part of anything.

Any change has an edge: a frontier, a zone where things are likely to happen. We can see the edges of frontiers all around us, every day, if we choose to look. On those frontiers, the tiniest bits of effort are what causes a change to perpetuate. One bit of ice melts; the warmer water that it becomes can then start melting the next bit of ice, and so on. One melted drop doesn't have to do much else. It can pass along the heat it is able to transmit, and then simply rest - the edge, the frontier, has advanced. Give it enough time, and a lake will thaw.

Tremendous change - the kind of planetary-scale changes we need in this day and age - does not happen easily. It does not happen because of the dramatic actions of a tiny number of people with a lot of luck and brilliance and dedicated energy.

It happens because, over time, one person allows themselves to use their own connections to impact a few more people around them. Sometimes those impacts are large, but mostly they are tiny - maybe even invisible, perhaps impossible to even recognize by themselves. But they add up.

You may not be near the edge right now; but someday, that is likely to change. You may not have the energy to do much with the edges you are near, right now - but someone else does. Connections allow that energy to flow, and change to propagate. The edges will inevitably move.

The more of us who can use our connections to spread hope, to spread compassionate empathy, to provide safety and acceptance, the more people will be able to find inspiration, to relay insight, to discover strength and vision to move forward in larger and larger ways.

There is no such thing as too small. There is no such thing as not enough.

This is your nudge, your dare to go ahead and do the thing you've always wanted to try.

This is your permission slip. If anyone questions who said you could, tell 'em I said so.

This is your admission ticket to a place where you belong. If you don't feel like you belong to anywhere else, join everyone else who doesn't belong.

This is your invitation - to the dance of life, to the story we all write together, to simply be who you already are and allow yourself to exist in connection with the rest of us, and to cherish that connection.

If you accept this invitation, it will add up. It will make a difference - no matter how imperceptible or unimportant it might seem, it all contributes.

There is no such thing as too small. There is no such thing as not enough.

You are hereby invited.

Your response is up to you.

Fibrillation

I've been around descriptions of cardiac failure for a long time; I have family members and have had a few friends in various medical and emergency-response careers, so hearing about heart attacks was not unusual for certain segments of my life.

What really made the concept real to me, though, was a book about chaos theory that described "fibrillation" in terms of a mathematical situation. The electrical signals of nerves and neurons that typically regulate proper muscle contractions - a heartbeat - become uncoordinated, uncooperative, and can even lead to permanent failure.

A heart-muscle in fibrillation does not move the way a heart usually should. Fibrillation can affect muscle fibers anywhere in the body. When a fiber is in this state, its movement is not as pronounced, not as recognizable - often requiring specialized, highly sensitive equipment to even observe that motion exists. And yet a fibrillating heart, just like a single fiber of muscle acting this way, contains phenomenal amounts of energy - it simply goes nowhere productive.

The mental image of this has stuck with me for many years, and I've actually started to see analogous concepts in other areas of life besides just muscles. Of course, the words used to describe those things are typically different, but that's the nature of analogy.

Cognitive Fibrillation

I work in a very mentally-intensive field that involves the need to make many kinds of complex and often very difficult decisions based on criteria that are far more intricate and detailed than any one person can hope to hold in their heads at once. Part of my job is helping other software engineers overcome analysis paralysis - an affliction that is likely familiar to anyone who has faced a tricky choice.

Given all these options, how do you know what the "right" choice is? What is best? Or what do we do first? There are tools and mental habits that can help make these decisions simpler, but they are not universal, nor are they guaranteed to lead to a particularly desirable outcome. In other words, they are necessary but not sufficient for making decisions.

Knowing the "right" choice always requires first stepping back and understanding the criteria and the situation. The exact same set of actions can be helpful in one case and harmful in another. If we're startled by something unexpected, sometimes taking a deep breath to steady our nerves is exactly what our bodies need - but if we happen to be underwater, that's not a good response!

Often there simply is no one right answer to a choice, and so we instead get fixated on the "best" options. Again, though, we need a lot of contextual awareness to understand this. What makes one thing "better" than another? What costs are we willing to incur? What effort are we willing to expend?

When this involves time pressure or a limited set of resources, we enter a mode of triage - what needs attention right now, and what can we get into a reasonably stable state, and get back to later?

A person caught in analysis paralysis is not literally motionless. On the contrary, they may expend tremendous amounts of energy, and generate massive amounts of anxiety, without actually making a choice - because the selection process is so overwhelmingly complex and difficult.

The mind, in this state, is using energy but the movement is uncoordinated, unproductive, and unhealthy. Much like with the process for recovering from an in-progress heart attack, the brain needs a jolt - some strong, powerful signal that says "this is where to go next" - and, almost always, both a fibrillating mind and a fibrillating heart can respond to that signal and return to coordinated, productive, healthy operation.

Social Fibrillation

Groups of people do the same thing. Groups of people, regardless of  - families, friends, teams, business organizations, countries, even the entire planet - exhibit patterns. Much like a fractal shape, the patterns are strikingly similar at different scales and levels of detail. They differ and evolve and shift, especially as the numbers grow and shrink, but they all have similarities.

The patterns of fractal nature within a single person's body, mind, and life also manifest in the collective.

On occasion, social groups - of all sizes - find themselves facing a situation that is difficult, complex, problematic, maybe even overwhelming.

Somehow, humans as a species tend to solve these situations. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here to write this, and you wouldn't be here to read it. And yet in the moment, those challenges are almost always daunting and may feel utterly hopeless.

The sad truth is that sometimes we don't solve them. Sometimes friend groups dissolve, business ventures fail, and life has to readjust. But this, in itself, is a smaller pattern within the larger context of human existence.

When amazing changes happen, they are almost never easy. They cost time, energy, commitment, and a willingness to endure change - which often brings sensations of discomfort, for all of us. This happens both in the context of a specific person, and all the way up to the entirety of our planet.

A great many words are invested in exploring the experiences of "leaders" in this kind of context - the people who seem to provide that "signal" or "jolt" that grabs our collective hearts and gets us moving again. These people are important, to be sure, but there are so many others who do not get much attention and yet deserve a far greater percentage of the credit and appreciation.

A defibrillator doesn't work alone. It simply allows the existing body to return to its natural way of functioning. The electrical action is very short, and often does not need to be used repeatedly; the body is able to recover and resume regular heartbeats. The hero of the story may be the "A.E.D." device as the tale is usually told, but the real quiet, unsung hero is the miraculous set of nerves and electro-chemical coordination mechanisms that allow the heart to go back to operating safely.

Of course, there is usually lasting damage from both fibrillation and the recovery from it; again, this is the way of analogies. Unlike heart muscles, minds and social groups can recover from these situations and go on to be far healthier than they began.

In a social context, anyone can provide that nudge. For a healthy heart, the signals that regulate pulse are very subtle and quiet compared to the jolt of a defibrillator. That extreme measure is only needed in dire circumstances.

In a heart, it isn't just one nerve, neuron, or muscle-fiber's job to maintain the pulse. It's all cooperative. Fibrillation occurs when something gets in the way of cooperation.

In a brain, for someone thinking and acting and choosing their way through life, cooperative effort is vital. "Cognitive dissonance" is well-known to produce actual physical symptoms when left unaddressed for too long. A mind in fibrillation will cause immense discomfort and damage - not out of some kind of malice or spite, but as a desperate plea to return to peaceful, harmonious operation.

And the fractal scales upwards even still.

In a group of people, moving in the same direction is immensely powerful. It's why we (rightfully) fear a panic-driven stampede. It's why we find hope and strength in marching together. It's why having people provide signals that keep us all cooperating and working in alignment is so essential to functional and healthy societies.

The story isn't - and shouldn't be - focused on the brief, temporary actions of extreme measures used to try and restore that cooperative alignment. The story has always been about the rest of the tapestry of existence. Knowing the rest of the context is what gives us the ability to know when to take a deep breath and when to remember that we're still underwater.

In a healthy heart, mind, or social group, the tiny corrections and gentle encouragement of cooperating members can sustain success and guarantee thriving for amazing amounts of time and through incredible challenges and struggles. Being disconnected from the collective, or being given a sufficiently disruptive jolt, can spell disaster - not just for a small part, but for the larger group, and even for the larger context beyond that: a heart attack can end a life; a poor decision can affect many people; and a species unable to find ways to work together can bring an entire planet into a precarious state.

We should be concerned about these risks; and we should also remember the hope: that with enough of an insistent supply of direction and effort, returning to healthy life is also possible.

Thinking

I think a lot.

I wonder if my recent blossoming fascination with human connection is really truly the deep, significant, profound glimpse of the true path out of the less-lovely aspects of the human "condition." I wonder if maybe it's just me projecting my fundamental angst and pain, or if all these people I talk to about the horror of loneliness are really, truly leaving our conversations with more hope and interest in nurturing the connections of their own.

I say lots of things.

Sometimes there are responses and there seems to be a moment where people think I've said something helpful, or useful, or insightful. On occasion people will even thank me for things I've said - whether large or small.

For a while that seems nice, and I leave those conversations with a little more hope and interest in human connection for myself.

I fear lots of things.

I worry that the way I write, the stories I tell, the perspectives I try to share, are all just a little too hard to manage. I seem to make a difference, sometimes, and I'm happy about that and proud of my ability to do it.

But I worry that it doesn't leave any room for the reality of what goes on in my head - the stuff that isn't sculpted into words or conversations. I worry that the act of translating my actual thoughts into words - the very act that enables human connection in the first place - particularly in a time when I cannot safely be around anyone in physical space - is so painfully expensive that I'm racking up some kind of emotional debt by trying to communicate at all.

I'm sure this makes very little sense, especially to anyone who has ever spoken to me in realtime - and even moreso for those who have talked to me without keyboards being involved.

I speak quickly, often with considerable precision and clarity. Words flow to me at a speed that must seem "easy" to most people.

What I have almost never admitted, to anyone, until now, is that it is not easy.

To explain this, I need to take a short detour.

I love music, and particularly the "live" performance of music. Instruments are endlessly fascinating to me, and watching a truly skilled musician work magic on their instruments is... well, the best word I have is that it feels, to me, like a gift from the universe, every time.

It takes tens of thousands of hours of practice - hard work, failure, patience, exhaustion, learning, trying, faltering, succeeding, repeating - to be that good at anything. Music happens to be one of those activities that can "look easy" when done by someone that has invested that kind of time.

I wouldn't call myself a particularly good musician, but I've invested enough time of my own to know when someone is doing something remarkably difficult and making it "look easy." There are certain things in music that are shockingly hard to do that don't "sound" (or look to the eye) particularly tricky. There are also certain things that sound amazingly impressive that are - with a tiny bit of training and theory - recognizable as fairly easy.

To me, words are not easy, and communicating in language is expensive. It costs time, emotional energy, and a level of focus and attention that is - despite all appearances - massively taxing to me.

It only looks easy because I have spent so much time practicing.

Incidentally, I only started practicing because of one of the most influential pieces of advice I ever received. I have long since forgotten the subject, but I remember a moment as a young teenager, struggling with frustration and confusion because the ideas I knew were right seemed to make no sense to the people I was trying to talk to.

My dad took me aside and calmly explained that being right - or even having a useful idea - wasn't the problem. My thought process wasn't to blame; the source of contention was my inability to relay what I understood. As he said, "even if you were the smartest person in the history of the world, it'll never do anything but hurt you and frustrate you if you can't find ways to communicate with everyone else."

Parental advice often doesn't quite work on teenagers, and considering that I had what can only be charitably summed up as a difficult, traumatic, and somewhat bizarre childhood, it's a minor miracle that I even listened to him. (It's a somewhat substantially larger miracle that we still speak to each other frequently, but that's another post for another time.)

But from that moment, I took it on myself to learn to communicate.

So now, two decades later, I like to think that I've at least gotten some kind of skill accumulated in that department.

I want to try something, now, that I've never quite had the courage to attempt before, nor have I really fully understood how deeply I need to make this attempt.

In most of my writing - which tends to be for professional, academic, or some flavor of semi-formal purpose - I try to find structure, and make things flow in a progression that suits the reader. For personal things, what I write much more closely resembles my actual thought process. There is meandering, there are cycles, there are revisitings of things, themes that unfold and emerge, ideas that vanish in the fringes of a half-cohesive paragraph and unexpected clarity that seems to come unbidden from the midst of it all at the end.

I don't rewrite or edit these posts, generally. I don't go back and change words or sentences or directions. This is almost entirely stream of consciousness - and the effort required to write it is far more than just the effort to press keys on a keyboard for an hour. I knew exactly what I needed to say when I sat down to write this; I knew exactly how to get the point across; and I knew exactly what shape the whole thing would take in the end. The process of turning that knowledge into words is what is so immensely difficult.

How do I explain that I can see this entire set of ideas as a sort of swirling mass in my mind? How do I find words for the fractal kaleidoscope of detail and understanding that exists in my skull? Could I even find images to try and explain it?

I don't understand things in words. When I understand something, I literally visually see the idea in my head. It is not a static picture or a simple combination of shapes and symbols. The more I understand something, the more detail becomes visible - shapes, designs, movement, patterns, shifting, evolving.

I do not feel things in emotions. I feel in something that I can only describe as music, and emotions come by attempting to translate that music into something that I can explain and communicate to someone else.

When I try to learn something, the first step is to get all the pesky words and feelings to quiet down - a struggle immensely complicated by the way my brain tends to work. In some venues, this is what would be termed "ADHD" and "autism" - except I take deep, bitter exception to the idea that the way my brain works is some kind of disorder, or pathology, or disease. I am not to be cured, not to be treated, not to be fixed. My difference does not merit the fear, the pity, the stigma, the disgust, the impatience, the bewilderment that so many people like me are forced to live under.

I carry many things that have required me to learn how to be invisible: growing up in a "third culture" configuration, being trans, being a lesbian, being neurodiverse. If I have learned any particular survival skill in my time, it has been to disappear.

The time for that is over, now. I need to be seen, and that requires facing up to my entire reality - and refusing, for all the awkwardness it will inevitably cause, to hide who I am.

I need to say that I often despair of actually convincing anyone how disconnected, alienated, and isolated I feel - even when talking to various groups of very similar people. I need to say that the act of connecting is, to me, both a vital need and a massively expensive undertaking. I cannot live without connection, but connecting takes something from me that is virtually impossible to quantify.

I do not understand social interactions. This may seem absurd to anyone who has spent time interacting with me, but it is true. I simply fake them. I do the words and the gestures and the patterns because they seem to help other people still want to talk to me again. But I cannot see why those things are useful - they do not fit into the mural of comprehension in my mind.

I see - by which I mean I truly understand - when a connection is working. I see when people respond to those connection attempts, not by the words they say, the expressions their faces make, or other cues of that nature, but by the way their own movements in life are altered.

I see when someone really, truly resonates with me, because as I look at their actions, their choices, their overall existence, the shift in their direction becomes a clear sort of vector in my mind.

How do I tell people that I know that moment of alignment, of connection, as a sort of visceral music? I can explain it with mathematical analogies, with metaphors, with all the prose I could wring from my exhausted brain, but will anyone ever actually hear that harmony as well?

Or will it all just be lopsided attempts at cramming an inner universe of immeasurable beauty and intricacy into the pallid, ineffectual shards of linguistic frustration?

Have I learned to communicate what is actually going on in me, or have I simply gotten good at faking it for the practical stuff so I can at least get by with daily life?

Will I ever really be able to convince anyone that I don't withdraw because I want to be alone, but because trying to interact linguistically often becomes too tiring to be a good idea? Will anyone ever understand that I suddenly leave conversations not because I have lost interest or energy, but because the ideas are moving too fast in my mind, and I need to let them thrive without trying to torture them into mere thoughts?

How many time will I say, to someone or even no one in particular, that I just want to feel like someone else will put literally any shred of effort into understanding me? Is there a magic number of attempts, after which it might actually happen?

Or do I need to be more clear about just how much effort this costs me - something I (apparently) do so effortlessly? If I make it "look easy", will anyone understand why I feel so alone every time I try to talk?

Will this make a difference?

Or will I click Publish, start preparing for bed, and wake up tomorrow into the exact same world all over again, with a smattering of mild reactions, and no change?

I only know two things for certain, right now.

The first is that I can, intellectually, conceive of a world where this does have an effect. But I cannot see it. I can see a world where this does not do what I hope it will do, in which case, I will try again another day.

The second is that the music is too much, now, and I need to go hear it for a while.

463 Days

Today marks four hundred sixty-three days since I wrote this - which became the first entry on this site.

The past few months have been laced with an odd mixture of monotonous stress and unexpected, bewildering calm. Sitting around alone, effectively quarantined, for weeks upon weeks was not a choice I would have made for myself - and yet, as odd as it may sound, I'm glad to be doing it. In a way, I'm at peace with continuing to do this for as long as I need to. It's not a resigned, powerless sense of "guess I have no choice" - I've actually become interested in making the best of it, for as long as I can.

Which is not to say it's been fun, or easy, or even consistently enjoyable.

I am a rather complex person and one of my personal realities I've been unable to hide from lately is my neurodiversity. There are many words for this set of characteristics and traits, but they carry a lot of stigma, misconceptions, and even overt prejudice in the world these days. I prefer to describe what I experience, first and foremost, and not shy away from the complexities and messiness of it all. An exploration of that particular set of oddities, however, probably belongs in a different entry.

Really, though, the subject reminds me of a much larger pattern of my life - and, in particular, my past 463 days of living it.

There is something tempting, I think, to the idea of simplification. Certainly the pressures of daily life tend to lead us to want things to be a little less messy, a little bit clearer, a little easier. We're busy, the world is a chaotic place, and stability and certainty are at a premium these days.

I feel like I have something of an unfair advantage in that regard. I don't like simplicity. I don't like stagnation or excessive predictability.

There's a word, I've often observed, to accurately describe what happens when things stop changing. The correct adjective, in English, to describe a state where complete and utter stability and simplicity has been achieved, is "dead."

Life requires movement. Movement requires that things change, even if the changes are subtle. Change implies loss: something old goes away.

Change also implies something new arriving.

For change to occur, something old has to stop, and something new has to happen. Change is movement; the very language of physics, and of much of mathematics, reflects a human understanding of the fundamental connection between movement and change.

Attempting to separate these things will always, in a sense, be an exercise in shutting out reality. It isn't as simple or blithe as "take the good with the bad" or anything as pat and impractical as all that.

I think of it like a palette of paints. Take a dozen colors, totally different hues, some vibrant, some muted, some contrasting, some barely distinguishable from each other. Consider a decent sized paint can of each color.

Throw them all in a bucket and stir it up vigorously.

What you get will inevitably be a bland, probably vaguely unappealing blur. Erasing the distinctions doesn't just make it simpler; it makes the dozen colors into a nigh-on useless muck.

The first trick is to stop trying to make everything simple.

Those exact same ingredients - the same selection of colors - can be turned into a beautiful display of artistry and expression, given patience and a willingness to respect the differences and the nuances, and a little bit of vision.

Given sufficient practice and imagination, a painter can take virtually any selection of twelve colors and produce something amazing with it.

I don't want to go through life wishing for a smaller selection of colors. I'd rather learn how to paint.

Storytime

I sat down earlier this evening to think a little bit.

I do a lot of reflecting these days - a habit I started (due to a combination of necessity and lack of meaningful alternatives) early in 2019 - but this session was different.

I have been introspective for most of my life, but mostly in bursts or short stints, until 2019. I've written before about what that year entailed for me and what came from it. Until today, though, I've looked at my own story as a sort of thread of continuity - a consistent but sometimes distant or distorted voice of experience across three decades of life.

I've traced the path of that thread many times before, mostly noting the significant turns, snags, tangles, and interesting changes in direction. But until today, I'd never really attempted to look at the larger context of everything around that thread - not merely at the places where I have gone, not even the places I could have gone - but the total setting of everything else that was going on around it all.

A few nights ago I wrote a short summary of major life events that I titled "things I survived." It was just a sentence, maybe two, about each thing that seemed like a serious ordeal, either at the time or in hindsight - the kind of things that would make me viscerally shiver in empathy if someone else mentioned a similar experience.

The list was just over three pages of dense prose when I stopped writing from emotional exhaustion. The final paragraph trailed off with a string of allusions to "lesser" experiences that, if I'd heard someone else mention, would still at least summon a heartfelt wince.

By itself, the exercise seemed interesting, but somehow lacking something. I resolved to never show it to anyone, because it almost seems too made up to be true. After some more consideration, I resolved to never show it to anyone, because - in all honesty - it feels self-aggrandizing, or like fishing for pity, or maybe one of those otherworldly tales where someone just remains unfathomably pure and optimistic in spite of almost caricatured hardships.

In the face of current events, with all the undeniable attention aimed at the sheer inertia of systemic racism, with the inescapable focus on longstanding oppressive cultural, political, and economic norms, and the very real loss of life and perpetuation of suffering in the world, it felt unspeakably trite to share my own list of "stuff some white girl lived through" - despite much of that list being rather horrific in its own right.

This evening, I realized what was missing from that exercise. The list is not important. What is important is that the list is about much more than who I was then, or who I am now.

The story of my life has taken thousands of turns - some larger than others. Some have been for the better. Others have not.

I don't want this to sound like some sort of sermon about how I always wound up making the right decisions and some kind of strength of character guided me back to being a reasonably good person. I don't think that is true. Many of the more intense twists and turns in my story reflect some of my worst decisions and mistakes.

What matters, I think, about this story is that it is not a monologue. It cannot be told with a cast of one character, and it cannot be told authentically without spending generous amounts of stage time with the endless line of people who have, at one time or another, called me on my bullshit.

Say what you will about temperaments and personalities, very few human beings ever truly exist in any meaningful degree of isolation. Quarantines during a pandemic don't count. Perhaps more pointedly for the current moment, imprisonment doesn't meet the criteria for true isolation either: imprisonment (unjust or otherwise) could not occur if there was nobody to put people into prison in the first place.

Like it or not, we cannot escape the fact that our lives are interconnected. In perhaps more flippant terms, everybody has parents, at a very minimum.

I've wondered a lot, since April of 2019, about what it would ultimately look like to tell "my story." After tonight, I don't think I should - at least, not like that.

But I would very much like to tell a story - one in which I have had a part, to be sure, and also one with so many more parts than I could ever properly capture on the page.

My life is riddled with interventions and interactions, major and minor alike, that served more to steer the "thread" of my experience than anything I ever could have done on my own - elementary school teachers, friends, colleagues, writers, thinkers, musicians, others dealing with similar experiences in their own lives...

I feel, now, that what I really want to do with this project is to help people find ways to discover alignment - the shifts and steering that change our individual courses, whether that means from day or day, or across our entire lives.

I have sensed, on several noteworthy occasions in my life, a sort of feeling in the air of uncertainty, of tension, of stagnation, of perhaps even hopelessness. Sometimes those moments give way to collapses, and sometimes they are revealed - in hindsight - to be the gathering of immense energy that just needs somewhere to go.

That ambiance has, for me, usually been contained to a relatively small set of circumstances. What I've felt this past week seems to literally touch the entire world.

Life, for each of us, is going somewhere. We may like the direction, or we may not. We may see good possibilities, or we may feel trapped. But one thing I can say for certain: in any group of people, no matter how big or how small, when people begin to move in the same direction, things get interesting.

Find people who are clearly moving in a direction that seems better. Move with them, even if it is slow or hard or seems pointless. If you can, point others to that alignment, that activity. Give the energy a direction.

The momentum builds, and perhaps far more quickly than any of us ever really expect - even people like me, who have seen this pattern many times, and even been a part of directing that momentum before. Nothing is ever quite as surprising as the sheer power of people pushing in the same direction.


So let's all go somewhere lovely.

Together.

Choose Your Fuel Wisely

I'm not going to link the news. If you aren't already seeing it, I want it to be your choice how much to engage with it.

But regardless of your views on what is going on right now - especially in the U.S. - and regardless of your choices in how you react and respond, I think there are some things I want everyone to hear.

What we do, in the next days, weeks, and years, will define the course of history. And that means what every single one of us does, or does not do.

We are seeing unprecedented awareness of the broken, unjust, and corrupt nature of the world we live in. It is not new, and it is not a secret. If the past week has felt like a surprising discovery to you, please take a moment to understand that many people in the world have never had the illusion that things were OK.

People have known about the injustice, the corruption, the bigotry, the hatred, the greed, the bias - and, for the most part, primarily those directly affected have been paying attention. Because they have never had a choice to ignore it.

Many of us have been able - either through deliberate turning away, or simply the "privilege" of busy lives - to not see the totality of the problems the world faces before. This opportunity will be increasingly rare in the time ahead. We no longer can ignore what the world is doing to other people who are "not us." And we must not ignore it.

But before we act, before we choose our responses, I believe it is vital that each and every one of us take time to choose our fuel wisely.

"You Get Out What You Put In"

There are aphorisms, wise sayings, quips, quotes, legends, stories - any myriad number of ways in which this wisdom has followed all of human history. The basic idea is simple to say, but perhaps immensely difficult to fully appreciate: when we act in violence, aggression, hatred, or fear, we create a space for things to continue to be violent, to continue to spark aggression, to continue to breed hatred - and more people will, as a result, live in fear.

Make no mistake, some things must change in this world. The process of change might be difficult and unpleasant - but we must, at every opportunity, strive to undergo that change wisely. Carefully. Calmly.

We know that certain intense emotions - anger, fear, being threatened, and so on - actually starve the brain's ability to think clearly and wisely. "Take deep breaths and count to 10" is good advice for a reason. "Step away, cool off, and come back to the discussion later" is good advice for a reason.

I will not ask anyone - especially if you are affected by the utter horror the world inflicts on people every day - to not be angry. I will not ask you to not be afraid. I will not ask you to turn away from demanding that things be made better.

I will, however, ask you to carefully consider the larger picture at work in these sorts of changes.

Power Vacuum

Suppose, for a moment, that the institutions, behaviors, and maybe even specific individuals responsible for "all this" (whatever your choice of "all this" might be) were removed from the equation.

What if it all just went away? What if the problems were forced to stop?

Something else will take their place. There will be a vacuum to fill, and make no mistake, it will be filled.

The history of every single human conflict, be it an argument or a war, can attest to the reality that the aftermath will only be as good as the "something" that steps into the void.

You can have a yelling match with a friend, and make up, and a few weeks later all is well; why is this? Because the good aspects of that friendship are already strong enough to grow over the gap created by the conflict.

Personal feuds, even national or cultural wars have perpetuated for generations or even centuries in human history, because there was insufficient goodness to grow new peace around.

Conflict, unfortunately, may not be avoidable. I'm not asking anyone to be conflict-averse. But all of us - no matter where we stand - can choose to strengthen the goodness that we all wish to see fill the void that we're starting to see opening up before us as a species.

Many awful things need to go away from our world. That removal may be ugly and unpleasant; I certainly hope it will not be, but I am not foolish enough to believe that it will be a smooth road. These things must be excised. But what will replace them?

Change, But Change Carefully

What we practice gets stronger.

What grows always grows outwards from that which is already alive.

We all have different roles to play in our lives; it is not for me to tell you what to do. But I will implore you to be careful what you allow to grow, in whatever areas of life that you can access.

If we sit only in anger, fear, or despair, those will be the things we practice. Those will color everything we feel, and ultimately, what we do (or choose not to do). The more people who allow those things to grow, the more we feed the very problems we want to fix.

Practice other responses - caring, compassion, support, encouragement, solidarity.

If you are angry, good. The world is full of awful, cruel things.

If you are fearful for the future, good. Turmoil is here, whether we like it or not, and the future is absolutely uncertain.

If you want to act, good. Action will be needed, desperately, and lots of it.

But please, do not stop there.

Refine the anger into focus - what really needs to be changed? What needs to be different? What is working that we can trust and rely on, so that we can be effective in that process of change?

Allow the uncertainty to give way to caution without paralysis - we must be wary of the temptation to let things "go back to normal" or to "blow over." Normalcy is the polite name of game over, we lost. If it "blows over," maybe some of us are "ok again", but the actual victims of the world's illnesses will only pay the price more dearly.

If your need to act feels uncontainable, there is one act of radical rebellion that is needed more than all others right now:

Reach out and love someone. Especially if they do not look like the kind of person you would normally reach for.