It's been a hard few years. For humanity, or society, or something about our evolved connections (or devolved connections). Though I avoid watching or reading news, I haven't done a good job protecting myself from it. I still internalize it, even by a passing headline, a banner on youtube, or a website's sidebar. I feel the news rewiring my head and reconstructing my reality. I feel technology gradually changing my routine, my schedule, and how I direct my focus. The changes we're experiencing were truly insidious. I don't think I could at this point, know what kind of person I was like, or what my personality was 10 years ago, let alone 20, 30 years ago. I don't recognize myself, or anything I use or engage with. And sometimes I even fret that to engage with the me who lived in the past would make me disappointed somehow. I realized this when one of my best friends in high school. wrote to me on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. I don't have social media, and once in a blue moon, my old friends in the past do find me there. I am often terrified when I respond. Because I don't remember me before COVID, Trump, enshittification, gen ai.
I don't remember myself before I worked a job that required me to hide myself. The me before I knew the word autism. I remember once, perhaps in 2009, a middle school friend had also reached out. We spoke on the phone, and she said that she didn't recognize me anymore. She didn't like me. But the me she knew seldom shared her opinion, and was always there for her when she needed something. Whether that was doing her makeup, listening to her process an argument with her mom, or in the end, being there when she dealt with the fallout of having an affair with our mutual friend's older brother. I think the latter was a tipping point for me. I felt back then that to be her friend was becoming more stressful than healthy. So I never knew what she wanted me to be in 2009. But that was the last time we spoke.
I think these memories bubble up because I feel a hole in not knowing myself, or my past selves. And they bubble up because sometimes I feel a yearning for something that the headlines never can give me. I miss goodness. I feel grateful that in this space, I can write and be myself, and to know that the people in my digital neighborhood are good people, that they make beautiful things and write things that give me hope. I realized that more today. I finished reading Travis Baldree's short story anthology that ties into the Legends and Lattes universe. Reading it made me feel a wave of grief. Not because it is sad, or hopeless, or didn't resonate. I grieved because seeing empathy is sometimes like a distant shimmer to me. To see humane thoughts on paper reminds me of the goodness in the world that I often forget in my daily life. I don't think that I live in a cold, mean world necessarily. It's just that a lot of what I exposed to and expose myself to has the tendency to devalue humanity. To devalue what is beautiful. Our ingenuity, curiosity, love of creation. In the world I put myself in, all we care about is KPIs, metrics, story points. I know that the world is not like this. I remembered going to my landlord last month to tell her about Brud and to pay the fee, and the conversation was so wonderful. There is something about a conversation that is beautiful to me. The simple act of exchanging thoughts and experiences and caring is uplifting, a blessing.
Sometimes, my knowledge of being autistic is a bit of a pandora's box. Because in a sense, I internalized a story that I am so odd, so out there, that I am safest on my own. That to share myself is dangerous, and to not trust empathy when it is directed to me. I am glad I educated myself about my neurodivergence. But it's also something that created a type of boundary. I also have struggled to shed the grief. Because for me it all ties together. COVID, Trump, enshittification, gen ai, autism. I grieve something I cannot touch upon. Perhaps it's the universe, society, humanity, me, my family. All I know is that I am often one happily ended story away or text from tears.
“I do so look forward to tidying here. Sorting. Organizing. It gives me great peace. I wonder, what do you discover when you bring order to things?”
– Travis Baldree (Bookshops & Bonedust)