20^th of March 2020

Dear reader. If there are any.

I don’t feel like writing anything today. But let’s see what happens.

I’ve always thought of myself as an introvert. I need alone time. I need calm and structure and a safe space to retreat to. I need to be able to choose when I socialise and especially have the option of not socialising. But in exploring how good it can be to have the right people around me, how stimulating good conversations can be and how those things help fight my depression, I’ve realised I need people around me a lot more than I ever imagined. I’m still an introvert. But I do like time spend with the right people. And for a long time I’ve been unable to get my social needs met. Because I don’t just miss people, I miss the energy I feel when I talk to the right kind of people. The people who ask me to think and engage and who are interested in deep conversations about deep topics. And I have very few people like that in my life. The ones I do are so important to me.

I am staying home from work of cause. Like most people around me. I thought I’d easily be ok not going to work. But to my surprise I find this isolation to be a little difficult. I didn’t realise just how much I was relying on work to create structure and get input. The commute was a lot and not great. But I always got the kind of input that helps me not sink too far into depression. I learn a lot. I get new experiences. I am allowed to ask lots of questions about a field I know next to nothing about. There Are so many new experiences since I never really know what I’ll work on from day to day, so even when I work on my own I am engaged and learning and being challenged. I am working with my hands and the results of my work are very clear and tangible. And even though my tasks are very varied and my hours flexible, the frames the workplace offers me exactly the kind of structure I need.

And now I am at home. Taking the situation serious, listening to all the advice and taking precautions. I am very aware of the risks. But also feeling isolated and missing work. I actually started of thinking I would be just fine and that it would be nice with some time home, getting things done here. But I am already finding it hard. I hadn’t realised just how much of my weekly input and interactions came from work, and that I now have to fight a bit harder to keep depression at bay.

And it’s excatly because I didn’t have enough contact to people who could fulfil this need for conversation, that I decided I needed to read more. Actually I just wanted to read more in general, but it’s the thing that made me commit to it.
This week I’m rereading “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It’s as good safe choice. I am a bit behind. Staying home and not having anything I absolutely have to do is not good for keeping me motivated and active.
Next week the plan is to reread “The Never Ending Story” by Michael Ende. A lot of rereading going on. But I needed some safe bets after some of the not so great books lately. Also I’ve wanted to reread this one for a while and a friend is going to read it too so we can talk about it. Looking forward to that.
Last weekend I read “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman and it was better than I had expected. I haven’t read any of his other books before, but all I had heard was that he is good and it didn’t disapoint. I just wasn’t sure what to expect of this one and didn’t want to set my expectations too high.

I am not sure I’ve got much more at the moment. But a few words did find their way out and I guess that counts as a letter. I am going to try again next week. But if my mind doesn’t get something interesting to work with I am not sure I’ll have anything to write.

Stay safe and take care of yourself and the people around you. I hope you find good ways to occupy yourself if you are also home in these days. As always thank you for your time. It’s a resource I have great respect for and I find it a great gift when someone offers me theirs.

Jace

14^th of March 2020

Dear whoever is out there reading.

Once again I am struck by the feeling of not having anything to share. I know something will pour out on the page, but I am not sure what. It’s not that I don’t think about it during the week. I think about it a lot. But by the time Friday (and in some cases, like this one, Saturday or Sunday) rolls around I am blank. I have not excuse for not writing yesterday. I just forgot or kept thinking I would do it later. I’m trying out bullet journaling. And I somehow forgets to put it on my to do list for the day and I think that is making it difficult for me to remember.
I don’t have a super creative and artful bullet journal. I am more of an only what is most necessary and wow my handwriting is awful person. I am giving it two months. Maybe three if the two first isn’t a total failure. Then I’ll decide for good if I want to keep going. I really liked all the things I saw online about it, but all the things I saw for a long time was just so artistic and creative and every page looked like a piece of art. And I thought it wasn’t for me. But when I finally read about it I realised it wasn’t about art and creativity at all, and that made me want to give it a go. So far I’m doing all right, but it’s still early. Maybe I’ll write a real update on how I am doing by the end of April.

Along with writing on this blog, reading a book a week and looking for communities I feel like I am doing a lot. I also got myself to two days a week at work and feel really proud of that. It might be over soon. I don’t know how long I can stay there, but I am looking into getting an actual job there, where they pay me a salary and I am employed and stuff like that. I would love that. But hope is still tiny and some of the joy the possibility died down a lot when my mom decided to meddle a little. Not something I feel like I can explain.
She just took part of the narrative around this and around my feelings about this away from me in a context when I had already told her I wasn’t comfortable talking about it. I so need better boundaries with her and my dad. But I am so bad at boundaries (my own mostly). By the time I understand that the boundary was crossed I am usually home again and calling to tell them off is just so much work. I am looking into finding books I can read about boundaries to maybe help me figure out how t o get better at setting them. I’ve finally reach a place where I mostly understand I am allowed to have and set boundaries. The next step of how to do it and how to overcome fear of backlash and how to handle backlash is still a little too far away. But that is also something I am working on. The list keeps growing and my energy and abilities doesn’t. Plus the fact that all though I am fighting my depression (by doing all these things) it’s not magically cured with books and writing and my mental health in general isn’t great. It’s still kind of bad. I think I stopped checking in with it. The status kept being the same. But I am doing the work. Or the work I think I need to do.

I am also working a lot on trauma related to mental health treatments, my parents and those boundaries. The trauma of rape and sexual abuse is not really on the table right now. I don’t have the space to work on it. It also took me a long time to admit, but the trauma of the other stuff, the none-sexual stuff, is for me personally more severe and more stigmatised. I feel like I am allowed to name the rapes as trauma. But my bad experiences with psychologists and psychiatrists are somehow not allowed to be traumas. My undiagnosed autism, my parents not understanding me, the world not understanding me, the demands that I need to be something I am not and that I need to have other reactions and feelings than I do, the constant invalidation and lack of respect or consideration for my experiences and feelings, bordering on gaslighting. Those things are not as clear cut, they are not allowed to be traumas, I am not allowed to have unresolved issues with this. Maybe because there isn’t a clear cut villain.
My parents did the best they could, they were in an impossible situation with my dad’s health problems, my mom trying to hold everything together. Of cause it was easier to tell me to stop being difficult (especially because I understood why they needed me to behave differently and therefore from their perspective it worked to tell me that), than to figure out why I was being difficult.
Some of the psychologists who worked on helping me might have been genuinely nice people who wanted to help make my life better and easier. But getting the wrong diagnosis several times, lack of consent and information, no focus in building trust and my long history of bad experiences made every new encounter with any kind of therapist a new bad experience. A long with a few bad apples who did and said actually harmful things to me. I also might be smart but I am not impervious to confirmation bias. And I spend almost twenty years talking to more different psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses and other therapists than I can count. That is a very big part of my life spend talking to people I didn’t what to talk to, who made me feel worse, that I’ll never get back.

It’s hard to explain exactly how or why these things are traumas. It’s so much easier to point to the sexual abuse and name that the bad thing that happened to me. But I also know it’s not the whole story. I know there are things that feel so much more shameful, so much more scary, things that to me was much more violating than the ways he used my body.

So at the moment I am also spending a lot of time and energy on looking at that. Naming my feelings and what happened and figuring out why it those things hit me so hard. I don’t need a villain to allow my feelings space to exist. I don’t need to name someone else evil to allow myself to acknowledge that my needs were fair and reasonable and that they were not being met. I can allow myself to be angry at my parents and the psychologists and still remember that they did the best they could and that my parents were having very real and very big problems that took precedence. No one knew I was autistic and that if they had known they might have acted differently and I might have gotten actual help and support.

I’ve also been operating with intention vs impact. And am allowing myself to look away from intentions and look more at impact. I’ve been living my whole life feeling like other people intentions were so important, that almost any impact could be excused. But allowing myself to look at impact and not get caught up in intentions allows me to better understand why things hurt, it allows me to acknowledge my own feelings and gives me permission to have boundaries. I don’t have to set myself and my boundaries aside just because someone else have good intentions.

And writing these things brings me back to how I responded to the sexual abuse. I actually let him excuse his abuse with good intentions. He actually told me he hoped sex would help me and that he wasn’t trying to hurt me. And when I thought intentions matters more than impact, I had no real right to be uncomfortable with what he did or be mad at him for it.
I also felt safe with him. I felt protected by him. Not from him, but from something else. From myself perhaps. Or maybe from all the other traumas I my life. Sometimes I think about how messed up a person’s life has to be for them to experience an abusive person who rapes them as the safest place they have ever known. And even now it’s easier to name him the villain, it safer to name his actions trauma, than to name all the rest that hurts inside me as trauma. I’m not saying what he did is ok. I am not saying what he did isn’t serious and bad. I’m just saying with him I know I am allowed to be in pain and not ok with what happened. And I don’t have that with the rest.

And that is what I am working on. Not because I want to name everything a trauma. But because I want the shame and fear and pain to have an outlet. So I will one day be rid of it. And to get that I need to look at it and name it and create space to feel and understand it. That way I think maybe one day I’ll no longer have shame and fear and pain about it. I’ll always have been shaped by it, but I won’t always be hurting and it won’t always mess up my present and my future. I’ll be able to leave what happened in the past. The open wounds will heal and the scars will be beautiful reminders to be kind to others and meet them with understanding and care and curiosity instead of fear and judgement. And they’ll remind me to be aware of both intentions and impacts. Both in others and in my own actions.

In doing this work I recently had an amazing conversation with a friend who listened and acknowledged and told me my feelings made sense. Just that. What I feel makes sense. She would feel the same if she had my experiences. I was so afraid of sounding mad, proper insane, delusional. And here she was. Just taking in what I said and telling me that I wasn’t delusional. I was having a very real and reasonable reaction to something that I couldn’t understand and was trying to protect myself from something that felt dangerous. She didn’t try to fix me or tell me I was wrong. She asked questions in order to try and understand me and then she imagined what I was going through and told me I made sense. Not logical sense, not “what you are telling me is the objective truth” sense. But sense in the way that my reactions and feelings were perfectly clear and reasonable in the context I was in and with the information I had.
Never underestimate the power of doing what she did. It was like this shameful secret of my reactions and feelings no longer had to be shameful. I didn’t have to hide them. She didn’t think less of me and she didn’t believe I was insane because of what I told her. And what a gift that is to give me. I am not done working on the thing I talked to her about. But I am in a much better place to do it. There is less shame, less worry, less fear. And now she knows me better and can understand me better. And that opens up a lot in the communication between us. A new trust has been build. I know I can return to her and feel safe that she will try to understand me and see my perspective, before she introduces me to a new perspective on what I work on. And that, I think, is the key. To trust and understanding and growth.

I am grateful to have such a friend. I am grateful that people like her exist. And I am inspired to keep trying to meet people like that. It might seem like a high standard to set, but a worthy one.

Thank you for your time.

Jace

7^th of March 2020

Dear reader

I am not sure what to write today. This week as been hard and exhausting and I am just too tired.

My commitment to spending time with people who have more time and energy for me, is both good and bad. I am seeing people more and that is nice. But I am seeing people who drain me and who are more likely to me feel empty than like my needs are met. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I am just unsure what the right cause of action is.

I also said yes to this fantasy book club and the first book we had to read was so bad I barely made it through it. I have no desire to read about a male protagonist with no personality who spends an entire book looking with both longing and lust at a woman who spends the story telling him she’s not interested and him trying to figure out how many chivalry points it takes to get her to love him back. Not a single character had personality and the love interest was every “I’m not like other girls”-trope thrown together with a bit of damsel in distress and only seeing her through the eyes of a man who only sees her as an object he can win and not as a person. The plot was thin, the language boring and there were so many inaccuracies that I just got frustrated.

I did spend 7 days not reading at all. So reading this one was a good thing. And it was the 12^th book of the year, so I am not behind. But I am hoping I get to only read better things this year. No, actually, it can only get better, because this was definitely as low as it’s gonna get. I so hope the rest of this book club agree with me about this book. Or it might e a very short attempt at joining a book club. But if that’s the case I’m ok with that. I was hoping to spend energy both reading and being more social/look for communities I could join. But doing those two things separately is probably more my thing anyway.

I had also looked into joining a new autism group for teenage girls with autism, to get back to doing volunteer work with kids. But my first meeting with them left me feeling unsure and with a weird feeling about the whole thing. I was told they would write back to me the next day and felt almost relieved when I didn’t hear from them again. But last week I got an email about a new meeting and I honestly don’t know if I should go or not. I want community. I want to make a difference. But the weird feeling from that meeting makes me unsure if this is the place to do that.

And lastly I was invited to join a group at my local church, where I used to volunteer with kids and teenagers. This is a social group for adults and it feels too religious for me. Too much talk of all the answers being in the bible. I don’t like that. And the group leader, a very kind and caring woman, keeps trying to sell me this group as being something it isn’t. I think in part because we are very different people with very different understandings of the words and contexts we are talking about, and in part because she really wants me to join this group. And it’s such a nice group of people. Everyone seems so nice and welcoming and like a good community. And I need community and people and a place to belong. But the times I’ve been there I just feel so out of place and like I’m in the wrong room. And then the bible is brought up and everything feels even worse.

And that is part due to the fact that I have no desire to be religious or only find answers in one book. Another reason is that I recently discovered I lost faith. My faith was never really defined, as anything. I grew up chosing to go to church. I found a place I was welcome and being an autistic person who didn’t know why I felt so different, having people embrace me and make me welcome was important. And back then it was never about faith or religion. I learned some bible stories, but I felt free to question and disbelieve and never felt like anything was forced upon me. This group feels different. The way they talk about the bible and answers and all that makes me so comfortable.

I guess faith used to just be in some higher power, something I couldn’t name or describe, but just something more. And that was enough for a long time. I called this thing I believed in God because the word was as good as any word, and it was a word I grew up with. But I didn’t think of myself as a Christian or religious. I prayed sometimes and it used to be helpful. And then the unjustness of the world, the cruelty of what happens, the inequality, all of that was something I finally looked more into. I always felt it, like a splinter in my mind, but I had just enough privileged to not look at it all the time. But I have been actively looking to understand the world better and the cruelty of it hit me so hard. And I spend a few years being mad at God. Trying to be ok being in this state, so sure my faith would help me through to some new state after that. And instead I one day realised I wasn’t angry any more. The entire idea seem foolish because there was nothing to be mad at.

That feels so sad. A part of me is grieving, a part of me is empty. I do not think my journey with faith is over. I don’t presume this is the final state of things. But it’s my current state. And it might last forever and it might not. All I know is that I have to allow myself to stop and be inside the things I feel and experience and think. If I am always looking at the bigger picture, always looking to have a greater perspective, I lose what I am feeling and experiencing right now. And I need to be better at living in my life and not just thinking about my life. I have to get better at stopping myself from thinking ten steps ahead and allowing myself to live in this step. And in this step faith is dead. And I am sad. Because if I cannot believe in God, there is no God to love me, and then I am not loved.

Somehow love is a theme for me right now. How disconnected I feel from love. How I try to act from a place of love and with acts of love. And how I know some people love me, but their love doesn’t reaches me and their love feels like it’s about them and what they want and need and not about me. And that makes me feel very divorced from their love. Like I have nothing to do with it. Like my needs, my love language, my feelings and experiences are unimportant to their love, because their love is all about what they feel and not about what I am receiving. That makes me think very hard about how I act and speak when I want to give love, because the love I want to give is not about me. It’s about the one receiving it. To me the other person receiving the love is more important than what I feel. By which I am not trying to say my way is better, only that my way is my way, and that I am choosing it in part because of the things that aren’t working for me in the choices of people around me.

I am loved. But I do not feel loved. I am cared about, but feel like no one cares. I have people who want the best for me, but I feel so lonely. I am spending time with people who leave me drained because I cannot bear my own company or my own thoughts any longer. And am keeping busy because I know if I stop, even for a moment the world will crash and burn again. I am not better. My depression not cured, my traumas not healed, my autism not understood, my boundaries are still not up. And the world asks me to carry on and acknowledge all the good that is happening. And I do. I just can’t do that and be in my own body and my own mind or my own life without breaking. Because all the good doesn’t erase all the bad and the more I am only allowed to acknowledge the good, the more the bad weighs on my shoulders. The more alone I feel. The more life has no meaning and death feels like the only honesty left.

I am trying so hard to do my part. To not just be victim of my own mental health. I am trying so hard to pull myself out of all the darkness. But I carry the darkness with me. And there is no room for what I am in the world. There is no room for the things inside me. The parts that hurt. I want to rip them out, with roots and all. And the world tells me I want the impossible. I need space for what I feel, I need someone to look at it with me, someone who’ll be a mirror and help me adjust my thoughts, feelings and experiences of what my pain is.
There is so much I can do myself. And I do it. I promise. I do all the hard work. But there is only so much I can do myself. And even when I do all of it, there are still parts of it I need another human being help me with. That was the hardest thing for me to accept and to allow to be true. I cannot overstate how big getting there was for me. I think we all need a hand to hold through our lives sometimes. I just can’t seem to find a person who can be there for me. And that makes me feel lonely and deeply unworthy of love. I was told last summer that I think I am fantastic. I felt very called out, but had to admit it’s true. I do believe I have a lot of good qualities. My intelligence and kindness, my way of looking at the world, which mostly consist of a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to learn. I pretty awesome. I have so much good I want to give to the world. But I do not believe I deserve love or that I should be loved. And I certainly don’t feel loved. Loved is probably the most empty thing I hear people tell me I am.

I happen to know one person has been reading along. A person who expresses love for me. A person with faith and with whom I have previously talked about God. To this person I need to say that I don’t need any talk of God for now. If that is the way I am supposed to go, I’ll get there when  I’m ready. That is not now. I can just hear you tell that even if I cannot believe in God I am still loved by him. But that isn’t helpful right now. Right now I need to find my own way in this. And it’ll take a long time, because I think I have a long way to go, and going is slow. Give me time to find out where I am heading. Give me space to find out what might be helpful.
I also want to say that I know this one is hard for you to read. But if I have to think of that I cannot write, so I have to not care. This is my blog, my space, my letters. And I need to allow myself to name what is happening. I need to write. I need to dig all this out and allow myself to look at it. Even when it’s ugly and not the whole truth. And I am sorry this one is hard for you. I am sorry you might be hurt or sad. But I am not going to censor myself even when I know you are reading. And we agreed I shouldn’t. I do hear the love you express for me. I am trying to receive it. And I am failing at that right now. Don’t think who you are or what you do aren’t enough or right or unappreciated. I am just a messed up person trying to navigate a lot of stuff, including a history that doesn’t make it easy to receive what you offer me. I don’t walk around taking other peoples words or actions personally. My intuition tells me it’s only about themselves. And therefore I always feel weird telling other people not to take what I do or say or feel personally, because for me that is a given. But I understand that not everyone sees the world the way I do, so even though I feel weird saying this, please know that me feeling unloved and lonely and all that is just about me. I know there is love out there, but right now I am not capable of receiving it. And just writing this brings be back to bigger picture and perspective and all that, so I’m going to stop myself there.

It’s good to remember big pictures, but I am beginning to understand that I cannot live in the big picture. I miss all the details and all the nuance and most of all I miss right now. I am so good at living in the meta where I think and talk about my life and my thoughts and my experiences and forget to actually be in them. I am dedicating energy to be in them.

It’s only been a few months, but I do feel like I am doing a lot with this year of being more intentional and having a few goals. I wish you dear reader the best with your goals.

I think that’ll be all for today. To whoever is reading out there, take good care of yourself. Thank you for your time.

Jace

29^th of February 2020

Hi there.

So I was a day late. But I have a good reason. I was celebrating hopes return yesterday. Good company, good conversations and sushi. I even got a small present. But the return of hope is worth celebrating. Even if I still feel wary and uncertain about whether hope will last or not. It feels fragile and small and like it’s still taking root. But it’s there. In my chest. Alive and growing.

Last week, just before I left work, I talked to someone who informed me that a job, a real job, might be possible for me where I work now. Part time, but with the necessary accommodations and with a salary I can live on. Not lots of money, but enough. It’ll still be almost twice what I have now and I won’t be stuck in this in between place where my situation is always uncertain and where I get money from the government because I don’t have a job and everyone knows it’s temporary but no one knows how to help me move on to a job or education. It would be so much more stable for me. So much better. A lot of things would stop being uncertain. I would have an income. I would have work to get up to and know what my life looks like (work and finance wise) in six months. I haven’t had that ever.

The depression didn’t magic itself away. But part of the heavy cloud of darkness, and lack of a future and the complete hopelessness lifted. I felt lighter and happier and more like a real person again. I’ve felt less depressed. Not free of depression. Just less depressed. But there is nothing just about that. That is a big deal to me. The hopelessness has lasted two whole years. I stopped believing in anything resembling a future, and any conversation about any kind of future had me back in bed crying and thinking about suicide. Because I believed there was no future. And now there is the possibility of a future. It’s not like an open door. It’s more like light from a keyhole, promising a door is somewhere nearby. There is no guarantee this door is for me, that I’ll find it, that it will be opened for me. But after years in darkness with no way forward… I don’t even know what words to chose. I’ve been stumbling around for so long, with no direction and no goals. That light gives me something to head toward. All my stubbornness and fight, ambition and drive now has somewhere to go.

I don’t want to think about what the loss of this hope would do to me. I am trying to prepare for it. What if there is no door. What if it’s locked and I won’t be allowed through. So much could still go wrong. This hope feels too fragile. Or maybe I am too fragile. Would I survive losing this hope? Would I break if it doesn’t pan out? Maybe. There is a really good chance that would hit me hard and that I might not be able to come back from that. And I try to use the newfound energy to look for more options and be open to more options.

The greatest part of this is that it supports my own theory of my depression. I am not depressed because of some chemical imbalance in my brain. I am depressed because I am stuck in a bad situation and my brain is reacting very naturally. Telling me something is wrong. Medication cannot fix not having a future or being disconnected from people. What I needed was a future. And I couldn’t give myself that. But someone else could and they did and I feel so much better.
I am so tired of the way depression is approached by doctors and my family and systems that doesn’t understand this exact thing. Last year I read “Lost Connections” by Johann Hari and that is the first time I felt understood and felt like someone else saw depression the same way I see it. It’s a good book, easy to read and so worth taking a look at if anyone is reading along and wants to know more about depression and a different approach to it.

I haven’t been reading so much this week. Which is kind of ok, but not really. I’ve read more than one book a week the last 3 weeks. So I’m not behind on schedule. But in a few weeks I am meating up with a newly started local fantasy book club and I need to read a specific book for that. But I find myself rebelling against the fact that someone chose a book for me. It’s probably not a bad book. It’ll be easily read. I just find myself refusing to start reading it. Hopefully I might begin tonight or tomorrow. Or I might read something else first to get myself reading again. I am just a little sad an disappointed that my really good reading streak broke. I am also sure that I’ll get back to reading soon and that this won’t destroy my “read a book a week” project.

I don’t think I have more to write today. I want to write more, but I am having a slow, wrapped in blankets, good movies, kind of day. And digging into anything more would require feeling something deeper. And today that is not where I am. Any other day I love to dig into all the deeper stuff. But today I am going to just exist in the nice warm feeling yesterdays celebration gave me. And that is enough for me.

If there is anyone reading, I wish you good happy times, lots of things worth celebrating and someone who will celebrate with you in whatever way makes you happy. I hope that someone will give you hope when you need it most and I thank you for giving me a little of your time and attention. I know it’s a limited resource and I feel privileged to receive some of it. Take good care of yourself.

Jace.

And hope did what hope does. It finds a way back, it returns, it lives again. Big words only hours after the resurrection. So unexpected and out of nowhere. Yet here it is. I’ll try to protect it and nurture it. The way you protect a candle flame in the wind, so worried it’ll just blow out again.

21^st of February 2020

Hi there.

I do not have anything to say about this unexpected introduction. I am afraid of holding too much of it to the light. I am too scared of what will happen to me if this doesn’t find a way to grow into something reliable. So for now no more will shared here about it. I’ll let whoever reads this know what happens when I am ready.

I’ve been trying to embrace my intuition lately. Without knowing anything about how to do that or what exactly it is I am trying to do. But I guess the thing I have been doing is listening to the things inside me that I do not know where comes from. The things that do not feel like things I myself have created or called forward. And there is the strangest thought in my head that feels like that thought of thing. Except I do not think it can be. The thought itself feels like something that is true and real and not something I think because I want it to be true. It feels like it was given to me. Which probably makes no sense to say. But the thing about this thought is that when I look at it it doesn’t feel like something that would be given to me.
Context: most of my friends are having a really, really hard time. To the degree that I genuinely worry if some of them will survive. And others are in and out of bad times and not really an actual part of my life (even thought I do hold a permanent space for them) because they need to take care of themselves. I care about these people. I want to help them. And I know I have an saviour complex that sometimes like to take over. I am working on that. And by working on that I mean I am actively trying to minimise the time and energy I spend trying to save other people. I have actively taken a step away from that and am more aware than ever of the amount of emotional labour I do.
And then this thought came. And it feels like the things I try to listen to in my intuition. And it doesn’t feel like the saviour complex rearing its head. It feels true and real and beautiful and right. And all it says is “I have to guide them out”.

In some ways (with a lot of my friends, not all of them) I am two steps ahead. Not in every way, not at every point. But in finding the way out, in finding the way to a better way of living, that doesn’t hurt so much, that allows us to breath. There I sometimes find myself two steps ahead. And I was given those two steps (or took them) very early in life. It’s like I was given a gift of being who I am, which in my case includes being someone who will not compromise who I am or try to be someone else. And that gave me those two steps. Or gave me the ability to take them.

Sometimes I feel like I see the world in a way no one else does. Which is a stupid thing to feel, because no two people see the world exactly the same. But it’s like the lens I see the world through is so different from the ones the people around me have. I don’t know if it’s the autism, it doesn’t seem like just an autism thing. But I see things, sense things, feel things differently.
It’s like I don’t see the thing in front of me but the thing right behind it. As in I see intentions and causes instead of what is happening. And I don’t know if I always did or if I learned it. But I know that is how I see it. It has taken me a long time to understand that other people do not see the world like this. Or see people like this. I think it’s mostly people I refer to in this instance. I don’t feel like I have the words to describe this at all.
My best example of this is that when someone is angry I don’t really see their aggression or their rage. I don’t think of it as an attack. Not even if it’s directed at me. I only see the hurt and pain or fear behind the anger. It’s like the anger isn’t even there. And I still remember my confusion and surprise when I discovered that other people don’t respond to other peoples’ anger the way I do. They feel attacked and focus on the aggression. But all I see is what is behind it.

I don’t really know what I want to say with any of this. The words pouring out through my fingers are a surprise to me. Both the subject matter and the ease with which they flow. All I know is that that thought has been stuck in my mind, and I do not know if I should trust it. It feels like something I should trust. But it sounds like something my saviour complex would say. If it wasn’t for that deep and overwhelming feeling that this comes from somewhere else I would just have rejected it. But I can’t do that. Not with that feeling.

I have no conclusion. No anything really. I just needed to write something today and these were the words wanting to leave me. I do not expect that I am making sense and today that is ok.

I hope whoever and wherever you are that you are ok. Whether things makes sense or not. Learning to be ok in all the things that doesn’t make sense is really difficult. For me today is just that kind of day. I had a really good day at work. That might just be the thing that makes the difference. I wish good things for you and thank you for your time.

Jace.

14^th of February 2020

Dear no one or anyone or whoever is out there.

There is a lot of loneliness and emptiness in my life right now. My feelings alternate between a deep feeling of meaninglessness and the question “How do I save the people in my life who are not okay?” as if I do have a purpose, and that purpose is helping the people I care about get better. I am trying to keep my saviour complex under control, but the utter meaninglessness of everything makes it flare up and gives logic to its reasoning. I try to ask if these people, their lives, their pain and their healing are really my responsibility, and the only answer I find in myself is “of cause, that I why I am here.”And by here I mean alive. Like finding a way to help guide these people out of their darkness is the only reason I could possibly have for being and staying alive. I am that desperate for purpose and meaning.

My feelings of self worth and being allowed to be in this world are at a low I haven’t seen in a while. I so feel that I can only achieve worth and permission to exist if I earn it. And a part of me sees a truth in this, that my lying mind is so willing to abuse. Maybe because that is all there is right now. There is no future, there is no hope, there is nothing I believe in or look forward to, there is only the emptiness of now and the desperate need to make the world a little less painful and empty for the people I care about. And so many of the people I care about are in bad places right now. And their pain overwhelms me, and yet my answer to these things have always been to ask, “so what do I do about it”. The pain I see and feel in the world are calls to action, and yet I feel so small and so powerless against a world of pain, injustice and suffering. I want to fight. I want to act. I want to make it better. I just do not know where to start or what to do. Why was I given this urge to care and act and heal, to fight and give and face all the things that hurt if I am not meant to do something with it? I might be weak and powerless and small, but I am also a kind of resilient and headstrong and so incredibly stubborn. The odds are not going to stop me. When I am told the world just isn’t fair, my instinct is to ask how we make it fair. When things are not okay I ask how do we change that or how do I change that. I think this way both about my own pain and about the pain I see around me. It took me a long time to realise just how unusual a way of thinking that is.

Of my friends four out of six are currently not doing well and the other two are working their way away from their own dark places. That is a lot. Sometimes it feels like everything inside me has been replaced with worry, and there is nothing I can do. I so want to help and at the same time I am so worried about being too much if I reach out. And I know that their struggles aren’t mine and that there isn’t much I can do. I know it’s the emptiness and loneliness in my life making me desperate to make sure no one else has to feel that. But maybe I just need to sit with my loneliness and emptiness and stop thinking about how to make a difference for anyone else. It’s just that there isn’t any more to do about my life than I already do. The emptiness kills me. Slowly. But still it’s killing me. Death crept its way back into my mind, suicide became the only option again, and I have not believed in a future for so long I cannot remember the last time I could stand the thought of what comes next. I don’t meet that kind of thoughts with acceptance and open arms. To my surprise I never really did. I always thought I did, but now I see just how much I have always met those things with the same kind of “how do I fight this” attitude as any other kind of pain. It’s just that there are no more weapons, no more resources, no more ways out. And yes I can survive on stubbornness and patience and spite. But I am so tired of surviving. So tired of not being alive in a deep and meaningful way.

I‘ve been thinking about just that lately. The being alive and having meaning and purpose part. I am also working a lot with old trauma around my parents. So naturally I finally managed to out words on the way I ask for purpose and meaning and feeling alive, and how my mom answer is that I need to do the dishes every day and vacuum clean and tidy up my home. She doesn’t see the disconnect. And honestly it took me a while to put the right words together to understand just why her answer was so painful to me. She doesn’t care if I am alive, if my life has meaning and purpose. She cares if I clean and cook and takes care of all the practical stuff, and I fail at that so she things that must be the problem. To me it’s the other way around. I fail at dishes and laundry and vacuum cleaning because life has no meaning and I have no purpose and surviving like a little machine isn’t enough for me. It feels too small and too empty, and I don’t want empty or small. I want big and adventurous and calm and exciting and full of all the emotions and experiences. She wants clean and tidy, and I am a mess in every way. I’ll never fit into any of her expectations of me.

I almost wrote I don’t fit into any of her boxes. Which is an unexpected sentence bringing unexpected memories and feelings. When I was first sent to see all those therapists my mom told me the reason the psychologists didn’t like me was because I didn’t fit into any of the books or boxes they believed children should fit into. She always talked like she was proud of who I am and of my choice to just be me, and yet she always acted like I did something wrong by not conforming. I never realised (till just now) how much she wanted and still wants me to conform to her boxes and her idea, even when she knows that she is supposed to tell me I am good enough for who I am. I am not. Not to her. Not to my dad. I am just not. And I am digging a lot into that at the moment with all the grieving, crying, sadness, hurt and sometimes anger that that entails. I feel very unloved. I am probably not as unloved as I feel. But I feel it anyway. And I am not in the mood to convince myself of anything else at the moment. I am always too much in a hurry to find next step. Right now I need to be here, in this step, in this part of the journey, in this grief and sadness. It’s all part of the process, Trying to skip ahead will not help me get there. It’ll only mean I’ll have to go back to this step over and over again. And 5 and a half year ago (tomorrow) I took a decision to get better. Real better. The kind of better that takes a long time and hurts a lot to get to. The kind that lasts and works. And so I need to feel this step, before moving on to the next. I know it and I try. But wow this step hurts.

I think this is it for today. Writing was difficult and painful today. As if the words didn’t want to leave my mind. My body is full of shame these days. There are only so many fights I can fight at a time. I’m not sure which ones I am leaving behind at the moment. All I know is I am not leaving any of the people I care about behind, I am here for them and I will keep doing what I can for them. And as for my journey and process, it’s long. It’s going to take years and years and years before I am something I’ll call done and something I’ll consider certain. I am allowed as many steps and detours as I need. And there is time enough for all my stubbornness to let me get stuck somewhere on a step. I’ve spent so much of my life in a hurry, to get better, to get out of the pain. People have always told me to look ahead and try to be open for the possibility of change and of other perspectives. I am finding so much power and empowerment in saying no to that, in letting myself be at this exact step and not looking at the next one till I am ready. And right now that means grieving and feeling unloved and being sad, before being open to the idea that maybe I am not unloved,  maybe the love just gets lost in translation, since no one in my life speaks my love language.

Thank you for your time. I hope where ever and whoever you are that you are in a better place than me. And if not just know you are not alone and that I don’t want you to be left behind either. Even if I don’t know who you are, I know that.

Jace.

8^th of February 2020

Dear reader.

I finished with “His Dark Materials”. The books, not the TV-show. I haven’t had the heart to watch it. What if they changed something? What if that actor isn’t what I pictured that character like? What if something feels wrong or isn’t like I imagined it? I know they changed the design of the alethiometer. I am sure there isn’t any actress in the world who would be Lyra to me. And I love these books so much. I don’t want to watch any adaption (except maybe the theatre production). I didn’t like the movie. I don’t think I’ll like the TV-show. And that has nothing to do with the TV-show. It’s because it’s an adaptation of my favourite book series and I am so sensitive and protective of them that nothing will really be good enough for me. I hated Disney’s Narnia movies too. They didn’t feel like Narnia and that broke my heart.
I am going to watch this show eventually. I actually like several casting choices and the fact that they are going to try this hard to make the books into a show is a good thing. The books might get a larger audience and they deserve that. I am just going to have to reconcile that this show will exist and that it might be really good objectively, but that I will never be objective when it comes to it and that I will always love the books to much to accept anything a TV-show based on these books could be. Because a TV-show is something very different, and a movie is something very different. And it will never be the book in movie format, but an adaptation. That is okay. And I am allowed to have feelings about it, I am allowed to not like it for reasons that are purely subjective and have nothing to do with the quality of the show. I just have to be aware that that is what I am doing and of the good things that this show will also do.

I finally finished “The Amber Spyglass” and it was just as wonderful and emotional and heartbreaking as always. I was a few days late with it but I wasn’t worried, because I read “Lyra’s Oxford” and “Once upon a time in the North” too, and they were short books that only took a few hours each. So technically I am one book ahead of schedule. But that is nice. What is a little less nice is leaving this world behind and reading new things. I love this world. But there are no more books for now.

So I guess now is the time if I wanted to write about dæmons. In these books, in the world Lyra lives in, people have their soul outside their bodies and it is shaped like an animal. They can touch it and talk to it. And everyone else can see it and talk to it too. Touching another person’s dæmon is very, very wrong, but peoples dæmons can touch each other. When you are a child dæmons change shape. They can be anything and be something else the next moment. But they often have favourite shapes or will change into something useful to the person. Like being an owl if they need to see something in the dark or make themselves big and scary if they feel like protecting their human. Once a person reaches puberty the dæmon will settle and have only one form for the rest of that person’s life. And what your dæmon settles as will tell you something about yourself and in the same way you can learn something about other people by what kind of dæmon they have.

Dæmons are not a separate being, they are one with the human. They are the soul. But they do have their thoughts and feelings and are not always agreeing with the human. It is difficult to explain but it makes so much sense in the book. They are almost always the opposite gender from the human. So Lyra (the main character ) is a girl and her dæmon is male and his name is Pantalaimon.

I’ve been a little obsessed with the concept of dæmons. Some people care deeply about their Hogwarts Houses or their patronus, but for me it’s dæmons. Maybe it’s the therapy and the constant need to look inside myself and work with what is happening there. I can’t help to wonder how different that process would be if I had my dæmon. What would he be like? What shape would he take? What would his name be and what is the sound of his voice? What would he tell me when I am depressed or lonely? How would he comfort me and how would I comfort him? What colour does his eyes have? How much wisdom could I learn from him and hoe much easier would it be to learn to love myself with his help? I have no answers but the questions keep being there. I try to imagine him sometimes. I think I am too worried that the shape I imagine for him is wishful thinking to tell the internet about it. But I do have a shape in mind. I cannot find his name, though sometimes it feels like it’s right in the tip of my tongue. But it always disappears right before I catch it.

I don’t know why this idea speaks so much to me, but it does. It has always made so much sense. As if all I had to do was reach out my hand and my dæmon would be there, because it wasn’t a thing invented in a book, but a real thing and our world just forgot how to see them. And I know that is not the case. But I cannot stop thinking about this concept and how it might help to have a dæmon.

The first book has this quote about dæmons and the forms they might take:

“There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.”

And I guess that is part of why I am worried my thoughts of what mine might have been is just wishful thinking. I have several idea that I like, but one I keep returning to. I honestly cannot imagine that I would not love whatever his form is. And I am curious about what I would learn about myself from his form. Because I know I can wish for anything, but the dæmon isn’t about what you wish for. And that is also why it’s not the same as a patronus. A patronus is joy and happiness, it is your happiest memory taking form. A dæmon is all of you, all your good sides and your bad sides, it shapes by the things you do and say and think. It tells you who you are. The patronus tells you about your happiness, which I guess is why several of the patronuses in the books are related to romantic love.

I am not sure I have more to write about dæmons. Not now anyway. But I am a little glad I finally managed to write something about these thing which I have been thinking about for most of my life now. And thought Dust is a concept that I have also thought and been shaped by I do not feel like writing about it at the moment.

Maybe this is it for today. I have no idea what book I will read next week. I have so many I want to read and a few I feel I should read. A lot is happening now. I am doing a lot of emotional work, trying to get a better understanding of my own traumas. It’s hard and I am sad a lot. I am also not really giving that sadness enough time and space, but hurrying a little toward the conclusion and the lesson and what comes next.

Thank you for your time and your attention. Thank you for sticking with me. I sometimes feel like I make no sense. But I write and that is what is important.

Jace

4^th of February 2020

Hi.

I’m just here with a short extra letter, that more than most of my letters really embodies what writing to here means.

Autopilot as been on a lot lately. As in the last 3 months.

The last week or so has been weird. It’s like I am fine, but I know I am not. I just can’t feel it- I just can’t reach and act on it. It’s like I have given up on all the things that matter and that fine is all I have. And fine today is better than in pain today. But at the same time, some part of me is screaming, some part of me doesn’t care about today, because I was supposed to have a life ahead of me, and I am not okay with letting that die. But there is no hope. There is no future. There is no life ahead of me. There is only know and if now is fine autopilot is happy to take over and function for me. Guess that’s the thing. More than feeling fine (because I don’t feel) I am functioning. And functioning is a good sign to everyone that things are fine and so I think they are fine. But they are not. I know they are not. The state of things are killing me, and if I don’t snap out of functioning I’ll never be real or alive or here again. I’ll just die, when the pain comes back.

I think I have been doing a thing I used to do as a kid. Not consciously but maybe as an old reflex, as an old habit I thought I had lost. I used to try and keep my mental state at this place where I was completely numb. That way I could function. I wouldn’t be a person, just a thing. But I would function. And everyone would be happy with me. My mom always needed help with everything around the house. Laundry, dishes, stuff like that. And there was homework and school. And if I didn ’t feel anything I would just do all those things and not be a problem. I would just sit down and do my homework after school. I would automatically help my mom when she needed it. I felt more machine than alive. I stopped being a person and became a thing. Sometimes I could find and keep myself at that exact level for a few weeks. But I would usually fall a little too close to feeling bad again, and then something would have to give. Helping mom or homework. My mom needed help and got mad if I didn’t just help her automatically, so usually it would be homework. I don’t know why housework is so important to my mom, but I think the importance it has to her is why I hate it so much and why I cannot find it important at all. If I got worse, which I almost always did, I wouldn’t be able to do either homework or help mom. And I would have a hard time with school My stomach would hurt and my parents would tell me I was making it up so I wouldn’t have to go to school. But I didn’t think I was making it up. They weren’t really mad at me for it. Maybe a little sometimes. But more often it would dismissed with a small laugh or smile. Like they were thinking “This again? Really? I thought we went over this.”
My mom always told me she wanted me to be happy. That my happiness was important. But that was just words. The moment I was happy I was distracted by whatever made me happy and I forgot to help her. I didn’t mean to forget to help her, but I did. Because something else felt important to me. And she would get mad. And homework wasn’t fun if there was something else that caught my attention. So the only way to do all the right things and be what others needed of me was to feel absolutely nothing and want absolutely nothing and need nothing. And then I wasn’t really a person. I was just a thing. Just a thing doing what I was told to do. I never thought of it like that of cause. I just thought of it as the only state in which I functioned. Like the rest of the time I had too many broken parts, too many feelings, too many needs. It was better for everyone if I wasn’t those things and instead just functioned. And I tried so hard for years and years to just stay at functioning. But it was a hard setting to find and I often just missed the right level and ended up in pain or sad instead of numb.

My mom used to hug me and tell me I was ahead of everyone. Not right now but in the long run. Because of my dedication to homework and school. Because of my intelligence and niceness. I think I am finally understanding that that was a lie. Not an intentional one of cause. I didn’t even know I had bought the lie. I didn’t know I cared. But I did. And somehow that lie just breaks my heart at the moment. I wish we had all known about my autism back then. Then that kind of lies wouldn’t have been needed. My social difficulties would have made sense. I would have made sense. And no one would have felt the need to tell me it would all be okay later when my peers all caught up to the idea of taking school seriously. Maybe I wouldn’t have expected things to get better. Then again, if I hadn’t expected things to get better I would have killed myself. But maybe with the autism diagnosis things would have been a little better. Enough better that I didn’t need lies about the future. I don’t expect it would have made everything a lot better, but a little would have been nice.

I’m thinking about the man who raped me. He was a part of my life for almost seven years and the sexual abuse happen through most of that time. He made me feel like a thing too. With him it was also better to not be a person. At least during those things. And it was so easy to just disappear and stop being a person. It was like I could make myself not exist. The biggest conflict, the biggest problem was that he didn’t want me to disappear. He wanted me present. He wanted me to participate and like it and have thoughts and feelings about it. But all I could think and feel was disgust and how much I didn’t want this. But that answer was unacceptable to him. And I could never give him what he was really asking for. Because I could never really like it, never be present, never be a person when those things happened. I think I just didn’t understand why he couldn’t just accept that I wasn’t that kind of person. All I could do was stop being there and let myself be nothing but a thing. And he tried so hard to change me, to get me to be what he wanted.

And as I write this I realise that has always been my response to people trying to change me. I stop being there. I stop being present and real and here. I become an empty thing they can ask things of. But under that, hidden inside, somewhere, I am still a person. Unchanged. My quiet defiance. Refusing to be what I am asked to be, refusing to change what I am asked to change. Making myself an object to survive the situation

And that is why I am afraid of my current autopilot. Why I am not grateful when I function. I am scared because it makes me feel unreal, unalive, not here. It’s like I am returning to a pattern I hate and that I know do not help me. And recently I have twice been told it might be good not to feel all time. But that is not what I feel is happening, but my voice was too lost for me to tell them that. It’s not a break from felling. It’s being a passenger in my own life, while autopilot drives me in the wrong direction. I don’t need to flee the pain. I need the pain to tell me what is happening, where I am, if things are getting better or worse. I need hope and a future. And autopilot is the opposite of that.

I want to be alive, to feel real, to find my way here. I spent too much of my life felling like I wasn’t real. Like I wasn’t a person. Like maybe I was a ghost, walking through the world but not really here, not really present, with no power to affect anything. And somehow it’s like my voice is failing again, like it’s at a risk of getting lost. I feel so disconnected to the world and to people. And all the systems I meet makes me feel unwelcome in the world. Not the people, just the systems that don’t know what to do with me and makes me feel like I have no value.

Hope died a long time ago. I need it back, alive and well. And I am so desperately looking for it, for ways to revive it, for truth and meaning and connection. For a future. And autopilot has no setting for that, no one has programmed it to know what those things are.

I feel like I should write more about the man who raped me. About the ways in which he made me feel like I was real and not a ghost. But honestly I can’t do that to myself right now. But I will say he did manage those things. And that is part of why he is so on my mind at the moment. I don’t miss him. But I do miss some of the things he did for me, some of the needs he fulfilled and some of the ways he made me feel. Mostly that he made me feel like I was real and like I mattered. And I didn’t know those feelings before him. It’s been difficult to separate him from the things I miss. But I am getting better at it. There are kinds of progress.

I’ll try to write again as scheduled on Friday. If I fail I’ll call this this week’s letter. But I’ll try to write something.

Jace

31^st of January 2020

Dear no one.

I am beginning to feel silly writing to you. But I am committed to the writing a little every week, even if it feels stupid and meaningless. It’s not about the letters. It’s about writing and creating a habit and dedicating time and attention to that regularly. It’s not about who is on the other side of this screen. It’s about keeping a promise to myself.

Another thing I have decided to be more dedicated to is how I spend my attention. I have uninstalled games and apps from my phone. I am reading. Maybe I’ll add more walks. But the hours disappearing into scrolling through social media or playing a game I don’t actually like on my phone, just for the dopamine hits have to stop. The last couple of days have been difficult. Mostly because I just uninstalled an app that took way too much of my attention. But I have decided to give it a month without this app on my phone and see what happens. I can still do all the social media scrolling on my computer, but since I don’t want to and since it requires me to open the computer and connect to the internet and open the page, I just don’t do it without a real reason. I do feel restless, I do pick up my phone over and over without thinking about it and my fingers move to find the games and apps I used to have. And there is an emptiness when I am forced to sit without the distraction. But maybe I can figure out exactly I am distraction myself from if I don’t just jump into the distraction.

I reach out to friends who have a hard time less. Not because I don’t want to be there for them. But because it makes me feel more lonely. Unanswered calls, messages with no answer, no real connection but a promise of someday, sometime, when things are better leave me feeling like no one cares, like I am not a priority. And that is a lie. A lie I do not need to feed. I need to throw my attention, my time and energy after people who have room for me in their lives. Not people who are struggling and drowning in their own troubles. My loneliness is not their responsibility, and I have spend too much time feeling sad and rejected and alone, because I chose to look for reciprocation in place that didn’t have that to offer. I am not cutting anyone out of my life. I am just taking a step back and trying to give more time and attention to friends I might not feels as strongly about or as connected to, but who wants to spend their time and energy on me.

I still miss the people who right now doesn’t have room for me in their lives. But this way I don’t allow my feelings to lie to me. I am not being rejected, these people do care deeply for me. But their survival, life quality and mental health right now depend on being able to have time, energy and attention to take care of themselves and not my wounded ego. And I still feel so lonely and sad and like no one cares. But I feel like I am taken responsibility for that in a new and better way. Not that I didn’t do that before. I didn’t and don’t resent these people for not having time and energy for me. But I also felt a sadness connected to these people. Because I like them and miss them and have room for them in my life. And I want to keep that room open. But if all I do is stare at that empty space I am going to keep feeling a lot emptier than I might actually be. And giving more attention to other things might help me discover what other things and other people I have been blind to. And it is also a way to be more respectful and allow these people time to themselves to figure out how they feel about me and whether they miss me and want to make more room for me or if they are happy without. And I feel like that is the least I can give them.

I have also discovered that things like reading and my work is something I need to force myself to do some days even if I feel like my mental health won’t allow me to do them. I might have gotten a little too good at listening to the parts of me that says “I can’t do that today”. I used to never listen to it, so this isn’t a disaster. It’s just showing me I need to find the balance. And that sometimes it’s okay to pressure myself a little more. I need to keep being dedicated and fight to do the things that are important to me even on the days when it is difficult. I just have to make sure to not overhear the signals that says stop. It seems I just forgot how much my depression was trying to keep me depressed, and that I have more power to fight it. So just like I sometimes (most of the time) write this blog because I have decided I have to, I also have to read,  not out of joy but because I have decided I need to and have a deadline. The deadline really helps.

I am reading “The Amber Spyglass” by Philip Pullman this week. It is so good. I keep thinking I’ll write something about dæmons and dust and how these concepts are important to me. But I can’t. And maybe my thoughts on this need to stay private. Maybe I’ll write about them in the future. Maybe nothing has to be decided today.

Dear reader, dear no one. Thank you for giving me your attention. Thank you for making me a little less alone.

Jace.

26^th of January 2020

Hi there reader. If you’re out there.

I wanted to write something to day. But the words won’t flow. Maybe I am too sad. Maybe I just know the words I need to write are not words that show my best side. Maybe I need time to sit with these feelings on my own for a while.

What I do want to write is that things around me put my life and my (lack of) accomplishments in a new focus and I am sad. Not because of what my life is or isn’t. But because I feel like what it is, is something that no one but me will celebrate and appreciate and care about. And I think I am allowed to grief for not being able to share my joys, my milestones, my life event, my accomplishements. I have these things, and I can celebrate them. But I guess I just realised that no one else will share in that joy and celebration, for the one reason that these things look so different to me than they do to most other people. And therefore other people will not think them great or worth of celebration. And that is ok. I do not need them to. But I will allow myself to feel sad about it for a little while.

I am ahead of my reading. I finished both “Northern Lights” and the sequel “The Subtle Knife” before this post was due. And that allows me to start “The Amber Spyglass” now. I love being back in this world. I love reading about Lyra’s journey and look so much forward to all the heart breaking things to come in the next book.

I wanted to write about dæmons and how much that idea mean to me. I wanted to write. I really tried to write Friday as that is my deadline. But there was too many other things. And today the words won’t do what I want. And I think I have to accept that that’s it for today. Hopefully I can do better next week. It’s too early to give up writing these letters.

It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay that I am what I am, even if no one understands. It’s okay to feel lonely and wish for someone to care about the important things in my life. I’ll get to the place where I can be alone in this and not feel lonely. I just have to give it time, and time I’ve got. And patience. I am sad but hopeful. And there are worse places to leave this letter.

If anyone is out there, reading, thank you for your time. Thank you for staying with me in my sadness. I hope you too allow yourself room for hard feelings that might not seem fair or right, but are human and real and honest none the less. Allowing room for them often gives room for them to drift away and not take up space in us any more.

Jace