i can feel things changing. not just around me, but something inside of me is becoming different now too.

things have been different in the last few weeks now that progress is in motion like when a bunch of stuff gets stuck in the creek and it takes a great gush of rain to loosen it up and make it flow again. everything is always changing, but the last 4 years of my life (i cant believe its already been 4, almost 5 now) have been spent stuck not flowing. but now things are moving again - in every single area of my life all at once

as an autistic person i don't do very well with change and i can remember being a kid sitting there terrified of things to come. even well into my adulthood i still do this but recently (as within the last year) ive been able to assume a new viewpoint on change. yesterday i found out my grandma (dads side) is going into hospice, something that should've happened a long time ago. i found myself sad not for the fact that she was dying, but sad for my father and how he must be feeling despite his horrible relationship with her. sad for the girl who's parents had left her to fend for herself in nazi-occupied france.

it made me consider the relationships in my own immediate family. when you come from a dysfunctional family, your entire perception of humanity and the world around you shifts drastically and makes it almost impossible to comprehend unless you try hard to fix your world view, which i think i have somewhat. growing up in the south i was always around families, usually big ones, that despite their problems were incredibly close. the whole mentality of "yes we're fucked up but we love each other and we'll die for each other" was something i would always see and would always be really jealous of. the relationship between each member of my family is strained and almost non existent beyond a surface level where everyone is content to tell themselves "i'm fine with this because it means i dont have to face the problems of addressing our issues" because that would mean something would change. the resistance to change has ruined the potential we had to be close.

after i fell asleep last night i had a dream that my entire family was together down in florida in my grandparents old house. i had only been down there once in 2003 when they had the entire family together for christmas everyone was there and was all getting along and i remember thinking how strange and relieving it was that everyone was finally happy. we all had gotten ready to go somewhere, and walked off into the thick forest and swamp. the path eventually turned into a strange uphill climb that required you to maneuver over and under large branches and as we moved deeper they one by one disappeared. i was eventually alone in an incomprehensible mess of forest and great slabs of orange stone but i wasn't worried or scared, i just kept going further and further until i eventually woke up. it left me feeling strange and sad but sad in the kind of way where you're accepting of it - this is how things are because this is how they were supposed to happen for you kind of way.

in the modern, colonized, industrialized world the concept of family has been gone for a very long time now. blood family is important, but community has always been family. i felt entitled to blood family watching all my friends with theirs growing up, seeing them supported and accepted - the idea of found family and community made me balk because it wasn't /real/ family. but i think in the western world we have a skewed vision of what family should be based off of the model of the nuclear family that's been fed to us for ages now. reinventing this concept for myself has been difficult and its something im still struggling with... but i think the older i get and the more i try to unlearn civilization it gets clearer to me now. often i like imagining my ancestors not long ago in the subarctic tundra huddled up underneath reindeer furs listening to the night world around them. i think they would let me in and let me lie down next to them.


it's just another chapter in my life that's coming to a close now. it feels like everything closes all at once and opens all at once, never in any particular order or sequence but one or the other all at once. getting all my gear together so i can turn it in and trying to make plans for the move thats not very far away now but it feels like just yesterday i was standing knee deep in snow that was piling on my eyelashes staring out over the PT field and feeling so much fear for a future that i was rightfully scared of and that would put me through unimaginable pain physically and mentally...... its a weird but good feeling to have it feel so far away now....... a lot of really cool stuff is around the corner and for the 1st time in a really long time i'm excited for it