I'm tired of this grandpa.

a little check in to ease the pain of this hellpit

Hello, dear readers. you know, I’ll just start this off casually, I think of you often. I wonder if I have it in me to put anything together that will make sense. I’m often persuaded to other activities because I don’t feel like I have a story for you. A good story has an ending, where all the loose ties are set in a pretty bow or totally mind-blowing, and there’s a lesson, a theme, a message of comfort perhaps. If I could tell you a message that would make this all worth it, I would. But, I’m not feeling like I understand if this is the old ways dying or if the powers at be are just responding to the decades we’ve enjoyed believing in the messages of MLK and hope for a future that isn’t segregated, and where we won’t need prisons because we understand human behavior now better than we ever have before. Right now, we don’t have the ending. It feels like we are at the part where most readers are checking to make sure there are still pages left because the storyline is giving… end times but time just keeps dragging on.

It is painful to watch the Christian Nationalism I knew and loved from my child hood cast a heavy and dark cloud over our lives again- but this time nation wide. Our country is constantly talking about freedom, the freedom we fought for with blood. We grow up knowing, and later painfully unlearning that freedom does not come from pain. Yes, pain happens, pain can be a uncomfortable message of needing change, we can live holding both the grief of loss and joy of life and still experience incredible freedom. However, our country seems hell bent on believing pain is the pathway to freedom, that every good thing needs an equal and opposite sacrifice while burning down anything that gets in the way.

It was when I distanced myself from the thought patterns and beliefs of my childhood that I truly did experience freedom in my spirit, this freedom experienced is painfully dependent of me accepting myself completely- to the extent that I offer others. oof. What’s so evil about the ways in which darkness has creeped into our lives is we’ve cozied up to it. We made it comfortable and adorned it, we made it right, pure, and just. So aesthetic. We are so in love with this version of Jesus, because he reminds us that Christianity is ours, and by ours I mean white church and we are experiencing the consequences.

The Christianity I practiced as a kid doesn’t leave your body at any point, it can go completely silent, but it does not disappear. I was formed into and exceptional person because I did believe in Jesus with all my heart and I followed his teachings incredibly well for a six year old who may or may not have autism. When you commit to that level of loyalty to your personal theology at 5 years old, the ideas like Iron sharpens Iron worked really well for me. I followed the teachings of Jesus so well I was sharpened into a little sharp knife that had a tendency to say out loud what was true, what was right, and definitely what was wrong and it cut deep.

For whatever reason, I am missing that part of your brain that preserves your personal comfort and for a long time I would just blurt out something possibly painful, sometimes tender thing that also carried the weight of needing to be said, in my opinion at the time. So many people are having a hard time finding the lines between ending our cycles of pain and walking into a simply, a better way of living. We are so afraid of change. Every time I recognize another perspective that was heavily influenced by propaganda I’m like *gasp* omg that too? This continues until you just run out of things that break your brain and you accept life without judgement and it’s less like, “of course” and more like, “okay”, another area that needs repairing from the foundation up but you have silly little habits that keep you happy each day as we collectively tend to this wound.

I think we can all understand that the thinking that got us here, is not the thinking that will get us there. We can actually change the thought patterns of our brains we can learn to live in a way that benefits all people. Just imagine my brain exploding over and over for like a decade and the whole time I was like WTF, god? and then that part of me died and I am sensitive, so it was slow and held the most real moments and I felt every drop of joy and loss. I was doing it live. I’ve come to a place where I kinda get where it was coming from. I needed to feel a couple really bad feels that turned out to be really healing to fix and I accepted some hard truths in order to get to healing. I was terrified to face it and then it wasn’t really a choice, so I sat with it and it felt like forever but truthfully was only a few seconds and once I felt it, physically felt that pain in my body, I was able to put it away. I closed the tab. I set something down. I just needed to go back and say what needed to be said about my own life at that time. I go all in. I experienced me coming at me and wow, immaculate process. intense but fun. not for every person. lol.

I’m the kinda of person you love or hate. I’m only now realizing how much nuerodiversity can influence your perception. No one in my life was like, wait, what if Lian has autism and this is just how her brain works? I was just told I was bossy, sassy, sarcastic and I hurt a lot of feelings (mostly boys) with my plain as day observations with out bumpers. I don’t know, if I have autism, or a keen sense of patterns in general but I can fully accept that it might be a mix of nuerospicy options- thankfully my psychiatric nurse practitioner isn’t as focused on getting an official diagnosis but rather treating the symptoms I’m having and we love her for that.

In closing, the more I understand autism I can see that I, at the very least, developed a survival skill to communicate with people who are nuerodiverse. And what a joy it is. My family was primarily composed of public service men and educator women so there’s definitely a type. So weird that my husband and I also work in the fields my family has worked in for generations? It’s almost like it was made for us. It’s almost as if I was following a pattern. boop. it got me. We did not break the cycle of being in helping professions because this is where its at right now. This is where the healing happens, when we adapt our world to meet the needs of its inhabitants, hopefully in a way that benefits all people, and not just the people who look and speak like you.