Thoughts

Most of the time I don't know what I think about something until I write it down and read it back, which is probably the most honest reason I do this at all. Writing is the only place where I can hold a thought long enough to actually examine it, because in conversation the thought moves too fast or the other person needs a response before I've finished figuring out what I'm trying to say, and then the moment passes and I'm left with the feeling that I almost understood something but didn't quite get there.

A lot of what I write about is things I find genuinely confusing, which includes most of human behaviour, my own reactions to things, and the gap between what people say and what they seem to actually mean, something which I have never been particularly good at navigating and probably never will be. I don't have answers to most of this. I just try to describe the problem clearly enough that maybe someone reading it can see what I'm missing, because I have learned that asking for help through writing reaches people who have the patience to sit with complexity in a way that real-time conversation rarely allows.

Some of it is about being autistic, not the internet version where it's a personality trait you put in your bio, but the actual daily experience of being simultaneously too much for some people and not enough for others and never being entirely sure which one you're being at any given moment. And some of it is just me being excited about an idea, a paper, a connection between two things that nobody told me were connected, which I write about because I don't always have someone nearby who wants to hear about it, and writing is the only way to find the person who does.