on luminance in ruins: creating hope when there is none.

In traditions, we create certain life paths by defining them in distinct, separate categories.

We have a strict set of conventions for these paths through society that are supposed to make the journey towards it easier. But more and more, conversations often come up about people who fall short in areas of those expectations.

Forums, social media searches, tweets, songs, art, text messages, and more overflow with these fears.

‘Can I still have a family if I didn’t grow up with a dad? Am I dumb if I don’t do well in school? Is it possible for me to still be loved by another person if I don’t love myself? Is my life worth living?’

What I’ve found interesting from an autistic perspective is the hidden language within our day to day communications. I often wear my emotions on my sleeve. It took me a bit to discover: we don’t say what we fear directly.

It’s alluded to, swirling under the surface. Most often — what I have come to know is that we are all asking the same questions in different forms.

On a societal, institutional, and systemic level, we ask in both coded and uncoded ways:

‘These are the terms that others have set for me to be able to do something. I cannot meet those terms. Can I still do that thing?’

I’ve had/have issues with seeing my future. When I don’t know the full extent of something, my brain often makes no, or poor decisions on what an answer to anything related to it is. I can’t act on partiality — my brain demands totality.

As I carved through life, I began to face circumstances that forced me into different shapes and pathways that evaded tradition. There seemed to be no ‘good’ traditional path for what I was looking for, and there was no totality for my brain to be able to make sense of breaking from tradition.

Obviously, this has led to some complicated situations in my life.

It’s forced me to ask the question over and over again: How do you cross a path you cannot fit into, knowing you’ll break in the process? You don’t.

Imagine this.

You are living in a house. The house is filled with things that you have been given, that you’ve fought for, that you’ve been promised, and more.

The house is meant to protect you from the outside, and to be a resting place.

You cannot leave this house. You cannot go into the house of others, but you can understand their state through the different forms of communication.

Our houses are poorly built. And it rains, storms, blizzards, and hails. Your house is flooded, all the time. It has been, and will be. And you must live in this home, never knowing when it will break, or how long it will remain.

When you live in a house that’s perpetually flooding:

Initially, there is a deep grief, and sorrow.

Then, anger and spite.

Later, jealousy and rage.

Further down, depression and an all consuming blackness.

Lastly, you find the hidden routine of navigating the flood, that’s created through the consistency of disaster.

You must go through everything in the house.

Knowing it’s all waterlogged, and deciding what to keep.

Knowing it all could be gone in the next flood or knowing it might be worthless and hiding extensive damage.

You live in a perpetually flooding house, and you must find the few things worth holding onto, or you will lose everything in the blindness of your grief.

Traditionally, hope is an emotion created by circumstances. Currently, as a tool, hope needs to decouple from emotion. and become a system of categorization.

Hope is a system of identifying what to rescue, and rescuing what we find over and over again. Finding it comes from looking through the broken pieces of what we once were familiar with to find what we must cling to, and clinging to it over and over again.

That is the secret to fitting into meeting traditions. You don’t. You rewrite them, and go forward anyway. Decouple it from the emotion, and build the system for creating the path yourself.

Hope is not a vague idea, or a vague feeling. It’s having confidence in yourself and your abilities to return to using a system to find what’s worth keeping.

It is a form of action. It must be reiterated, developed, cherished, and built.

This applies not only to hope, but to any traditional concept we wish to have that seems to have a black and white defined path.

Our emotions, needs, past, and relationships are written all over our conscious and unconscious communication — it’s also written all over the way we define the systems we create emotions from. What constitutes love, family, home, hope differs from person to person. How we define what constitutes those, is a reflection of our experiences with it — good and bad.

Are me and my 3 pets a family? Is an old Sheriff’s command center a home? Traditionally, no. In my eyes, yes.

When you aren’t able to access things traditionally, rewrite the definition of the thing. You don’t wait for the exact circumstances, people, or time. You build it the way you can, and fight for it day by day.

My home is a mirror. It has two previously homeless cats. A betta fish I rescued from a half-filled mason jar that lives in a 14 gallon tank. Thrifted clothes, and furniture that I’ve put meticulous care into restoring and selecting.

My tiny house shell is a commercial trailer that was used by the local Sheriff’s office as a command center, left to rot in its original materials from 1975 back in Washington.

I have a soft spot for misfit, abandoned things, and I’ve built my home out of them.

That’s the system I’ve created to identify what home is:

What’s abandoned?

How can I give it a place in this world?

What is my home? Whatever needs a home.

Like hope and its’ separation from emotion, home is not a place — it’s knowing that anywhere can be a home because I know I will put in the work to make it so.

I’ve come to know also that hope as a system of categorization doesn’t mean that it defies emotion alone, in fact — the opposite. What makes up those categories, what makes things worthy to us, is the emotions they create in us. Hope isn’t an emotion alone, but it’s a way we define certain emotions.

When we have love for things, we have hope for them. Just as though there is no self unless there are others from which to define it, there is no hope unless there is reasons for that hope. A loveless world can quickly divulge into a hopeless world.

This future that we’re all working towards, that yet terrifies us: it is worth fighting for because something is worth saving in there. It’s worth fighting for, because people we love will be there.

It is knowing — if there aren’t paths that fit us, we will break them to cross regardless.

We will find something to save, we will create it if we must.

That’s what makes our futures bearable. And that’s what makes me know there will always be luminance within the ruins of whatever floods we face.