being an adult is killing the old you, over and over.

TW: mentions of trauma.

I became a mental health advocate at 15, after a very hard childhood with a lot of strife and attempts on my own life. In some ways, my childhood was a series of trials and tribulations that I had to dodge in order to achieve the golden prize: adulthood, freedom, autonomy, and the ability to chase my dreams.

I made it out running as fast as I fucking could into the caring arms of self-independence and the safety that drips around it.

But what it brought instead was a crushing diagnosis. Autism. (And ADHD, which I don’t acknowledge as much since medication has fully worked for me).

I love 16 year old Amanda. I love her, still. I envy her in so many ways. She had a lot of ambition, vision, and the belief that the world was good and worth building beautiful things for. She was confident, and she believed in a better future.

I don’t know if I believe in a better future anymore.

Age has brought cutting clarity. That my social issues and constant avoidance of others in an effort to reduce sensory overload is never going to be grown out of. It feels almost embarrassing that at 17 I would do keynotes in front of 12,000 people. And I get such bad anxiety that I have to hype myself up to go into Home Depot to return something.

I struggle to empathize with myself, surrounded by the burning fusselage of what my dreams actually cost: the quite crushing experience of bootstrapping a non-profit by myself for 6 years as a full-time volunteer on top of 2–3 other jobs at any given time.

The lack of friends that I’ve been able to keep over the years because I work insane hours every day. rejection over and over again in pursuit of trying to build my dream non-profit.

The world having passed me by while I retreated into myself to cope with a brutal childhood, and then later sexual assault while unconscious (which I will briefly mention for context and will never publicly discuss again).

The subsequent building of a tiny house that took a 1.5 years of my life and my entire insanity.

These are things that young Amanda didn’t ask for when coming to adulthood. These are the things you don’t know to take into account when you’re 11 and suicidal and being bullied at school and have no parent within a 100 mile radius who would tell you they will support you and you’re looking for any branch of a better future to hold onto.

I read this beautiful relationship advice about finding someone that you can love every version of, as they grow. Something something, loving someone is attending the thousands of funerals of people they used to be.

That’s what I’m doing today: attending to the grief that I still hold over coming to a future that’s crumbled in my hands. I tell myself there is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’. There is just whatever happens, and how I experience it.

I wish I could tell you all that I crossed the chasm from neglected kid into superwoman who makes everything happen. It’s an unsatisifying conclusion to the narrative.

The voices are silent in self-anger, and I try to remind them that better is not a destination but a circuit of new habits and thoughts that must constantly happen. The voices tell me to shut the fuck up.

That’s what adulthood feels like: a constant inhibiting of the body of someone who is fatally wounded in some way or another, through false trust or false belief. Someone who has something they will die for, and they do again and again.

Trying to chase your dreams through those phases of death is putting everything you love on the surgical table and seeing what remains at the end. There is a spectre of what you originally wanted, but it becomes righteous through the surigical precision of extraction and revision.

It walks off the table, but it will never be the same again.

I lost a majority of Astra’s team when we went into out Gen 2.0 plan, right before my assault happened, because there was nothing else to be done but to program and build (which is my job).

After the scale and terror of what I was doing alone hit me, I had recurring nightmares where the previous team was in the loft I used to live in for a startup in San Francisco.

Everyone has circled me and I’m on the floor begging them to end my life. The love of a previous life is also there, and I’m holding onto his leg and asking him to do the thing he knows I want more than anything: kill me before I turn into a monster.

They just look at me, they don’t talk to me. I seize and grow into someone unrecognizable, with a face that isn’t my flesh and a heart that doesn’t fit in my chest. I die on the floor. They walk out of the door, walk back in, and the process repeats.

Everything is changing, forever, all of the time, and through needing constant change to survive: nothing really changes at all. The hunt continues. It’s the who you needs to live in the future, carving up the you who fought to survive the past.

Thank you for everything you tried to do for me, tiny Amanda. I’ll take it from here.