Irreducible Me

It took me some time to muster the courage to even start transcribing from my journals of the last four years for this.
I cannot name the intensity I felt at the thought it; I am not one who takes to histrionics either.
I don’t even know how to start, except to just start. I’ve decided against issuing a preface or interpretation before delving in.
I have to get these in one place. I’m sure there are parts that blend in but they are fragments still forming; I share those that seem complete and clear in context to the others.
They are a part of the me who was becoming, and the me who has become, and the me who becomes and will become.

I am perceptive, empathetic, sensitive, (systems) analytical, resilient and damned perseverant.

I was raised in a low income, turbulent, single parent household , without a present father, tending to the emotional needs of my mother and younger brother.

I have ADHD and PTSD, and have live with hypernormalised anxiety and depression since childhood - thinking this was the only and normal state I could be in. In 2021, for no apparent reason (although I can hazard a few decent guesses), I developed tinnitus and acute noise sensitivity, which are, apparently, connected to my PTSD. In late 2023, I got a positive screening for autism; the diagnosis is expensive and not covered by my Dutch health insurance.

All this might explain my pursuit of a kind (of) transformation that is inclusive of the traumatised. A ‘therapeutic’ transformation if you will. Call me idealist. I’d say, given the above, I’ve had to deal with the hardness of this reality we call a world since I was baby. But don’t tell me what is and is not real.

This term, therapeutic transformation, didn’t just occur to me; it came from several key expert interviews in my PhD research on sustainability transformations.

The kinds of transformation we are currently living through are traumatic; compounding the already traumatising impact that society has on more of us than we know (although a live-streamed genocide gives us a pretty good sample).

Do not tell me what I cannot do, what is wrong me, or claim to know enough about me to tell me who I am.

Do not tell me - or my brother - we’re not doing the work. We’ve been doing it since we were toddlers - starting with teaching each other how to lucid dream as the sole means we could find and imagine of having some agency in our lives (I like to believe that’s the reason).

I have spent 35 years proving you and people like you wrong., over and over. It’s not about you. It’s the work the matters, and that’s bigger than any job, role, assigment of duty.

I have lived a lifetime in less than half that.

I contain multitudes, and am contained, in turn, by them.

Don’t you dare tell me this is ‘just how things are’. I researched that.

Do not tell me I am broken, disordered, dysfunctional, disregulated.

I feel, attune, sense, diagnose and interpret what you cannot fathom; what you discard as unnecessary, unreal, imaginary and umimportant.

You are closed, numb. A good 'citizen’. A good ‘consumer’. A good functional member of society. Enjoy your comforts. You worked hard for them. Self made.

I am alive, effervescent, thrumming, challenging. Dancing on the shoulders of giants you cannot see, to a tune you cannot hear. You laugh and derride me as mad, therefore. Though there are many more of us (like us). We are already living in another future, which you daren’t acknowledge.

You are afraid of the world we already inhabit, growing through the cracks of your shattered mirrors and screens; through the open, unhealing wounds of your ego-civilisation.
That same world you forced us to inhabit by refusing us out of your promised land. That has been your choice; you are too late, I expect, to change.

Should you even change your mind, and regret your paths (secretly, I surmise), you will not tell a soul; you are too far invested - too weak in fact, to suffer the necessary and devastating transformation that letting go of your dying paradigm will do to you. Ironic, then that we walk through that aperture gladly, having already been delivered to brink of hell by your complicit apathetic ignorance and greed.

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We grow, through, out, up.

We re-root, re-seed.

Our interdependence makes us mighty.

Your isolation and hyper-indivuation makes you brittle, weak. Part of a flimsy membrane of detritus remaining of a world that is dying. The bed you made you shall sleep in. This will be the dust to regenerate with later.

It no longer hurts me that you project your insecurities and weaknesses then onto those strengths of ours you fear the most.

The tesselate fibrous strands of our ecosystems are our empathy, our solidarity, our attunement and our presence. This is a power you are rightly suffocating in.

We will not need to topple you; you will decay and tumble in to an abyss of your own making. The damage will be immense. It already is.

This we have reckoned with. The arch of future history is calculated through integrating the many pasts you deleted in the cleansing genocidal furvour of your cancerous capitals and colonies.

But we are already rebuilding.

You will end, alone, empty, mad and gnashing your own face instead of confronting the wretched wreck of a thing you have become before our crying eyes - and what led you there.

You gave birth to us. We know already - a long time ago.

We tried to warn you - you killed us for it.

Some of us still try to stop you, in spite of our better judgement.

The light and the dark, and the dynamic, paradoxical relationship in between.

On the Monday, I was feeling more clarity and calmer. I’d slept well the night before, but I also wondered if it wasn’t the beginning of a positive uptick, after so many months of struggling.

I just felt like maybe it was the start of getting and feeling better, and wanted to believe this - that I’m in recovery. I am, finally, recovering, and this is great. I will try to connect more with this feeling; of intactness, of wholeness, moving forward.

A couple of weeks ago, when I noticed I was crying a lot as I allowed myself to feel sad more, it was so intense and overwhelming in one case, that I had to sit down on the ground, against the wall behind our kitchen table, just to feel more stability, to feel more ‘grounded’ as they say, and supported.

As I was riding the wave, sobbing uncontrolably, hyper(almost)-ventilating - could have been a(n autistic?) metldown - I told myself:

This is not too much

This is you

You can hold this

All of it

I think this is a new mantra for me. I also imagined I was a sphere surrounding all the inner tumult, allowing some distance, and I think this helped.

When I shared this one in a facilitator’s gathering I’d been attending, I had an older male facilitator approach me after to give me feedback and his own edition of my intention. I still have no idea how to interpret this. I’ll leave how I should take this to you who reads:

Alex, It has taken me a while to respond as I became part of the great timelessness of the Solstice/wintering period. Here is the note that I wrote to myself which came from the pulse of your affirmation (I hope it withstands the test of timing and spaciousness in responding - it is as much a practice and meditation for me also):

I can welcome this all to the table of my heart, the home of my body and the song of my soul. I can sit with what needs time to be seen and felt, and rest a while, as new vistas of perspective unfurl within me. As I becomes we, and we becomes us, and as everyone leaves each other what is theirs, "us" and "we" becomes an appropriate and dignified "I" and we can depart from this time together, a little lighter and with clearer sight.

Anonymous, Jan 2025

I am creative and imaginative, and think and feel deeply. I’ve had the capability of introspection for a long time, at least since primary school.

I held my own views and opinions, thinking for myself, even when these were not shared by family or elders. I held my own ground, even when none was given or allowed.

I had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and needed to know how everything around me worked. I would read and study tirelessly; also, subconsciously, as some form of survival or escape strategy.

I’ve always asked questions, even when this was uncomfortable; even when this got me into trouble. That was something no-one ‘taught’ me.

I’ve always been curious, precocious and bold (the word ‘intrepid’ was used - it doesn’t sit well with me). I’ve gone well beyond my comfort zone - although, admittedly, this was also a means of escape. But I got a thrill from it all the same.

I wander off, meet new people, and make friends quickly and easily.

I hated to pick sides when I knew deep in my gut, that there were no sides really. Why should I be forced to choose between two sides alone anyway?

I didn’t like drama, misunderstanding, dishonesty, or hypocrisy, and was always very perceptive of contradictions, unfairness and injustice.

I am allowed to grieve the loss of the version of my mother that I always hoped she would be.

I am also allowed to lament and distance myself from the version that she holds on to being, rather than the best self she could have been for us.

My expectations of her, of myself, were understandable. I wanted and needed her to be emotionally available to me. She expected me to absorb her most extreme emotions, leaving no space for mine.

So I learnt not to confide, not to invest, not to trust.

I also learnt never to ask for help as this was never permitted of me. I learnt that I was the only person I could count on.

I also learnt never to give myself a break, as to stop meant that I could be hurt, betrayed, cornered and alone.

This was never all that I am. I guarded a part of myself that no one knew; under many layers of acting the roles assigned to me, and ones I invented for myself to escape. This part of me is the part I have to nurture, water and develop, as this is the real me, the me that survived, and the me that is now allowed to thrive.

My former self, built on her imported trauma, was fighting to keep me inside.

Now I am permitted to liberate myself.

This is the self they somehow found threatening and the part they told me I could not be.

They denied me my true identity, as this was anathema to their manufactured stories and comfort. This was no healthy family system to be shaped by. A true family?…

Share Through the Prism Darkly