20231203

Context: Abe's birthday party, in London; everyone hanging out in the penthouse living area; in turn, everyone giving Abe a little affirmation/speech/thing. These are rough notes that I wrote while listening to everyone else, as I prepared to go last.

I made a point not to make this a performance. I'm a skilled public speaker, and I chose not to use any of those powers here. I just gave Abe what I carried, without trying to make it a thing.

(I didn't use all of these points when I spoke.)

• chair to chair -- may I appreciate you?

• I am always caught off guard, and now I know I always will be

  • thank you for guarding me

• you said: "make everything special ... because everything is special"

  • I recognize myself in that

  • (all I have is you in my experience, and what my experience of you points to, from every vantage point that time allows me)

• time used to terrify me -- i wanted to throw a party for everything

  • I think I've been working to move fulltime into celebration. like, I might tear up here, but I believe that this state of apprecation is normal. in moments of serendipity, or a moment of beautiful support and love, I've been steering my beliefs such that I'm no longer making a big deal out of each moment. I can celebrate everything, but I can't have a party every time. this feels like grease on the tracks, or maybe just momentum? instead of thinking about moving the train by dragging it forward one inch at a time, brakes on the whole way, we just rolllllling now

  • it suits me better

  • and here I find you at the head of that train

• I wouldn't have stood a chance meeting you any other way

  • I'm hearing ~12 perspectives on you, more than I can hold

  • any one of them would be enough for me to look closer

  • all of them, too much, lol

• theory: gratitude requires no thought, leaves the brain unused

• karen: "things Isaac said, considering things you'd never considered"

  • you and I fit each other now, because I'm showing you my true contours, because now I've been shown my true contours

  • the primary thing holding me back is that I couldn't stand the idea of hurting someone else

  • learning I had autism, turns out I'm even worse than everyone else at making assessments like that

  • so, I'm free

• shelby was talking about your belief in the good that's coming, liz talked about you dreaming bigger for her than she could

  • maybe we dream for each other

  • maybe we help each other with the things we can't believe

  • kinda works with the electric monk idea

• I can't tell if you led me here, but I am here with you, and our relationship is as current as it was on day one

• more than dewdrops, standing in the rain. I think about water metaphors too

  • throughput

  • I think a lot about what it means to be a steward of so much flow

  • or to flip from water to trees, what it means to be a trunk, and to hold up branches without holding it over them

  • you've demonstrated that to me this year

• I don't care, go on and tear me apart -coldplay

  • been feeling like this lately

  • self vs other right? just gonna go with what's true and let go completely of my self-concept and other-concept and see how they shift, when the only thing I hold onto is this nexus of truth at the center

• if we look backwards using memory, we see what happened. if we look forwards using memory, we see a continuation of the same. changing the energy of the moment, we see a different future, and I think that comes with a kind of changing the past. maybe/probably not literally, but, why do I have to live in such a way that my past makes sense? I don't have to make sense of that. and so it's a sort of timeline-travel -- not time-travel, but timeline-travel