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So. How are you? How's it going?

I feel good. I recognize the core of the thing I'm experiencing. It has a flavor of the confidence that I remember from specific episodes of childhood. I remember hiking with my family (I was maybe 12?), we were deep in the woods and it was pouring rain, everyone was hungry and miserable, and I effortlessly rallied. I was just in the best of spirits (mmm okay, I see it), totally unaffected by everyone's mood, fully in a mode of joyful encouragement and support and a kind of leadership that had everything to do with helping the people around me get back to a place where they could lead themselves again.

The vibe I'm in now feels very very similar — essentially the same. It's a relief and a surprise. Not shocking, not a twist, more like the softest kind of recognition of something so familiar but perhaps not seen or recognized for a very long time.

And?

And it feels effortless. It feels like starting a project and knowing exactly what step to take in each moment — having a general sense of the overall shape, but doing no preplanning whatsoever aside from keeping one eye ahead on that shape as I approach it, making sure that I notice as each detail gets clearer in my vision. My steps are fast and sure.

I think I'm just meeting me again, but through an interface that has gone through some pretty deep improvements. It took me from age ~14 to ~34 (god, was it really 20 years? I guess!) to solve for the pieces of myself that I couldn't see. Being gay and being autistic weren't really relevant pre-14 for me, but that 20-year span held episode after episode of me (1) finding some kind of stride, (2) finding my eagerness and enthusiasm subsiding, (3) the stride turning to struggle, and then (4) finding a dead end that I couldn't understand. I could get emotionally close to girls, but I felt blocked at some point. Gay! It would have been called Asperger's if I'd been diagnosed at the time, but all that nervous system dysregulation was also a function of this physical body. Poor dude. I didn't know. It was so hard. It hurt so badly, and I couldn't understand why.

This is exactly how I do things, though. I skim the manual, dive into assembly, do it subtly wrong the first couple times — subtle enough to not notice until I'm nearing some kind of finish line, and then it becomes clear, and then I have to disassemble and begin again. From IKEA furniture (lol, but really) to my love life to my social life to my relationship to life itself — so it goes.

I like it, though. God it sucks so hard but I have a powerful mind for engineering and the kind of errors I initially make very specifically steer me straight into an intimate understanding of what the underlying principles of a system are and why they are important. It's the kind of understanding that can only be reached by almost but not quite getting it right, and that multiple times over. It gives me the kind of felt understanding that lives in my body, not just in my mind. It means that all the levels of my awareness and intelligence receive the same education at once, and we collectively come away with a powerful understanding of the system.

I think the understanding may be mutual, between me and the system. It feels like something to me when a system is uncomfortable, when something hasn't quite been put together right. It's not about correctness (it was never about correctness), it's about ease of movement, of moment, of movement in the moment. Relief is the initial symptom of improvement, but the best part is what comes next: the reveal of what's possible when a system is allowed its own fullest expression.

What do you see?

I see you. :) It's good to see you. [no words here, just feeling] The game here was to time the rotation of these concentric realities so that the same opening (that same 10% opening that each one has) aligns — a clear channel from the core all the way on up through as many of these as we can manage to pull into alignment at once. They're always moving, and things are still clicking into alignment elsewhere. This, yours, is good. :) :) :)