For this entry; we got lists, we got abbreviated tangents, we got lots of water. Turbulent & calm but flowing. It’s the new moon and it’s cancer season, according to folx I know who stay afloat in these topics. I went white water rafting for the first time at the end of May, after a two-week-too-quick jaunt back to Alaska, and I’d compare that venture to the rhythm of this write-up now. Especially the part where the boat got bent like a taco and we were tossed around in a fray of spray and chaos. All of us laughing, howling, riding the raging water. We were maniacs. I was running with the boys again. Reckless.

I made 2 new Spotify playlists; Wash. reNew is summer dream hazes and turns at every bend. bReach is the other, a quick compilation; not as polished but certainly got some bright, sharp gems.

My dreams have been packed with visions and feels of big, big changes ahead. Very likely personal but reaching out and reaching wide and reaching in.

This is the first day I’ve had to sit and focus on this narrative in… a while. I been out, I been about, and I been mentally at max capacity. Which is a nice pace: constant stimulus. I do well in throes of frenetic movement and then soak deliciously in the days of reflective rest.
So after Alaska, I hit the ground running all across the state of Wyoming; camping trips and rafting trips and intertribal gatherings (witnessed the signing of the Buffalo Treaty and the debut of Tribal Waters, a must-see film about local landback narrative) and the Caspian concert at Meow Wolf in Denver and attended the native plant workshops and returned to Ten Sleep to be shown an energetic spot by an old local friend that pulled up some powerful visuals and feelings about a very intensely spiritual area and then a big epic wedding for one of my besties and a gorgeous Indigiqueer-led Pride parade: a true landmark for what has carried as a hostile scene in white rural Wyoming ~ love, love, love and expression ~ coming through, coming in hot, coming in cool.

Wyoming has had a long, wet spring ~
a wonderful reprieve from the past few summers, thick with smoke and heat and dread.
I went back to Alaska in mid-May for two weeks, my first time back in 2.5 years; and two weeks felt like two months; and two weeks was not nearly enough. Nettle, fiddleheads, and pushki were swarming and the weather was stunning sunny and windy and we foraged and hiked the beaches. It was the exact window for spring up there. I tattooed as many people from the list as I could and each experience was exceptional; many of us held ceremony and prayer and set our intentions and moved energy and laughed and told stories and caught up. Some of us just shot the shit and had a fun time. All of it was valid. I went out dancing as many nights as it was available and performed live art for my he(art) brother’s exceptional & weird & amazing ‘pagan cybersexual goth thrash’ band Ayla Ray. Alaska really knows how to fire up the homegrown art frenzy. I miss it! My presence was big there! I had so much fun!
If there is a specific unity that I miss the most about living in Homer, it is the theater community. All those goofy-ass, brilliant, quick-witted, heartfull devotions to curating experience and sensation for audiences. I take great pride in my participation as the Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead at the legendary Pier One theatre. It was a challenging but very fitting role for me; to play an androgynous and devilish character, complete with stage death and sword fights and abstract fury rants.
Reliving memories of my performance in burlesque as well. All stories worth celebrating and recalling.
It was extremely difficult to leave but it also felt very good to be back in Wyoming when I touched land again. I always feel recharged after travel: there’s that part of me that’s always looking into a different horizon but also I needed to heal something that felt undone in that abrupt and fatalistic departure from Alaska.
The community of Homer is my soul family. When I returned, I felt so loved and so embraced and so held and so welcomed but I was also still ‘one foot in and one foot out’ within myself; I was confronting the results of a cut and run, which I have been known to do in my lifetime. My internal world was alive and roiling as I was rolling through those days. Leaving Homer the way I did was the first time I fully felt the impact of that sharp loss. Timing and the events of the world revealed a depth that I otherwise had not known to access, just as much as I recognize the necessity of that unpredictable, impulsive leap for change: I felt that something big was coming (and ya’ll we been on this huge ride and it’s still wild’n’ up, still reaching this tipping point, and transition wears many different guises depending on where/who/what you are); and my instinct was to be in a place where I could listen; where I could grieve; where I could heal; where I could be alone and not explain anything to anyone; where I could feel strong, and be in the sunshine ~ and that place was, is, the Wyoming hills.
That was the beginning of 2020. I very much felt that pulse from the earth rippling wide.
But it could have gone a lot differently. The exodus could have been care-full, and forward-thinking, and planned ~
Qualities that I have not always been consistent or very strong with because I simply am not wired that way. I just get senses and act on them.
Some refinement and understanding, much like the breadth of discovery as beWilder serves to explore, improves upon that sense of & for sense: I’m not always impulsive and reckless. It is my intention to overcome re-action.
But at the time, I certainly harbored behaviors of dramatic sensationalism. It was a product of quiet frustration and feeling trapped. I got called mentally ill more than once during that window and I had not the means to fully explain and express what it was I was going through and certainly not in the behavioral lens of rigid expectation forged by Amerikkkan society and, I might add, with the pressure of bullying on spiritual language. What some call psychosis was like a psychic fracturing. I saw something. But I didn’t fully understand it then.

And so I pause, empowered, riding this swell;
the ones who pinched me in that place, I reflect, are people so choked on their own need for control, who shame the world around them, who miserably and ignorantly denounce anything wild ~ say what they say to feel powerful within themselves because they cannot be honest ~ are not, by any means, good friends; to me or to themselves ~
and I could see right through them and they didn’t much like that at all.
And most have not, I can gather, left the confines of that pretension; been outside their comfort zones of provisions; will continue to make balking whines over the rims of their wines;
And I shrug, because we can see from where systemic social structures are borne, and until they are addressed they’ll just be more ~
(and this is bitterness, yes, I spit it out, and be gone, just move on:
and I repeat the observation that our history teaches us to just tell a story
that’s not ours to tell, to disgrace the other and favor ourselves:
not once was I asked or even given a chance to speak for myself.
And energetically this still creates dissonance and disconnect. It creates shame. It creates spiritual discord.)

breathe;
this is the banter of a late diagnosis of ADHD and all the other threads entangled there. Grief and relief.
this is a new path opening;
this is release.
this is a life long echo that is dwindling out of a hidden obsession of trying to identify ‘what is wrong with me’
this is delayed reaction, delayed response-ability
(this is also residual angst from the roe vs wade overturn news
which has stirred up so many deep emotions)

So when I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, it opened up a different kind of door to look through.

And serendipitously, the book Scattered by Gabor Mate arrived today, a gift from a friend who knows me well and holds up no walls.

A quote from it; ‘People with ADHD can’t remember themselves in the future.’ (John Ratey)

I want everyone to read this book.

Especially with the sort of dialogue that we are all in about the western social constructs we are shaped by and the instant-gratification of a digital generation. A sort of underdevelopment from oppression that exists in many facets. Escapism and emotional re-direction. A lack of tangibility for many.

It is well-rounded, immensely thoughtful, beautifully researched, beautifully written.
Touches home.
Touches homes.
Touches home.

So I been looking through it, this door, and passing the threshold too ~ and so suddenly engaged in it, and paying attention to how the author’s studies reflect much of my own observations and the very strong navigations of origins in trauma; a need for attention and validation that was not otherwise provided; a difficulty fitting into the structures of a society that is clearly built on great injustices; how sensitive we all really are and some of us can’t hide it, and there’s breakthrough;
and as mentioned in this narrative before, it lifts a veil from around me that I have made too ~

And I can’t begin to express enough how this has dramatically changed and altered not just my life but how I see myself.
I mentioned this in my first entry about the diagnosis, still fresh, but now, some months into it, the core healing has really just begun.
Sometimes, I would oscillate on this diagnosis, dwelling, poorly, on responses I got from some people I shared my diagnosis with;
That it doesn’t exist.
That it’s a diagnosis for people who can’t figure out what’s really wrong with them.
Or; oh, that’s all? (Having no idea how intense and destructive it can be. Those struggles are valid.)
Or, the common response – which is no response at all, so underspoken or misrepresented or classically the butt of some joke ~
the common jolt of privilege, or just assholes, to just ridicule and condemn that which is not understood or known to them (and their glaring insecurity too);
Ridicule and judge, before a source is found.
Push away and give facades, becoming demeaning:
instead of curious inquiring.

And activism ~ calling it out, and educating, and moving the narrative ~
that’s a part of a greater healing overall.
Just like having a diagnosis with worlds of words
to better understand and function in a world built
on the worlds of words is part of a greater healing.

I’m throwing my fists into the air.
and stomping my feet.
Straight up inner child
raging.

It’s been so important that I uncover this.

Some shit you can absolutely change.
And some shit, some wiring, some threading,
a webbing
you can only accept.
push through push through carve carve canyons under slow soft direct pressure river running