I am 20. I was born at the age of 0 in a hospital that no longer exists. I lived in stories, and resided in the United States of America. You can pathologize my raw thoughts as you wish. I'll give you a free space though: I'm autistic.

For as long as I can remember, so presumably for as long as I have been alive, I have consisted of "lanes". These lanes are my connections to people, symbols, ideas, experiences, and moments that linger in that place we each hold in ourselves called "Obscure". I am made up of my responses to each, and I embrace this. Each lane curves, intersects, and sometimes vanishes, yet I continue along them, making note of the beautiful and terrible things I see throughout. There is poetry in movement, in the curves and intersections.

I am a collector of impressions, fleeting and fragmentary, weaving them into the way I see, the way I think, the way I exist. Conversations, books, music, the pattern of light on walls, the way the birds flew when I stepped outside; each becomes a thread in the tapestry I carry with me. I don't, can't, reveal the whole thing to any one person, but speaking to me gives one all the tools they would need to imagine it with 100% accuracy if they only wished to.

I am both an observer and the sole participant; everything I do is done through the perspective of another, or rather, it is done under the influence of the observer effect. Fortunately, the observer tends to agree with the participant. When they do disagree, the emergent whole of their disagreement is woven into my being and alters me for the better. I have learned to welcome the tension between the self that acts and the self that watches.

In the past, I struggled with knowing which part of me was the real one. The brazen mask I put on in an effort to actually live, to "do"--rather than reenact Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground--or the endlessly ruminating, planning, never-acting part of me that operated by default and required no effort to keep in control. Both felt authentic in their own ways, but they also felt incomplete.

At some point, I realized the real “me” wasn’t hidden behind either side, it was the friction between them, the spark created by the constant conversation they held about how I should move, think, respond, and grow. That tension is a catalyst, a generative force shaping something endlessly new. The mask taught me the mechanics of walking, and the quiet part taught me to understand where I stepped. The interplay between them--their arguments, their alliances, their uncertain truces--became the place where I finally recognized myself.

It should, hopefully, go without saying that I appreciate all aspects of life. I am equally satisfied with the world when I am walking through hell as when I am given a brief taste of heaven. Both states illuminate something essential; both reveal a contour of who I am that I would not have seen otherwise. There was a time when I was filled with a desperate desire to rewrite my past, to undo every fracture, every misstep, every place where someone else’s hand left a mark on me.

Where there was once an anger at life for being so hard to let go of, there is now a deep gratefulness for that very resistance. The difficulty, the relentless grip, the way life refused to release me even when I begged for an easier narrative, all of it became a form of guidance I didn’t recognize at the time.

Again, I am completely shaped by my responses to every event in my life. I want to see others allow themselves to be shaped.