for a long time, i have been afraid, really, of just writing my stories, of just coding my ideas. i am plagued by… by unreal expectations of what performance and success look like. i have forgotten the joys of writing a crude BASIC program to just print out a bread recipe. it didn’t matter that it was ugly. it worked, it printed, and it enjoyed the heck out of me, figuring out how to print the title centered, print a line of ==== under the title to make it fancy. sometime after that, i started taking computer/programming classes, and that’s where i lost it all, i think.

i started to get more worried about everyone around me.

looking back, i think it was another of the many many, many, many, many… so, so, so many… instances … of me getting too caught up in the idea that others around me must never find me weird. because my neurodivergence really showed itself in two ways i used to love to express myself: computing and storytelling. two ways that got burned, severely and utterly and miserably, by school. it has taken me almost 40 years to begin to take it all back. to really see a way to make computing personal to me again. to really see a possibility of a way to make storytelling personal again.

i hope i can keep it up. i want to keep it up. i need to kep it up. i will keep it up.

step by little, microscopic step. i will carve my way out.