Stop explaining yourself. For a few days, weeks, even months basking in the absence of it, if you can.

See the difference in your personal peace and how you carry yourself. Observe how your internal soundtrack changes–

From shame, self-criticism, productivity, conflict, and frustration to the sound of your own voice–

Creative, expressive, comedic, playful, loving, curious, and inquisitive all waiting to break through.

Stop all the time you spend fixing yourself, over-educating yourself in anything that doesn’t resemble play.

I bet the best athletes and artists in the world don’t even know they even are and have yet to discover it– pouring that passion, color, and energy into people and places who flush it all away as if it’s nothing.

The things that separate us from others–

That make it hard for us to fit in,

Those are our gold mines. They are our liberation.

Whatever it is.

For me– it’s my writing, my extreme interest, countless research, personal experience and intuitive ability in health and healing, my ability to connect very deeply with people, my ability to alchemize suffering and identifying and being a vigilant friend and ally to those who have known it, too.

It is the passion I feel from deep within my bones, even, the way I engage with the world through awe-struck observation, poetry, cycling and skiing.

It is how I am stubborn in taking the long way, the hard way, to staying within my means but also reaching far, far beyond what I ever perceived possible for myself.

It is how I forget how profoundly incredible I am–

But I can find it in every next person in less than an instant.

I can find everything beautiful in someone and a muse in anything.

But I can also dazzle, impress, then disgust and appall the few people who begin to see me.

I am no stranger to the fast-earned affection, unsolicited advice, then downright ableism of someone new who has discovered me–

Seeing how I glow in my individuality, through art, sport, and unexpectedly hard-hitting satire and comedy.

When the things that fuel my incredible light–

Namely, my unknowable shadow, existing within the inevitably oncoming sensory overwhelm, persistent invalidation, and the panic, confusion, and fear that brews within it at catastrophic speeds–

Causing me to forget myself, who I am, all that I’ve accomplished–

Grasping at any string or straw or anything at all as to why I’m not insane and please, don’t leave me–

Abandonment always makes the final call

Even after all the “healing”.

I cannot outrun, outsing, out-lunge the fact that I have a disability in this world–

Trust me, I have tried–

Far too many a time to count.

So instead of letting shame surmount,

Falling down, around, and overwhelmed–

I don’t grasp at the feet of the people who won’t meet all edges of me in the same careful observation–

That, maybe, under the sharpness of my voice indicates a deeper suffering that is alleviated in the gaze of tender eyes instead of people cracking whips on their thighs–

Rolling their eyes–

Not sure whether I deserve to be taken down a peg or two, to be dismissed or called rude,

Perceived as being a victim or with a terrible attitude.

These are the people I can’t tell anything like I can’t change myself and I’ve learned that why would I want to?

If I could snap myself into the shape of every falsified advice and twisted face I’d ever had strewn in my direction then how would I be?

Could I stand on my own two feet?

Surely I wouldn’t be the double black diamond, 100km per day cyclist and skier, writer, and dreamer that I am so effortlessly in the absence of misunderstanding who I am.

I’m not meant to know how I appear to every person I engage with–

I am far too complex to be digestible in one fell swoop, to be overly liked, pursued, employed, accepted, and even enjoyed by the same people I could find ways to love.

I am not for everybody–

Which only serves me by filtering through only the finest gems–

That can only try to hold space for some of my duality.

The reality is the one who knows me most intimately is still, and will forever be me.

And I need to explain nothing to no one.