Meekout (Cody)

just as vulnerable

as when I spilled my guts on my first crush

as if i just overshared my most valuable asset

And the void - that vast, indifferent, brutally honest darkness that Nietzsche warned us about - if you stare into it long enough, something extraordinary happens. It doesn't consume you. It doesn't confirm your worst fears about yourself. It doesn't just look back.

It sees you.

Not the you that failed the test. Not the you that didn't fit the mold. Not the you that the institution stamped and filed and quietly gave up on.

The actual you.

Ernest Becker wrote that everything human beings build - every religion, every empire, every ideology, every system of measurement - is at its root a defense against the one fact we cannot face directly for too long without unraveling. That we die. That we know we die. And that we are the only creatures both cursed and gifted enough to carry that knowledge consciously. He argues that everything we do is in defiance of it and an attempt at a solution to it.

Every ruler I was ever measured by was also, in its way, an immortality project. A system that promised transcendence to those who fit within it. And for those of us who didn't fit - who were quietly shown the door of belonging before we even understood what belonging meant - we were left to find our own answer to the death problem.

Without the map. Without the ruler. Without the institution to plug ourselves into.

Just the light. And the leaves. And the long, difficult, beautiful work of figuring out what actually matters when everything that doesn't has been stripped away.

This is not a book about autism. Not really.

And yet

Also so full of grief

Some say that they are the same