2KVYOT3.L0VETukayote Helianthus v2Walking away from suffering.Walking towards love.With intention.
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A month ago I found out I am autistic, and every pattern I spent this year naming suddenly had a different shape underneath it. I didn’t have language for any of it when I recorded this piece, so I let my body move through it instead. Kai Wachi said what I couldn’t, and I danced the grief because my mouth hadn’t caught up yet.
There is no substance left standing between me and whatever I feel now. No drink, no chemical, nothing to soften the edges or buy me a night off. So when this song ripped open the way it does, quiet grief giving way to an explosive drop, I let my body do what it had to do. Weeks of stacked, unfinished grief moved out of my nervous system the only way it could. Not through numbing. Through movement.
June 2026 was a month of exploration and wonder. Learning about being autistic while exploring dating with 3 different women. 176 days completely sober from drugs and alcohol. 161.4 miles walked on two feet that kept my nervous system regulated. I road tripped through 5 states and slept in 4 of them. I went no-contact with several people I used to be close to.
A year ago I walked off a 25 year IT career with no plan and no safety net. Since then I have lost nearly everything, including an identity, and people who had been part of my life for years, and found chemical and emotional sobriety, a personal operating system that actually works for how my brain runs, and the truth that I have been autistic and masking my entire life without knowing it. This is the full road from that exit, including the boundary that got tested within days of finally setting it, and the new connection I’m building without…
For the first time in my life, I can actually feel the love. Not as a concept. As a felt thing. I danced to prove it.
Someone called me a creep in public last weekend. Loudly. In front of other people. He looked at a stranger spreading anonymous kindness and reached for the most dehumanizing word he could find. He didn’t ask what I was doing. He didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. He just aimed it and fired. I wrote him a letter. Not to start a fight. Because he tried to silence me with shame, and I do not let anyone do that anymore.
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