Living my whole life simultaneously

I know this is somewhat doxxing, but there is no way to write this essay without it being easy to infer anyway. My alma mater is shutting down this year. It is one of many small liberal arts colleges to close lately. There is much abuzz on the what lead to the closure and what this means for America, and what we all lose when we lose this particular quirky college. This essay is not about that. I'll be writing another essay about that under my real name, on some other website.

The closing announcement had lead to much reconnecting with old friends, much perusing old photos, much sharing of stories with other alumni, much connecting with students who came after me and hearing about the impact I left on campus through my activism, and the other things that never changed. It's sometimes comical how similar the stories are sometimes. It's been ten years since I graduated. 2.5 full four-year cycles of students came and went.

While digging through old college documents, I found something else: a short-story I wrote when I was fifteen years old. It was set in the cult I grew up in, but written before I realized it was a cult. Written when I was 100% in favor of "our philosophy" and yet it was not simple propaganda. It was quite a good story. It held space for the emotional conflicts that we went through, and the process of how we subsumed them to thought-stopping cliches. I showed the story to my current friends, providing no context other than that I was fifteen when I wrote it, and it was set in my real life community growing up. They all agreed it was a very good story, and also that it was horrifying. There was no intended critique of the cult when it was written, but there was one present in the story itself, to be found by an outside reader.

I polished the story, adding sensory details and fixing awkward phrasings, but kept the plot and characters in-tact. I sent it to my friends again. It's even better. It's incredible. One friend told me I should expand it into a full novel. An autobiographical novel, so I could avoid concerns around libel or the inaccuracies of memory. Having been reflecting so much on college lately, the form of this novel was clear to me. The short story would be a prologue to a novel set at my alma mater. It would be the story of how I mentally left the cult ideology while attending a quirky liberal arts college, with flashbacks to the cult included in footnotes. It would explore PTSD and the onset of bipolar in my early adulthood. My alma mater was a weird place, and it would lend itself perfectly to a surreal story told not entirely in chronological order.

And so, I began outlining this novel. Chapter by chapter, working through what should happen and what flashbacks should happen when. This vivid imagining of my past, what all the buildings looked like, what it smelled like, the finest sensory details, the voices of the people I knew—it all has been reactivating dormant neural pathways in my memory.

Simultaneously, as I catch up with every old friend, or give advice to new graduates facing an uncertain future, I have been frequently recounting the ten years since college. How did I get my first job out of college? Where was it? What was it like? How was grad school? What was moving to Philadelphia like? How was my pandemic lockdown experience? Do I remember this student reaching out to me in 2022? How was getting GRS? How did I get a brain injury? What am I up to these days?

All at the same time, I am still living my life, day by day, doing the things I am doing, and seeing the friends that I have. I keep having dreams, where my current friends were students at my alma mater. They would have fit in so well. They are all a certain kind of passionate person. Last night, I had a sex dream about a very tall and well-dressed coworker of mine, where we hooked up in a room at the cult I grew up in. I have been idly fantasizing about alternative lives, where I knew who I was immediately, and went through college post-op. I have been revisiting and reframing old narratives with new knowledge about myself. Oh, right, I've been autistic this whole time. That explains that memory. Oh, gosh, bipolar is a progressive disorder with age of onset right around when I was in college. That explains a lot of behaviors. Oh, that means no matter what happened to me during college, I always would have gone crazy at the end. I got on mood stabilizers relatively quickly, actually, all things considered. I definitely should keep taking those.

The end-result of all this reminiscing, imagining, writing, and reflecting is that I am experiencing my entire life simultaneously. Every neutral pathway is lighting up at once. I am remembering entire important people and routines I had forgotten. I am feeling old intense emotions about moments long past. I feel insecure, and afraid. I am repeating old behaviors I had already grown out of. I am feeling my inner child and inner adolescent and inner young adult and inner thirty-something all becoming one single person. I feel as though I am every version of myself that I have ever been.

I once felt as though my life was neatly divided up into different stories featuring different main characters. Ages 4 to 10 were one person, ages 11 to 13 were another, ages 14 to 17 were another, ages 18 to 21 were another, then 22 to 24, then 25 to 28, then 29 to 31, and so forth. Perhaps right now, I am having my "eras tour." I feel strongly in this moment that everyone I have ever been has always been the same person continuously growing through every experience. Even as my identity outwardly changed, I always remained fundamentally the same person.

I am becoming very aware of clear through-lines between every era of my life, where even if it looked different, I was ultimately still building on the same things. I am reading old writing and seeing I have always been concerned with certain topics. My mature adult hobbies are but evolutions of the same things I did when I was a small child. I have consistent values, personality traits, and behaviors.

Some of my stable consistent qualities:

1. I am incredibly verbose. I have learned this is associated with Irish culture, Jewish culture, and being Autistic. So I am doomed to be wordy. I was always a precocious hyperlexic child and now I am incapable of shutting up or using simpler words.
2. I am a very sentimental person. I get very attached to life cycles, milestones, symbols, metaphors, poems, archives, and rituals.
3. I have always loved music, singing, dancing, theater, and the performing arts.
4. I have always loved to play pretend, role play, play imaginative games together, and improvise.
5. I have always been a storyteller, even when I wasn't a writer.
6. I have always valued a community's ability to move through conflict productively.
7. I have always valued being a part of a group or community, even when I said I would not commit to any single group. I always subsumed myself to the values and needs of that group or community, but only in-so-far as I would not break certain rules of integrity.
8. I have always valued integrity, even as a very small child.
9. I always took things seriously, while also always being one to make jokes.
10. I am always passionate and deeply caring.
11. I have always been philosophical and interested in things like phenomenology and consciousness, even when I didn't know these words.
12. I have always loved learning, and valued knowledge and science.
13. I have always cared about doing the right thing and sometimes that means following the rules and sometimes it means breaking unjust rules to adhere to some higher righteousness. I care about doing things the right way, how they're supposed to be done, whether or not that's how anyone else is doing it.
14. I have always been dramatic, and hardly the most stable person. But this never precludes me being the most reasonable person, even if I express it dramatically.
15. I have always allowed other people to shape my identity and presentation too much in order to get them to like me and include me, and yet this never stopped me from transitioning or being gender non-conforming. This requires further investigation.
16. I have always been rebellious towards perceived authorities and refuse to take orders from out-groups, yet among trusted peers I become deferential and compliant. Even at my most unstable, having manic paranoia and publicly decrying campus staff as being out to get me, when a friend would tell me to do something for my own good, I would just do it without question. Even now, I am willing to rebel against my superior officers and commit insubordination, yet hardly resist a friend's guidance. This requires further investigation.
17. I have always been a Joiner creating a busy schedule of activities for myself even in the cult when there were, intentionally, no scheduled activities.
18. I have always been a host and a community organizer, taking initiative to make things happen, hosting people, providing emergency housing, creating community spaces, having people over for dinner.
19. I have always been the mom friend, someone who cares for others, someone who reminds people to drink water, who tries to look out for others, who tries to nurture.
20. I have never been afraid of conflict. Even with my closest loved ones, I am quick to directly disagree or tell them they are wrong. I never hesitate to just say "that's wrong" even to superior officers. I have always been willing to keep talking through conflicts. In college, while I was known to be a dramatic SJW, I never stopped talking to and engaging with my ideological opponents. Many of the people I disagreed with became my best friends. I always tried to struggle through and understand their position, and get them to understand mine.

Looking at this set of qualities, it makes sense why I would have a blog, but also why—in absence of a writing community to read and exchange writing with—I have lost motivation to write publicly as much. Doing things as part of a group is central to everything I enjoy. I am collectivist.

Experiencing my whole life simultaneously and in non-chronological order is also causing my to reconnect with things I've deeply enjoyed in the past and want to bring back into my life again.

• Contra dancing, something I've frequently used as a metaphor in my writing but haven't done in eight years after several years of doing it weekly.
• Singing and/or the performing arts. This one is difficult, since I have dysphoria around my vocal range, but finding some sort of trans choir would probably be very valuable to me.
• Existing in public. Since the pandemic, I have become very reclusive, seemingly having forgotten how to leave my house on a weeknight. Some of this is disability and fatigue, but I used to just go out and spend a whole day outside of my home. I used to play card games with friends at cafes. Maybe this is just having less time in your 30s, but there was a time even in Philadelphia when I would sit in a cafe and people I knew would walk by and say hello.
• Nature. I need more nature. I need to like, find a place I can go for walks around plants and do that regularly. Even if, from the inner city, it's a shlep. Let's go on adventures.
• Cooking and baking. This one I definitely fell off from because of my brain injury. For a while, I couldn't count measurements in my head. I'm getting back into this one again.
• Taking moments to express gratitude and appreciation for the people in my life.

Even when I thought that I was a plural system, I was always one person, essentially expressing one singular personality. I was using that as a frame to filter for evidence to support a certain phenomenology, but looking back on the actions I took, the things I said, and so forth, I remained the same person I have always been and continue to be. I may have been dissociating, and not feeling like every part of myself at once, but all those parts were still one cohesive whole. When I was not dissociating, there was no distinct personalities or identities. When I stopped dissociating all the time, I simply realized I had been one person the whole time.

Without thinking about it, in my life, I have drifted towards the dreams I held when I was a teenager. Without thinking about it, in my life, I have repeated patterns and cycles. Without telling a cohesive story, my life is totally cohesive. Things that felt crazy at the time had rather simple and reasonable explanations. My life is surreal, and yet totally comprehensible. As I view it from every angle, I understand myself, and how I got here, and can very easily think about where I am going. I have come so very far, and yet my emotional needs remain the same. My old journals still resonate, even if I cope with the emotions much better. I am still the same person. Even in my manic scribblings, I would write things in Yiddish and Esperanto. It was still me.

As I once wrote in my first book of poetry: Everything that happens, however you tell it, shapes you. Whether you understand it or not. Whatever narrative you come up with to explain it. Whether your narrative makes sense or is true. Everything you are makes absolute perfect sense.