Mostly self-taught, for a reason

A while back I wrote about what school was like for me, growing up neurodivergent in a system that had no idea what to do with that. I'm not publishing the whole thing here. A lot of it's rawer than I want sitting on a public page, and I get to keep some of it. A few lines still hold up, though, and they're the closest I have to an explanation for why I taught myself instead of waiting around for somebody else to do it well:

"I had an IEP, I had all the common systems and tools available to neurologically different kids, but I couldn't thrive with any of them because they were all so generic they never touched on my actual case."

"The people meant to teach me didn't know what to do with me. They gave up, and the system failed me at an extremely early age."

"I fundamentally enjoy asking questions, questioning what I've been told, and living as many experiences as I can. If I could pick a purpose, I'd pick learning, and sharing that experience, as my job."

I went back into that old draft expecting to be hit by how angry I was. What got me instead was how early I'd decided that if I wanted to understand something, I was going to have to go get it myself. That instinct has been useful and exhausting in roughly equal measure. It's behind every project on this site. It's also why I'll build a rough version of something that fits me before I'll keep sanding a polished version that doesn't.

If any of that sounds familiar, the generic IEP or the system quietly giving up on you early, my ADHD & Hazel page gets into what it still looks like day to day as an adult, and what I built to work around it instead of waiting for a system to catch up.

Most of what I've written about being trans started as something I needed to say to myself. None of it was aimed at anyone else first. The advocacy work came afterwards and changed the writing more than I expected. Once you've had the same conversation forty times you get much better at saying the thing plainly and much worse at padding it, and I'll take that trade.

"Respect isn't a lot to ask for. Use the name someone gives you. Don't out people. Don't assume you know someone's story. None of that costs anything; it just takes a little consideration. That's most of what advocacy actually looks like day to day: small, consistent choices that add up to someone feeling safe being themselves."

"Any single one of them looks like nothing from the outside. Strung together, they're the difference between bracing for a day and just having one."

"You don't owe anyone a polished narrative or a particular timeline. You don't have to be certain before you're allowed to explore something. Go at your own pace, and let it be messy while it needs to be."

This is the subject I write about most often. Partly because it's the one I live in, and partly because so much of what gets published about ADHD and autism is either a shame spiral or a productivity pitch. Neither of those ever did a thing for me. I'm not trying to motivate anybody. I want to describe the mechanism and let you decide what to do with it.

"The gap isn't between knowing and caring, it's between knowing and doing, and no amount of caring harder closes it."

"A reminder tool you have to remember to open is just a to-do list with extra steps."

"Anything that punishes you for a missed day is something you'll eventually stop opening rather than face, and a scaffold you avoid is worse than no scaffold at all."

Those pages are the long version, complete with the code. This page is just the sentences I'd keep if I had to throw the rest away.

How public did I want to be about any of this? That question held the relationship writing up longer than anything else I've written. It's also the writing I'm most glad I didn't soften. Being plain about it turned out to be far more useful to people than being careful was ever going to be.

"Non-hierarchical doesn't mean directionless. It means nobody's love gets pre-ranked before it's even had a chance to be itself."

"Non-monogamy doesn't replace them. It just means you can't get away with skipping them, because there are more people to hurt when you do."

"I'd rather build honest relationships around what's actually true for the people in them than inherit a script nobody sat down and chose."

Fair warning. The pages those come from are written for adults, and they don't dance around their subject matter.

Not all of my writing is about my own head. A fair amount of it's me explaining a technical decision to nobody in particular. Why? Usually because the decision was interesting and I knew I'd lose the reasoning by morning if I didn't write it down. Those notes end up scattered across the project pages instead of collected anywhere, so here are a few I like.

"A project that responds predictably to what I do is a good counterweight to a brain that doesn't always."

"I could have used the order of lines in the file as a stand-in for time and nobody would have checked, but I have no way to prove that file is even in chronological order, and a chart that might be fiction is worse than no chart."

"It's whitelisted mostly so I know who's in my house, not because I'm precious about it."

Do I have a process? Not one worth calling that. What I have is a handful of rules I arrived at by writing badly for years and slowly noticing which sentences I never wanted to delete.

Say the plain version first. If I can't state the point in one sentence a tired person would understand, I don't understand it yet. Dressing it up won't fix that. Almost every paragraph I'm proud of started as a much longer one that was hiding behind its own vocabulary.

Put the caveat in the text, not in a footnote. If something on this site is a guess, an opinion, or a thing I can't prove, I'd rather say so in the same breath than let a reader find out later and reasonably wonder what else I glossed over. It costs a sentence and buys the whole page.

Write it for one person. Usually a version of me from a few years ago who needed someone to be straightforward about this exact thing. That framing quietly solves tone, because you don't perform for someone you're trying to help.

Not everything gets published. Plenty of what I write is for working something out, not for an audience, and there's no rule saying the two have to be the same document. The self-taught piece higher up this page is a good example. Three lines of it belong here. The rest doesn't, and I'm not sorry about that.

I pulled my full Facebook and Instagram data exports and counted every word I've personally written on either platform since 2011: posts, comments, captions, and messages I sent. Not what anyone wrote back, not who I was talking to, not how much I talk to any particular person. Just the total volume of me, typing.

I expected the number to be embarrassing. It's worse than that.

Fun facts I didn't ask for

The word I reach for more than any other content word is "people", 3,034 times. That's a fairly damning summary of what my brain does all day. After that it's know, time, good, work, think and want, in that order, which reads less like a vocabulary and more like a diagnosis.

I have typed the word "dog" 1,378 times. I have typed "love" 997 times. The dog is winning by a margin of nearly four hundred. Nobody who has met Harley is going to be surprised by that.

My median piece of writing is ten words long and my average is twenty-three, so most of this was never essays. It's a decade and a half of short messages. The total only got that big because I never stopped.

The quietest hours are 4am and 3am, with under a hundred pieces each. Between 5am and 9am I've written almost nothing in fifteen years. I appear to be, in the most literal measurable sense, nocturnal.

Everything quoted above came from a page on this site, so it's a rigged sample. Those are the sentences that survived being turned into a website. These nine didn't start that way. They're essays, written as essays, and the excerpt under each one is the line I'd keep if I had to throw the rest of that piece away.

They're heading to the blog instead of becoming pages of their own. A page is a thing I maintain. A post is a thing I wrote on a particular day and am allowed to have moved on from, and most of these are the second kind.

The essays and the blog, plus the writing that's filed elsewhere on the site because of what it's about, not what it is.