I don't wanna "get better"

accepting who we are and finally just ✨being✨ me

I’ve been in a season of being. Of tinkering on the piano and running with my arms open. A season of staring at the wilting tulips on my desk because in their death their translucent petals are impossibly beautiful. 

I pushed pause on therapy a few weeks ago. An idea that came into my head that rattled around long enough it felt like freedom. Going through the autistic diagnostic process is like pulling all of your organs out into the floor categorizing them, turning each cell over, showing everyone and then trying to put yourself back together and perform human woman again. Expect now you know what the insides of your guts look like I was feeling overly perceived and absolutely exhausted from talking about myself. 

I wanna be clear, I am obviously a big fan of therapy. It has done a lot for me. But there has got to be a point where we fucking enjoy all this hard work we put into ourselves. 

I spent my 20’s surfing through the collection of self help books, trends, and courses. Anything I could get my hands on that would make me seem more normal. I had a lifetime of evidence being told I was simultaneously too much and not enough and therefore was looking for the thing that would fix me. I thought that if I just drank the right things, did enough sun salutations, stayed out late, got up early, I’d finally figure out what came so naturally to other people. I was sitting at a bar with a group of friends one night and they all talked about “turning their brains off” for the night. My jaw literally hung open. I do not think I have ever experienced a single thoughtless moment in my life. Surely I was broken and surely there was a way to fix this (turn off my brain). 

The internet feels more tenuous these days. And when I make large assumptions about the internet what I am really saying is people. There is hot take after hot take. Everyone is dieting wrong and everyone is perpetuating diet culture. You cannot love yourself the right way and if you do love yourself you should be ashamed of your love for yourself. Every other ad on my IG stories is someone telling me I am working wrong and they have a new answer for me, for a small fee of course. Each time I walk into the coffee shop and eye the cookies I mentally calculate how many treats I have already had today, and then I feel guilty for calculating treats and then wrestle with what I can only assume is a demon of white supremacy taken up residency in my head – all while waiting in line at the coffee shop. 

I never stop thinking. 

I have a bizarre sense of confidence. I really think I can do most things. When we sit on the couch at night and watch Survivor I pause before each challenge course and explain to my boyfriend the best way to attack the course and how I will certainly win. There have been times in my life where I have not loved myself. Where I would be the loudest in the room just so no one would actually see the me underneath. I would over preform and over promise myself – abandon myself and break myself off into tiny little pieces for everyone else to consume. 

There has to be a point where we can just let ourselves be. Where we can enjoy our hard work or maybe our lack of hard work on ourselves. A moment when we can bask in our unabashed sense of self pride (no matter how non-transferable my surviour challenge skills are)

I’m tired of getting better. There is so much pressure to be better, to do more, the most even. We rejected the cringe of the girl boss years and applied capitalism more more more to our own selves and internal landscapes.

Receiving my “formal” autism diagnosis back in January and despite the 5000 layers of crazy I have felt, the list of horrible things people have said to me about being autistic and the level of upheaval and (self) gaslighting you go through to get diagnosed. 

I finally don’t feel broken. 

I finally feel like I can just be me. 

I want to run through up the park steps to the top of the fountain with my arms flailing just because it feels fucking good. I want to take piano lessons and be so completely bas at something my neighbours hold their hands over their ears. I want to enjoy my overly inflated sense of confidence and dust of my roller skates. I want to think of the seeds I want to plant on my back deck this spring and I want to think about all the money and time I am going to spend to nurture one mealy back deck tomato. And I want to eat the tomato alone with a knife and fork. I want to let the mask I shellacked onto my face decades ago, the one I took to therapy to learn how to perform better, more comfortably for other people, to fall off. To let the edges of my too tight human suit I have been wearing fall back along the edges.

I'm not interested in getting better. I am interested in being me. 🌱

The Autism diaries 

I started these diary entries months ago. Autism is lonely but the diagnostic processes is so much lonelier. During this time I consumed every piece of autism content I could find, searching the internet for anyone that had gone through this extremely isolating experience. I would have given anything to speak to someone going through the same things I was going through.

I didn’t know how to tell people. I didn’t know what to DO with myself. I know I’m not a new person but it felt hard not to be a new person all of the sudden. But what I do know how to do is make something. I know to grab a camera or a mic or a pen and start to process it. And while most of the footage I shot I don’t think will ever see the light of day. There is so much I wanted to share in being me 🤸‍♀️

What has actually helped

• Talking to other autistic people.

• Piano lessons, being a beginner at something with 0 expectations of “goodness” and especially delish for me, not monetizing it

• Other autistic creators + writers.

  • Charlie Rewilding

  • Autistic Culture
    Podcast

  • Fern Brady’s book

  • @autisticblackgirl

I am both so nervous and so excited to share all this with you. Each time I have been working on this I stop and ask myself if I want to keep going. and each time my body and spirit say yes. To me that is really creative commitment. That’s what being really is. Listening. Even when it’s scary. Especially when it is scary.

Big love

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Creators Dispatch. A weekly essay about the creative journey! Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and living in the dumpster fire of a world that says not to make your art. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼