Work in Progress

  Before I get to updating you on my progress this week, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the fact that I am finally feeling myself again. I had a really difficult year last year. It took a lot out of me; not only my self worth but, worse, my sense of self. I felt lost. Unmoored. On top of everything else I was going through with very complicated and damaging family stuff, to the loss of my father (the complex grief from a complicated relationship with him was really hard for me to deal with and understand), and finding myself essentially with no place to live for a while took a lot out of me because I no longer understood where I fit in the world. In MY world, with my family.  Family is a complicated word. I no longer describe family as being related by blood but by choice. Family is who I choose. Family is who chose me, even in my darkest moments. Those who, when I had trouble seeing myself clearly and shining my light into the world, never gave up on me and never stopped seei

Hi, my name is JJ. I have done a lot of work to come out, to figure out who I am and what I am capable of over the past several years; to figure out what labels I claim for myself and what ones were assigned to me by others. But my queer identity isn't the only one that seems to have been growing and changing. I have learned I have autism as well. And being on that spectrum as well as realizing I am nonbinary and on the Ace spectrum, I realized that I still have so much to learn about myself. So many things to figure out. Ways to grow and learn.  My whole life I have struggled with feeling not enough. Not good enough. To belong. To be respected. To be loved. But part of what I learned through trying to understand my autism is that I also struggled with feeling like I was too much. Scared to take up too much space. Scared to be my full self because I felt it was too much for people to handle. I shrunk down. I stayed silent. And when I did try to achieve things, I didn't feel lik