Some thoughts on my mind in late May that I just want to record for now. Not sure they’re all that valuable.

• Life isn’t easy and I don’t want it to be easy. The struggle is where my good stories come from. The trend of self-care bothers me because striving and resiliency are good traits to have and push. Discomfort is not a bad thing.
• I don’t want my hurt to color how I write about people. I have been petty and mean because I felt unloved. I don’t want to do this. I need to learn how to hold pain and cruelty that is directed at me without losing myself in it.
• Finally figuring out who I am. It’s not that I stopped caring what other people think because I most certainly do, it’s that I am learning to hold the same weight with what I think.
• I want connection but also value privacy. I don’t know exactly how to square these two things. To connect means to be vulnerable, which I have with my personal, in real life relationships. Online? That’s something I’ll need to play around with.
• Writing is thinking. I know nothing but working through my thoughts and emotions with written words helps me process. Nothing is gospel and all thoughts are allowed to change.
• I want to lead with generosity. It’s so easy to shitpost, see the bad, assume the worst. As I try to see that everyone is trying their best and assume good intentions on everyone’s part, I want the same here. This doesn’t mean weakness or naiveté. I’m choosing the good over the mean and unkind, which I think is pretty rare to begin with.
• I believe in kindness and inclusivity, and I want to start with that. I may not agree with a person’s viewpoint but they don’t need to prove anything. I have to put in the work if I want to understand.
• Learning to be comfortable in my own skin. External validation has been a constant need in my life, not feeling like I was ever enough, like I had to justify my existence. It’s a slow process but I’m beginning to let this go, realizing that no one should have—or has ever had—that kind of control over me. It was always mine. Leaning into the comfort and imperfection of who I am makes life, and the ease of being me, so much sweeter. I am learning to be Alison.

It’s an odd place to feel like life is beginning at forty-five. Nothing tragic or life-changing has happened this past year, nothing out of the ordinary. My young life contained much more dramatic and tragic events that shaped and shifted the first half of this life. But this year, there wasn’t an event I can point to that demonstrably shifted my trajectory. A number of small events, each in succession that, looking back upon, seem almost destined and not serendipitous at all, but this is just my brain pattern-making and seeing causality when, in reality, it’s all just chaos. This chaos is something I’ve always been partial to; the joy of change, the opportunity to inhabit a different world, a different way of being, trying on new skins and methods of operating in this world. Yet, for much of my life, this shedding and donning of new ways of being have often been the result of outside influences, rather than coming from within. I have largely known who I am, who I was, from a very early age. I’m genuine and kind, open and vulnerable. I had to learn hardness and anger and fear from what the world taught me. The world is not an easy place to exist in.