I’d like to say that my absence from this blog has been purely about laziness, but that would be a lie. Over the last year or so I have been learning a lot about myself in so many ways. Much of what I have learned has to do with health, with healing traumas, and discovering who I really am in this world. I can’t say the journey is complete, really only started, but I have spent this time away healing and quietly creating.
My whole life I had always felt different, just left of center, and never quite part of things. I was an obsessive people watcher trying to learn how to be like everyone else. It has been an exhausting life and sometimes a dangerous one when I let people close who had no business near me. Though it is a self diagnosis, I do believe I am on the spectrum. I have done the research and taken the tests enough to know that there is no way around it. When I realized this, I sobbed on the couch alone. I wasn’t sad that this is who I am, but only joyful to know that I was right. I was different. I made a promise to myself that I would not longer spend all my efforts on masking my way through society. I was going to live life my way and I set out to see what that meant exactly. I had spent over 40 years living by other people’s standards and often without any of my own input.
I think back on how many poems I had written myself about not fitting in, about feeling invisible without understanding what that meant. I am learning to be my authentic self in a world that does not really understand people on the spectrum or agree with how their minds work. It is a lot of trial and error. I tend to be a pretty blunt speaker when put on the spot. It doesn’t always work in my favor. But there is something extraordinary about feeling free for the first time in my life. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
This year has been also about healing traumas and finally, after ten years, allowing myself to grieve my mother’s passing. The shock of her death was more than I could handle as were the dozen deaths that followed hers. How does one reconcile a lifetime of questions with someone who is dead? I had to go back and look at life through a different lens. My world is seen as the world in relationship to me because I am the only person that I can control. It isn’t to say that I’m not empathetic, because I am, but in the moment and without time for processing, the world does not exist to me. I have dug deep and really looked at what I thought were the injustices in my life at the hands of my mother and found that she did the best she could. She was a 15 year old child having a baby. She had a mentally ill father who was an alcoholic and a probably a mother on the spectrum. She was young and wild and did what she wanted. But through my life, she was always there working two or three jobs to pay the bills and keep us fed. She was gone a lot and in my mind, I suppose I felt abandoned. I didn’t understand what it meant to make ends meet until I was older.
I did a lot of trauma work in the last six months. I was sexually abused as a child but really had no way to process that information, no one to share it with who would understand. People would say, oh that was so long ago, but when I sat down through all the tears I shed that month and saw how that still affected my life and every relationship in it, I knew that I had never gotten over it. I made my life “tolerable” by always staying busy. Overproduction is the devil on my shoulder along with perfection and rigidity. This hard work would have never been possible without the love and quiet strength of my boyfriend Chris. He truly is my safe place to land. He accepts me with all my quirks and stims and strange views of everything and still chooses to tell me he loves me every day.
This year had me doing what I thought was impossible. I joined a women’s group. Relationships with women have always been hard for me. We don’t like the same things most of the time. It has been a long life without a circle of women to share with and find power with. This isn’t to say that I haven’t had some of the best women friends the world could offer. I have met great women along the way and they are still in my life. I cherish each one for their strengths and weaknesses that show me what humanness is. But this new group of women have helped me elevate myself in ways I could not have expected of myself. They take me for who I am without question and I admire all of them for their willingness to discover themselves and create the life they want.
I have been writing but not publishing. I am working on a book about 72 micro-seasons, which is largely something in Japan, but I took it on as a project for myself in 2022. Writing a poem every five days about nature in a certain scenario is no small feat. I don’t always show up with the inspiration which is why it isn’t done yet, but I love the poems inside it, how they catch the environment and my emotions in a snapshot that will never be recreated again. I have been making art. I had always wanted to be an artist and with Chris’ help as well as letting myself be myself at any cost, the inspiration has bloomed.
This year is going to be a great one. I am going to do my best to share it, to ask questions of the universe, to flesh out ideas and creations with you. For those that still stop by here from time to time wondering what I am up to, I appreciate you hanging on.
Be kind to each other. Read. Write. Paint. Laugh. You only get this one chance.
Aleathia
Aleathia Drehmer 
❤️
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