November

Sometime during the while I graduated from having nightmares about explosions to having nightmares about cyclones, reality certainly became less of one. It hasn't nearly been half as cruel as I'd become accustomed to, and a new kind of freedom has been found, it seems. Not the "spread my wings and soar away" variety, but more of a "today, I decide to stop pretending these chains are made of anything more than yarn that I would have slashed away with a fingernail a long time ago, had they not have been a metaphor for something that was rather valuable once upon an unreal and delicately fragile time" kind.

I understand more about this thing people call "human frailty" than ever before. I still call it cowardice, of course... and you, being you, might scoff condescendingly at the fact and shake your head in misleadingly unconvincing exasperation, continuing to unleash upon this world a false sense of security that will forever remain your ultimate, all-serving escape route. But so be it. Like I've said before, this is the way of the world and the world, I will not argue with. It's too predisposed to its own frailties for that. 

Having witnessed my words lose all power the year before, this year was also about reclaiming faith in them. I said so much that needed to be said, in and to people and places, not so respectively. I said that everything in this life is compensated for, and my balance stands levelled and even. Keen and quivering ratio, yes, but balanced nevertheless. I said that these things happen and the victories are not absolute. Nothing, unless broken down to the microscopic level is binary data. And once we're there, we're both the same. Broken down, we're both the exact same sequence of 0s and 1s and QR codes. I said that proof by analogy is never a proof, and I refuse to use it to describe the degree to which our own intent governs our lives in contrast to pure entropy and probability. I said that my violent, passionate, disagreeable self will always be so, because it is the only thing I can be knowing the things I know. I said that I would always go to the greatest lengths to have my environment be a product of my actions, and not vice versa. That my life, my volition, my choices and my loves are entirely my own and so is the responsibility of bearing their consequences. I said that in this wild spinning world, we are specks in the whirlpool. Colliding, drifting, cracking, shifting, breaking, coalescing. When not a single point in these realms stays constant, what do we centre our world around except our own estimations of perspective and standard deviations? I proposed that we take the sum total of all existence, slice it in the dimensions of space and time, and capture a sliver of reality in our minds. Every premise sorted, every colour accounted for. That much of reality, you get to keep. I said a lot of things, and mean them as much today as I did then. I, being me, will continue to do so.

There is more than a glint of hope, you see. This year and a half has brought in a lot of change. Having previously escaped the traps of formal education, it was a concrete step towards making(not finding, for that is too passive) my place in the world. Places, people, cities, and a fair deal of altered states of mind. Green, amber, and the entire rainbow wedged in between. Inconvenient loves and some very convenient hate. Bright lights, and wild nights. It was also the year of fending off droves of the redundant, the fatuous and the wasteful, fighting gender biases tooth and nail, and fighting for the fact that I am responsible only for my own actions, even if the weight and blame makes good stuffing for a communal piñata. The realisation that if the world insists on making me choose between wasting a lot of my time talking about it, or have it waste a disproportionate amount of its own talking about me, I might as well choose the latter despite the associated costs. 

The understanding that if I claim that a person is to be defined by their thoughts, beliefs, premises and ethos, then death is far more threatening a proposition than I ever imagined. Death, of course, of an entirely different sort. There were mountains and beaches and everything in between a million times over again. Music that you could touch, music that killed and resuscitated, music that broke, music that fixed, music that connected a hundred people through one feeling, music that set the air on fire, and music that made my heart want to explode. A lot of things made my heart want to explode, in ways good, bad, and honestly quite messy and ugly. But there is freedom. Never have I felt so wholly responsible for, so completely in control of my own life. Taxes, bills, and paying the rent. Living on my own, and breathing in a decidedly unhealthy amount of rarified oestrogen on a daily basis. 

But you shouldn't dwell, I implore. For "you", you must understand now, is not really you.