I dreamt that I was meeting a bunch of people and getting out and being social and seeing live music and going to events and I met up with some cool hipster motorcycle riding scenesters. They all worked at a trendy clothing store and I ended up a bit smitten with one of the guys there who had a moustache and soft brown eyes. I think he was also smitten with me but I got a bit drunk and started to feel very self conscious and like I needed to go home. The store was quite high end and at one point I was watching the guy I have a crush on flip through some sweaters that cost $250 each and I was like there’s no way I can go out with this person. I was feeling like I was too scrappy and like everyone was too cool for me. I also felt quite vulnerable and exposed and like everyone else around me was solid in who they were, and I started to fray at the edges as the alcohol I drank kicked in.

It was quite late at night and the guy I was crushing on with asked me if I wanted a ride home on his motorcycle and I say no and that I would be okay walking, and I was trying to get all of my stuff together and I wasn’t really okay and there was also a woman who worked at the store and she was my age but was more mature than me and had mom vibes and she was helping me get my stuff and she offered to drive me home on her motorcycle. I started crying and having a meltdown and the guy I liked was in the background and he was asking if I was okay but keeping his distance, and really I just wanted him to hug me and take me home and hug me more but I was really scared. And I felt like I wanted him to be more forward about it and read my mind and know my true feelings and a part of me thought that if he really liked me that he would be more assertive, but I could see that he was really just a nice person who was respecting my boundaries, and it was me who wasn’t being open and saying what I wanted - but then I was too much of a yard sale.

The woman helped me gather all of my stuff. I had so many jackets and shoes strewn about but I managed to find everything. And really, maybe it was best that I didn’t go home with a guy I just met and I was being sensible. I thought to myself that I would like to leave him a note or tell him that I’d like to meet him for a coffee sometime when I was sober but I wasn’t in a state to do that and I thought that he probably wouldn’t want anything to do with me after he had seen how fucked up I was inside. A part of me knew that I had missed out on an opportunity to let someone really get to know me and be there for me and that he was a sincere person, but I was too scared (this has happened to me a lot in my life).

The next day I went to a nature spot where there was supposed to be a lot of water but it was quite dried up and there were a lot of people all around trying to find a place to swim. I had to fight through some crowds to get to where a waterfall was flowing down the mountain.

I had such a lovely night with my friend Sara-Rose last night. First I went to a yoga class and then we met at GC and ate lentil soup and lemon cheesecake. It was cloudy when we first met up and we headed over the bridge to my neighbourhood and went down to a little dock over here. As we were talking, Sara let me know that it was their second year anniversary in Victoria and after a little while the full moon came rising out from behind the clouds. They asked if I would mind if they sang a lullaby to the moon that they wrote when they were riding home on their bike one night and I was like heck ya. Sara has such an incredible voice and the song was very beautiful and it was one of those rare moments when the thoughts in my head subsided completely. In time with Sara singing, the wind picked up behind them and carried their voice into the water making ripples on the waves. I was completely smitten by the song and the mirage of clouds dancing around the brightly shining moon.

More time passed and we started hearing harsh little crunching sounds from the shoreline and then we realized that there were 3 raccoons eating clams and muscles just over the water from us. At one point two of them scuttled up to the edge of the shoreline facing the dock we were on and they were looking right over at us with their little bandit faces as they munched away on rock hard pollution saturated seashells like it was nothing - as they checked us out, as we checked them out.

We decided to get cozy and sit down on the dock even though the wood was a bit damp, and we talked about coming to terms with our mutual neurodiversity in adulthood and various traits that we share - like not really liking asking people too many questions in a conversation and not really liking it when others ask us super direct personal questions and preferring a conversation to flow naturally and offering information mutually as it feels comfortable (which can sometimes be perceived as rude but really we are just very engaged). It’s something I had only reflected on recently in realizing that I had schooled myself over the years into a certain amount of formulaic conversational small talk. But when I meet other neurodivergents* it all gets thrown out the door and we have a unique style of talking that seems to work intuitively and sometimes we interrupt each other and go on tangents and leave part of a story hanging and then go back to it or one person will talk for a veeeeery long time time and then the other person will talk for a veeeery long time.

As we continued hanging out on the dock herons started flying back and forth in front of us, and against the night sky they looked like giant prehistoric bat shadows prowling along a glowy moonlit backdrop. Then a wood-fired sauna party dingy floated by, and then a larger boat drove alongside next to them and made some big waves that rippled the water into giant bands and rocked the dock we were on. The lights that were shining across the harbour from the big industrial sites looked like jagged neon lightning bolts and like something out of a 90’s techno music video, and we tripped out on that for a while, and the we tripped out on all of the shadows and reflections around the full moon and how clouds are like negative 35mm film right around the moon and then the shadows slowly reverse themselves as they feather out into the sky. I’d never noticed that before.

As if the night couldn’t get any cooler, it turns out that Sara is a Christopher Pike fan!! We looked up covers of his books picking out the ones we’d read until their** phone died.



* usually when I use the term neurodivergent I’m referring to individuals who have traits that are commonly associated with the high-intellect / low support needs flavour of the autism spectrum and those who have traits that are sometimes labelled as ADHD. There are many people who are neurodivergent who are non-verbal and none of what I’m writing would apply to them. I’m figuring all of this stuff out as I go along, though I definitely share a kinship with many people who get labelled as Aspergers, Autistic and / or ADHD, and perhaps in another dimension I would have been labelled as such, though thankfully I’ve lived a very unconventional life with an unconventional family and had very unconventional careers, so traits that may have inspired psychiatric intervention in a more conservative environment were shared and accepted by those around me.

** I still struggle sometimes to use non-binary pronouns. It’s difficult for me to use “they” in the singular form and I often get tongue tied and confused. Though they/them is what’s been accepted by the broader LGBTQ+ community and I care enough about my gender nonconforming friends to make it work and to be uncomfortable with it until it becomes second nature. As I use gender neutral pronouns more and more in day to day writing and speech and hear them used by others, it’s starting to come to me more naturally.

Resources on using gender neutral pronouns:

The Pronoun Dressing Room

Practice With Pronouns

The History of Thon