APRIL 29 2022

Impending Eclipse. Tomorrow is Witches Night. Halfway through the Celtic New Year. When the veil between the ethereal and physical dissolves. Sister night to Samhain.

I dreamt that I was back in Vancouver and working in film again, surrounded by ‘high status’ people who had arbitrarily decided that I was part of their inner circle and were bestowing me with all kinds of praise and special considerations and attention, which I found really discomforting (much as I did in real life when exposed to all of the butt licking and sycophantic ways of high society).

I’m in a big warehouse building near Clarke St. and a wiry older woman is giving me keys and too many passwords all at once and some of them are intricate alphanumeric codes that make my head spin. I’m crumpling into myself and covering my ears from the noise of the mileux around.

I finally unfurl myself and scream at the woman “ENOUGH!! That’s enough for right now.” And then I take leave of the place.

I come to another grey, decaying warehouse near the railroad tracks that run through Strathcona and it’s cramped full of stuff. I use my newly acquired keys to go in the back way and I suddenly become Megan Fox. I slip into her skin and I feel confident and energized and then I bend down and burrow through a narrow passageway to get into the warehouse where people are mulling about. I walk with eggshell ego hubris into the main space paying little mind to others who are around.

As I spend more time in Megan’s body, I begin to feel weighted and uncomfortable, and I want to retreat from being the centre of everyone’s attention. I can only hold this veneer of self assurance for so long before I start to disintegrate. I want to run away and hide.

I become me again and I’m happy to be me. I don’t want to be Megan Fox and I don’t want to be around film industry people anymore.

I wake up thinking about drugs. I think about drugs a lot. Being sober is hard, even 10 years on. I have to deal with the mental and emotional Beelzebub's of my inner cosmology every day and it can be crippling.

I had a slip up a couple of years ago with an old friend. It was kind of gross how quickly I descended into a former version of myself and eagerly crushed up the pills that were left over from our friend that had recently died of cancer and then snorted them right up into my face. My friend did some too and he was violently puking all night while I was nodding in an out of consciousness, lost to the swirls in my mind on his small couch near his balcony that looked out over a smear of rain obscured city. There was also a large throbbing power box and a mess of power lines near my head and I could feel it pulsing and surging all night. I took more pills throughout the night while my friend paced around and puked and then I started to come down and felt my pores itching and gross pungent sweat staining my clothes.

I spent the next week hating myself and wanting to die. I hated that I had taken drugs from my dead friend and I hated that I became a self-absorbed shell of a person too lost in my own brain to offer much sympathy or notice how fucked up my other friend was from the drugs I encouraged both of us to take. Slip ups are pretty normal though and I had a lot of them in the first few years. Hopefully that was the last one.

Dreaming about being Megan Fox led me to reflect on being a silvering haired, baby faced old soul bumbling into latent maturity and the temptation to play up my youthfulness as I creep further into my 40’s - and how looking up to celebrities is lame and soul destroying.

Last summer at the the blockade I got some attention from some interesting and attractive young men, most of whom where also neurodivergent; and it was initially quite flattering. Though I’m just not into casual sex anymore at all. Even casual cuddling, which I experimented with for the first time in my life, was more intimacy than I was comfortable with at the time. I think part of it is that: I’ve been in love before, like really in love, and I know what that feels like. So everything else just feels like a cheap comparison. I’d rather stay at home and hang out with my cat until the real thing comes along – or just stay single and become a crazy cat lady in the forest. Aaaaand, I’m letting my natural greys come out now and slowly metamorphosizing into my own twisted form of adulthood.

My cousin sent me an email the other day titled Smash the Patriarchy asking me for resources on how to do just that. Among other things I sent her a link to this Reddit forum I recently discovered: Witches. vs. Patriarchy.

I find it interesting how so many people will get upset and hyper critical about feminism and trans rights but then turn around and swallow up wholesale corporate greed, apocalyptic environmental devastation and totalitarian war mongering and genocide. Though I suppose that could describe me in my younger years, as I devoured extreme black metal and scoffed at annoying lefties.

I’ve been slow to come to a place of recognizing my place in the world as a woman, and all that it entails. I don’t consider myself a feminist and I’ve experienced a lot of violence and abuse from women over the years. Yet I’ve come to recognize that in spite of all of the “wounded femininity” I’ve encountered, there is still a global power system that systematically abuses women in the form of physical and sexual violence, forced underage marriages, lack of access to education and forced adherence to rigid gender roles, among other things.

I recently read a book called “Tears of the Desert” about a Sudanese refugee who is about the same age as me and it was harrowing and humbling to learn about all that the author had lived through. I consider myself very lucky to have been brought up in a part of the world where I have more freedoms than so many women globally and I’m one of the first generations of women to have the option of not having a family and living an independent life on my own terms. Yet part of that has involved divorcing myself from my deeper sensitivities and natural inclination to nurture in order to succeed in a Yang-centred** world., And so much of what is presented as girl power is just alpha women behaving like alpha men and the Yin qualities that the world is so lacking like gentleness, intuition, emotional openness and fluidity are rarely brought to the foreground. And I don’t see how replacing a wounded alpha male patriarchy with a wounded alpha female matriarchy is going to heal the world in the way the world needs to be healed.

The more I learn about gender, assigned sex, and Yin and Yang energies, the more inclined I am towards focusing on certain qualities a person has in determining how good of a leader they are. Because currently it seems that most leaders, regardless of gender, hold positions of power because of hubris, Machiavellian social manoeuvring and manipulation, not because they are kind, noble and sincere.

In all of it’s messiness, I think that part of why the Ada’itsx Fairy Creek blockade has held together for so long is on account of the qualities of the main elder who has led the movement – Bill Jones of the Pacheedaht. He has a gentle, receptive strength that naturally draws people to him. He’s the kind of person that you feel instantly comfortable around and who commands respect in a very beautiful way. Bill is also able to verbally disarm people in a nonviolent way that's very powerful.

A good leader leads with their heart and roots themselves in a love for greater humanity and a desire for freedom and social justice. A good leader is connected spiritually to a force greater than themselves and is humble and gracious. There are too many power seeking egomaniacs at the helm of this fair planet and various ruthless corporations and corrupt governments control all of the land and resources.

Coming to recognize that I’m likely on the spectrum feels like the elephant that’s been in the room for my whole life. Though after so many years of squeezing the autistic qualities out of myself in order to have a social and sexual life and try and understand this strange fucking planet I’m on, and then suddenly realizing that I’m very likely neurodivergent, I’m now in a fuzzy place where I don’t really know who the fuck I am anymore. I don’t really want to go back to how I was when I was a teenager and shut out the world completely and cave into myself, yet I’m pretty disgusted with the people pleasing shell of a person I’ve become. I imagine these things will sort themselves out on their own as time passes.

Part of the reason why I’ve been so late to come into myself is 1. I’m female* and there is more social pressure to conform and mask attributes and autism often expresses itself differently in femmes 2. I had very open minded parents and many supportive teachers who just let me be the little weirdo that I was. 3. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s before children were being labelled and drugged en masse just for being different or hyper sensitive. 4. I hung around in extreme subcultures when the scenes were filled with legitimate weirdos and various neurodivergent traits didn’t really stand out that much (like for instance at a goth bar where sitting alone in the corner ignoring everyone else doodling on a napkin avoiding eye contact for 2 hours and then suddenly coming alive when the Virgin Prunes gets played and then twitching around maniacally for a few minutes before returning to said corner to sit in silence and solitude would not be considered strange) 5. I didn’t think I was neurodivergent because I believed one of the many fallacies that gets spread about autism- that we’re not capable of empathy.

It’s interesting, as I actually had an actually autistic roommate for a time who had nearly the same name as me and despite many superficial and socio-economic differences, our experiences in our early years and our roles in the dynamics of our families were nearly identical. Yet the conclusion was that I didn’t “have Aspergers” on account of my capacity to empathize. Though when my roommate would share details about things happening in his life with me I could sense that there were emotions there, even when he wasn’t expressing them – and he said that other intuitive friends of his had told him the same thing. And years later, upon further reflection, I realized that I had also repressed my sensitivities up until my mid to late 20’s. My empathy was very selective when I was younger and I would very easily become cold, withdrawn, misanthropic, violent and hateful.

I think that what may be perceived as a lack of empathy is just that a lot of us neurodivergents are holding such strong emotions within us that we have to keep them contained and we're not always even aware of what we’re feeling or processing. Until it explodes. Or until some kind of crisis happens and we’re forced to face our deeper sensitivities that we’ve been ignoring.

Much of what I’m writing here is likely relatable to autistic individuals who process on an intellectual level and are gifted in reading comprehension and writing. Some autistic people process things differently, i.e. in a visual or sensory way, and their experiences will be unique. And I’ll say this over and over as I speak to these things: I only use the word autism for lack of a better word and don’t fully identify with autism as I feel that the word itself is a product of a Western system of thought that’s extremely corrupt and limiting - a system that tries to calculate and quantify the mysteries of human existence. Yet for the sake of understanding each other and people gaining acceptance and help if they need it, I’ll use the word autism at times to describe myself and others who are hyper-tuned conduits of the senses and often feel overwhelmed by the world and have a hard time fitting in with mainstream society. These struggles can sometimes manifest into violence and psychopathy or in beautiful creative sensitivities, or a combination thereof.

I also think that there is a lot of overlap between neurodiversity, attachments types, inter-generational trauma and other mental health struggles we face as humans. It’s all an infinitely complex web of multi-coloured fractals that can’t ever be fully parsed.  And in the end, I reckon it’s more about accepting all of the different kinds of humans on the planet, whether it’s socio-economic background, race, gender, culture, class, neurotype, style of dress, employment, social skills etc., and to stop trying to force everyone into tidy little boxes that can be engineered for the powers that be. Because:

WAR PIGS ARE BURNING THE WORLD TO THE GROUND!! PLAGUES< FLOODS< DESTRUCTION< DISEASE< DROUGHT < FIRES< FLOODS!!

I guess we’re just not ready collectively as a species for peace, gender equality or co-operative and egalitarian ways of co-existing. It seems there will still be a lot of scrapping, grappling and swinging of the pendulum before we settle and wizen.

The mutants, matriarchs, and sea levels are rising. The larval reindeer horn blood drinking Grim Reaper Vladimir is having a grand temper tantrum that is rapidly plummeting the world into even more despair and destruction. I didn’t think that was possible. I didn’t think I would make it through March and April. If I had had a gun in the bedside drawer, I wouldn’t be here right now. But fret not dear readers: I made it through stronger and more resolved to be a force of neon light.

Or is it really all the fault of the big bad West because we won’t let Putin oppress and genocide others in the same way that we’ve been doing for hundreds of years? Is our pseudo democracy really all that better than the all out autocracy of Russia or China? I definitely don’t buy into the narrative of North America and Europe being benign freedom lovers fighting for the emancipation of all of humanity. Especially after reading about the CIA’s coup in Iran. HOLY. FUCK. No wonder Iran is siding with Russia in this conflict.

I really don’t like Americanism or Western excess in general. The vast influence of commercialized Western colonial “culture” has spread globally, wiping out so much uniqueness and beauty. When travelling, I found it really sad to see so much of Japan and China industrialized into cement wastelands and seeing so many people wanting to be “cool” like Westerners and putting me up on a pedestal thinking my life was like that of characters from Friends or something.

When I was working in China, once I got a grasp of some of the language I realized that the primary topic of conversation among the students and the teaching assistants was: America. America this, America that, China this, America that, China America America China, blah blah blah blah. By the end I was just like, who fucking cares? If you hate America so much, then stop emulating them! Be better and do something different. Stop mirroring all of the worst aspects of American excess and imperialism just to win some immature power game. And to what end? To lord over the wasteland that will be left of this planet when all of the tyrants have poisoned every drop of water and bled every drop of blood?

Yet there seems to be something enduringly appealing to to nearly everyone on the planet about basic freedoms. However superficial and self-destructive and hypocritical the West can be, very few people, myself included, would trade a life of excess, shitty pop music and corporate soul sucking for life under a totalitarian government. Though there does seem to be some heavy reticence to step out of the bosom of Big Brother and into the land of true freedom; which would entail a great deal of spiritual maturity, responsibility, self sufficiency and accountability. It would also entail leaving behind both pseudo-Communist totalitarianism and Western corporate totalitarianism. It would mean a global revolution.

And to the Russian trolls: it’s actually insane to complain about Western “fake news” and then swallow wholesale the propaganda from a regime that funds literal troll factories, poisons the political opposition and is currently imprisoning people for holding up blank signs in public.

And then there’s the lands that I inhabit, Northern Turtle Island (aka Canada), and the damage that’s been done here ecologically in such a short period of time – and the genocide proper against the people of the lands.

And my own ancestors in Europe who were brutally Christianized and Romanized.

I don’t want to be controlled by corporations and corrupt governments and be bombarded with advertisements and Hollywood movies and soulless TV shows. I hate shopping malls, Starbucks, sitcoms, McDonalds and modern cars and I love forests, clear blue lakes, wild berries and animals. I want to protect the last of the wild places on this earth. But even that is very complex, as so many Indigenous people are now dependent upon resource extraction. And even though I participate in direct action, I often feel conflicted, as I know that stopping projects will have an immediate impact on communities that are already struggling financially.

I kicked in a wall the other day. I’ve been raging a lot lately. I fixed the wall, so no-one (except for you, dear reader) will ever know what happened, thanks to 20 years of busting ass in the film world making specialized props. I even matched up the age stains and splotches with the areas around where I busted through the gyp rock.


*female is a gender and doesn’t necessarily correlate with assigned sex
**I adopted the terms “Yang centred” and “Yin centred” from the website CyQuest