December 15 2024

I’ve been having intense, painful, traumatic, beautiful and overwhelming dreams, like 3-4 full dreams throughout one night. It’s hard to stay grounded when there's so much going on in my subconscious. I’m not writing them all out like I used to, but some snap shots are: last night I dreamed that my cat-child MauMau curled up next to me and went stiff like a corpse, much like Ezmeralda did when she passed away. I freaked the fuck out and I started giving her CPR. It was a messy process, and at times I was giving her too much air because I was shaking and so distraught, yet I could see her chest rising and I kept going for several minutes. Life was coming back into her and eventually she opened her eyes again and started moving her body.

In another part of my dream I was in San Francisco and there was a cement flanked river that that moved parallel alongside a busy street, and piles of garbage would get strewn up alongside the walkways surrounding the filthy flowing water. The area was blocked off from public view, and some of the people I was hanging out with were witches who told me that there was a portal within one of the cemented areas. I started exploring around looking for it. I was using my mind to dredge slimy clusters of garbage out from the waterway so it could flow. Then I entered a portal and got spit out into a field that had patches of evergreen trees surrounding it. More witches were there. I was going through some kind of initiation and the focus was on me and the process I was going through. So much energy was flowing through my body that I was convulsing, gyrating and levitating in the open field as dozens of wise elder womyn stood around me holding space for me.

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was in the Bay area (once again) with my mom and we found an Airbnb in a house with some hipster people. It was a cozy old Victorian style house that hadn’t been renovated, and so everything creaked and was off-kilter and there were lots of cracks and stains in the walls. I went upstairs to where the room was and it was tiny room in the corner, dusty and drab, with some succulents in big pots and piles of old bedding strewn about. I was thinking, wow you gave us the shittiest room because walking down the hallway I passed by several other rooms that were super nice. I didn’t mind too much though because it was so darn cozy in that house.

I went to to see my favourite local band Hedonist play and there were super big now, and were playing at a small stadium, though the venue was also very run down, and reminded me of a bigger Carlton (in Esquimalt). It was overwhelming how many people were there to see them and I was feeling some mega sensory overload. Then I ran into a guy from New York called “Salandor” who was very chill and grounded and we became instant friends. He told me the best place to stand to avoid the gaggles of girls who were there to see Hedonist (they’re an extreme underground black / death metal band so it’s was quite amazing to see such a hullabaloo).

**

Some thoughts about neurodiversity, community and belonging:

Victoria (and Vancouver) are notoriously difficult cities to find community in, and people can be quite standoffish. Or a really common thing is: you’ll meet someone who you seem to get along with, maybe even exchange numbers - but then they’ll ignore your texts, flake out, or act like they don’t know you when you see them around next time. Of course these are generalizations, and some people may move to these areas and find community right away, and everything just clicks and they love it, yet overall the alienation really can’t be ignored, cause it’s in the air.

I really don’t know why people are like this. Is it because there's a collective sense of insecurity over not being as cool as Melbourne, despite the comparisons? At times I’ve wondered if it’s colonialism, classism or white supremacy, but that applies to America, New Zealand and Australia as well and there are some hella friendly cities in all of those countries. And there are other cities in so-called Canada that are much friendlier, like Winnipeg or Montreal.

Other theories I’ve heard is that it’s because of the city design and the geography, and that people are more connected to nature than they are too each other.

Whatever the source of all the isolation might be, it’s definitely something I’ve dealt with a lot throughout my life. Though recently I’ve been forced to confront the fact that I also behave this way sometimes as well. And there are many neurodivergent traits that can come off as snotty or unfriendly when often we’re just socially anxious and aren’t good at paying attention to a whole bunch of different things going on at once, or making eye contact. For instance, a friend of mine walked past me on the bridge near my place one day and he thought I was ignoring him, but I honestly didn’t see him at all. He fumed for a few days and then finally texted me and asked me if I remember seeing him. I was like no, not at all. We talked about it more in person and I explained to him that I was a masked person on the spectrum, and how people don’t often notice my autism until they get to know me and then they’re like, woa.

Recently I had an experience with a person who signs me in during yoga classes, and the first couple of times he did I thought he had a problem with me and I felt off-put by his behaviours. But then today after my class when I was hanging out afterwards drinking some tea he made some causal conversation with me and he was quite friendly, and as we talked I realized that he was very nervous inside and also had a hard time making eye contact. I realized that the energy that I was feeling from him was his own anxiety about himself, not him having any negative feelings towards me.

In small misunderstandings like this, I could have lost a friend, or put up walls against connecting to a potential new friend.

On a far more profound level, here’s a beautiful podcast by Hadar Cohen on how collective healing can happen:

Arab Jewish Mysticism

On another note, a couple of months ago I forced myself to go out to a Halloween Grindcore show by myself, as a band from France was playing and it was a house show, so it sounded very cool. I told myself that I was going to try and make some friends (something I was avoiding when I first got here), and I tried to talk to a group of people who looked a bit older (like me), but they were extremely stuck up so I just went back inside the house. I did end up talking to a rad person who I assumed was from here but when the headlining band started (Pulmonary Fibrosis) it turned out they were one of the guitar players. Then when I went to buy some merch I saw someone I recognized from Vancouver and we ended up becoming friends. We hung around in similar scenes but never knew each other too well, but we’ve been keeping in touch and the other night we went out to an arcade here and played Rampage and got to level 80. Some young kid came up while we were playing and was like “my friends and I are leaving and we have some extra tokens, you guys can have them.” It was so sweet. Then some random drunk people crowded next to us playing gauntlet and one of them was like “woa, those guys are good”. I’m so happy to have found someone who's obsessed about the game rampage as I am.

I definitely have a crush on this guy, and it seems likely that the feeling are mutual.