A little update!

💋 A Little Update...

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending years trying to be legible to a world that was not built for your brain. I didn't have language for it for a long time. What I had instead was a rotating cast of explanations: too sensitive, too intense, too scattered, too much. I was either completely frozen (unable to start the thing, stuck in the comfortable loop of the same show I've seen four times already), or so deep inside a project that I forgot to surface for days. There was never any in between.

          What I know now (and what took longer than it should have to understand), is that I wasn't failing at a system. I was running two alternate ones at once and they didn't always agree, never mind fit into the system built around us. One part of my brain craves routine, sameness, the deep comfort of the already-known. The other part gets bored and restless in a way that's almost physical. And when it does, it needs movement or something new to sink its teeth into. These two systems live in the same body and negotiate constantly. The result is a person who can appear composed on the surface while something underneath is working very hard. My brain notices everything: the thing someone almost said, the shift in a room's energy, the detail that doesn't quite fit. It is not always what you'd call restful but It is also, I've come to understand, a gift.

          I was diagnosed late. Which means I spent the better part of my life developing elaborate and mostly functional workarounds for things that other people seemed to do effortlessly. I became very good at performing legibility. At reading the room and calibrating accordingly. At being whoever the moment needed while trying to keep the engine running quietly underneath. It turns out that acute attunement to other people's states have made me great at my job.

          The last few months have also taught me something else: having a handle on your brain is not a permanent state. It requires maintenance and sometimes life doesn't leave much room for that. When it slips, everything slips with it: the schedule, the writing, the showing up. That's where I've been. I think that's the part nobody tells you about figuring out how your brain works later in life: it doesn't simplify anything, but it does make you the most fascinating unreliable narrator of your own story, which is honestly not the worst thing to be.

           Anyway, I've been really bad at keeping my schedule updated. If you've been wondering why, now you get a peek into what my day to day looks like. I also have a couple more new essays up that I'm particularly proud of. One is part 2 of why I've been preoccupied and the other is just a personal reflection and something to sit with. They are linked below if you'd like to read them.

He's Been Here Through Everything

On Attention 

Warmly XO, Frankie Finesse 🖤 Intimacy Artist · Storyteller · Muse