"Shawn, I Might Be High On Too Much String Cheese, But What The Hell..."

 So, Audible kept saying, "Oh, you super duper love Jenny Lawson, so you should check out Lindy West!"

To the best of my knowledge, I didn't recognize the name, but she's a fat white chick who is probably my age-ish, so I clicked on a title and listened to the sample, and decided they were totes right. 

So, after a month of refraining from the goddamned slippery slope of buying multiple Audible coins at a time, to sorta save money by spending money (no one who never had to wait for weekly trips to the library will, perhaps not quite understand an addiction to getting any damned book in the entire damned universe INSTANTLY), I went low-key nuts and bought a Lindy West book called The Witches Are Coming. 

Yikesabee, y'all. 

It's fucking amazeballs and I'm having this weird sensation. It's not frisson but it isn't NOT frisson.

I suppose the idea of doppelgangers is close enough to what this feels like. 

I get an identical sensation when  watching Lindsay Ellis, and I'm putting my finger on it very precisely: they are other mes. Other Heathers. 

They're versions of me that... This is a guess, because I haven't looked up Lindy West's bio except to find her husband's name to look him up (she speaks so glowingly of him that I wanted to know who to picture her with), and I could be wrong about her education level... Graduated college. 

I always feel at least the dregs of guilt for not having finished college. 

At this point, I believe (grain of salt: I'm not officially diagnosed, this is a layman's best guess after a lifetime of self observation) that I have ADHD, and that figures in quite strongly with my perpetual inability to thrive within formalized systems of education. 

I spent a long time hating myself for being lazy when it's maybe more that my brain just processes things differently enough that I hit walls (which I'm still not awesome at navigating, and I think medication might be quite useful in this way), and it doesn't mean I'm stupid, either. 

I wonder how differently things may have gone for me if anyone noticed my likely symptoms/pathology when I was still in school. 

I just got to wondering, if maybe I'd been at a different school for college would it maybe have come to light in a way someone else would notice and possibly do something about? 

I can't point to a way anyone may have noticed, and said or done something. 

But what if I'd been at a different school? 

Like, if I hadn't been at a bullshit cult of Christianity college... 

But, past that, if I'd had any way to stumble into or near critical theory, I could've fucking found the thing that would actually make sense to me. 

And so here I am, wondering how different things may have been for me at an actual school. 

Useless to dwell on what ifs, I know, but... I feel like my journey of self-discovery, which largely means deconverting from Christianity, might have had a very important jump to hyperspeed at a really critical juncture of my life, had I been allowed to attend a secular university. 

The illusion of choice. Brainwashed people don't get to choose, but they make it seem like you do. It never ever occurred to me to go to a secular school - I NEEDED the structure of the goddamned white cis heteronormative patriarchy's guidance! 

I. Have a lot of anger for the choices I didn't get to make for myself. 

I have a lot of anger at how much of my will and strength was broken before I could even imagine they had ever existed. 

I am made of stardust. 🎶 I gave joy to my mother/ and I made my lover smile/ and I can give comfort to my friends when they're hurting/ and can make it seem better, for a while🎶

But I wonder about the versions of me that might have been. 

But to almost quote Alanis Morisette, I'm still here. And that's pretty fucking good for now. 

And I totally meet Bob Belcher's dream: "All I know about her is that she answers to no one, comes and goes as she pleases, and she is truly free." 

Anyway, Lindy West is my spirit sister, go look her up. 

Also I haven't posted in eons, so I'll get the hang of formatting as I go along.