My identity was all wrapped up in the perception of others for the second chunk of childhood. The first was totally uncaring. This coupled with a deranged and focused sense of justice was like candy to anyone with an urge to bully. My first impulse had been to fight back, but I was always better with language than fists. Too good with language. I still remember the time a boy was making fun of my fat legs and I told him his dad left because of him, probably.

The thing about the autists of this world is that we do not lack empathy. We do not even lack the ability to read social cues, so long as that language is explained to us in the way you’d explain anything else. Yet the neurotypical majority has this tick where if something comes innately to them, be it behavior or wealth, they feel it ought to come innately to others. And that thing, that ought, that’s something anyone like me is capable of falling short of.

So for that first raw chunk I was real, I was mean, I was undamaged. I held my soul bloody in my hand like I was presenting the nutrient-rich liver of the world and said, just you try and devour it; it’s all mine.

I was a total nerd, a tool. This would’ve been fine, yet cruelty negates any sympathy for that. I was accidentally cruel often, and on-purpose mean perhaps more often than that.

The world devoured me and spat me back up. I didn’t know how to be. I learned the social organization of our society like an alien might, touching down and seeing all this bullshit for the first time. I realized the way to avoid hurt was to please the right people, and I tried. It didn’t quite work.

If you’ve been here before you know what happened next. Mom got sick. Thus enters void.

Looking back it was maybe fifteen years I spent risking nothing but my own life, and that was less risk and more ‘yo, fucking take this please.’

When I came back I cared too much again. Risked too little. Bubble-wrapped what was left of my life and tried to protect it too hard, brought in my stupid childish rage like some kind of guard dog and said sic.

Risked too much, all of a sudden, after I hit a year sober and realized wow, there’s not a trophy. You just keep going.

Failed, failed, failed.

I got sober in 2020. Yes, that 2020. The one where the plague started. Went to rehab a week before Philadelphia shut down. I understand how it looks from the outside, but I gotta say: getting sober was the bigger risk, of the options available.

It’s 2026 now. The last risk I took was querying, I suppose, and I did that for years. Form rejections turned slowly into full requests, then followed by more detailed and personalized rejections. I read, I worked, I wrote more than one book. The risk was letting anyone at all read it. Once I had come home to myself, writing was no longer a risk. Not writing was more sketch.

For years I queried, got attention, and then rejection. More and more personalized. I enmeshed myself in communities that needed to write. I got better, I read more, I kept going.

Ciara offered representation and I honestly blanked out for a moment. Some part of me had forgotten this was a possible next step. The next part of me was awed it had happened at all. Not only that: Ciara Smith! The one I’d found when I was writing my first series, that trilogy that will only ever be mine. Dream agent extraordinaire, yet authortube had told me not to have one of those, so I’d listened and instead thought it quietly in the most wordless part of my mind.

_{Ciara Smith! The Dream Agent.}

So now I’m here, I gotta say: the last risk I took ain’t querying after all.

It was stepping into the reality I’d longed for, worked for. It was accepting the possibility that this all might be really happening and it wasn’t some sick joke. Signing the paper, partnering up, and diving into the next stage of my career.

Trauma does weird things to us. Nothing feels more dangerous to me than something good happening.