Y'all seem to think I'm something, do you wanna know? I'll tell you my secrets. I tell you what I am what Hazel is. Maybe you like the wanting to know, I'm sorry. I'm gonna tell you everything I don't say on here, where I come from.

This is my story.

"people don't change, not really" but I have. Fundementally. I don't know how or why I found my way alone but I've clawed my way back I've suffered and I've searched. What was I?

I've talked, briefly, about being a lil autistic on here before, but usually in the context of other things. But that's where its all at. I *was* the autistic kid. Not the "wannabe edgy, cringe group, socially inept autistic" I was never that. Not the "person with autism"

I was the *autistic kid*. I was the "screaming when the blender turned on" autistic. The "barely verbal, sitting alone and playing with rocks at recess" autistic. But I was just functional enough no one ever told me. I legitimately had no idea what was wrong with me for so long

I knew something was off. I could tell in the way people would hesitate when they spoke to me. I could tell in the way teachers stepped in when I started to fail too spectacularly. If I pushed, seemingly hard boundries would soften and curve, except at home of course.

I remember in 8th grade a frustrated girl explaining to me how conversations start and realizing I had no model for that. (I had bungled her attempt to be nice and start one by being suspicious and hostile.) "What's ur favorite color? " "Why do you want me to tell you that "

"because... That's how conversations work?" I had no idea how to talk with people. The only psudo friends I'd had I would just launch into talking about black holes, or ants, and they would tell me about video games. We didn't talk, we exchanged information we found fascinating.

I decided to learn to talk. What followed was a super intense period of people watching. Picking up on mannerisms and lines and inflections. I learned how to repeat them back to people, to establish engagement. But the next steps were harder, how to actually engage?? I learned to

Deflect. To casually and competently respond when engaged and then shut down the conversation before anything else could reveal my actual incompetence. It was enough to stop most of the bullying at least. It was leagues better than where I was before. Then high school started.

Starting high school was a trip. I got to start over, it was a minor miracle. 3 middle schools combined and nobody knew who I was anymore. Nobody knew my secret. My new social skills kept me mostly safe from bullying, but I still didn't make friends as I wasn't engaging. I was

Frustrated with my inability to crack the code further. How do you *really* talk to people? I didn't get the chance to observer deeper conversations like I did with casual things. But a funny thing happened. Like immersion when learning a new language, I had the skills to exist

And participate in social environments, and slowly I started to develope deeper functioning just by being in it all the time. By the end of 9th grade, the hesitations, the teachers exceptions, they slowly started to disappear. I was doing it.

In 10th grade, I made my first real friend. I'd had "friends" before, but looking back none of them had ever treated or seen me like an equal. This was different. His name was Ben, and he was a really great guy. I'm still friends with him today.

He wasn't a super "normal" kid either, but I wouldn't have resonated with someone who was tbh. He was overly analytical, loved to talk shit, brilliant at math, and from a background he didn't mind people who were different.

When I was awkward he didn't shy from it, he gave me shit. He picked apart my social tricks. I'd never had someone willing to look right at me and ask "what do you mean?" before when I wasn't communicating clearly. But he was still my friend, and would still talk to me. I learned

*a lot* about how to communicate real things from him.

And then high school ended, and I started college. Had I really changed at this point? I don't think so. Not really. I was still the same autistic kid, I had just learned to communicate a bit. Aquired different skills.

College was hard. I was reinventing myself again. The social standards were not just way higher, but fundementally different outside the tiny microcosm of my local highschool. It took me nearly a year to make another friend.

I was still fundementally sad and alone. I was dissasociating for months/years at a time still. I almost gave in my second year and joined a church group for the promise of free community. But I couldn't do it. I could see it was full of desperate awkward kids, attempting

To circumnavigate their own social failures. Nobody really vibed there, but there was the implicit promise to be friends anyways. It sucked, but it was light-years better than being alone. But I couldn't conform like that, couldn't shut my eyes to where we all really were. I

Choose to keep being alone. Keep working. I kept being sad

But there was a new element now. I had worked part time in highschool but now it was full time. I didn't (and still don't) get the entire process of workplace socializing. I was quite, worked hard, and didn't make a fuss

They made me manager in a month.

But I was refusing to have anything to do with my parents. I was going to school on mostly grants/scholarships, one loan, working full time for a tiny one room apartment above an ally where people sold crack. I started an unpaid internship on top

Of all that. The workload was incredible. I would pull 3-4 all nighters a week to keep up with everything. I worked closing shift until 3am and walked to the library to finish my school work cause my apartment had no wifi. When I did sleep half the time I woke up in paralysis

With shadows in my room. I was still running from gender problems and loneliness and everything else. My sole point of social contract was having lunch with my one friend ever other Wednesday. I was falling apart.

Near the end of my second year I woke up in spasms I couldn't control. I've never told anyone about this, but I'm quite certain it was a seizure. I quit my job 2 weeks later. I didn't know what to do, but I could feel myself dying.

My savings were quickly running out, and I made a decision I still kinda regret. I reached back out to my parents. They covered my rent for the next year. I still feel very ashamed of this.

I spent most of that year crying alone in my bed. I stopped doing homework or studying, +

I was barely passing my classes. Then I was failing them. I was playing with thoughts of suicide for a while. My one friend graduated and moved away. I was alone again.
I moved frequently. I lived in an engineering house briefly. I accidentally sublet from a neo Nazi for 3 months

until it turned out he was pocketing our rent & we got evicted. I ended up in a big old house in a neighborhood full of stay dogs where I heard gunshots nightly. The girl I was renting with left to live with her boyfriend in Vegas but kept paying her half of the rent. (Bless her)

I didnt have enough things to fill up my bedroom so the house (big enough it had secret passages in the middle) was mostly empty. It was like living in a haunted house. I grew sweet potatoes in the backyard. I fed stray cats& cried when I found them dead. I was still crying a lot

I finally figured out what my gender issues were, and the playing with thoughts of suicide suddenly got a lot more serious. But pursuing that led to community. It was another year before I started hrt, but already the day to day was feeling better.

I stopped failing so many classes. I moved out of the haunted house. I got pressured into really awful sex with another trans girl I still refuse to count. I still consider myself a virgin tbh. Fuck you thats my business.

Eventually I started working again. First in a parasitology lab, and later as a wildlife technician. I finally, finally started hrt and it was like my brain changed. The dissociation finally started to clear. I was alive again, or maybe for the first time.

I drifted away from the trans community I had found and it's morass of poor boundaries. I made friends with a more generally queer group and met the first person I'd ever loved. A girl named Lauren.

We got drunk together and would cook together and watch bad movies and play video games and just talk or cuddle. I had a crush on her briefly that never went anywhere, but she was the first person I'd trusted in a long long time.

For the first time since I was a very little kid, people touched me, and that alone changed my life. It was like all these pressures were building inside me, and then the virus started to hit, and it all turned inwards.

I was happy for the first time in my life. I was binging creative projects and strange philosophies, occultisms and discovering introspection and meditation, and finally something broke.

I... don't really know how to describe what it was. I had a weird ego death like experience meditating that gave me days of euphoria. It was like I had gained access to some deeper level of consciousness. Punctured into some hidden underground pool.

I didn't just do anymore and deconstruct it later, I could understand things, and choose different approaches to being alive. And I could actually be alive and do in ways I couldn't before. Something like embodiment. This is a terrible description of the change.

Social interactions, which had become fine tuned, lightning fast, and reflexive the way a master martial artist might move and fight reflexively and creative, finally took on a deeper understanding.

I could perceive and understand others motivations and feelings beyond the information they gave me, at a scale I never could before. I was *connecting* with people in a very deep way. I had finally found some fundamental change, and I stopped being who I was before.

I became me, Hazel. The one you know now. That is my story and my mystery. There are a thousand other details of vital importance, but this is how I became. That is why I am what I am, the way I am. I hope this helps you understand. This is how I love the world the way I do.