Okay. It's time for me to start putting something together for myself. If not now, I'm realizing again, as if for the first time even though it's more like the nine millionth time, then never.

I'm going to take some hints from what feel like some pretty anodyne places – the Artist's Way, The Creative Act, um, other sources with titles that sound kinda self-helpy & mad-libby like those two do – and see if I can get a story out of me, either as a novel or a screenplay. Or, shit, something else.

This is the dumbest fucking thing I have never been able to successfully accomplish, and I feel like shit for my supposedly huge mind not being able to bend around this kind of a project. One of my constant pep talks, throughout my whole life, has been: People way dumber than you do this all the time. Not that's always (or even sometimes) true, but it's a good way to say fucking get over yourself and just get started in a way that at least on its face seems less harsh than saying, well, that.

I don't expect anyone else to read this. The stuff I really care about, the stuff that's closest to the center of my self or my existence or whatever has never landed on anyone's ears, and I'm in the process of making my peace with that, shit, 40 years too late for it to be helpful in any meaningful way.

Perhaps I should explain myself.

I never finished high school. I got put in one of the first "Gifted Programs" in the 1980s, for kids who would have been insulted if you'd told them they belonged in Special Ed, even if they really did, and the school system dressed our mutton up as lamb, telling us we were being fast-tracked to the highest echelons of society due to our superior intelligence, and then promptly ignored us until we aged out of being their problem, at which point we slotted into middle management or alpaca farming or clinical psychology or the manosphere or what the fuck ever, at which point we were society's problem and not these poor Greatest Generation School Officials who, if you scratched their surface even a bit, really would just rather have brought back corporal punishment rather than all this namby-pamby hand holding.

So yeah, I didn't do well in that environment, and literally on my 16th birthday, my mother (who unapologetically resented how much work I was to her in ways I still can't fully fathom, 40 years on) kicked me out of my house, and a month or so later, I realized it wasn't really worth it to keep attending high school while I was sleeping in a crisis shelter (or in a cardboard box, or in a parking lot), and I just… stopped going. I'm sure there was paperwork I was supposed to file, notifying the proper authorities of my intention to pursue another path, but fuck it, I had no guidance whatsoever about this. The Guidance Council office at the school was full of people convinced I just needed to find Jesus, and my case workers at the shelter were only well-versed in addiction recovery and 24/7 monitoring to prevent self-harm; they had no interest in helping me keep up with homework, let alone useless shit like applying to get back into the school system or even providing a consistently clean, well-lighted place for me to study, or even just read.

Instead, I wound up at Covenant House, a Catholic charity where I was monitored 24/7 and shoved out the door every morning after a few slices of toast to go look for work, and wait for a group home slot to come free. That did eventually happen, but it took months, and of course they had a policy in place that you couldn't stay there and wait for a slot forever, so if they couldn't place you after a certain amount of time (I think it was 30 days), you had to stay somewhere else, which in this case meant Sally Ann (the Salvation Army), a brutal place where the harder cases wound up, where your possessions disappeared the moment you walked through the door, and where many street people went basically to die.

The other option was sleeping outside. Toronto is not a great place for this, especially in the winter. But it can be done. I did it for the better part of a couple of years. School's out forever. I was in no way the only person dealing with this; Covenant House was full of kids who were (not that this word existed at the time) neurodivergent, or who had had a but of a rough go and had fallen through the net, and who just needed a break from someone to get back on the beam. Thing is, no one is giving breaks to anyone at that level. You just gotta work it out yourself.