2026.10

https://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/monthlies-202610

I spread my wings, and am reborn.

I made it no big secret that I came into this year with some wounds. After the long walk back from the metaphorical burial grounds, I find myself healed, but also changed as well.

For so long, I always thought that it was simply an unchangeable facet of my destiny that I was "on the outside", that I was "the leftover one", that "they don't choose me back". It was something I knew in my body as truth because I had simply experienced so much of it, but the rationales I came up with were numerous and fleeting. Maybe it was because I was a boy. Because I was different? Because I was aloof. Because the world was cruel. Because I didn't belong here. Because I lacked confidence. Because I lacked a belief in self-worth. Because I lacked a community.

And yet, without even stopping to find the "answer" to it, this part of my life had already changed, in a subtle yet seemingly-impossible way. I no longer play the part of the child looking through the window at the shelves of candy. I am no longer on the outside looking in. I carry my own heart with me, find care from those who give it freely, in a corner of this world that I once thought would not offer it.

I don't think it was a magic spell, or a specific realization, nor an ally that helped me defeat some evil force blocking my path. It was, as many important things are, an accumulation of what I had learned and become up until now. I wrote in January, "after a certain point, something shifts and you just =are= ready." I guess after everything that happened in the past two years, it was just time.