alternate universe
This year, I was finally able to taste how it would have been like to have grown up healthy and well supported.
My illnesses were finally addressed, I felt normal and was able to do so much, and I am in a healthy environment where I am loved and supported, and I invested a lot into myself financially for my education and career.
And in a way, it makes me sad. Happy that I got to experience it at all, but sad because I now know how different I could have been if I had the medical and emotional support I needed from the get-go. With my drive, my passion… I could have managed a lot more, and done some things earlier. But I was too sick, too poor, with no friends and an abusive and neglectful family.
Now I feel like a discount version of myself, a Temu version. But I guess that’s normal… I fear almost no one gets to experience their true potential. Born in specific countries, poor, disabled, a minority etc. can significantly hinder you throughout life and never give you a fair chance.
So I guess I’m in good company.
It’s wild to think about the dominoes falling in my life… my mother smoking during pregnancy, me arriving early because of it and having complications, probably having an effect on me being autistic and often very sick in childhood; then come the allergies, then autoimmune issues start and depression, anxiety and C-PTSD come on top that all add on to each other, and the financial hardship. I think the only things not stacked against me are my location, my education, my skin color and still being able to walk.
I would never like to be below 25 again, no matter what. These aren’t my best years, even if I would have had the ideal upbringing. What I do wish though is that I could snap my fingers and change those years so that I was well loved, healthy and financially supported.
I’ll never recover from this.
But also, it’s so interesting: I worry about being 30 and having no proper degree yet, still taking 2-3 years until I’m done, and then continuing to add more, all next to my job. But then I see others with two degrees at 30 years old, worrying about not having much or any practical experience and not knowing how to actually juggle a workload. I also see other 30 year olds who have done two degrees while working full time already, but they’ve had to run on a strict schedule for so long they don’t even know who they are anymore or cannot handle the downtime they finally have after being done with education for good.
It makes me feel a little better. There are always trade-offs and worries, and even if I already had my degree(s), I would have different things to worry about.