Who is Jessa Joyce?

In short, me!

In long, well…

It’s been a long time coming. Anyone who knows me in person knows I balance my writing with my music, and up until recently, I’ve kept the two separate. My blogs, articles, etc. had all been published under the Jess J. Salisbury moniker, while anything music-related has been released as Jess Joyce. I’ve always maintained a certain degree of separation between the two. I assumed anyone who was interested in the crap I blog about wouldn’t care about my band.

Something struck me, though, as I was thinking of things to write about. Musician-me is such a huge part of my identity, and I’ve kind of been hiding it on here. It’s something I mention in passing at best. But here’s the thing — I’m trying to reach as many people with my music as I can. And I’m trying to reach as many people with my blog as I can. And right now, I have two very distinct audiences for the two without much overlap. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to just combine the Jess Joyce music brand and the Jess J. Salisbury writing brand into one cohesive online identity?

So that’s what I’m doing.

Why Jessa, though? A few reasons. It was my former stage name when I was touring with my old band, and while that stage of life left a sour taste in my mouth, I still feel very attached to the name and want to redeem it in some way. I’ve always pictured Jessa as this badass rock star version of myself, the same way Yami Yugi is looks like a more badass version of Yugi. (Were y’all expecting a Yu-Gi-Oh reference here?) She’s what would happen if I became possessed by the spirit of an ancient pharaoh.

How else would you explain my taste in hair and makeup? #cleopatrachic

I thought about switching everything over to “Jess Joyce,” since that tends to be the name I use most publicly, and because “Salisbury” is the name I wanted to reserve for more academic pursuits, like when I start publishing research. I don’t want colleagues and students to go searching for studies I’ve conducted on music and autism or queer music therapy, only to instead be greeted by my inane ramblings about whatever it is I blog about on here.

The problem with that, however, is that there is already a Jess Joyce online, and she’s a search engine optimisation expert. I can’t make this up. Basically, barring my music and writing becoming Taylor Swift levels of popular, the Jess Joyce that is me would likely never, ever be the first thing to pop up when you Google me. And if you want to make it as figure in the entertainment business, you have to at least be Googleable. So I adopted my former stage name as a pseudonym for my internet presence.

What does this mean for the blog? Aside from the name change, not a lot. Now that I’m integrating my music into my writing and my writing into my music, expect to see a few more music-related posts on here. I’d love to be more open and transparent about the music business and what being in a band is really like. But I’m not going to stop posting about philosophy, mental health, and wellness. It’s all part of what makes me, well, me.

I know I’ve rebranded several times throughout the years (thanks, ADHD), but I have a feeling this change will stick. I needed a fresh start in both writing and music without entirely erasing everything I’ve done so far. With me turning 30 in less than a week, this feels like the perfect time to adopt a new persona of sorts, although still one that’s unequivocally myself. One of my favorite daily affirmations is “Imagine the best possible version of yourself — then start showing up as her.” That version of myself is Jessa, and in this new stage of life, I want to embrace that side of me.

If you still call me Jess, that’s fine! I won’t be offended. In fact, if you already know me in person, it would be weird if I started having you call me by a different name. Like in 7th grade when I tried to get everyone to start calling me Sophitia like the Soul Calibur character, and only my dad went along with it until my mom made him stop.

And my best friend’s little brother, who called me “So-eat-my-feet-ia.”

Jessa and Jess aren’t different people, and I’m comfortable with people calling me whatever they feel most comfortable calling me. I just wanted a cohesive online presence, and consolidating my music and writing identities into a new identity felt overwhelmingly right. So, welcome to the new jessajoyce.com and a fresh chapter of my story. I’m glad you’re along for the ride.

An Open Letter to Friends and Family

I wrote this out as a sort of explanation to my family about my unique situation, because it’s definitely not a conventional one. But I’ve never been a conventional person, so it shouldn’t come as a shock. Still, folks tend to get all weird and squirrelly when you mention any kind of relationship outside of the cishet monogamous norm, and I owe it to my loved ones to be open and honest with them.

When my wife and I first officially got together, I had my hesitations because we weren’t compatible in some ways. See, she’s likely something called ace (short for asexual), which means she isn’t interested in the physical aspects of a typical romantic relationship. She’s not much of a romantic either, while I’m probably a lot more romantic than I’d like to admit. But I still love her and want to start a family with her, so she proposed an idea to me — an open relationship. I could date other people, and even ceremonially marry someone else if I got close enough to someone.

I was a little hesitant because of the stigma. People don’t really understand polyamory yet, and I don’t even know if it’ll ever be truly normalized in my lifetime. Jealousy is still lauded as romantic and the idea of finding “the one” is so pervasive that suggesting the existence of more than one “the ones” sounds as foreign to our ears as the idea of people laying eggs, to the point where accommodating for it would require changing the entire societal paradigm. But I want to be more open about it because I love my partners too much to hide them, and because society is never going to change until someone speaks up about it.

I met my girlfriend at a Valentine’s Day show last year while she was on tour, and I felt immediately drawn to her. With my wife’s blessing, I pursued a long-distance relationship with her. And it has honestly been such a magical year with her by my side. She means the world to me, and so does my wife. The same way a mother can love her two children, or a child can love both their parents, I love them both. And I’ve never been happier.

This past weekend, I had the honor of meeting my girlfriend’s family, which really cemented the feelings I already knew I had for her. I also knew her friends and family would eventually start following me on social media and notice I’m married. I guess I wrote this as a letter to them, too. Just know that I have every intention of having a future with her, unconventional as it may be, and perhaps even starting a family. I want to provide for her, be her soft place to land, and let her know every day how special she is to me. The way I see it, she is my stars and my wife is my moon, and I have enough love to fill the night sky, and beyond.

I know it’s not going to be easy. I know being openly polyamorous comes with risks, doubly so for my wife (who is black) and my girlfriend (who is trans). People can react violently when presented with things they don’t understand. But it’s a chance I’m willing to take, and if push comes to shove, I’d happily lay down my life for either of my partners. Love conquers all, and all that sappy stuff.

It might not make sense to everyone, but it makes all the sense in the world to me.

Pieces of Myself: Learning to Love Past-Jess

Full disclosure: I started using the good ol’ Mary Joanna to help me sleep at night. Yeah yeah, I know that technically means I’m not sober by the broadest definition of the term, despite being alcohol-free for about a year new (hell yeah). But I use it medicinally to help with my constant waking up in the middle of the night, and honestly, it does help me get a more restful sleep

Sometimes after I smoke, I don’t immediately fall asleep, and when that happens, I either get horny, paranoid, or philosophical. It’s kind of a crapshoot every time which of my high personalities shows up. It’s usually the one I don’t want at the time, which means using it as an aphrodisiac is a gamble.

“Jess, this is *not* the time to ramble about how we’re living in a simulation.”

Last night, though, I had a strange experience. My wife was giving me a pep talk regarding my mental health, which has been pretty bad as of late. Nothing concerning, just the usual “What if life is meaningless and everything I do will eventually be forgotten?” Which is pretty heavy stuff to think about literally every second of the day, and I’ve been in this mindset for most of my life. Yay, anxiety!

But, in my high, pseudo-intellectual stupor, something my wife said really itched a part of me I didn’t know I needed to reach — the past Jesses (is that the proper plural of Jess?).

I haven’t been nice to past me. Not any of them. I tend to think of my past selves as different people, instead of a cohesive part of who I became. I look at Child Jess through my adult eyes and judge her unfairly for being, well, an outcast. A pariah. The weird autistic little girl who stims by spinning around in the back of the classroom and making bird sounds. I get mad at my younger self for having the nerve to not fit in and be popular. And as my wife said, that little girl is a part of me still, and every time I resent my childhood eccentricities, I bully her the same way I was bullied by other people.

Then I think of College Jess. The me who was skinny and outgoing and optimistic and popular and excelled at school despite barely trying. Although she’s a part of me as well, I resent her for being all the things I wish I was now. I’m jealous of a past version of me! It makes no sense when I really think about it — at that time, my mental illnesses were worse than they’d ever been before, and I’d sooner saw off my own pinky toe with a nail file before I’d willingly deal with my OCD at its worst again. But I only see this rose-tinted version of the past, with this girl who is infuriatingly everything I want to be. Everything I was.

The thing is, these aren’t two different people. They’re all me, and they’ve taken me to where I am now. And honestly, where I am now isn’t that bad. I have a wife and a girlfriend I love dearly (that poly life, I’m tellin’ ya). I’m back in school for music therapy, and I’m closer than ever to getting this degree. I even won a scholarship for it! I’m about to be debt-free, and I’m working on getting back in shape. And despite my depression being ever-present, my mental health has never been better. Everything is falling into place for once, and I owe it all to my past selves for bringing me to this place. I started thinking of these past selves as an Inside Out-type of inner council that influences my day to day decisions and emotions.

It’s going to be a process, but I’ve started making peace with my past. I want to continue to honor and integrate these past versions of Jess into myself as a whole. Writing this out was my first step in healing these broken pieces of me. If your brain works at all like mine, I hope this little blog post helps you, too.

The Jacket Potato Gospel

(This one’s for all the Christians who read this blog. If you’re not into that, this post will probably not be applicable to you.)

Yay! Another musical episode! You’ll need to watch this video for any of this to make sense — and at the end it still might not make sense, I dunno.

If you’ve never heard of The Masked Singer, it’s this TV show where a bunch of celebrities put on fursuits and other ridiculous costumes and sing. The judges are tasked with guessing who each singer really is. As you can see in this video, Jacket Potato is assumed by the judges to be a number of different dudes.

But in the comments, one name is mentioned more than all of the celebrities put forth by the judges combined — Richie Sambora.

And if you don’t know who Richie Sambora is, you clearly haven’t spent enough time on my blog.

These judges have to be insane to not realize that Jacket Potato is Richie Sambora. Seriously, just listen to any of his solo works and compare the voices. Even if you just compare the second “wanted!” in the chorus of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” to the vocals of Jacket Potato, it’s obvious, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this spud is Richie incognito.

Fine, here’s all the proof you need:

Do you ever feel like the people in the comments? Like you’re screaming “For Christ’s sake (literally), Jesus is the way!” to a world that just isn’t listening? I mean, we were told to share the Gospel with everyone, right? We know the way to God, and it’s through knowing His Son.

The problem is, historically, people didn’t just leave YouTube comments yelling about how Richie Sambora is definitely Jacket Potato. They broke into the judges’ houses, murdered their families, and made them declare that Richie Sambora was Jacket Potato. And this is absolutely not what Richie Sambora would want.

“Please do not kill people for me.” – Richie Sambora, probably

And it’s not what God wants His people to do, either

We should want to share the good news, but not because we want to hurt or exert power over others. Instead, we should do it because we know peace and unconditional love unlike anything we can find on this planet, and we should want other people to feel that good too! It’s the same as how I want everyone to know who the singing potato really is. I want the world to know Richie Sambora’s name because I know people are missing out by not hearing his soulful singing voice or exquisite guitar playing. That’s how we should feel about the name of Jesus.

Part of this involves humility and admitting we don’t have all the answers. I could get to Heaven someday and be greeted by Anubis. I could die and become reincarnated as something else entirely. Or maybe there’s nothing else after death, and we go back into the same darkness we felt before we were born. But I believe what I believe because I’ve felt it myself. And of course I want to talk about that feeling, because it’s a huge part of my lived experience.

In that same vein, they could take off Jacket Potato’s mask and it could be any number of the dudes the judges named, or somebody else entirely. But in my heart, I know that voice. I know it well, because I heard it many times throughout my life. Jesus is my King and Richie Sambora is my Jacket Potato, and if those beliefs encourage me to live my life with purpose and love, so be it. I could be wrong about everything, but it’s enough for me to know I could be right.

And it feels *really good* to find out you’re right.

Two Girls, One Objective Truth

I want to start this blog post with a song. This is the musical episode.

It’s a beautiful piano piece, and one I happen to really like. It’s a simple, melodic piano composition titled “Lover’s Theme,” penned by a contemporary French composer, Hervé Roy (1943-2009). Take a moment. Close your eyes and let your mind wander. What mental images come to mind when listening to this piece?

I’ve been studying music therapy research methods and philosophies. Or rather, my program is making me study music therapy research methods and philosophies, but I’m a big enough nerd-in-an-unfun-way that I probably would study this topic unprovoked.

In formulating our capstone project, we’ve been asked to self-assess and analyze our ways of thinking when it comes to this stuff. See, there’s several schools of thought in music therapy research, but two stood out to me as polar opposites — positivism and constructivism. Positivism is essentially the belief that there is an absolute truth that can be measured, while constructivism tends to believe that many things can be true at once and often depends on a person’s lived experience. Neither of these ways of thinking are superior, but it helps to know which side of the coin you’re on before embarking in a research activity.

Most of my classmates leaned toward constructivism. Me? I was the weirdo positivist.

Maybe it’s because I come from an evangelical background that always preached that there was the way, the truth, and the life, and that was Jesus, and there was absolutely no other way to God, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m autistic and tend to think more literally than a lot of people. I like facts, and proof, and facts that I can prove in some quantitative way.

Maybe there’s more than one answer to the big questions of the universe, but one thing has to be truer than everything else, right?

I really want to think I could play a song like the one above and everyone would have a universal and measurable experience. Like, the sound of a pretty piano piece increases serotonin in the brain by an average of 45 percent in all subjects of the study.

Unfortunately, serotonin is not the bodily fluid most associated with that piece.

You see, several years ago, a video went viral on ye olde interwebs. An absolutely putrid, disgusting video of two women enjoying each other’s…company. I’m not going to name it here, but if you haven’t gleaned what video it is by now, congratulations! You haven’t been corrupted by the internet!

This bowl of ice cream has no relevance to this post. Carry on.

Unfortunately (and probably to the chagrin of Mr. Roy), the piano piece you just heard was used as background music for the aforementioned shock video. So if you’re like me and had sadistic friends, you were probably tricked into watching this monstrosity. And chances are, you were traumatized.

You see, positivism doesn’t account for people’s unique experiences. If you’ve never heard the song in the context of that video, you’d probably have a very different reaction than someone who has. This is why learning to see things from other perspectives and accepting that there’s no one “correct” perspective is so important in music therapy. Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A song might evoke a positive emotion for you, but to someone else, that song was performed by their abuser’s favorite band. Or perhaps someone in that band was an abuser: I can’t listen to Brand New or All Time Low the same way anymore, which means half of the music I liked in high school is ruined forever. Thankfully I’ve still got Jimmy Eat World.

I never got why music therapy, especially certain listening experiences, were contraindicated for particular patients. Music evokes a lot of emotions, and they’re not always positive. That’s the danger of a strictly positivist philosophy. Emotion is not easy to quantify, and it’s even more difficult to predict.

My perspectives are changing all the time, and the older I get, the more I’m realizing that everyone has a different version of reality. Maybe humans are more complicated than can be described with numbers. Maybe I need to learn to be okay with that. I always sought solace in certainty, in knowing there was an answer. Perhaps no one can know the answers, because there are none. Or conversely, there’s a zillion correct answers.

I may never know for sure, and I need to accept that.

In Search of the “Genesis Week” and the Innately Human Act of Creation

If you didn’t grow up in the church, the idea of a “Genesis week” is probably foreign to you. If you did grow up in the church, you probably heard it told a zillion times in Sunday school, but maybe never heard it phrased that way. Basically, it’s the creation story of the Abrahamic faiths — God spoke, and in seven days, the universe was formed.

These days, in my post-evangelical philosophy, I don’t believe the world was formed in seven 24-hour days, but over several eras, in accordance to what we now know from scientific discoveries. This ideology is known as old-earth creationism, and seeks to reconcile the concepts of evolution and the text of the holy scriptures. In fact, the Hebrew word for “day,” yom, can mean a period of time, not just 24-hours, which implies the creation “week” was actually millions upon billions of years.

This is tangentially related to the topic at hand, kind of (I hope).

I’ve been a little creatively stifled as of late, mostly owing to my own dumb brain. I’ve been meaning to post the entire first part of my story (not just the intro), but I keep chickening out and not doing it. At the same time, my band is in the midst of recording its debut album, and of course, that’s progressing at a snail’s pace too. I want to write and play music and draw and dance and do all of the things that have been on my heart, but I just can’t seem to shake this mental block.

I revisited Psalm 51, the emo poetry King David wrote after being called out by the prophet Nathan for thinking with his dick. (I need to be a biblical scholar with these descriptions, I swear.) I’ve always related to this passage as someone who’s also slutted too close to the sun and ended up hurting people I care about (although I never, you know, had a dude killed in war so I could sleep with his wife). A lot of the time, when reading through this psalm, I’d reflect on the whole “I suck and need God’s grace” aspect of it, but there’s a sneaky little part that I’ve always overlooked. I discovered it when I switched over to The Message version of the Bible, which is basically the translated scripture disguised as John Mayer lyrics.

God, make a fresh start in me,
shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.
-Psalm 51 (MSG)

There it is! The Genesis week!

The intention of this verse, I’m assuming, is that we need God to take a Genesis week to work on us, but my first instinct was to apply this to my own life as well. Do I need a Genesis week — a week (or an entire era) of intense creation?

Humans are innately creative, but I feel like sometimes we suppress that part of ourselves. As children, we were always playing make-believe and acting out stories we made up. The fact that we’re born like this is no accident — we were made in the image of God, and so the power and desire to create is rooted in the very depths of the human spirit. It’s the one thing that makes us different from the rest of Animalia. Even if my cat had opposable thumbs, he still wouldn’t be able to paint a picture, or write a story, or dance in a ballet production (as hilarious as that would be). That’s a uniquely human characteristic.

Basically, when God created humans, He gifted us with His own special ability to imagine, to create. Think about it — the power that created the entire universe is inside you! And yet, we take that for granted. Our society tries to beat the imagination out of you before you have the change to do something revolutionary with it, and sadly, it often succeeds. It reduces us to little more than lazy housecats content to eat, sleep, and poop all day. We were built to be like God, but spend most of our time being like Garfield.

I think we all need a Genesis week. Imagine what would happen if we all stepped back for a while and did what made our hearts happy. What would happen if we threw ourselves into our creations and stopped caring what other people think? What if we wrote, sang, danced with abandon? What if instead of being so divided, we united over music and art and storytelling, the way we were intended to be? I think that would spark more than just a revolution. It would create a new Eden, a place of peace and contentment.

There’s a reason I study music therapy, and it’s because I feel there’s nothing closer to God than the act of creation. Nothing heals and changes people quite like creating music — or creating anything for that matter! Throw yourself into your creative endeavours, and if you don’t have one yet, find your passion. Maybe it’s baking. Maybe it’s knitting cat sweaters. It doesn’t matter.

Just create.

I’m Autistic (And Why That Matters)

Fair warning: I’m going to be writing about this topic a lot in the next few months for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a few paragraphs.

And yes, I *will* be using this topic as an excuse to post as many adorable pictures of little Jess as I can.

My last blog post delved a little into what it was like growing up autistic and how I’ve learned to mask to such a degree that most of my psychiatrists don’t even take me seriously when I mention that I’m likely on the spectrum. For that reason, I’ve been hesitant to “claim” the title of autism. If I’m “cured,” then I don’t have autism anymore, right? If I can blend in enough with the “normies” to not have any visible disability, and I can’t even get a proper diagnosis, I’m not really autistic. I’m just faking it for attention. Initially, I gave up on getting “properly” diagnosed for that reason.

Last week, I began research on my project for the undergraduate symposium. It will go hand-in-hand with my presentation that is conditional for my receiving of the Brehm fellowship, awarded to students who are looking to contribute to the field of disability research and advocacy. I chose autism as my focus, primarily because it has affected my life in deeply personal ways, even without a clinical diagnosis.

Even if I had to “change” to fit in with neurotypical society.

One of the books I found myself drawn to study was Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price. His research comes from a neurodivergent place, being autistic himself, as well as having a queer perspective as a trans man. The book focuses on the ways neurotypical “passing” folks have used “masks” to fit in with societal norms. Traditionally, these masks were forced on us by things such ABA, now viewed as harmful by most autistic advocates. Some of us, like me, consciously decided to, as I like to say, break our own bones to fit in someone else’s box.

At this point in life, after decades of studying people’s behavior and learning what works and what doesn’t in social situations. I “pass” well enough that I’ve hesitated to claim the autistic title. I’m scared I’ll be looked at as a fraud by the community, someone who claims the title for clout and to excuse my admittedly sometimes annoying idiosyncrasies. But as I’m learning, that’s about as nonsensical as me trying to pass as straight for so many years when I knew damn well I was pansexual, and about as harmful too. It’s harmful to the community, as I perpetuate internalized prejudices by denying my identity, and it’s harmful to myself, as I force my body and mind into a crevice they were not designed to fit into.

Here’s the thing — Price explains that oppressed folks are ridiculously underdiagnosed because we’re forced to conform even more than people who are part of the majority. Straight white dudes can skate by on their privilege, but we have to try harder to make it in this world, and part of that involves hiding the less socially acceptable pieces of ourselves. Not only that, but the current diagnostic tools used for detecting autism is literally based on its presentation in white little boys. If you’re black, or an adult, or a woman, or any combination of that, it’s damn near impossible to get a proper diagnosis because of implicit biases in the testing process.

Here’s the other thing — a proper diagnosis isn’t a requirement to be part of the autistic community. In addition to the roadblocks mentioned above, there’s also the problem of access to testing, which is often prohibitively expensive and not readily available to everyone. For this reason, self-diagnosis (or as Price puts it, self-realization) is valid. If you relate to the autistic experience, you’re probably one of us. Surprise!

So that’s that. I’m autistic. And no, I don’t have autism any more than I have pansexuality. It’s just part of me. And that’s important, because we need more people to advocate for people like us.

Just a few days ago, a dear well-intentioned friend of mine invited me to an online seminar about some wellness products. The speaker went on and on about how her tinctures and potions can cure this and that. And then — I shit you not — she spoke this exact sentence:

“Our products have been shown to eradicate autism.”

Almost immediately, I excused myself and logged off. I felt gross, like someone told me they could fix my gay, as if that wouldn’t erase the beautiful, loving relationship I have with my wife. This time, that sentence — it was about me. It took me three decades to come to terms with who I am. It took me three decades to learn to have a beautiful, loving relationship with myself, with my own identity. And the fact that someone tried to sell me a cure for that feels insulting.

We need more people to fight the good fight for us. We need more people to stand up and declare that there’s nothing wrong with us, just that society isn’t built for us. We’re not the problem, the current rigid sense of “this is what is socially acceptable and this is what is not” is the real problem. As long as we don’t fit into the narrow ideals of what is acceptable behavior, we’re going to continue to be dehumanized and discriminated against. So something needs to change, and maybe it shouldn’t be us.

This was a lot of words, but I feel like it’s important to say. I am autistic, and I don’t owe anyone a proper diagnosis to claim that. Not in a world that makes it prohibitively difficult for an AFAB adult to even get clinically diagnosed, let alone get assessed. Not in a world that beat all the quirks and idiosyncrasies out of me before I even reached adulthood.

No, I don’t owe anyone a damn thing.

Phantom of Me

Damn it, Rina Sawayama. This website is going to turn into a fan blog if you keep this up.

I swear this woman lives rent free in my head.

I was on my way to work, listening to her as per usual, when her song “Phantom” came on. I’d listened to it in passing, but I never really listened to it. The second verse just hit me like a truckload of turkeys.

If I could talk to you, I’d tell you not to rush
You’re good enough
You don’t have to lose, what makes you you
Still got some growing to do

When did we get so estranged
Haunted by the way I’ve changed
Claiming back the pieces of me that I’ve lost
Reaching in and hoping you’re still, waiting by the windowsill
I’d bring you back to us

I wasn’t a popular kid. Quite the opposite, actually. A lot of it, looking back, was because of my (finally freaking diagnosed) ADHD and (still freaking undiagnosed) autism. I was the weird kid who spun around in the back of the classroom and stimmed by making parakeet sounds. I had special interests like 8-track tapes and Bon Jovi, stuff “normal” kids thought were strange. I had sensory issues when it came to smell and gagged at the scent of ranch dressing, which my peers loved to torment me with. I had to eat lunch in the library to avoid being pelted with the stuff! And it’s so easy for me to forget that I used to come home from school crying every day because kids are so fucking cruel.

What changed?

In the autistic community, there’s a term called “masking.” You hide parts of yourself to fit in. You learn to “pass” as neurotypical, because there’s no other way for people to love you. When I got into middle school, something flipped. I methodically studied what the “cool kids” were wearing and doing, and made myself into a caricature of who I really was in order to be the “most popular” version of myself. I clipped my own colorful wings to become something I wasn’t, all for my peers’ approval. And it worked. By senior year, I was unrecognizable. By college, I was — dare I say — popular. But little Jess—

—that Jess was dead. And I killed her.

I’ve brought up getting a proper autism diagnosis to my therapists several times, and each time I get almost laughed out of the clinic. But you’re so popular, and social. You don’t look autistic, whatever that means. You don’t go on and on about your special interests — because I learned early on that talking about the color of Richie Sambora’s toothbrush would get me ostracized. You don’t stim — because making silly little sounds and moving my body in ways that make me feel good aren’t “socially acceptable.” You don’t have sensory issues — because I had to force myself to deal with things that made me really uncomfortable, because otherwise, no one would like me.

I broke my own bones to fit in someone else’s box, and left me with a phantom of myself.

I wish I could tell my younger self that she doesn’t need to change to fit in. That she doesn’t need to hide entire parts of herself. That she’s valuable the way she is, and doesn’t need to change. That’s why autism acceptable — not just awareness — is so important. Because somewhere, some little girl is feeling the exact way I felt back then. And I don’t want her to feel like she needs to kill her autistic self in order to be loved.

I hope she’s still there, waiting by the windowsill.

Raising a Glass (of Stinky Ass Mineral Water)

Two things happened recently. I saw a beautiful post by a woman who was addicted to crack and got her life together, and made a heartfelt video about her journey. And then, this status popped up on my own memories:

“One Lake Michigan” is a valid unit of measurement in the Midwest.

It’s been a year since I decided to get my own shit together (for real), and while I did slip up a few times, this was the anniversary of the day my wife and I dumped our liquor and threw our vapes in the trash. That was the beginning of the arc of my story where I actually cared about my health, which led to my current character arc of “working out, taking vitamins and proper medication, and eating better.” It started with that small step of deciding I was better than getting blackout drunk every night and poisoning my body.

And it feels good.

Like, I actually LIKE my body now. Who’d a thunk?

This New Years was a dilemma, since it was the first New Year’s Eve I’ve ever spent sober since I’ve been old enough to drink. Would I make an exception for a nice glass of champagne?

Or would I invent my own tradition?

Back in February, Crass and I got legally married (still waiting to have that big official shindig until we have the money). Our first purchase as a couple was this mineral water we saw on some Ghost Adventures-type show. They were investigating a supposedly haunted Well in Texas, and they sold cases of water from it. This guy was drinking some and it looked like he was having a great time, so we impulse-bought a case of fancy schmancy stinky ass mineral water on our wedding night. Our first purchase as a married couple.

So anyways, we still had some leftover. Not because it tasted bad, but because it was the kind of water that’s hard to guzzle. You know, the kind of heavy water that tastes too mineral-y to be refreshing, but tastes good nonetheless. I don’t know how to describe it properly. I’m not a water reviewer, I’m a lifestyle blogger.

So we cracked open a bottle of fancy schmancy stinky ass mineral water, and celebrated at midnight by toasting with it and dancing to the Black Eyed Peas.

It sucks that I can’t partake in traditional traditions like toasting with real champagne, or cracking open a cold beer at a race (because that’s a thing my hillbilly family does). Hell, I can’t even take Communion properly if I wanna get real technical, although now that I’m Methodist, I don’t use real wine anyways.

Might as well drink grape juice if *this* is the bread we’re stuck with.

Sometimes, recovery doesn’t look like a carefully curated TikTok video of all your wins. Sometimes, it involves sacrificing long-held traditions. But the beauty of letting go of tradition is that you can start your own, more meaningful traditions in its place. Champagne on New Year’s Eve is a nothing tradition to me. It’s just peer pressure from dead people.

Now, stinky ass mineral water on New Year’s Eve? That’s something unique. That’s something special.

That’s what recovery looks like.

A Blog Post About Making Babies (Kind Of)

Well well, it’s 2023. I’m going on my thirtieth year of life, which is surreal to me. As a kid, all I wanted was to be old. Well, specifically a grandma, so I could have people do stuff for me and I could watch game shows all day.

Now that I’m actually getting older, the idea scares me. It’s not like I haven’t talked about this on my blog before (so much that I’m too lazy to link all the times I mention my fear of getting old). A lot of it is that I’m scared I’ll be viewed as geriatric in the music business, that people won’t want some 30-something rock star over all the fresh young meat out there. But there’s another side to my fear of growing up, one I always sneered at when other women discussed it in the past.

The ol’ “biological clock is ticking” feeling.

I feel like it’s often frowned upon in alternative, queer, feminist-leaning communities to want a family and kids. Which is a damn shame, because we’d make much better parents than those creepy reactionaries with a definite breeding fetish and a need to fill their metaphorical quiver with like, twenty soldiers for the Lord.

Maybe I do have a slightly spiritual reason for wanting kids of my own though — I feel it’s my duty to raise up kids who change the world for the better. There’s no higher calling, right? And people have been procreating since the dawn of time. What if my bloodline ends with me? Will I have failed on the most basic measure of success? Animalistic instincts literally exist to keep a creature alive to propagate its species. It’s both a spiritual and an evolutionary need.

But what if I fail? What if I never have kids of my own?

My wife and I are planning on trying for a baby after I graduate from music therapy school and we buy a house, which is way closer than I could have ever imagined. Life moves so slowly day to day, I forget I’m about to jump into the next stage of life soon. And part of that stage involves me getting knocked up (with some help from a sperm donor, obviously). But I’ve never tried for a baby before. All my sexual experiences with penis-havers were characterized by me actively trying NOT to get pregnant. And as far as I know, I’ve never been pregnant before. What if I like, straight-up can’t?

The idea scares the shit out of me. That someday, I will die and no one will be alive to carry on my legacy. That I’ll be completely forgotten.

Why yes, this scene from Coco *did* traumatize me, a grown woman.

I know I shouldn’t worry about it too much yet. My mom had me at 38, for cryin’ out loud. I’ve got at least eight years to make these kids, right? Right?!

I guess what’s helping me get through this albeit normal fear is that we’re people, not simply animals, and we’ve created multiple ways to “have kids.” Maybe that kid is a work of art, or a story, or a song. Freddie Mercury never had a biological child, but we still know who he is, and people will know him for generations to come. How many others have that honor? Think about it — do you even know your great-great grandma’s name? In the end, we all get forgotten, no matter how many children we bring into this world, unless we do something great on this Earth that will live on after we’re gone.

This has been a really depressing blog post considering it’s the first post of the new year, but I don’t mean for it to be. Rather, it’s a call to do something big with the little time you have here. You’re worth more than just your ability to make babies.

I need to keep reminding myself of that, too.