dailyprompt-1804 – Stories That Are All True

I used to think that writing about my challenges meant confessing failures — a kind of public inventory of what I can’t do, don’t do, or should be doing better. But the older I get, the more I realize that challenges aren’t moral verdicts. They’re terrain. They’re the shape of the landscape I move through every day, the hills I climb without thinking, the valleys where I rest, the weather systems that roll in whether I’m ready or not.

My brain doesn’t run on linearity. It runs on resonance — on meaning, on emotional texture, on whether something feels connected to the larger story of my life. This is beautiful when it works. It’s also maddening when it doesn’t. I’ve built a whole ecosystem of anchors, rituals, and technological scaffolding to help me navigate the days when my mind feels like a radio tuned between stations. Some days I’m a conductor; other days I’m a passenger. The challenge isn’t “getting organized.” It’s learning to work with a brain that’s more tide than clock.

I’m also good at setting tone — reading a room, sensing what people need, quietly adjusting the emotional thermostat. It’s a gift I’m proud of, but it also means I’m often carrying the invisible labor of making things feel good for everyone else. I’m the one who notices the tension, the silence, the shift in energy. I’m the one who smooths it over. The challenge is remembering that I’m allowed to be part of the group, not just the one holding it together.

Meaning-making is my native language. I map meaning onto places, rituals, food, conversations — it’s how I make sense of the world. But meaning-making takes energy, and sometimes I’m simply tired. The challenge is wanting to live with intention while also honoring the reality of my bandwidth. Some days I’m a philosopher. Some days I’m a person who needs to sit on the couch with coffee and orange juice and let the world be small.

Winter adds its own layer. The cold, the low light, the way the world seems to contract — it hits me harder than I admit. I’ve built hygge rituals to counter it: warm drinks, soft lighting, conversations that feel like blankets. But the truth is that winter still asks more of me than other seasons. The challenge is not pretending otherwise.

I’m also working on a long-term creative project — an AI User Guide that’s part philosophy, part memoir, part field manual for how I move through the world. It’s exciting and meaningful, but it’s also demanding. Long arcs require consistency, and my energy comes in tides. The challenge is showing up for a project that asks me to articulate my worldview when some days I’m still figuring out how to articulate my morning.

And then there are the places I long for: Finland, Basra, Damascus. They aren’t just destinations; they’re emotional coordinates, places that feel like they hold a piece of me I haven’t met yet. The challenge is holding longing without letting it turn into ache — letting desire be a compass, not a wound.

I notice things. The small shifts, the unspoken cues, the emotional weather patterns. It’s a superpower, but it’s also exhausting. When you’re the one who sees everything, you’re also the one who feels responsible for everything. The challenge is learning to let some things pass through me instead of taking them on.

If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that I’m learning to live in a body and mind that run on resonance, not efficiency. I’m learning to honor the way I’m built instead of fighting it. I’m learning that challenges aren’t failures — they’re simply the shape of my landscape. And I’m learning that naming them is its own kind of relief.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Daily writing prompt

What are your biggest challenges?

View all responses

Being autistic makes me naturally come across as demanding, when I am not demanding anything but the truth all the time; it is how I take in the world. If you bullshit me, it takes me a long time to regain trust. Therefore, I spend a lot of time being in anxiety about the situation, and it’s something I just don’t want to do anymore.

My biggest weakness in life is Supergrover, and it sounds romantic and yet it’s not. When she refused me as a partner, it didn’t mean that she refused me or cared about me any less. The feeling is mutual, most definitely. I don’t know how to turn it off after 10 years, and the only reason I bothered chasing her down (virtually), is because I wanted whatever our relationship grew into, not what it was in the moment.

In the moment, we were always hotheaded and angry, without exception, because that’s what an anxious/avoidant attachment does. It is not personal, ever. If someone is being avoidant and you need information to function in the relationship (and you do, always), then the relationship cannot proceed because it can’t. The tautology is real. True intimacy is by sharing information, not by hiding it. Saying we were fine was okay with me, but not after years and years. Something about it didn’t feel authentic, and I couldn’t fix it. But there were genuine moments, clearly, or she would be off my radar.

I’ll always keep the promises I made to the best of my ability, which is why it’s so hard for us both to make room for each other. My blog is a threat, objectively, and I understand that. But in order to describe what is happening with me, some information is necessary. I can use little things to talk about big things….. because the little things are the things that mean the most, not what is impressive.

In the future, for the readers I haven’t met yet, if you can’t understand that I’m a writer and try constantly to take it away from me because you think it’s a threat, then I don’t have time for you- not that you aren’t valuable and special, but it takes a lot out of me to write and this is what I do. If you don’t like this, you don’t like me on a very fundamental level. And I don’t need those friends.

I’m not going to stand for anyone having a problem with my writing, because I’m going to do it whether you’re in my life or not. It’s what I have when I feel the most unwanted- I can entertain myself by putting myself out there to strangers when you don’t want to talk. If you won’t listen, someone else will. And that’s all I’m asking. That this blog is my way of coping with life, and I learn more about myself than when I am in conversation, and it drove me to write six books’ worth of my journey as it was happening, not reviewing everything when it’s long in the past. Here’s the thing that’s most important about being a writer: you learn intimately that patterns repeat and there are no real surprises in life if you take that attitude.

If people are avoidant about bad things, they’ll be avoidant about good things, too. The person that won’t open up at work probably has trouble opening up to people they like as well. It’s never personal, it’s how they operate. A person like that in a relationship where the other person spills their guts is going to irritate the fuck out them, no matter whether it’s me or anyone else……

because patterns repeat and if you don’t change the dynamic, you’ll get stuck. It’s how the most people connect instantly and come off the rails over time. If you have trouble believing this is true, think about how many women leave their husbands because they work all the time, never share anything, and shut down when there’s a problem. It’s not anything personal to them, it’s how they operate. If they’ve caused damage to other people in their lives, they are 100% going to cause damage to you. I don’t look at it like “everyone is out to get you.” I look at it like “everyone has their own issues and how they respond is none of my business.”

For all people, the way they respond to my writing is important. What I have found over time is that everyone loves my writing as long as it’s about people they don’t know. For 99.9% of the world, this is true. But if you stop liking the mirror I hold up once I’m writing about you, then it was never about supporting me. It was always about adoring me and then discarding because they just can’t handle it. I didn’t leave those people behind, I grew past them.

I don’t go around picking people to write about because I don’t have to. All my friends are interesting enough to be characters in fiction. I don’t even make them a real person unless they’re close enough to me to warrant writing about them in the first place.

If you love the good and praise it often, and don’t like the bad and kick me in the nuts over it, then it shows that you’re not in it for the long haul. It’s really that simple. I will never kick anyone, because I am doing two things that they’re ignoring.

I have never found all the bad in someone without finding the good, but it may not be in the same entry. I am only talking about a snapshot of my day, and I change my mind frequently. Therefore, it might be a hit piece one day because I think your actions are fucking me up, and it might be that you are the best person in the world for me because we’ve just had a breakthrough and I want to celebrate it. I do not go after people, I reflect them as they are in my perception. As my perception changes, so do the characters they represent. I am laying out my thoughts this way so that they’ll change, not because I am trying to direct ire at them. I have the right to say I went through something bad and it hurt, without bugging you to read about it. If you want to know what I think, you’ll read. If you don’t, you won’t. But at no time should you take it personally. I write about everyone in the same way.

If I didn’t, then you would see that I’m only mining my friends for the gossip and not what is really happening in real time. It wouldn’t change me, because I’d just be a vicious, vindictive person and not trying to do therapy on my own. You are reading my most intimate thoughts regarding the people surrounding me, not the happenings around town like I’m the local Gladys Kravitz.

I try to be non-specific about people that matter. But if I start out with your real name, I won’t change it unless there’s a solid reason, and I have them. If you’re not named, you’re not that important, and I want the people around me to know that. I also know that it’s better to write about people than it is to not, because when I stop writing about them because they hate the negative things, they rail that I’m not only writing the positive. No, if you insist that you like an international audience thinking the sun shines out of your ass, then you don’t make a good character. Flat out.

It’s why I’m having so much trouble believing that any of my friends don’t see themselves as a 3D character, because I’ve even been nice to exes that have slashed my heart in two- less so with Kathleen, mostly because I don’t remember our day to day life together, but I definitely remember how she left. But again, emotionally unavailable so she wouldn’t talk about underlying issues, but would beat the hell out of me emotionally if I didn’t clean something to her standards, recognizing that not everyone grew up the same way. I fold the towels the way my mother did, and so does everyone else. It’s not worth relationship crisis, but she did it often enough that I knew she’d never open up. But I couldn’t leave, and I don’t think she could either- which is why she pulled such an egregious trump card.

And the thing is, if our relationship had been set up with poly in the first place, that she couldn’t commit to monogamy, so we’d make other things our touchstones, I don’t think I would have handled it as well then as I would now, but it would have been better than ambushing me with so many lies, and waiting until I was out of town to cheat.

Due to that experience, and having my own new relationship experience while I was still married, I can’t commit to it, either. It’s not because I’m incapable, it’s because I never want to be accused of cheating ever again. It’s not cheating if you’re not breaking an agreement…. so I just won’t make it.

I’m not going to trade new relationship energy (no matter what kind- platonic relationships are just as fulfilling) for my entire life falling apart. I cannot put all my eggs in one basket anymore, and part of it is that my heart is already gone. I don’t have a choice about that, and yet, I do. I want a scenario where when I have to make Supergrover a big deal in my own life that it doesn’t affect any of the others, and if Supergrover is in any way picking up what I’m putting down, she knows to the very depth of her being that I made the right decision by putting her first, even in my marriage.

I will never apologize, ever, for that stone cold fact, because I cannot do anything about it. She should have realized that when we don’t interact, it almost affects me more than when she is. We have a hard out, not subjective like with my other friends, and she has taken no responsibility for that fact. What she has taken responsibility for is changing my life and she wishes she’d never told me anything at all, when it’s the best gift I’ve ever been given. But gifts don’t come without potential problems when the wrapping is fallible- and I mean human, not that anyone has to be perfect; they can’t.

So, when I talk about biggest challenges, they’re always emotional because that’s the wavelength I’m riding and not many people are. Most people don’t know themselves as well as I do, so I seem threatening when I’m just certain. I can also listen to someone else without agreeing with them; then, they become threatened that it’s going to take different words to convince me they’re right, because I’m not trying to find a situation I can “win,” but a situation in which we both get what we want. It takes time and effort to do that, but it’s not impossible. People just cut out long before the discussion is over, and if you’re supposedly in it for the long haul, then you’ll meet me halfway.

Because I see their biggest challenges, too.