Random thoughts on the Eve of my 35th birthday…
5 years ago today, I posted asking to confirm if the mayor of Bellingham had asked everyone to stay home as the COVID-19 pandemic was hitting Whatcom County and we were going into lockdown for the first time on a global scale.
I was still in the middle of my ‘Big Autistic Burnout’ episode that I went into right after getting my official Autism Diagnosis (ASD dx) in 2018, at age 28, after 6 years of attempting to be formally diagnosed after realizing I was autistic at age 22.
It was wild that 2020 was 5 years ago already.
It’s wild that people then were and still now denying that the virus even existed/is even real. No matter what your thoughts about autoimmunity and social responsibility regarding masking and vaccination, to simply outright deny things are happening is such a severe degree of delusion and mental compartmentalization of reality, it’s no wonder people have no empathy.
99.99999% of humans are not living in the same reality as me, nor seeing things in the same ways. Sometimes it’s like we’re seeing things in opposite ways. Since I’m usually the minority POV, I often end up being invalidated, dismissed, and gaslit no matter how hard I am actually trying to connect to the other person. They often simply seem to misunderstand/misinterpret the words I’m saying.
It’s literally terrifying and makes things ten times harder as an autistic person trying to socialize because I can’t figure out how people are likely to think or react anymore since everyone’s a wildcard with so much trauma, chronic illness, and dynamic disability, no matter their neurotype and whether they’re aware of these pathological conditions they’ve acquired or not.
The eerie parallel is all that happened last year and this year (which has not even been three months yet) is that now we have a fascist authoritarian dictatorship forming in the USA, and no I neither mince words nor censor myself because I obey none but myself, least of all janky algorithms created by petty, weak men.
The reason this is all so freaky other than the obvious reasons is because yet again we have not just active deniers and inverters of reality gaslighting and terrorizing other members of the population en masse, we also have the continued frozen and fawning privileged members who are too scared to take their heads out of the sand.
It’s quite possible they may not have the cognitive tools nor social supports needed to process what’s happening if they face it, but I would be far more in support of people collectively having a mental breakdown in the USA if it meant they stopping work for the corporate overlords and doing some deep introspection work instead of just externalizing their pain and giving into despair and destruction.
Without proper internal resources and external support, however, we know that the latter is more likely than the former, which is why I’m so hellbent on launching the GCN, Gryffin Core Network. I’m trying to develop both a for profit and not for profit sector of the GCN because while some of us are ready for a post-capital/ist world, not everyone is, and we have to respect everyone’s sustainable rate of change.
Only by meeting each other where we are at developmentally and mutually supporting each other as best we can when we can to so, will collective and deep-rooted systemic change occur. We change the whole by addressing the individual issues we experience collectively and sharing the burden of pain as a community.
So far, I have felt very unsupported and under resourced my whole life. I have lived both outside of the USA, been a member of non-American cultures, and lived in multiple parts of the USA. No matter where I’ve gone, there’s always been some issue of who I am whether only I was aware or not. At times, when I was younger, I was aware that I was feeling unsupported, but didn’t really know why or what was causing me to feel so sad and angry constantly.
As I grew up, I started to understand systemic discrimination.
At age 17, I was so inflamed by the injustices of the world (and the oppression I was facing without even knowing it at the time), that I chose to attend the JSA’s (Junior Statemen of America’s) intensive 4 week Summer school program at Georgetown University, so I took AP US Government and Politics before I became a senior in high school in Washington DC for fun. Even though I aced the course, I never took the AP test to get college credit because I became so incensed at how the legal and political system worked in the USA, that I turned my back on everything to do with government.
This was at age 18. I tabled for Obama, and then I never once voted because I became an anarchist. While I’d had anarchic and socialist leanings prior to that age, it wasn’t until I took the AP US Gov & Pol course and went to the hear senators speak at the capitol building that I realized how messed up it all was. I had initially been naive and hopeful, thinking that I could make change from within the system, but after I went that deep into the belly of the beast, I saw first hand that it was a system designed to chew well-intentioned people like me up and spit us out too depressed and downtrodden to do anything.
I did meet some amazing people in DC that summer, though, like my Palestinian friends who first taught me about the whole situation between Palestine and Israel. I remember crying my eyes out for several years after they went back to the Gaza strip and sent me videos of their neighbors and loved ones’ homes being bombed next to theirs.
Those friends joined my JSA group and wore their keffiyehs to the Israeli Embassy in DC. I remember the hard-hitting questions they were asking and how uncomfortable it was for everyone, but it really opened my eyes to what was happening. This was in the summer of 2007. I also remember that it these friends took me to try shwarma and hookah for the first time! That was pretty cool haha they also taught me some Arabic words from different dialects. That was probably my fave part of the experience.
Anyway, the reason I mention all of this is because even though some of my friends and followers online have known me my whole life, since before I started my public transition journey about 5 years ago, too, and while some of you have only met me more recently, none of you know all of the details of my life, and what makes me me or why I do the things that I do.
I know it can look really confusing online or externally when trying to “track my progress” or “follow my life’s work” and that’s sort of deliberate or intentional to a certain degree. I am working to consolidate and organize the content I share online to tell more of a cohesive and linear story to help others piece together each part of the journey I’ve been on and still am on.
Many have told me I should write a book, especially an autobiography. I’m still working on that. I’m just first trying to get my health well enough that my attention span can handle sitting down and concentrating on one thing for hours on end. These little rants and life updates I make from time to time do not require the same kind of brainpower or editing as a book would.
I’m doing what I can to use the tools available to get my story out there since that’s what everyone tells me to do. It’s just slow going. Thanks for the patience and support, y’all.
As of now, my story and journey is as follows…
I am Jax Gaius Bayne.
I am 35 years old.
I use they or he pronouns.
I am mostly transmasculine nonbinary or an agender transman.
I am demi/pan, grey ace-aro-flux, and polyamorous.
I am half-Latinx (Catalan-Cuban) on my father’s side, and white American on my mother’s side (mixed Northern European).
I am considered a “white-passing person of color/person of the global majority” but I definitely prefer the term POGM over POC since I have very little melanin and am highly literal haha I do use BIPOC a lot to emphasize the colorism and systemic racism in the USA since that’s where I’m currently located.
I am autistic and plural, and I consider these both disabilities (requiring accessibility accommodations & supports), but not disorders. These are also cultural and political identities like queer and neurodivergent. I also identify as neuroqueer.
I have various chronic illnesses that I do consider disorders (pathological and requiring treatment/support to heal), and while I am generally fine to talk openly about my health situation, I do not like when people feel entitled to comment their opinions of what I should do or how I should feel in response to what I share. That feels very rude and activates a lot of trauma responses from me.
One of the chronic illnesses I am struggling with is endometriosis, and while I have the surgery scheduled for April 15th, I’m still very nervous about it actually happening, healing properly, and feeling well enough to start working again afterwards. The work I want to do is not about money or profit, but getting stabilized enough to be able to support others even without a lot of money.
I am concerned about the state of affairs here in the USA and abroad. I am thinking of ways to ally myself with the tribal nations instead of the colonizer-settler regime, but it’s hard when I have hardly any privilege in this stupid capitalist system other than my skin tone and education level. Doing what I can to not betray my conscience, yet also be realistic and pragmatic when it comes to aiding in the reparations and redistribution of resources work.
It’s frustrating feeling like so many are only paying lipservice to the movements of decolonization, collective liberation, and abolitionism, yet don’t actually wanna get their hands dirty and do the hard work. I’m happy to do the work, I just need help getting well enough to do it again, and it’s hard to convince people I’m not well when they’re not in my body experiencing my daily pain load.
I’m going to keep trying to work on my websites, one of which expired I think cos I’m broke… uh oh… I’m going to keep trying to create the documents and resources to share and sell online. I’m going to keep on keeping on and trying my best, but boy is it weird and wild times right now.
I cried today on a business call. That was embarrassing haha.
I am so not okay, but still somehow surviving.
I think it’s due to all of you.
You’re keeping me alive because you care.
That’s all I need apparently.
So for those of you who still choose to support me and stick by me after all this, thank you. You’re what I’m most grateful for in life.
Here’s to my 35th year around the sun!
I’m going to manifest the best year of my life so far!
2025, here we goooo!!
Love to you all! ❤
Jax Bayne 