It’s Sunday morning now and it seems to be rather cold. I will not be visiting mum today as there are no buses to where she’s staying, which is a village called Studzianki. Mind you, the care home is not actually in the village but in a field over one kilometer away from it.

I was having second thoughts yesterday whether I did the right thing moving her. The previous place was not suitable but this one seems to have different issues, like, well, being difficult to reach. There’s not many choices of care homes in Poland, unfortunately. There’s not much I can do about that.

I do occasionally worry what I’m going to do when mum runs out of money but this is not an issue for now I guess.

I was wondering also if I’m doing the right thing posting publicly about my problems. It does make me feel much better and especially one of my last posts about self harming was really helpful to relieve loads of tension. But then I worry, what if… what if prospective employer will find it and decide not to give me the job based on it. What if I’d be trolled by nasty comments on the blog. What if… I don’t even know.

But it feels like being publicly authentic is exactly what I need. I don’t need recognition, I don’t need to become autism activist, I just need space to be myself and this blog gives me exactly that. Before there were so many things that I didn’t allow myself to talk about that it’s unbelievable. It always started by others not allowing me to talk about something, it could be an innocent comment made by a therapist that I shouldn’t think about something the way I thought or something more direct like my mum telling me not to mention my dad’s mental health problems to anybody. It translated into me not being able to be myself, ever.

Now I think this is exactly what gave me that feeling of a glass jar being put over me that I later felt like I wanted to break.

Now I don’t think I need to do that anymore. I have a history of self harm and a suicide attempt (mind you, I didn’t really want to die) but I feel like I’m also a creative, caring, curious and brave individual and I don’t want to hide my shadow any more only to create another illusion that would serve a purpose of advocating and giving me false hope that when people notice me for my advocating effort, I’ll be finally able to be myself.

At the same time I don’t want to bring all the attention to my problems: I didn’t self harm for years, I’m not suicidal now, I’m coping with life somehow and I’m in a supportive relationship with an autistic partner who helps me a lot to be more authentic with myself. I often feel like I want to praise and celebrate him (even though he’s certainly not perfect, but who is?)

So I guess being authentic requires me to talk about both my struggles and my successes. Successes can be small, like, for example creating colourful design on Redecor that didn’t end up on the last place. Not waking up with anxiety about my family situation. Keeping my flat tidy and going to the gym on a regular basis, cooking a nice dinner, and yes, blogging. Those are all part of me. And The Boyfriend of course, he’s the most incredibly caring individual that I’ve ever met. He’s been with me through all those years of struggle and confusion, talking to me calmly when I needed that. I don’t know what I would do without him.