Reality Lately
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I keep being frustrated about this Substack for a specific reason, which is that I keep promising you posts about animism and autism, about the nature of reality, and those specific posts are the ones that keep not happening.
So I want to be honest this week and tell you where I'm at with that.
(Note: This will be one of those navel-gazey posts where I tell you about where I'm at in therapy. If that's not your thing, feel free to skip.)
I still think that reality is much weirder and more complicated than most people give it credit for. I still think many things around me, especially in the natural world, are more aware and alive than people think.
However I am also in therapy and, look, some of the things I need therapy about are tangled with this view of the world very deeply. Like, I'm not going to share details because it is very personal, but I have trauma involving supernatural events (or events that I understood to be supernatural at the time) and I also have at least one episode of psychosis in my history, so it turns out shit's complicated.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m absolutely not saying “oh, turns out magic isn’t real and I was crazy all along.” That’s simplistic and also insulting, and doesn’t account very well for what my experiences have actually been like at most points.
But while I work through this stuff with a qualified professional (and maybe you're seeing why it took so long to find a professional who was qualified to deal with me), I'm asking myself questions like:
How many times, when I thought I sensed a presence "outside me" - either friendly or threatening - was it actually something inside, already a part of me, trying very hard to get my attention? How do I even tell the difference between these two things?
How do I make peace with not necessarily knowing what "really" happened, or what's "really" real? With the fact that, because of how much there is to untangle, I may not know this for a long time? With the fact that, at certain stages of this process, it's the least helpful question to ask?
These are meaty and fascinating questions. Like, there's a lot that I'm actually enjoying about this, even when it's also very painful. And they're questions I wish I could dissect and share with all of you, but because of the very sensitive personal context in which I'm asking them, I can't. There is stuff that it feels safe to share online, with people who are essentially strangers but who clearly like me enough to have paid for this newsletter, and there is stuff that it doesn't. And of course trusting my own sense of what is and isn't safe is one of the first things we talked about in therapy!
Maybe at some point I'll find an angle on some of this that does feel safe to discuss in more detail. Until then, all this analysis is happening on the inside, with my therapist and a few other trusted confidantes. And until then, it doesn't really feel authentic to write happy little posts about communicating with the spirit of my house, either.
Don't worry, there is still a lot else I can talk about! Autism! Book characters! AI! (My goodness, AI lately. *shakes head*) What stories I'm working on next! But I just had to get that off my chest.