It's been a long time since I'd thought about how hard blogging was for me, in the beginning, but when I decided to start this blog, I remembered. 

I remembered how I didn't want anyone to know about my first blog or read what I had written.  I remembered how I decided to hide it. Or at least hide it from everyone I knew.  Doing that wasn't hard for me.  I had been hiding things all my life.  To just keep on hiding suited me just fine.

While I eventually got comfortable with other people reading my first blog - all my old insecurities came rushing back when I thought about blogging on autism.  But I did want to do it.  Partially because I felt isolated, but mostly because I have always worked things out through writing.  

So, I revisited my old orphaned journals and misplaced poems and half finished manuscripts.  I thought about all the false starts and the writing that I had loved, then hated.  I saw those fragments, those bits and pieces, stretching across the entire course of my life like stepping stones in the dark and I knew that following them had saved me.

And I wondered if writing here might serve that same purpose