My life recently has been defined by three things: losing about 100 pounds, losing everything I owned in a fire, and discovering that I’m on the autism spectrum.

• Thinking about any aspect of my life, I bump up against those three things. Perhaps only two of those things at a time, but they’re always there.
• How I react to my friends’ rallying around me after the fire: Do they love me because I’m quirky, or because I’m more attractive now that I’m no longer fat?
• How I replace clothing since I can’t go into a store and try things on: Sure, I’m a “medium,” but what size is that in vintage clothing? At Banana Republic? At Target? And where do I find clothes that suit my very particular taste?
• How I interact with strangers, who are the lion’s share of my interactions since the fire: Are they being kind, courteous, solicitous because they find me attractive, or because of the huge effort I put into seeming normal?

Since the fire, I’ve been thinking about my life pre-weight loss, pre-diagnosis, pre-fire. I know I’m not the only person in the world who feels that 2020 has drawn a line across my life, which was one thing before, and a very different thing after. What part of that earlier me is still there? How could things have been different?

Without the fire, I don’t think I would ever have had a reason to examine my life in the detail I have in the past three and a half months (as of this writing, it’s been 105 days since we lost our house). On the other hand, I have always been self-reflective, second guessing my every thought word and deed almost before they are completed.

I read a book where two characters were discussing two separate, but intertwined things, and one character expressed the desire to separate them. The other character said that separating them would be like removing the nervous system from a frog intact, and without killing the frog. It can’t be done, and it would be painful and disturbing to try.

I’m driven mad by how unscientific an experiment my life is. I can’t isolate any one of the above events and observe the public reaction from that thing in isolation, and if I were to hand everyone I interacted with a questionnaire that said things like “Which of the following factors was most influential in your interaction?” people would tell me they had the plague as an excuse to never interact with me. Sadly, I’m not smooth enough to figure out how to subtly ask stuff like this without the other person knowing that’s what I’m getting at.

We are each an amalgam. Not just emotionally – composed of every experience we’ve had, sensation we’ve felt, emotion we’ve endured – but physically. Every human being is an amalgam of human bits and a unique group of bacteria and various symbionts that live in our blood and guts, making each person a literal aggregate. So, it looks like going forward, I can’t separate any of the large defining events of 2020 in my experience.

I came into 2020 as an optimistic, fat little tadpole. I go out as a lean, muscular, and quite whole frog.