I have recently completed one of the most difficult semesters of my college career. I have created a goal of keeping a 4.0 GPA as long as possible, and that sees me putting in twice or three times the amount of time on each assignment as my peers as I pour over each and every one of the details. As you can imagine, that hasn’t left a lot in the tank left for posting, so during this break, I wanted to get back on here and update you all on how things are going and my future projects.

I recently reconnected with a friend that I used to work with in the past. We both have “found greener pastures” at new places of employment and fields of work elsewhere since then, so reconnecting was really nice. She recently became a published author, and seeing someone I grew up around my entire life as a newly published author convinced me that it’s not an impossible goal to achieve at one point. I’m going to publicly commit to writing a book, something that I have been mulling over for a while privately. This book would be centered around my journey as a person diagnosed with autism as an adult.

My journey with autism is something that has created a lot of pain and struggle in my life, but it has also given me a new shot at life in so many ways. After diagnosis, I went through social regression HARD. Things weren’t clicking, so I just wiped away everything I thought I knew and started from the ground up. I started publicly stimming. I started carrying around plush toys in public. I snapped. Even typing this right now is embarrassing, and that feeling is what tells me that I have an interesting story to tell.

Now, around 9 years since diagnosis, I have learned a lot. I have a lot to share. In a world where people are getting diagnosed at later and later ages in their lives, my story is one that matters. So I’m going to tell it! There is no deadline for the project, and I don’t want to impose one and create a negative experience. The goal is to have this book done whenever it gets done. I’ll carry around my laptop or iPad/keyboard whenever I go out and just use little moments here and there to chip away at it. Over time, I will get it done. I was able to get a 51-page portfolio done in a week. I could probably get a 200-300-page book done in a year or so.

Finally, this blog is going to move to a new home. I have acquired the domain for josephblog.com, and I am going to start migrating the content and format of the site over there sometime in the next few months. I will make sure to very clearly alert everyone of the change here and might even cross-post on both platforms until most of my audience has migrated with me. By the way, thank you all for 500 site views. It really means a lot that you come back and read what I have to post.

Until later, bye!