interruptions

One of my biggest personal challenges is feeling like I'm a cosmic target and taking offense to the universe at large. I was born with this baditude on the autism spectrum. I see everyone else's 'stuff' that gets in the way of me humming along my little path as me being gleefully picked on by the dark gods of old. You know, like I'm so cool that Satan knows my name and wants to take me ~down~.

I know it's not really like that. I know psychologically that is a small child mentality, immature if I can twist it into something cute or funny, ugly if I can't. I know everyone on the planet has crap loads of stuff to deal with and other people's crap loads of stuff getting dumped all over them. I know it's not just me and I'm not really a target.

But I sure can't help noticing how exquisitely timed it seems to be... Even Scott concedes that I sure do seem to catch the weird perfectly timed cosmic arrows more often than not. It just doesn't seem to fail that when I *finally* catch a break and actually feel good about my day, even dare to feel happy, within seconds the phone is ringing and there it all goes again. Someone is having a crisis, and I'm the first one they call.

I should feel flattered. I'm a hero! I'm so awesome that people think of me FIRST for comfort in their darkness. I'm needed and loved and even admired. But I'm also autistic. I usually don't regret anything about being ASD, I like my head the way it is, but as I've grown older, I'm understanding more and more that other people seeing me as being the one who is able to help them handle their stuff is not only a huge compliment, it means I have wildly succeeded in living with my ASD and especially my yawning gaping social deficit.

I take things personally that I shouldn't. I am the one who actually takes offense at someone dying in the middle of my good day. I'll be there johnny on the spot if they didn't, heck, I've even saved a life doing that, but after it's handled, I find it very hard to let go of the despair of not having gotten something done that I wanted to. It's not a big deal. But yes it is. And I cycle through the depression of my day being shattered in pieces along with the depression I feel over whatever bad happened. I'm not the sort to stew or worry, I certainly don't dwell because I'm so easily distracted, but for some reason, I feel pretty hateful at the most inappropriate times about other people's bad luck. That kind of shocks me when I think about it. I mean, I would feel terrible if other people were hating me behind my back for wrecking up their days, and being ASD, I'm pretty confident I have been doing that all my life.

It has taken me most of 50 years to figure this out. I guess I'm pretty lucky. Some people don't make it this long, and some people never learn it. I just know I don't want to take bitterness and complaining to the grave with me, and I especially don't want to be remembered for that, or for someone to feel relieved I'm out of the way now. Actually, I don't think very many people know it's like this for me because I'm sorta good at hiding it, and since I'm usually embarrassed by it later after the emotion has passed, I hate sharing too much of myself just in case, you know?

I spent part of my week hanging around a hospital for Scott's ex-wife having high risk surgery. She would have died without the surgery, and she could have very likely died having the surgery. She is my age. I can't imagine how hard it must be to face absolute certain death like that. I've had near misses, but nothing like that. And no one else came, just me and the daughter I raised for her. No one else bought her flowers, which bothered me very badly. I took flowers in yesterday and we had a good visit. She made it through the surgery with flying colors, against quite a few odds.

I used to think my marriage was so tainted, my relationships with Scott's family so skewed, in large part because of this person in his past. Over time, I think I have learned more stuff about myself because she is in my life, and I feel like I wouldn't have grown to this level of self awareness if I had never known her. She has struggled for so long with drugs and alcohol, her health has been wrecked, her relationships shredded time and again. A long time ago I imagined what it must be like to be in her shoes, to wake up to the depression she must have to face every single morning, and maybe the only way you don't kill yourself is to take another drink. She found a way to go on. And she has found a way out of that path, too. It was long and hard, and she took so much crap for it. Granted, she dished it out. But in the end, she was the one sitting up smiling and happy yesterday, thanking me for always being there for her daughter, telling me I am a blessing, and behind our yappy chat it was all I could do not to cry, because not one single word was spent on self pity, anger, or shaking her fist at the cosmos. So now I cry alone at home. I don't know if anyone else cries for her besides her grown kids. I have a hard enough time pretending and acting like I can be that socially interactive, never mind all the angst around the emotions that come with it, and here she is, open and honest and beautiful and even sweet after all this stuff. I would be hiding in my cave not talking to anybody.

Her girl is going to make her a gramma this year. She has everything to look forward to and be happy about because she isn't dwelling on other people's past judgements or fretting about what anyone thinks of her. I realized yesterday talking to her that everything I see as an interruption, everything I see as more work, everything I see as me having to drop my stuff to help someone else- is a blessing. I'm autistic. It took a woman's lifetime of alcoholism and near death to show me how to bridge over to that. And I'm thankful I had a chance to learn it.

Going forward, I want to see the blessings that happen around me. I don't want to miss them because I'm too wrapped up in my own head and the dodgeball I play around how other people perceive me and react to me on top of the plethora of ways I react to them. I want it to be simple. I'm tired of negativity and all the ways people judge each other. I grew up with that, so maybe that's where the feeling of other people being interruptions in my day comes from. I pray every day that I'm good for other people. Yesterday, the person I least expected was good for me. I still get tears thinking about how lonely life would be without the interruptions, you know? Everyone calls on me, no one visits her on a day she might die. That is blowing me away.

So, I get many blessings in my day... New way to look at the people in my life in my ASD head.

I'm Blue

Sometimes it's hard to tell what to do during a minor brain crash. I'll be all over the brain map, full of great ideas while I tool around to the fitness center and the grocery store and stuff, then get home and my brain falls out from a pain spike or fatigue wall or a blood sugar drop, and its all black again and there's just nothing. Sometimes I can't so much as construct a complete sentence, like I've had a stroke or something. I can't think to make the sentence, and my hand can't hold the pen well enough to write the words.

This month got a little hard again. Here came the nasty cold weather and holiday stress, and along with it came the nerve problems and the dumb. And the crying. I'd love to pop a pill and have some gooditude, but my chemicals just don't work that way. I fly blind, or I don't fly at all. But I'm not scared any more. I've already lived the scary stuff, already faced the sadness of loss. Now it feels like a race against time. To actually become capable again, to feel my brain come back on and my body work better, is a blessing. To sit around not making the most of every moment feels like an ignorant waste after the years I could barely function at all following my nervous system crashing.

No droop yet...

This month has felt like the Bell's palsy would come back. I had it really bad in 2004, most likely complicated with the nerve damage I already had from a car accident. Before the palsy hit the right side of my face, the 7th cranial and trigeminal nerves flared up in wicked pain, itching, and numb spots in the left side for 6 weeks, along with the worst migraine I'd ever had in my life, and when the right side finally drooped, I lost all tear production in the left side, and had stabbing pain in my left eye and ear and nostril for a couple of years, long after the droop on the right side healed back up. I get the left side nerve stuff flaring up again every little bit and go through spells of maddening itching or food tasting like sugar or everything smelling like gasoline or one of those really nasty nerve headaches, but the worst is losing being able to think. It got so bad the first year that I couldn't type a credit card number into the computer at the hotel where I worked. I had to hold my left thumb next to each number and whisper it to myself as I typed it, then move my thumb to the next number, and like that through all 16 digits. That was pretty tough to accept after being able to ace college bluebook essay finals from the raw memory of writing them out the night before. They checked me for strokes several times, just like they checked me for multiple sclerosis a few years after the accident- always nothing. No sign of damage, and I was able to hide it for so long that no one believed it when I finally lost everything and had to get disability. I have so many tricks for hiding my flaws, they're automatic and I barely even have to think about it, and most people just don't notice. But it's a pretty serious problem, nonetheless.



This was my worst brain day in all of December 2012. I really did crash again from a two hour streak of the old familiar brilliance and the joy that surged with it back to the empty nothingness of feeling like a pet fish with a brain the size of a speck. And I cried. But only for a few minutes. Then I got back up out of bed, moved my laptop to a different desk in a really dark room, and started making notes in my spiral. Sentence fragments. Dangling thoughts. I think I sort of remember the cool ideas I had earlier. I think I can reconstruct what I was thinking. I think, if I write down a word at a time and let them bump around a bit, that maybe, just maybe, the ideas I had can still come out somehow and be cool.

Like someone reconstructing an earthquake smashed mansion brick by broken brick without a plan, I am reconstructing my brain today. Like someone who lived in that mansion, I know I lived in my brain, and I know it's all still here. So I glitched again, so what. It's not gone. I just have to go over all the little connections and see what needs to be plugged back in. Some of the fragments kind of make sense. Some of them make sentences. Some of those will make paragraphs. I started writing this nearly five hours ago. I have made a hundred typos. I kept forgetting what I was doing. I lost my train of thought over and over. But here I am, at the other end of a post now, and I think I'm nearly ready to start working on the cool ideas I had for my other blogs.

At least my hair is still growing.

See, the thing is, just do it. It doesn't matter how long something takes, or how hard it is. All that matters is that you actually do it, even if you crawl through the whole thing with your eyes shut trying to hold the sensory overload down. All that matters is that all the tiny little bits come together and make bigger bits. All that matters is that I'm the only one doing what ***I*** am doing. No one else in the whole world is making blogs like mine and doing what I do on twitter and saying the things I say. As long as I can say stuff, I think it's worth any effort to keep saying.

haters gonna hate

Let's be honest. Holidays do a pretty good job bringing out about as much stress as anything on the planet. For some reason the pressure gets cranked up and everything comes under not just a spotlight, but a microscope. It's the season for charity, for giving, for selflessness, and for media driven haters. And I think we're all getting tired of it. I've run into several posts and comments this last week pointing out the redundancy and stupidity of grouping up a hatefest on haters. I mean, it's ok to vehemently hate the little stuff, right? It's ok to group shred a person for having a bad day and saying something stupid. But it's not ok if someone blows up and starts shooting little kids. I'm not understanding where the difference lies. When is it ok to HATE in the first place? Where do we draw the line at stomping on people's heads? I think what's bothering me is that the haters hating the other haters think they're the good people and it's their duty to hate the bad haters as long as we're on the good haters side.

One thing that's kind of bothering me is famous people doing this. They have huge loads of followers favoriting and retweeting everything they do, moving along like a synchronized school of fish. If a famous person designates someone to group hate on, the whole school of fish starts chiming in, even if it was just one comment from a hit and run person who normally doesn't follow the famous person to begin with. It's important to establish that we HATE ANYONE who dares to speak their mind about something they don't like, regardless of where that person is coming from. It's important to GROUP HATE and make sure we're all on the same side PROTECTING OUR FAMOUS PERSON. *wow*

Grow up. I just want to say that to everyone in the media who has a bad day getting a little offended by a tweeter or commenter saying something not as nice as you'd like. So it got to you, so you blew up. YOU are affecting a LOT of people by responding to it. YOU are TEACHING people to GROUP HATE. Even if you do it in the name of all that is good and holy and justify all your reasons for crashing down to their level reacting to it, it is still HATE. I'm really tired of seeing that. We want our superheroes, but we can't be superheroes ourselves on the internet. We can't just walk by a few pissy words without having to make a huge deal out of them.

I see famous people talk about having depression, and I see them make big deals out of making sure to post that you should help family members or friends get the proper help they need for depression every time suicide or grisly crimes or whatever pops up on the news, but I don't see them actually say anything substantial about how they themselves are surviving real depression DAILY, or how they are themselves helping real family members and friends cope DAILY. They don't talk about how emotionally exhausting it is, or how we keep ourselves going, or the little things that help us keep it all together when our worlds fall apart. In fact, those very people with the big schools of fish following them don't seem to notice how much they rely themselves on those schools of fish to keep them going. Must be nice. Where can *I* get a school of fish to follow my every move and support me through every minor crisis and shred any haters that cross my path? I know, you earned that because you did something that makes money. I could play the same game, actually the ultimate in gaming, right? Become successful, gain a following, build your private army, and Be Someone in blogs and on twitter. I'm all for that, I just think the group hate thing sux.

Haters gonna hate. If you can't deal with one or two little haters popping up in your following of, what, 20,000 or more (millions?), DANG. You've got a problem, famous person. Because the rest of us deal head on with haters while the lurkers cower and hope we are the superheroes who can walk on by and not be phased. I have been learning how to be a superhero. It's not pretty or easy. It's a really lonely way to live. You don't get paid, and most of the time no one publicly cheers you on. You famous people can feed your schools of fish on your crumbs while they group hate for you for free (internet body guards, what next?), but that makes me sick, and I think I'm so unimpressed that I'm going to just keep doing what I'm doing and stop using you guys as role models. I watch other people suck up over that kind of stuff and I just reel away wondering when grown people stopped noticing their playground mentality is what isolates the very people they CLAIM they want to get help for. Is it any wonder we see the kind of stuff on the news that horrifies us.

Piranhas. Barracudas. Pretty schools of fish.