Aspie Overload

o.m.g.

I'm not one to whine online. I know I really hate being dragged down by other people's whining. I'm not talking about genuine emotionally healthy and good writing skills sharing of the suckiness, more like when there is no point except a full blown pity party fishing for validation and pats on the head. You have no idea how many times I've actually heard that. "I just want validation." "I just want someone to pat me on the head so I'll feel better." I personally don't feel validated when people in comments assuage me with dysfunctionally chain yanked sympathy, and I hate being patted on the head, even metaphorically.

But I gotta whine. ~omg I gotta whine~

After going through another stupid reaction to another medication (of all things this time, TYLENOL) and finally getting to a real allergist, my growing list in my health history now includes what boils down to 'autoimmune reaction disorder'. Sweeeeet. 'Splains all the food reactions, med reactions, stress reactions... I've spent the last couple of weeks sludging along on more zyrtec than the bottle says to take (doctor insisted) and NOT taking a single thing to alleviate pain, discomfort, depression, whatever.

I don't drink. I got off Xanax in 2012, took two years to get off that stuff and I never want to go back on benzo meds. According to a cousin of mine who has successfully conquered meth addiction (that is very very rare), getting off Xanax is comparable to getting off meth. I believe him. I stopped taking muscle relaxers because they mess with my head. Skelaxin has me weeping, Flexeril has me wanting to pick up a real knife and really stab people the first hour after taking it. I can't even joke about it. Ever since a severe illness in 2007-08 a number of meds get me so weird that I don't dare walk out on my deck in case I might think it would be cool to jump off and float around. Lyrica sends me into psychotropic bizarro land. My med list was finally whittled down to half a Norco twice a day. Seriously. I couldn't handle more than that, but at least I had *something* to get through the hardest parts of my day. And this kind of stuff is crucial because I'm allergic to ibuprofen, which is basically everything that's not Tylenol.

So yeah, that's gone now, too.

I'm actually doing fantastic. Decades of lupus and fibromyalgia flares and handfuls of medications and years of illness, this last year has been phenomenal, probably the best year I've had in my entire adult life. I'm not pain free but I'm slowly decreasing the pain levels and increasing mobility and energy with lots of physical therapy and regular workouts, a very nutritious carb restricted diet (I'm also diabetic and can't take the meds), good hydration (no sweet drinks or alcohol), and quality rest, even when I don't sleep well.

PILLS DID NOT FIX ME. I DIDN'T GET BETTER ON MEDICATIONS.

But I want something so bad I can hardly stand it.

I'm dealing with the depression head on and my psychologist is so pleased with my progress. My doctors are so pleased with my physical improvements, even when they seem incremental. My family is so pleased that I'm more capable of taking care of myself, even on my worst days when I can barely think straight. I am able to stay on track with daily planning now. I struggled with that for years.

My shining glory in all this is Asperger's. I can try to hide it but I usually glow like neon before too long. One thing I've noticed during all the medication lowering is how difficult it's getting to hide or suppress my behaviors. I've been practicing on social interaction for years and I'm getting better and better at it, but that only means I'm self monitoring well, and I'm doing that amidst all that other stuff going on with me. IT'S HARD.

Today is one of those days where I'm worn out. Too many things have been happening for too long, and I feel like it's piled up on me. Today I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm on my face in a ditch because I suck at handling everything, and I've mostly been hiding in my cave, not interacting much. It's crucial I not go back to that. I've spent years at a time reclused away from the public, and for me it's just not healthy.

Today I want to pop a pill. I want a brandy. I want chocolate and coffee and loads of sugar. I want to go blow $1000 shopping and I want to curl up and go to sleep all day and I want to get angry and say it's not fair.

But I'm going to do something else. I'm going to ask myself where I will be a year from now. I asked myself that 5 years ago when I was very sick, so sick I thought I might even die, and I never dreamed I'd get this much better and be able to do stuff again. Last year I asked myself that and made a plan of where I WANT to be in a year. I've surpassed that plan so well I still can't believe how much I've accomplished with my health and my daily life and my goals. So I'm asking myself today- where will I be in a year? In 5 years? Where do I WANT to be?

I want to see Ireland with my own eyes. Considering how difficult it's been for me to travel, that's a pretty big goal. And I'm not going to get there with a pill today. I'm not going to get there if I distract myself with immediate gratification and short term feel good stuff. I'm going to get there because I made it through a rough day, over and over and over. I'm going to get there because I want to.

The rest of my day can suck it. So I lost a day to pissy depression, so what. At least I didn't cave to medical validation and a metaphorical pat on the head. I may be caving to chocolate though. I need chocolate. See ya.

Mother's Day, 25 years later

Every Mother's Day has been bad for me since my little girl was about 5 years old. That was the year I made some poor choices and got very sick and had an abortion right around Mother's Day. I wrote about it on my bluejacky blog several years ago before bluejacky morphed into my hard hitting silly survey site. It was the 20th anniversary of that abortion and suddenly hit me hard. My little girl was 25 when I wrote it. Mother's Day

Last year about a month before Mother's Day, I went through a severe hormone crash, and doubly so. My body started going all wonky, so my gynecologist pulled me off birth control pills, which was enough of a crash, but that in turn threw my thyroid hormone way outa whack because supplementing with estrogen for years can cause a requirement for extra thryoid hormone uptake. So when I stopped the birth control, I zoomed into hyperthyroidism, with full blown anxiety attacks and insanely high blood pressure. My endocrinologist had to crash me down to a much lower dose. The next 8 weeks were a nightmare, and all the jokes and stories you hear about menopause making women crazy suddenly became bizarrely real for me. The world bubbled out into multiple floaty realities, and I could never be sure which one I was in, although I was in all of them and it was all real and I did just fine with it, according to my psychologist. As my body figured itself out and readjusted to its own new default hormone levels, my mind coalesced back into 'me', and everything seems to be fine now.

During that weird couple of months I slid back into my past and exploded with abrupt honesty. That Mother's Day post I wrote in 2008 left out some glaring details, one of them being that I was 'escorted' to that clinic by two men in a car that wasn't mine. Even though they weren't cruel to me, the pressure was immense, and my psychologist very simply calls this a forced abortion. Read the other post if you feel inclined to argue with me- they literally stood guard at the clinic door, and I was restrained during the procedure. Since I was already trying to justify it away in my head, I didn't realize how much like a rape that would affect me, and I never got over the death of that child. My psychologist says this is a pretty common thing when women go through menopause, they go back through all the emotions they stifled from earlier losses. It's so common to keep women on some kind of hormone replacement or antidepressants through menopause nowadays that I didn't have anyone I could talk to about it, having to wing it without meds for other reasons.

This year my little girl is 30, and she popped my first grandchild out the day before Mother's Day. My nerves have been pretty shot. I'm at the age now where I'm experiencing the deaths of loved ones more and more, and having already lost a niece and my own mother in the last decade took a pretty big chunk out of my soul. I didn't want to tell anyone how nervous I was about the possibility of things going wrong during this birth, so I sucked it up and bit my tongue, because it's so much more important to be positive for the new mommy. The relief afterward has been overwhelming. I spent another Mother's Day crying.

I watched the world blab out happy mother's day greetings on twitter and facebook and other places, and didn't really say much. I know there are a lot of very sad women out there who have a very hard time getting through Mother's Day. My own mother's birthday is a month after Mother's Day, so this time of year feels weird since she died a little over 3 years ago. My sister has been going through it without her oldest daughter for nearly 10 years. And every year all I can think about is the kid I never had, and how old and smart and handsome he'd be now. I know it's so very sweet that my daughter had a little baby right on top of Mother's Day, and you'd think that would make it all better for me. But it's weird. She had to leave her baby at the hospital when she came home (nothing terribly serious) and spent her night crying. And I know that's a horrible feeling and felt so sad for her, and I cried too. We know it's going to be ok, but it's still hard.

Mother's Day is over for another year, but we still need hugs. All of us. You, too. And you don't have to technically qualify as a mother to deserve a hug.

 

 

 

Please Don't Bring Merlin Back

I'm growing very impatient with the Bring Merlin Back groupie thing. I joined to watch what's going on partly out of morbid curiosity, because I have a sociology degree heavily anchored with anthropology and psychology. I've never observed a live cult group before, although I've seen a few from a distance. And I have to say, this one comes as close as any to weird obsession. I have bets on that if someone instructs them to drink the koolaid, a few of them just might.

In the real world, one fan does not hold the power to make a staff of hundreds of people do his or her bidding. The group leader ~seems~ to understand that millions more dollars would have to be dredged up and a number of lives would have to screech to a halt and go in reverse to get back to an intersect point where they could pick up where they left off. But the group leader also seems to epic fail to see that playing fan politics like this looks like a mental affliction gone wildly awry. To expect the world to behave this way because a very few people (compared to the entire fandom or world audience) 'work hard' to make it happen isn't much different from a toddler throwing a tantrum or a teenager manipulating relationships or an adult refusing to deal with reality.

I'm not wanting to be mean. I love Merlin so much that I spent good money procuring all 5 seasons, plus a calendar and a t-shirt. There are other fans out there spending much more than I have, buying collectible toys and apparel and traveling to film sites and conventions. IF these kinds of things are what keeps a show from ending, then Merlin would never have ended. Its international success exceeded so many expectations, and most of us feel so lucky to have seen it or been a part of it. But c'mon. Investing one's emotional belief system into remolding a television show via a fan army of swooning believers isn't how the rest of us want it to go. I do NOT want Merlin back if it means a handful of fans become the boss of everyone who ever created Merlin, and I especially do NOT want those fans to be the boss of Bradley and Colin.

I love the way Merlin ended. I bawled my eyes out, yes. I've seen a lot of Arthurs and Merlins come and go, and this creation was such beautifully crafted story about such a deep friendship, and how that friendship survived through thick and thin and eventually led to the United Kingdoms. We watched a core belief system rebirth through the seasons and in the end came down to a serving girl on a throne because of the utter kindness of her king. THAT is what Albion is all about. Albion is a dream that we are ALL equal, that we ALL matter, and that we treat each other with respect and courtesy, not drawing lines at status. Because Arthur had such good friends, he was a good king.

I do not want obsessive fans to change that. Arthur dies in all the legends, and I think this version of his death is fantastically beautiful and symbolic. Everything in the last two episodes is very symbolic- Merlin stuck in the dark cave while the battle begins in the dark, brother and sister both dying by swords forged in the dragons' breath, an actual dragon being Arthur Pendragon's pall bearer, and much more. I wept not just for the death of Arthur, but for how absolutely beautifully done that entire last stand was executed in film, how wonderfully uplifting the entire series was, how much it has actually helped me in my personal life to believe in good things during rough times.

I thank Bradley and Colin very much for being Arthur and Merlin. But I never want to see them do those roles again any other way. I vehemently do NOT want obsessed fans to change what is in MY head by bullying the market with faked email accounts and spamming. I'm sorry those fans need that to hang onto, and I do understand that sometimes we really do need something concrete when our lives need meaning. I don't want to make anyone feel like I am making fun of them, because I'm not. I have observed and not said anything for a long time. But as an American who has watched this 'international' group execute 'actions' to bring Merlin back before some of us have seen season 5 aired in our country (or even season 3 in some countries), I think they do the rest of us fans the discourtesy of not caring what WE want.

I want Arthur to rest in peace for awhile now. I want to make up my own fantasies about him rising out of Avalon again to join Merlin. I want that sparkling effervescence of 'maybe'. I want to move on and become the sort of person who would also be noble and patient and true like the rest of the supporting characters in Merlin.

I have been part of a number of fandoms, and while I appreciate that fan support can sometimes bring a show back long enough to bring a little closure, I also understand that sometimes a show really is simply over, at least in the real world. In my mind I carry on to my own amusement, as is should be. Stories give us something to occupy our thoughts while we get through mundane or difficult stuff, and stories can even help us with problem solving our own relationships and decision making. To turn a story into a production on demand taints the joy of those creating the story to begin with (after all, it WAS someone else's idea), and neglects the feeling of pride in their accomplishment.

I would invite the fans who demand a different sort of closure to create and publish their own stories. Instead of just demanding that everyone else drop whatever they're doing to please them, grow up and put the work into it yourselves. Invest your own money, dedicate your own hours of labor, form your own teams and produce something wonderful for the rest of the world to read or watch. The whole Merlin and Arthur field is wide open, anyone can interpret it any way they want. But don't think you can dare to turn our Colin and Bradley into puppets that you pull the strings on. Not cool. They have so much potential to go on and do so much more, and I want to see them continue to excel in other work. Please accept that they are actors, not dolls, not the real characters, not enamored of themselves as the fans are. They are simply men who get paid to fill roles. And we love them, that's ok.

I rarely cross post my stuff, but this one is going on multiple blogs I have strewn across the ethernet. Those of you wonderful lurkers who stalk all my stuff, sorry for the redundancy, but this feels important. Thank you for your time.