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This evening I watched The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and ignored the world. It felt really good.
I dumped Facebook off my phone sometime last year or maybe longer, you guys saw that ship go down after an app crash and then HTC Sense took over and started fights with other apps. I don't miss it. I've had twitter notifications turned off on my phone for a long time, too, except for DMs. I just turned DM notifications off.
I have friends who regularly either block the crap out of people or go underground whenever they have mood swings. That's understandable. I've been known to destroy the internet over a mood swing. I'm getting better, though. I'm having a really big mood swing right now and the only two people I've blocked today are a twitter biz noob who DMd me to get new followers and a FB chick I don't know or have a clue whether she got hacked or purposely tagged me pushing spam. In the old days I'd just block everyone and disappear, but since I'm sworn to no longer do that, and since part of my discipline is dealing head on with it, here I am.
I'm calling a moratorium on DMs and PMs. I'm getting hit daily/weekly with several people having personal problems over other people (remember I stick out like a sore thumb in a fandom, plus other friends), and since we're all thousands of miles apart, and since I myself am working so hard on my own stuff without reciprocating these levels of mood swing dumps, I feel like my plate is getting too full and I'm starting to drop things. Like spending the same amount of quality time talking to my own family. Which I don't do because I suck at it most of the time and they completely understand. They probably have bets going on how long it'll be before I blow something else up on the internet, actually.
I know it looks like I have tons of free time on my hands because I don't have a job because full disability. But if we stop there, that's really misleading. I have been through years of both body and brain fail, scraped myself back together with loads of hard work and discipline and created a job for myself when I could no longer go to work, spend at least 40 unpaid hours a week building what is now beginning to look like enviable web presence, and the plan behind that is to launch actual product, and the plan behind THAT is to get off disability.
Over the course of this scraping, I've had to deal with continual setbacks, including losing nearly everything I'd ever written because of server moves, on top of so many other things happening all the time, plus I don't get to eat the food I like or dope myself up or self medicate, so everything I'm doing is done gritting my teeth through pain and interruptions and making myself GET TO WORK. I regularly feel very jealous of other people and just never say anything.
Since I'm home all day doing 'nothing', I kind of owe my friends, right? I mean, I waste time posting stuff, why can't I spend time talking to friends? I'm getting strong hints from several directions lately. It occurred to me today that if I were to turn the tables and drop private time demands in a few laps after long work days, I would be a dick, right? In fact, I kind of felt like a dick after I privately bombed someone else who manages to stay apart from all this stuff, like I was passing a 'dump my day' hot potato around. I felt like a chump once I realized that.
The whole point behind me going public is to be PUBLIC, so that anyone can see what's going on and I don't have to break it down individually, because 1- I loathe the redundancy of saying the same thing over and over individually (which is why I don't teach college, every semester would be hideously boring to me), and 2- friends who've been subjected to emails very quickly drown in me not shutting up, and only one ever had the guts to say anything about that, which I respect, by the way.
One example of my private messaging conundrum was a guy in another country who hooked up with every social media account I had and privately asked me nearly daily on every single one how my day was going. When I finally engaged in a convo I realized I was very clearly caught in quicksand, and as I started extricating myself he started very publicly asking me why I didn't like him. As many years as I've been on the internet, you'd think I'd learn by now, but nooooo. As of this last month, I'm still having private convos with too many people way too often, and it doesn't take long for that to turn into 3 hours a day *poof*, gone.
I've been trying to model on other successful bloggers, and I often ask myself what they would do given certain situations. You know, such as a follower I barely know starting problems with someone extremely high profile behind my back and then coming back to my public timeline with a message saying they were told to tell me I'm full of shit. That part was actually pretty funny because it's old fandom stuff (I did actually laugh and everything's fine, more or less), but what I'm not sharing is what's not being said in public because it's private, and the private stuff is wearing me down, and it's all I can do to keep being nice. I've come very close several times last few days to being a real dickweed just because I'm really tired. I have to keep reminding myself I'm the one putting myself in the situation where I'm struggling with not being a dick.
So I'm going to buy myself a WWWWD shirt for my birthday that says "Don't Be a Dick".
My favorite person to learn from is Wil Wheaton, since he's been so thoroughly minced through the public grinder, so I often ask myself- WWWWD? What would Wil Wheaton do? Well, he actually writes some pretty scathing commentary about things once in awhile, which is awesome when he's powerful enough to actually get an apology and a change of policy from a company here or there, and he also openly deals with depression. but he doesn't have Asperger's. I have yet to find a sufficient model for me to study on how to handle my typical aspienado reaction to other people's very public passive aggressive jokes, taunts, and sideways hints at my personality (which they think are cute and clever and harmless), because I was obviously born a dick. I personally would feel the need to blow up my blog if I got tons of comments like Wil does. I've never really been able to put a finger on why, because I feel this way even when response is 100% positive. Fortunately, the smart remarks are really rare nowadays, hopefully because I'm being honest about my stuff and people are in turn being kind, because otherwise y'all would wanna flay me and I would lovingly hash you up for sport.
Now, all this asplaining doesn't mean I'll be jumping back on those DMs and PMs any time soon because I'm in overload - (2 minute video experience) this month between all the extra driving and physical therapy on top of EVERYTHING else, so I'm in prime dickweed condition to kill people. If what that guy says in the overload vid link is true, being in aspie overload is likened to an LSD experience. I live like this.
Here is another sample vid of what overload is like for aspie heads, but keep in mind this is ONLY auditory. It doesn't include visual, olfactory (@bonenado burning popcorn), anything skin including quarter degree temp and air pressure changes, PLUS all the mental processes I have to keep focusing on, like driving, reading, finishing chores, etc.
Right now I've got headphones on because it's late, I'm tired, and football is grinding my brain something awful. I love football, but I can't process it when I'm tired. The headache I eventually get is a nerve headache, like every nerve in my brain is throbbing. (NOT the same as a migraine, those are worse.) Think stress headache + cluster headache + occipital/trigeminal, etc. Think of noise as sandpaper rubbing your skin, or your eyeballs. Chaotic noise gets old real quick, so I find rhythmic noise to counter it and help me navigate through overload.
I have also trained myself to go to my keyboard and write through overload because it gives me a way to focus through the sheer chaos going on in my head. @bonenado loves this because I'm not crabbing at him while I'm keyboarding. I can't just go to bed and shut the door because my head literally feels like a battery is buzzing in it from all the overload, and it takes awhile to process it down to less irritating levels. I can't just play a game and increase the overload. I actually literally have to wait out what I fondly call 'feedback loop', like old mics do during sound tests, only it goes on for an hour or longer. Imagine me trying to deal with several people having mood swings all at once in separate private messaging or texting on top of that. I've never been able to juggle convos like that anyway, even on a good day. I'm getting better at maintaining being a pleasant and supportive person, but I feel that snap coming and I've gotta bail before I set fires.
My family has seen how awful I can get when I'm like this. I'd rather not dump overloads on my friends without warning. I'm saving your lives. Because I'm a dick. I bet I'm the dickiest dick you know, and you just have no idea. I know I can out-mean just about anybody in seconds flat when I'm like this. My sense of humor gets mean, I hurt feelings galore, and I lose all my friends. I also have to win every argument, and people in my past know very well how long I can go on making a point. Wait, this is where I've trained myself to go look for a cat meme. brb. Ok, this is better than a cat meme.
So you guys can wave at me, emoji at me, DM the crap outa me, whatever you're doing out there, but if you're jumping up and down trying to get me to ~respond~, it's not gonna happen when I'm like this. I'm not going to get on my timelines and whine about my life, I'm not going to get on private messages and hold back dumping about my life while I try to stay nice, I'm not going to leave a trail of bodies in my wake, and you're all going to be fine.
If it's any comfort, I'll be ignoring at least 30-40 regular taggers, PMers, and DMers for awhile. Not picking on any particular person, just lumping everyone into silent mode. Through a week's time I often get tagged 5000+ times, and while I'm sure this is small potatoes compared to Wil, it's a bit of a workout, especially when I'm focused on sifting out new Lexx fan contacts.
I'd also like to repeat again that I appreciate all the support I've had coming back out public, which I never expected, and I'm not sitting here simmering about anything, just trying to control going down that black hole. One of my fave sayings about aspies is that our kind doesn't flock, we all go to our separate rooms and corners and rock or something.
Here we go, this is my head, only everything in my head is moving way faster.
