fear and loathing

So auties freaking out about MIT, didn't hear you outcrying when China purposely created autistic monkeys to inflict experimentation on. I've been saying for years that we're on the brink of the nastiest form of human genocide we've ever seen. I've stopped freaking out. Also, all you Trump haters so obsessed with the guy that you're saturating everyone around you with pix of his face- ever thought that you're part of the indoctrination process? Really tired of miles of his face in my feeds.

Here's the thing. When you obsess about something, anything, your brain works overtime on something you fear or loathe, and that prevents you from truly enjoying something else. It's one thing to be "concerned", it's another to be so obsessed that your feeds are crammed with whatever, or that you even create artwork around it. *wow*

I used to worry that I was the messed up one. I'm fine. Some of the rest of you probably need to look into psychoneuroimmunology and mindfulness.

Moving on. Reaching a level of relief as I'm nearing the original dose goal. The nasty withdrawal headaches seem to be lessening, I'm kind of starting to sleep again, and I actually held it together going into town yesterday for an equipment update and a lengthy grocery list.

Anyway, I am a proponent of neurodiversity.

"To me, neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences like autism and ADHD are the result of normal, natural variation in the human genome. This represents new and fundamentally different way of looking at conditions that were traditionally pathologized; it’s a viewpoint that is not universally accepted though it is increasingly supported by science. That science suggests conditions like autism have a stable prevalence in human society as far back as we can measure. We are realizing that autism, ADHD, and other conditions emerge through a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental interaction; they are not the result of disease or injury."

This proponency started long before the autism witch hunt. I was shocked at the ADHD witch hunt decades ago. I couldn't believe how many parents could get so selfishly vicious over something so innocuous as children not being posable dolls, boiled down. I learned a long time ago in anthropology that 10% of ANY population is considered a normal part of distribution, and even necessary to the health of the whole.

There are people out there who want you to hate. They want you to fear and loathe. Why? Because they get money for it. The more freaking out and opinionating you do, the more monetizing someone else gets.

Zoom out and look at bigger pictures. Look at what is really going on. Fear and loathing is the most lucrative machinistic process on this planet, and every time you pass on your auto-fear and auto-loathe, you are doing their dirty work for them.

George Orwell didn't foresee how the proletarians would be used by social media.

The 5 Stages of Treatment & Healing on Social Media

The only thing wrong with this picture is regaining the weight I lost. 😡 This ramping up the gabapentin thing has me wanting to snack like a pot smoker or something.

Here comes a thought.

The 5 Stages of Treatment & Healing on Social Media
by Janika Banks
(inspired by The 5 Stages of Grief & Loss)

1. Dissociating and disappearing

The fastest way to kill a blog or facebook and go dark is to start revealing and recoiling in horror at what you just did.

2. Outrage

Letting people know that no one understands when they try to reach out, fuming over others sharing what your new awareness is suddenly highlighting as everyone is doing it and loathing that they 'speak' for you.

3. Arguing

Going on massive research sprees and targeting #actually proponents with gleeful negativity memes and alternative information.

4. Despair

Feeling utterly stuck in a body and a world you utterly reject, and the only way forward is the way you weren't planning on going with your life.

5. Embracing

Meds, lifestyle, whatever- you are who you are and it's comforting to know you're not alone on whatever scary path this is.

It's real. Internet is just as real as real life. Connecting to other real people is just as difficult on media as it is in real life. Sharing who we are, our fears and joys, whatever we perceive our flaws to be versus whatever we perceive others are pointing out our flaws to be- all experiencing is real. Even if we're making it up, experience itself makes it real. Whatever illusion we create for ourselves, or that the world creates around us, it is very real to our hearts and souls.

We all have fears. While others are able to project their fears outwardly on vague presidential nightmares and whatnot, some of us dwell with daily fears of cytokine storm or SJS. Sticking to treatment is difficult, going out in public escalates anxiety, sitting home alone can become suddenly overwhelming.

The hardest thing some of us do is keep talking on social media. We don't want to be needy, we aren't trying to get negative attention, we hate baiting for response- we just want to worry about the stupid little things like ordering online going screwy or getting the wrong order in a restaurant or being stuck in traffic. Well, we don't like those things either, but given bigger picture, anyone on lengthy treatment dealing with personal demons or cancer or crippling diseases tend to take the little things more in stride after awhile, or simply lump it into everything sucks.

I've been on social media a long time. I've been in an out of groups and forums, on and off both facebook and twitter, moved around both publicly and privately on a few blogs, and I've seen just about everything that can go down. Everything I see out there is redundant. It all eventually boils down to Who am I? and What do I want? There is nothing I can plug into that will ever make my depression or anxiety go away, no person I can lean on without eventually breaking them, no cause I can stick through without dealing with some kind of burnout. In the end, it really does come down to Who do I want to be?

The sky is the limit. Your brain is your infinite possibility manufacturer. It's all real, and you're part of all of us, even when you think you're not. We are here to Be Someone and Do Something, and as far as I can ascertain after all these years stuck in my stuff and seeing other people stuck in their stuff, we can all still learn how to be Kind.

Kindness isn't about patting people on the head or being a yes person. It's not about fixing things for other people or trying to *make* them feel better. You can't really do any of that, and if you try, you'll sooner or later become very frustrated.

Kindness is allowing people to be themselves without stomping on their heads for being stupider than you, or kicking them with truth when they're already down. Kindness is about recognizing that we all have a very short time here, life sucks for all of us in some way or another, and what you revile in someone else might be a completely erroneous perception and definitely gets in the way of kindness.

A thing that struck me growing up in the bible was that people had to be told to be kind to animals and slaves. Let the oxen eat while they are tied to a giant heavy wheel. Treat your slaves fairly and justly, and make sure they are taken care of when you set them free so they aren't just turned out onto the streets. The idea that we can use others without recompense or thought, even on social media, is a prevalent concept in our lives.

We have the power to remake the world around us. We may be riddled with fear and anxiety, drowning in self loathing and depression, flaming the world around us in vitriol, but our power lies in ALL OF US learning the art of Kindness. We can go down with our Titanics, or we can remold our illusions into something much more useful.

Way too thinky.

#transparency Med dose adjusting sucketh. Plz to forgive if I meltdown, & if anyone needs me I'll be making nachos. Bcuz weird head stuff. I can do this. I'll keep touching bases and hopefully this won't get too weird. Kinda went a little 2012 all sudden yesterday.

Where's my workout jam? Here we go.

collecting myself after collecting my thoughts

It's amazing how settled my nerves are this morning after that long post yesterday. Normally on appointment mornings I'm a tad 'distressed' underneath everything I'm doing, but today I'm like meh because that post yesterday took all day long, and I'm so worn out with the work and material that I'm kind of sick of it, lol. 😐😒☕

I'm sure they'll unsettle on the road. Long day in town today, temps already dropped 30 degrees in the last couple of hours, lots of big cold wind and and possible sleet, ice pellets, or freezing rain, depending on the weather service you check with.

Actually balanced to ye olde exact pennyage on my $$ sync today, first time in many moons. Calendar sync still on point. Had to move a couple of things already going on later in the month, but so far it's all good.

Wrapping my head around getting out the door...

disturbances kaleidoscopic

💟🦃🍁🎈💃

That's as close to a Thanksgiving autumn parade theme as the new emojis will get. There's no pie emoji. I don't have pie on my phone, either. What's up with that?

Lotta pie tweets in the gang last night. No one I know is making any piecaken. I can't eat any of it any more anyway, but piecaken fascinates me. Here is a Thanksgiving piecaken. Click it for the recipe. I think in the old days, I'd have tried making one just to see if I could.

I don't think we're doing much here this year. All I was going to make was an actual turkey, but I have been talked into pie. I said ONE pie. So I picked up a can of pumpkin, a frozen pie crust, and a can of redi-whip yesterday.

I'm feeling particularly brainless this week, but still on track with chores, $$, and calendar. Funny, even tweeting and barely looking at the TV, I was able to remember a bunch of stuff going on in Dirk Gently earlier this week and @bonenado was kinda lost, reverse of our usual. My fave character, naturally, is Bartine Curlish, the crazy homocidal holistic assassin, played by Fiona Dourif (her dad is a huge fave of mine, played Wormtongue in LOTR and many other parts and shows). BBCA says "Bart is a terrifying, homicidal, deranged, fearless, and nearly invincible self-identified holistic assassin. Like Dirk, she is a causality psychic. Bart doesn’t determine who she kills or when and how she kills them. It’s all instinctual. Drawn towards people who kill or endanger others, she feels a second nature urge to eliminate them, which she can do with very little effort. She’s rough, rude, kind of gross and an upsetting person, but there’s a complex sweetness to her. Bart is comfortable with who she is and unlike Dirk, she’s found peace with her power." How could I NOT be drawn to this character?

She went from this

to this, and if you click this next one, you can follow her on twitter.

🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃

Ok, switching gears. Let's talk Facebook and why I'm not on board. I kept getting notifications on my phone last night during The Flash about invitations to join messenger by a certain person, and since that person is who they are, I had my doubts. Facebook has done this to me before, throwing a name out here or there saying they're inviting me to join messenger. I finally got on my laptop last night and direct messaged and found out not only was this person NOT initiating contact, but was just arriving home from a funeral. So not cool, Facebook.

Facebook is one of the most intrusive social medias I've ever used. I've complained about it for years, to the point of deleting and not using it one year. I'm back on it as part of my social media hub and for Lexx stuff, but I am keenly aware that Facebook auto-shares my personal and private info behind my back in so many ways that I cannot find every single setting there is to turn that off. On top of that, Facebook looks into my phone AND my hard drive to continually suggest many things to me, from friends to shopping, and in some cases has made some very faux pas assumptions about mixing bad blood kind of history. And by bad blood, I mean possibly dangerous. If I'm getting these suggestions, then they probably are, too.

After last night's extremely awkward and poorly timed contact, I loathe Facebook more than ever. I think I may be tweaking a few more settings. Also, I will NEVER use a Facebook messenger app on my phone, so if any of you ever receive invitations from me, it's not me because I don't have the messenger app installed. I also have the chat feature turned OFF on my laptop. I've still been allowing nonfriends access to private contact since that is the only way some people can get hold of me, but it's so rare that anyone actually does that I ignore it for days, and have been known to miss seeing a message for 2 years.

Some of you may think I live in the stone age, but I still have quite a number of your personal contact details against my every wish because social medias and Android are so grab happy about info swapping and sharing. Trying to stay public every day against this kind of instrusiveness has been very facepalm for aspienado. I could go on into the ways I'm dealing with anxiety over this (my physical therapist was impressed yesterday how long I've stuck through psychological therapy), and I've actually got an eye twitching just writing this paragraph. Just started. Maybe I'd better switch gears again.

🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃

I think between Thanksgiving and Christmas I'm going to divert into a side project and see if I can stay on track getting through it before the holidays are over. I'll still be tweeting and movie gang and minecraft and stuff, but hopefully I can stay focused and get myself back onto the main track for 2017. I've dropped a lot of stuff juggling through this year and I need to get my focus back.

I'm also thinking about a new sox direction. O_O Yes, you heard me.

Happy Turkey Bird, fellow 'Muricans!

mombie apocalypse- the slow evolution of time smashing

Day 12 on neurontin. Please to notice I'm not on minecraft as much. Maybe. You might wish I'd go back to the tunnels and trees.

clicks to bacon soda convo

This is how scattered I am. I called up to move an eye appointment from the end of this month to the first Friday in September. As I was changing the date on all my calendars and pocket planner, I noticed I had the orginal time different on every one- 9:30, 10:00, 10:30... That's me moving from room to room writing stuff on calendars. I have to have info in my hand and look at it every time from moment to moment. I live like this. No one questions it. Not one of the professionals on my care team has ever expressed any concern over this.

That is why I journal. I try to get the dates right when I blog, but once in awhile I run into a post where I've written the wrong year down for something happening.

The irony? The year I finally got away from my ex, the only way I could finally force him to leave me alone was by telling him he could see the kid if he agreed to go to an appointment at a psychological assessment center and sign a paper saying I could talk to whoever evaluated him. We are talking top of the line behavioral health, this building is famous around here. He passed with flying colors until I asked the assessor point blank if my ex had given dates for when we got married and when our kiddo was born, and watched the assessor turn really white when I pulled out the documents and showed him the real dates, and he actually asked, "Can you get him back here?" I simply said "Sorry, this is all I needed", got up and walked out. Basically, if he couldn't get the facts straight and really believed whatever popped out of his mouth (making our toddler two years older than she really was, stuff like that), that pretty much validated that other things he'd said about horrible injuries and surgeries in his life being a lie, and I was able to point to documentation with a neurologist disproving that, as well.

Him being a pathological liar wasn't the problem. One of my scariest days with my ex was the day a neurologist showed him on x-rays that he was fine. The drive home was not fine, and the stories didn't change. It was the neurologist who was wrong, and that really fueled a temper that translated to abuse later as a form of stress relief. What prompted this final break was a concerned social worker at a local welfare office sending him to job counseling, and one thing led to another until someone upped the ante and filled out forms for the state to pay for proof of hardship. It was a miserable year dragging from one office to another and another, but vital to an end game I didn't know at the time would save me later.

I can remember those basic kinds of dates, like when my child was born and when my wedding anniversary is, but I have what I feel is an uncomfortably laughable time orientation problem. But yeah, it's still really ironic, I think. You could say my own going time wonky thing is karmic justice for 'doing him dirty', but back then, time orientation really was a vital part of an elaborate escape plan because child safety stuffs. Note of interest- If you are reading this and have been considering seeking legal help leaving an abusive spouse, keeping a date and time noted journal of when whatever happens is significant to your case.

People take a lot for granted. I've had to remind Scott that if it weren't for him, I'd be in poor housing and have a court appointed guardian, and likely be living so broke that I wouldn't have tech at all. It doesn't matter that I got over 30 on an ACT or was in grad school or even held steady jobs for 8 years while the kids were in junior and high school. All that matters is that I live with a calendar and clocks in every room of my house and still can't get the day right, much less the time.

You wouldn't believe how many people I've run into that say they have problems, too, but they never tell anyone. Whole lotta brain blips out there. Illness, injury, trauma, lots of people living with time jags or deja vu or even moment to moment from meal to meal, but otherwise come across pretty normal. I think time orientation is taken for granted because so many of us are on schedules for school and work and stuff, but when the schedules are taken away during vacations or job loss or in beween semesters, we feel lost. Time passes weird.

One easy fix- use the TV for a time schedule, right? Fave show, this night of the week. Nope, doesn't work for me. I float week to week having to check my DVR timer for what day it is, and several times a week point blank ask @bonenado what day it is, sometimes several times in one day. I can be all over knowing something is two days away, and without warning think it's tomorrow, or even that I missed it somehow.

Feeling this disoriented can be unnerving. At first I couldn't put a finger on what was causing some of my anxiety, and then when I'd bring it up, someone else would counter with my anxiety was causing the time disorientation, but I've lived with this so long now that I think the two are separate. I exist, time is now, and having to attach it to what's going on around me with other people is where the anxiety comes from. The pressure to be synchronized and know what to do when, like meet for a special day, is where that comes from.

I used to think this was a really big deal, but I'm finding out as I share more and more of my own stuff that other people are like this, too, and there's not always a specific start date or cause. It's just something we all go through. I'm not sure if human brains were made to be tethered to time like this, to be so aware nearly every moment of where we are in a vast ocean of spacetime, to know what our planet tilt is and where we are in our orbit. We used to watch the stars, and that would be enough.

Time sync is upon us. Our entire planet is on the brink of super sync. This reminds me of two things- the Hopi time prophecies, and the Wrinkle in Time quintet. I think what transpired on Camazotz was about the scariest thing I ever read. I don't know if L'Engle ever read Lewis' Space Trilogy, but her CENTRAL Central Intelligence (1963) isn't far from his N.I.C.E. (1945), and then Spock's Brain airing in 1968. All three of these stories use a disembodied human brain to sync control over a population.

Is it any wonder I like Lexx... (Awesome brain removal screen shots.)

If there was a point to this, it's probably subconscious. I just think humans being synced into schedules, while efficient and profitable, is much akin to being kept in boxes, if you can twist the picture around enough to see it like that.

It might not be long until the entire world is finally synced up and all of us are in perfect rhythm, like on Camazotz.

The Hopi spirit is how we'll survive the time sync. This planet-wide sync has been coming all along, and maybe the only way humanity survives the machinery of it is to hang onto what really makes us human. It may not be in our natures to handle time pressures, but it is in our natures to forgive each other for feeling stressed out. We might feel a little disoriented, but as long as we don't take our stress out on each other, I think we're going to be ok.



Also, this is Wednesday and a new Mr. Robot is on tonight. I checked.

aspienado

I dreamed last night that way in the future, a really old library in St. Louis had the last remaining section on twitter, and it was devoted to Star Wars tweets. They were divided into 3 sections- parody accounts/tweets, movie quote tweets, and fan gifs, which were randomly playing around the library aisles like full adult sized holograms. I blame this dream on a few twinges of possible (but not really) regret during my recent mass unfollowing of useless Star Wars accounts and an article I ran into last week about how the Library of Congress actually attempted to document twitter and gave up after a year saying that our millions of thoughts would need far too much work and storage space and could never be properly reassembled into archives outside of twitter itself.

I also dreamed about living in a really old building that was rotting out, and a giant tree limb had grown into one room over a dining table and was covered in a big web with millions of spiders and other bugs. It bothered me very badly that as bad a shape as this place was, it still commanded a high price as living space. I sort of blame this dream on a combo of playing minecraft and watching both Divergent and Insurgent within a 24 hour time span.

And then I dreamed both these things were all actually one big place over time, and I got to see how it became demolished bit by bit and renovated into futuristic new materials and hallways and furniture and people, and I'm going to blame it on this cool tweet I saw come through last night, because I have always loved anything timey wimey since I was a little girl. It's up to you how far you want to take the emotional metaphors in my dreams, since I am spending my month redirecting out of a rut and creating a new work plan for this year. You can check out the book on Amazon and click this snip to get to his account on twitter.

And then he tweeted this. Yes, it clicks back.

One direction I'm definitely staying away from is not being truthful about who I am, especially on networking sites. It's one thing for people to make parody accounts, which I find entertaining, it's another for people to actually list specs and credentials about themselves that are erroneous. I've openly stated I use a pen name registered with a publisher, and at one time paid to use it as a business name. However, I don't appoint titles or descriptions to myself (so many entrepreneurial CEOs of startups out there), and I don't say I'm somewhere I'm not (it's cool if people want to identify with 'the biz' in Hollywood or the UK or whatevs, but allowing others to believe you're actually there physically when you're not is called 'conning'). I am a real person in a real place dealing with real stuff and trying to do real things, and I'm still just discovering how much my own reputation has been dented by connecting so deeply with a few others that don't seem to understand the value of social media cred beyond being popular for talking a lot.

Before some need to protest, I know all about juggling a public social media presence with a dangerous past, so yes, I don't think people should publicly share physical addresses unless they are real business locations. That being said, there was a person once about a year or so ago that suddenly blurted something on twitter that I had to ask be removed, and that person knows better. So I find it interesting that person still lists erroneous info as legitimate business cred.

Part of my problem lately with this big flip into a new direction is the anger I've bitten back for a long time about not being taken seriously. I finally just had to spell it out- I felt duped. I felt baited and reeled in like a total noob, and then my sense of naive aspie loyalty was played until I was so confused that I got stuck in philosophical self questioning. So while some of you are wondering what in the world is going on with me suddenly diverting into minecraft and seeming to be going nowhere, I'm wrestling with some very emotional depression over the winter and being guided into calming down between a psychologist and a good friend who knows how to redirect and keep my mind on something in lieu of self destructing. That's important.

Part of the big change is friendships. I am totally on board with social media saving lives. Sharing and touching base are pretty awesome when you need them the most. However, becoming dependent on social media as opposed to getting real help (supervision, meds, actual real people looking at your actual real face and smiling actual real smiles at you and actually listening to you actually talk) can be like spiraling out of control down a black hole. Twitter is not a cure for depression, guys. It's a crutch. Yes, it's a very good crutch when we need it, and some of you saw me tweeting around the clock for months at a time there for awhile, but it's still a crutch.

It takes a few guts to step out of your real actual door and find real actual help. I totally understand that. I have lived through unimaginable anxiety and PTSD. It has gotten so bad in the past that I'd pull out of traffic on major highways just to get out of my car, or drive in freezing sleety weather with my windows down because my claustrophobia would be so bad. It's gotten so bad at home many times that I'll suddenly drop everything I'm doing at home and drive into town (that first 15 minutes on a highway is horrible) just so someone will see me die if I drop dead, and I won't be all alone (because depression lies, especially in the middle of having a nasty anxiety attack), and sometimes it's so bad that it's all I can do to lightly touch my steering wheel with my fingertips over and over while I chant or something because I'm so terrified of my car.

Depression and PTSD are horribly very real. I've lived for decades with stuff that people still don't know the half of, and I've made it this far. There comes a time when a person finally just has to admit that some people don't help make this better. People that hide behind masks and smooth things over and tell me in private what I can or can't say don't help make this better. And finally realizing it's like the blind leading the blind, the severely depressed coaching other severely depressed on how to HIDE being severely depressed...

Guys, that's dangerous.

All the big thing on social media now is talking about how hiding our depressions behind smiles is what is killing us. Believing other people telling us we have to smile is what's killing us. Letting other people tell us how we have to play head games with them is dangerous.

I've had one of my best winters in at least 12 years. Best Christmas in ages, best health in forever, and what you guys didn't see me grappling with nearly every single day was pop up suicidal thoughts. I don't want to die. But I have PTSD and severe depression, and several people on social media were triggering me over and over and over, and after weeks and even months of asking them to stop, I finally just lost my temper on 3 different people, 2 of those were pretty public.

I don't want to die. Neither do other people who are hiding severe depression. Not everyone is as brave as me asking 'friends' to back off. It takes a lot of guts to stand up to people who are used to tagging you a lot. My anxiety was going out of control again, especially on major highways. I was once thrown from a violently flipping vehicle. You guys have no idea the trauma I'm still working through from my dad pulling me out of an ER and taking me home with internal bleeding without a single x-ray. I had absolutely no mental, physical, or emotional support from my own parent through a car accident that should have killed me. I've had to deal with aging parents and my stupid childhood flashing back while I'm trying to write a very honest book, and through all of this, I have yet to hear one word of comfort about finally dealing with the loss of my friend to a murder or watching my mom die very slowly from a person who claimed to have read everything I blogged. Is it any wonder I blew up on Christmas Eve after being PM'd about someone's one of two moms taking some Christmas presents away. I wanted to say grow up, but I realized I was the one sticking around for that drama. Maybe it's time for me to grow up.

Friendship is about balance. I am trying to find my balance and keep working. I'm dealing with cognitive disability doing it. My last attempt at honesty was returned with being unfollowed on other accounts and no closure. You know what? I would be stupid to take that bait and pursue answers. There are no answers except that I was gullible again. If I'm the one making the same mistake over and over believing people when they say they love me, then I'm the one who needs to take at look at why that is happening. I'm easy. I make a good pet. At first...

And then I start digging holes all over the yard and leaving half eaten mice in shoes and taking off through windows and fences, and the head games pivot around who will last the longest in another unbalanced relationship before the explosion happens. And it did happen.

My job on this earth is to put stuff into words. That is my natural inclination, to wrestle with how to say the stuff that's hard to say, how to make it easy for other people to understand another point of view, how to share ideas that are difficult to talk about. I believe I was born deficit especially for this calling. I've had to work so hard to get to this point, and I know what I have to share is important. It's worth the work and all the time and effort, and everything I go through and learn about myself adds depth to what makes what I need to say so important.

Depression is not a game. You don't ice it over like a cake. You don't tell people they have to keep their masks on. That's conditional love. A lot of people don't seem to understand the concept of conditional love. Don't even call it love, ok? Stop baiting each other with the word 'love'.

True love is doing everything in your power to break down the walls that are hiding what is killing people.

That is why aspienado was born on this earth.

the nuts before Christmas- part 4

This is a continuation from the nuts before Christmas- part 1, part 2, and part 3. I ran my data plan out and couldn't get this really long HD vid loaded until it rolled over again, router refused to handle it.

If this is your first jump in, my family is ASD, and @bonenado's family is ADHD, so it was really interesting getting Bunny and Batman together in one house for the first time. Parts 1 and 2 were watching the kids acclimate by running around, part 3 was watching Bunny experiment on my dad (super young ADHD + super old ASD). Part 4 here is Batman retreating into the laundry room, which makes a really good cave for kids and pets who come into our house, and Bunny adjusting back down from the wild activity when he disappeared.

I've noticed with Bunny being super social (I'm not, I've had to adapt) that keeping a running dialogue with her works really well, and apparently Batman picked up on that and even adapted to it himself. Bunny has a much bigger vocabulary and was speaking in complete sentences by the time she turned 2 like her mama did (they're both 2 1/2 here), but Batman is more inward like his mama was at that age, and I don't remember her talking a lot with me until 3-4 years old, and anyone could tell when she didn't pay attention on purpose because she preferred being in her own little bubble. Bunny kind of walked in all over Batman's bubble because she wanted him to come back out and run with her again, and I got a kick out of how their communication signals crossed and then started smoothing out. I think this would be a great intro vid for child social psyche students. I felt kind of like a brain interface for awhile, but it's something I've become used to. I'm saying that last bit because the simplistic narration I use in the beginning actually annoys me silly (ASD), but it really does work when one can be patient enough to handle 20 minutes of interface adjustment, like I was doing here. My opinion is that neither barking orders nor interfering work well with neuro collisions, and that patience and narrative are key to same-paging, essentially lining up our brains. I can imagine teachers and daycare workers not having the time to apply this on more personal level, so I applaud programs that help begin integrating neuro atypicals together before they slam through the culture shock of suddenly going to school. I'm pro neurodiversity, and I believe all of us have talents and skills that we can find niches for.


I'm not sure yet if there will be a part 5.

the nuts before Christmas- part 3

This continues from part 1 and part 2.

The first two posts were about the kids. Now let's take a look at ASD from the old days, before it was even a thing.

This is my dad. He grew up with simplistic little kid interaction and thoughts because the ASD range was common enough around him growing up that it was normal, but remember that ASD kids sometimes super plug into acedemics later. By the time he graduated the 8th grade in a one room rural school house, he was acing tests about government structure and economics that they don't give kids today until they're in college. One of the first things I learned from him was how to count, because numbers are behind everything that goes on in the world. He doesn't know Bunny already counts to 20 (at 2 1/2) and is just watching to see why he's even acting like that. Bunny's ADHD is going full blast in her head right now, super focused on studying how to socially interact with this guy. An ASD kid would have just ignored him unless he/she were interested in actually doing something.



Bunny has got my dad figured out, and without any words at all (funny to us because she's normally a nonstop talker), spends a little time manipulating him without him even knowing it. When I first met Bunny's mama (at that age), I was nearly still as rigid as my dad in the way I saw the world and what I thought of things and how they should work. I think Bunny wanted to see how complex my dad could get because he'd been doing the same simple thing over and over trying to get her to repeat it.



On the other hand, my dad knew what to do with Batman and actually got positive response. This behavior in a 2 year old wasn't at all considered deviant or abnormal with him, this is just what 2 year olds are like and they click in later and get real smart.



One of the reasons I got a sociology degree was because I craved to know what I still didn't understand about how humans work. Group interaction and individual acceptance is a really big deal everywhere you go, especially on jobs and in families. A person who doesn't feel accepted in a group can become despondent (depressed) or despotic (bossy), both of which can have sad and bad consequences, or inspire them to leave to find another group, but not everyone is strong enough to leave a group on their own and seek a better fit.

Being different from one another wasn't acceptable when I was growing up. We all had to think the same way, behave the same way, even have fun the same way. I was unable to fit in with people everywhere I went. I found a few here or there that I could kind of be part of, but never quite fit all the way with. I think it's human nature to want to fit in as oneself, to be useful and cherished as unique. Sometimes it's difficult to find that when the world around us is very rigid about who we should be and how we should act. When the world is like that, it loses great opportunities for creative problem solving skills.

'My people', as I generically and fondly call people whose heads work like mine, are everywhere. When you travel from city to city and find comfort in familiarity in a franchise, that was probably one of my people. When you zip into a store for something and rely on super organization for easy and quick shopping, that was probably one of my people. Every time you use your phone, some of my people helped make that possible. The rest of us don't have to worry about satellites in orbit relaying signals and the obsessive number crunching that goes into maintaining the information and entertainment tech that services, thank goodness, but if you do ever wonder about it, well, that's my people.

I come from a people with a very long history. They go back to the Anglo-Saxon days like the King Arthur myths. They go back to the Goths and Frisian. When Hitler was scourging the earth, he praised the Prussian Mennonites. ('My people' in that article wound up routing through Russia, thanks to Catherine, and then on to America.) It was my good fortune to have a Mennonite college professor (author page) who remembers being 12 during the time of Hitler and questioning his father over why they supported him. That boy wound up becoming a secret envoy to China, helping bring out the historical traditions and stories to a world that still didn't know much at all about what was really going on in China. (book) He knew my family name and asked me in front of the whole class (World Religions) if I knew so and so on the Navajo reservation, and it turned out I did, I'm related to him. My people are all over the world, and some of them keep track where all the rest of us are.

When regular people think of Mennonites, they assume tight knit communities on farmland. They have no idea we are floating like cream to the tops of everything around them, in industry, medicine, education, government, even the entertainment industry. I have some profoundly astonishingly amazingly intelligent cousins, and you would be surprised what all they do.

My dad is a little more close minded. He is very suspicious of government and was convinced college would brainwash me. He wouldn't allow me to see a psychiatrist as a child because psychiatry was invented by government (think old Germany) to brainwash citizens. If you can survive talking to my dad long enough, you find out he knew everything about Illuminati as a child growing up in a wheat field long before they became a whisper and then a conspiracy theory and now a hushed reality. I won't go into that right now, but some of you have seen my dabbling in that sort of information gathering. I have a sociology degree steeped in world religions and political science, and I quietly research at home for my own amusement.

My point is that ASD isn't a scary thing. Our modern society is no longer supportive of functional ASD. In the old days, there was no time table for social and personality development, and kids developed naturally in their own time. Sooner or later, most ASD kids find their niches, and they immerse themselves in the glory of problem solving. They love complexity and patterns and winning the game. They may not be cute little dollies as tiny children, and they may not be very cooperative for awhile- remember, I started out a screamer, and I never hugged my mom or told her I loved her or went to her for comfort, and here I am coaching people with anxiety and depression on social media.

I am writing a book about BEING an ASD child, what it was like from my point of view, the things I thought, the feelings I had, and how I finally figured out how life works. It's taking awhile because I'm not closing myself off from the world and just doing it, because I'm making myself available to the public, and I'm told privately by several that this has been very encouraging.

Survival is key. Mental health wasn't a thing back in the old days, but now we know how important feeling secure and accepted in groups is nowadays. We have broken away from our natural daily survival busy-ness and problem solving to live our separate lives not really plugging in to society around us any more (it's ok, I don't trust my neighbors, either), and kids wind up with their heads in gaming consoles or getting into trubbas. Childhood depression is a real thing, and parental support is out there. My mom didn't have the support when I was growing up, and I watched it devastate her in ways other people didn't really notice, because back then admitting depression was extremely taboo and she never let people know how bad it was for her, even when she tried to communicate it. Your ASD children are like recording devices, and if you give them enough time (took me 3-4 decades), they will remember all your words and feelings and turn them around into a sweet empathy that will sweep you off your feet. Your job is to live long enough to see that happen. I've already lost my mom, she missed most of it, but she knew it was there. She never stopped believing she could find a way to push me into seeing the bigger picture, although I frustrated her all my life.

ENJOY YOUR CHILD. Just love your child. Be there and don't worry. When it all boils down, our last thoughts before death are about our relationships. Learning to love is why we are here, and ASD kids have a long and winding road learning it. I was not born with natural empathy and rarely cared about anyone for a very long time.

Because of my experiences, I very much enjoy people in my home nowadays. My home is my sanctuary, and the people who come into my home are in my sanctuary.

Yes, there is very definitely a part 4 coming. My internet has been glitchy for several days and my data plan is critically low, so loading HD vids is slow going. The best and very cutest part of the Bunny-Batman ADHD-ASD collision is yet to come.

World Mental Health Millennium

Pinky blog is a cover for a lurker deluxe, a shadow in the dark. You guys have seen me work on putting my own puzzle back together in public posts, and I appreciate the respect that goes into staying back from the temptations to snark bomb my comments, or worse. The history I have with some of my lurkers is heavily tenuous, if I may wring a visual out of an uncommon word pairing.

Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay. I've mentioned a few times being around the block with blogging, saying I've seen it all. I've also said a few times that blogging saves lives. But I don't really say more than that, do I? Pinky blog is for my stuff, not other people's stuff.

However, part of my stuff, part of what has helped create who I've become, is other people's stuff. I've privately logged many hours in the past with a number of people who blogged about their stuff, mostly privately to friends-only. What I'm about to share is a delicate summary of some of the long, haunted nights I've been privy to with other people on protected (partially private) blogs.

Each of these sentences represents a summary of someone else's dark journey, and these are all different people who didn't know each other. It is by no means an exhaustive list. I will never forget these people.

I drank a whole bottle of benadryl last night. -teenage boy with terminal illness desperate for distraction.

I lost custody of my kids because I can't stop cutting. -mid 30s woman with severe depression.

I got this recipe from (***) and it's loaded with calories. -young medically anorectic 20s female with terminal illness.

I had to leave my psychotic mother before I was legal age and get my own apartment and a job. -young lady on double lung transplant list.

I've been stuck in a bed on IVs for so long that I'm losing hope. -middle aged woman with cancer.

I really like knives, is something wrong with me? -teenage girl with the most beautifully twisted dark goth blog I've ever seen.

I hate everything about myself because my stepdad raped me since I was 13 and my mom didn't do anything about it. -girl in her late teens trying to get a job so she could leave home.

I'm afraid to go to sleep for months and can't see myself coming back from the next hospital trip -a young lady with a terminal illness who died a couple of weeks later in a hospital.

I hate Christians and everything about them. -young man after leaving his parents.

My parents secretly performed 3 basement abortions on me and I'm so scarred up I can never have children. -mid-20s woman working on a counseling certification.

I'm so desperate for answers that I'll go to great lengths experimenting on myself and learning everything medically and scientifically related to every little thing that goes into my body. -middle-aged woman living with years of chronic illness and infection.

I know God will heal me if I just have enough faith. -woman who vanished from the internet and likely committed suicide.

I know the military is watching everything I do and just waiting for me to slip up. -military personnel hiding a schizophrenia diagnosis.

My wife hasn't let me touch her for years except to give her a massage, and I like to wear my jeans loose around my hips. -older man grappling with his mother raising him as a little girl, likely due to birth defect or botched circumcision.

link source riddled with bugs
I no link u no get bugs

One of the reasons I keep telling you guys that you are not alone is because you're not. One of the reasons you feel alone is because those around you are either inexperienced and don't know how to see what you're saying or really talk to you about it, or because they have already been through so much themselves that they can't carry someone else's emotional load, or because they are in place where they must emotionally withdraw for a little while and recharge themselves. Please never take it personally if someone doesn't emotionally respond appropriately to the mixed and cryptic messages you are sharing. Just keep trying. There are loads of people on this earth, and internet makes finding someone who understands a lot easier and faster than the old days.

My core belief that I have developed from seeing all these things is that we need to share our stories so others can see they're not alone. It's not about trying to get attention or empathy or validation when someone is just whistling out loud in the dark. We must become the teachers allowing the inexperienced to learn on us if the world is to heal. In a world of block and mute buttons, it's becoming easier to share who we are in real time, and others can come and go as they wish without pressure to respond. Lurking through other people's living thoughts is better than hanging out at a library. Humans on the internet are becoming a living library.

Blogging helps. I have gotten through so many bad days knowing even just one other person would read my stuff. Simply just sharing your stupid bad day and how you got through it might actually save someone else's life. You might never know that a lurker in the dark found the thoughts you wrote down and made a decision to keep hanging in there because you did.

Sometimes I say "I love you guys". If we could see other people with the same empathy we have seeing abandoned, neglected, and abused pets, who knows how the world could change. I see the pain and sadness in the dark when I lurk around, and I just want to say I love you guys, so I keep blogging.

I know I beg off personal interaction nowadays with aspie's so aspie and talking about the saturation level I've been through in my own life. It's true, I'm barely capable any more. In the past while I was more private I was able to handle more personal interaction, and I've even been encouraged by other professionals to finish my master's and get my certification in counseling. I've chosen to be a public person and reach as many people as possible. Even when I hit walls, with a blog I can keep sharing my own stuff and help point the way for others.

Mental health is such a stigma. I wish my mom had been able to get more help without others fussing over her fails and poor decisions and not having enough faith, all that crap that strengthens the lie of masking who we really are. I fought the stigma myself for decades with doctors arguing with me over whether I'm a hypochondriac, and whadayaknow, it's all medically validated now. I know what it feels like to be dismissed and blown off and gotten after, even insulted by the people who should have cared the most. I've come through years of anger and the hate that those blow offs inspired and have arrived to the conclusion that I can't live like that, and that my own emotions were killing me. I've further determined that I no longer care who says what any more, and I would even be selfish to keep what I've learned to myself. depression, suicide, and Pinky's revenge

I'm sorry stuff is hard. And it's not a contest, sooner or later it gets really hard for every single one of us in one way or another. You are part of a world family, and all of us are going in the same direction and learning the same things. In the end, we will all be able to say we understand, and part of learning the understanding is walking alone in the dark for a little while. But please don't despair. None of us are ever really and truly alone. Somewhere on this earth someone wants to know your story from your point of view, because they want to know someone else gets exactly what they're going through, or what someone they loved must have gone through.

There are so many ways to share ourselves, from social media to volunteer services, from a variety of art forms to simply hanging out with someone watching TV for awhile. Even if you are the fabled crazy cat person, you are sharing yourself with other living beings.

failure to tweet is the main problem here

Yesterday was a debacle. I think three attempts to sedate me with valium is enough to call that one quits.

My counterintuitive med reactions get a little ridiculous, so my severe claustrophobia was heightened to "cat clawing its way out of" fill in the blank. Basically, the SpongeBob side of my brain kidnapped the Spock side and we all just left the building.

I'm skipping a few details. I'm pretty sure I looked a little psychotic, especially holding my chicken.

I immediately dug into deeper research (users comparing notes online) and feel confident, thanks to a couple of very heavy medicators, that just sticking to what I know is probably preferable for this morning's attempt. Xanax it is, then. But MOAR.

Panic disorder is a real thing. Aspienado growing up with panic disorder will hopefully help a few parents out there understand what in the world is going on inside their screamy little children. In the meantime, I learned yesterday that injection sedation is no longer used in MRIs without airway (yeah, been in this rodeo before, I know way too many things about sedation), so if I want to know what's going on in me, I must be brave and trust the xanax. Given my pill phobia, I'll get double points for bravery if I can do this.

I don't mention it very often, but I own nearly every Jackie Chan movie ever made and practically memorized his autobiography. Falling is an art, a skill developed with practice. My whole life has been about turning epic fail into epic fall. I'll try to remember that today and grit my teeth through another sedation attempt. I've mentioned before I'm the sort of person that wakes up from full sedation and talks to people during surgeries, right? If I could tweet from inside the MRI tube I'd be fine...

blue is a really good color for me

The funnest part of burritos is getting to pick them up from daycare and take them out to Applebee's for macaroni and cheese and apple dippers when mama is all wimped out from a tummy bug. I didn't get pix, and I sure hope I don't get the bug! O_O But in case that sounded yummy, here you go. I might have to look into joining the club and online ordering if burrito likes that place so much.

Something came up and I have to drive into town on a very wet day. I know this will sound weird, but I'm in a blue pink mood. I noticed when I was very young that looking at specifically patterned colors (even if the pattern seems random, artists and mathematicians would probably get this) I can focus myself into directions, like channeling the energy that pops up from anxiety into a more aware plan of actions. I don't know if it's the synesthesia, but I've been using thought experiments like this all my life to help me 'deal', because my anxiety goes off the wall.

Interesting that I can find the background I've been using on my Lexx blogs since 2004 in this search.

Can you imagine a future where a brain chip could handle anxiety spikes with subliminal color/pattern variations instead of having to take pills with all those side effects? I bet sometime in the future psychologists and psychiatrists will help us determine whether certain settings are working and help us adjust them with tweaks to subroutine commands.

I stall really bad on anxiety days. Time to go.