Ripped down curtains and threw them in the wash with rugs, stripped bedding and bathrooms, the usual deeper spring cleaning kind of stuff.
Confirmed no incision hernia from all that flu coughing, yay! Always hard to tell what's going on with fibro flare and pain referral stuffs.
Also confirmed healthy bones, soft tissues, and no arthritis in feet even though they hurt like hell nonstop and make life difficult, but now have hardcore dx of diabetic neuropathy, even as stringent as I am about keeping my blood sugar down with diet. The only thing I can do going forward is increase gabapentin in order to keep moving to stay healthy, and tighten up my diet as much as possible in case my A1C is slipping, which can happen when one indulges in even small amounts of carbs regularly. Just because my blood sugar is controlled doesn't mean it's not sticky and literally shredding nerve sheaths. If I want to keep being able to walk, I have to get smarter again. Kinda slid into a bit of leniency this last year with the kiddos around me.
Spent more time being staff on game server during winter hammering other staff with power outages, but learning faster that way and handling more stuff now, including helping with the launch of official social medias. The luck perms tutorial is going over my head atm, but I'm sure I'll pick it up.
Our money is a mess this year and we're hanging in there until tax refunds and hoping that covers what we need. @bonenado doesn't get overtime since the company sold around Christmas, and Twink's work might outsource, which, if it does, means she'll have changed jobs twice in less than 5 years over budget cuts. I'm still paying cash on the genetic cancer testing, so no play money until that's done around Christmas-ish. I still have tech, a house, and a car, so I'm grateful.
Made it through about a week-long euphoric episode, crashed a little, and bounced back without missing meals or losing that much sleep, so that was nicely controlled. I'm getting better at this!
I'm otherwise time jagging a lot again and barely staying in the right day/week/month, but I think I'm making good progress with my psychologist about what's behind that. Still able to deal in real time with real life even when I don't know where on a clock or calendar I happen to be.
I'm also managing somehow to keep up with a number of people all over the webs, which cheers me up. Starting to get my regular touch bases back on. Actually making it to movie gang weekly and have regained a little control over juggling my medias.
I don't even know how all that is happening. I feel like I'm barely aware, not because of the meds but because living on the edge of full aspienado shutdown through all of this. I may need to take a day off and not interact with anyone till my brain sops up this drippy gooey mess I feel like I'm sludging through. I mean, who is this person doing all this stuff, lol. Whatever is going on, apparently I've still got some brain healing going on.
My braindeadedness today feels like deep fried calamari and side of coleslaw. I am choosing not to go full aspienado hard shutdown because I'm actually the least likely person to make the noise level worse. One is asleep because overnight job, another is staring at football, I am utterly drained of manna, and a 4 year old is prattling nonstop and remodeling my kitchen into a 'house' of 'pets' defined with an afghan spread on the floor as the rug, various containers and toys posing as pets in their beds, and at the moment the mailman is running around the house announcing "mail! mail!" and handing out quarters. I got 2 quarters, representing the most mail. I bet they're bills. I'm not inclined to check. I was up 19 hours (that's nearly 24) before my 5 hours of sleep last night, and I can't handle bills right now. I'm just thrilled that she's in a good mood and entertaining herself. Irony is when twitter sends you a long email yesterday letting you know your account qualifies as an item in the U.S. Presidency-Russian scandal investigation and sending a happy little tweet today about it being your 5th anniversary on twitter. It's actually been longer, but I closed a couple other accounts further back. I think I go back to at least 2008 on twitter, technically.
Couple of quotes from that email include, oh what the heck, here's the whole thing. Notice it's from their legal department.
In which my freedom of speech violation is hinted at.
In which it is suggested that I am part of these malicious accounts.
In which I'm let known that people don't come to twitter to see ME.
I addressed this issue publicly over the weekend. This next shot clicks to twitter source, which in turn clicks to the post I wrote.
I handled that while I was vigorously multitasking- cooking breakfast for several people, handling chat help on an international game server, looking after a 4 year old, and getting ready to race out the door to an event.
I made friends with the wrong people. They are Russians. Twitter unites us around the world, and I've been friends with a number of people in a TV show fandom (international production) since 2005. We have a history that goes back across forums full of dates and timestamps. I am very publicly documented in google search in this fandom.
And now I am apparently a possible enemy of the state. Because I am friends with people on the other side of the ocean over a 20 year old TV show. Because I used a public international social media host to be friends with them. Because, of course, every American must now be investigated in this ridiculous scandal conspiracy if they are friends with Russians.
I don't know if other fandom representatives (I'm not official, but very obvious thanks to a lot of web presence) got emails like this. A lot of us on twitter are friends with worldwide fans of all kinds of TV shows. Stargate is a great example.
Heads up, America. It has begun, whatever 'it' is. The Big Brother thing that people have been freaked out over for decades. I really hope social media isn't about to flip into something very ugly.
#transparency- I didn't vote for any of the leading candidates. I voted for someone who had already withdrawn from the presidential race. I didn't want to have anything to do with anyone who is currently in office, and I am neither for nor against any of them. They run the country, I don't, and it's all the same to me.
I have legally documented multiple disabilities. I choose to stay busy with a fandom and a game server. Both are international. I have friends all over the world. I have been visited by well over 150 countries on my blogs since 2004. This has never been a problem before. I wonder why it's a problem now.
click to purchase this print on canvas, metal, wood, or greeting card
Woke up from one of those very long tangled dreams to Barry Manilow singing a new Christmas song about superheroes, and thinking ok, that lisp of his is getting way worse...
I was at a friend's house up the road after not visiting for a very long time. For some reason, I needed to use her shower, and only very briefly saw her to ask, because she had to rush off, but handed me a folded note. I didn't open the note right away, just wanted to get that quick shower and go home, because it's always weird taking a shower in someone else's house.
By the time I got upstairs, the house had grown a bit bigger, added rooms, appointed details, and naturally I had to slow down and think Wow, she always did love her house. I made it in the upstairs bathroom, but for some reason I had to go back downstairs and outside real quick. I don't remember why now, but this happened over and over and over umpteen times, and each time going back into her house, the house kept getting bigger, more people kept showing up, until the entire building was nearly as big as a small shopping center, and every bit of it was still her glorious house, decked for holidays and people everywhere.
She wasn't the sort to have loads of guests, but very quietly the genteel artist type who loved Americana and flowers and the good life, excellent with complex recipes and always a picturesque purebred dog by her side. I didn't think about any of that in the dream, which would have thrown it all off. None of it seemed out of place at all. Everything that kept adding on an becoming more detailed and thronging with more people seemed right. It felt like exactly the kind of holiday party she might love if she had been born a very wealthy person. It had her spin on it.
I don't know how many times I made it back upstairs to that bathroom, which also kept getting bigger and more elaborate, but I finally opened the note. The topside was typed, and I don't remember much of what it said, but it was to me from her. Then I realized the underside was handwritten in felt tip pen, and oh no, the bathroom was damp (the shower was steaming it up), and a lot of it was running onto my hands and my clothes. Most the words were on me by the time I tried to decipher it, and the harder I tried to read it, the more it faded until it was gone.
I realized about then that I was in my shabbiest jeans about to get a shower, and there were dozens of people arriving all around for the start of the party, all dressed up from where they came, like one big family had just come from a ski slope and were all laughing and red from the cold and in matching sweaters, and another family had just come from a big church service and were still all dressed up and looking for the wine cellar (I don't recall her having wine around either in real life or the dream), and many other groups, and I thought Wow, she has a LOT of people connected to her. She'd always seemed so quietly reclusive to me, but I imagine I saw only a glimpse even though she was right up the street.
So I left the bathroom again, intent on going home to get better clothes, but it was too late, the party was starting, Barry Manilow was singing, and I woke up.
My very first thought this morning was maybe she had died and that was one of my heaven dreams, so I did quick recon and she hasn't, whew (although now I'm hoping there isn't something else). Yes, even though she moved far away a long time ago, I know where she is, what her house looks like, and a tiny little bit of how she's doing. I don't deep lurk very often, but a handful of people have never left the back of my mind, so once or twice a year I check on them.
So, psyche analyze this dream. Barry Manilow singing a Christmas song about superheroes. A friend's house growing very big and luxurious. Me trying to get a shower and being embarrassed about my shabby clothes. A note I couldn't read.
I have lately (this past year) become a bit self aware of how public I am. It feels awkward, and even though I'm not bothered by it most of the time (in my aspienado mind I'm just an avatar living a story), I've been feeling a little bit shy for possibly the first time in my entire life (I'm diagnosed with a mild to moderate level of narcissism, thankfully not dinging the psychotic bell or anything, but this is thanks to the childhood I survived as I've pointed out on facebook, you can find tests online to see how you rank, as well).
Ok, that was a stretched out overly-inserted paragraph. I'll just daintily step away from it instead of trying to fix it and move on.
I don't know yet how I feel about being aware of feeling sorta shy. It's not the kind of shy that people automatically think of as shy. I'm not afraid of anyone seeing me. I think it's more like I'm shy of seeing myself. I'm shy realizing I'm in this role I'm playing out. I'm cognizant of being ME.
When I was a child, I'd have very disturbing moments, almost out of body experiences, about being a skeleton walking around, about living in a skull, about my arm not being 'me', about my legs feeling like doll legs that I moving around from the inside. I know now that is a dissociative disorder. Not feeling in the moment, running all the incoming through filters, losing track of time (quite badly sometimes), and delayed emotional response most of the time come from this dissociated thing. I am often walking beside myself, following behind myself, distracted away from myself, coming back to myself. I am often not in the moment.
I love that I had that curious dream at the very start of 2018. I love that I have another mystery to solve about myself. What was in the note? I already know why Barry Manilow. My best friend that was murdered later gave me her double best of Barry albums before I moved away when I was 14. Christmas over the last ten years has very much become about superheroes, we are inundated with merch and entertainment on all sides. The beautiful house growing larger and more detailed was actually all in my head. More and more people arriving is me connecting, while I hide out in a bathroom. Click that. It's very pertinent. As for the shower part, that's baptismal, like washing off the old and putting on the new. Cleaning off. Refreshing ourselves. Maybe it's time I faced this.
I've still never reconnected to that friend. I've not reconnected to a lot of people in my past, but that particular friend had a very strong impact on me. You guys know how I feel like I'm walking through people's minds when I find their artwork somewhere. She takes photographs. I've seen all the public ones. If she reads my blogs at all, and I know she did in the past, then maybe she'll find this post and feel a little hug in her mind. I wasn't able to be what she needed when she was here, but I understand now. And that is the way our lives work, isn't it?
She was one of the very rare few who knew me in real life.
:edit: nearly 6 hours later- I burned 4 1/2 years' worth of correspondence between my best friend from school and I after I heard she was murdered. Clearly that is a horrible regret I live with, the note I can never seem to read in so many of my dreams. THIS TIME- the. words. got. all. over. me. That just screamed through my brain just now. The words are IN ME. I was handed a note and the words got all over me.
I'm not in the mood for a psychotic break right now, so I'm going with this is all normal and it's cool because I'm going to write a whole bunch of words this year that are totally going to vindicate that sad ritualistic grief burn. Creating Rituals to Move Through Grief
I know what books I'll be looking into this next year, thanks to this video, Earliest Examples of the Mandela Effect. That chick's research goes back to 1999 and actually uses some well thought out science, which will be fun. I watched another vid, which lines up with conclusions I've come to myself over the years.
For instance, I discovered that the most interesting thought process follows the question "If I could go back and tell myself anything, what would it be?" I took that question very seriously for years and decided that everything I am doing NOW is the result of this question. Everything I ever wanted to understand about reality and why we are here is all coming to me. I concluded years ago that I am affecting my past, and that a lot of the weird stuff I seem to go through might actually be from me at a later date. I've had far too many coincidences, remote views, dreams that come true, and deja vus in my life to not be meaningful in some way, and I gravitated to synchronicity as I was looking for answers, which I've talked about many times. I've 'always known' who I need to be and what I need to be doing, I just didn't always know how and with what at the time. It's like I had to accumulate experience and knowledge, like you do in gaming, to be able to level up and do bigger things.
Here is one example of that process. For years I questioned faith if people assume praying changes nothing once a certain time has passed. How can an omnipotent god be constrained by something like time? (Especially now that we can visualize stepping outside of time ourselves.) I didn't realize I had the opportunity to test this until I found out later it worked. I was on my way to nursing clinicals at an insanely early hour, and about halfway there I had a sudden urge to pray for my kids to get to school safely. That was not a daily habit back then, and I was very distracted with pain issues, so it felt weird for that to come so strongly into my mind. I took it seriously and focused a few minutes on asking for my kids and I to all arrive home safely that day, and that the day be easy for all of us because it felt like things had been so hard lately. After we were all home hours later, I found out the school bus had just missed being broadsided on a major highway by a big transport truck. The kicker was that happened before I prayed, so where did that big urgent feeling come from? I immediately thought of quantum reality and figured time going forward or backward has no power over anyone I could possibly pray to about affecting reality, and that meant my prayer was still very meaningful and important after the event had passed, particularly because I didn't know about it. I think that the not knowing somehow gives us more power to affect change, and I don't mean that *I* changed anything, but that I inadvertently asked it to change and it did.
The key is the not knowing. The whole point is about going with your gut and focusing on what you want. What do you REALLY want? Give that all your focus for a quiet minute or two. This has become a daily habit for me. I use the form of prayer because I honestly can't not believe in someone being more powerful than me being able to see all this stuff from the outside. Given the new breakthroughs in cosmological thought about simulated universes, this isn't that big a stretch. I think our wording is very misleading, instantly lending to downplaying intent and purpose, but it makes total sense to me that we mimic our bigger universe by creating more digital universes ourselves.
I've turned this process into a shared journey.
clicks to source
And of course I played around. Since every time I do a search for ANYTHING and Benedict Cumberbatch usually pops up in there somewhere (hence #bengruity lol), I thought I'd do a deliberate search for "Benedict Cumberbatch Mandela Effect" to see if anything pops up, especially since he's got one of the largest fandoms in the world possibly mass mind quantum changing everything around us, right. Well, guess what. The only things I could find at all were one person swearing his name had really been Cumberpatch, one person certain he'd played Doctor Who at some point, and one person swearing they'd witnessed him dying in a car accident with a girlfriend that apparently doesn't exist now. You'd think there would be a lot more weirdness around as big a deal as him. Maybe the fandom has locked him into place. Benlocked.
I've been thinking for a long time about how social media has created new ways to connect that no longer fall into traditional roles. I've been on the internet since 1994 and have seen it all in so many varieties of ways that I'm convinced traditional roles in societal norms in developing civilizations over tens of thousands of years catered to the purpose of crowd control, when all else is brushed away from the archaeological bones of our anthropological history as a human race.
I remember my mom being on the phone quite a bit on some days when I was a kid. We shared a party line with several neighboring houses, about ten miles out of town along a rural highway. Back then we didn't know anything about depression and how connecting helps people get through rough days. Telephones were probably a godsend to her on some days, but none of us really understood the need. Our world was pretty black and white back then.
I was in the 9th grade when we moved to another state. My best friend and I snail mailed each other faithfully 3 times a week for a little over 4 years. I'm not exaggerating that at all. I had a huge box full of letters that documented her half of our unending conversation, and when that conversation ended, I was so lost that I completely shut down emotionally. It took me years to understand why that particular friendship was so deep.
In the mid 90s I jumped into the email trend, which was basically a lot like twitter in slo-mo, and wound up in fan groups and forums quickly after that. I had never had so much connection in my whole life. I cannonballed with so much gusto into connecting all over the place that I irritated a few people with my splashing, but I loved every minute of it. I didn't learn how to emotionally connect, though, until real faces started showing up with all that connecting. I had no idea what to even do with that, but I learned very quickly that's when it starts to hurt. It took more years to figure that part out. I had to learn to be more careful and play nice, and I'm the first to admit that my idea of careful and nice back then were not careful and nice.
I ran into a wall one year that disconnected my whole world, and everything felt like the rubble in the wake of the Nothing in Neverending Story. Several horrible years of rubble went by before I decided to give up and walk away. I was on the verge of deleting the very last of the rubble when Something Happened and shook me awake in seconds. From that moment I have intensely interrogated myself and studied how to get what I want.
I made a Plan and got back into the internet, learning to swim all over again, trying new ways of connecting. People are real, and I need people. I've spent most of my life so alone inside of myself. I have felt several times like if I didn't find a way to connect to my own humanity I would wilt and die inside. I cannot connect if I'm alone.
Part of my motivation was unclear at first. I had to keep reaching deeper and deeper inside myself, pulling out ripped up shreds of cast off emotions I never dealt with. My survival skills were a lot like the Walking Dead, shoot first and walk away, or just go another direction and disappear so no one can find me. I've done that both in real life and on internet. I am really good at knowing how to just go away. Part of my intense self questioning vomited up a very ugly self righteous gloater that didn't have a clue how to care about other people (my narcissism diagnosis, guys), an emotionally distant loner buried deep in obsessions (my autism diagnosis), a sad cynic who refused to believe happiness was nothing more than a lie invented by social structure controlling people (severe depression), a tiny child terrified of monsters and shadows and water and death (anxiety and dissociative disorders), and an overlord squeezing all of that together into a tightly controlled survival unit that blew apart after a string of viral illnesses affected my brain.
I watched everything about me fall apart as I raced time to keep dissecting, keep laying it all out in autopsy, keep looking for all the pieces I need to make all of this functional again, because without a coherent goal, 'I' simply have no meaning. My soul is a tattered shred on a crusty plain in a very long night. There is nothing else laying around inside myself that I am able to see that gives any part of me a tic mark in a box that doesn't say 'FAIL'.
Except to tell the stories.
There is redemption in honesty. I think that is inside all of us. Humanity is a story. We are all stories.
I need each of my people in each of their individual places. I can no longer slot people into categories like a tackle or embroidery box. Each person I connect to is unique to me and in their very own slot in my mind. Each slot has its own kind of personal reason we are connected, and I will never be able to go back to the traditional slotting of genders and roles and whatever else people get labeled with. Each and every person I've ever met seems to have grown into their own thing inside of me while I have taken myself apart, and as I put myself back together I can see now that the only way any of me goes all back together is by intersecting the connecting lines of other people with myself. I still feel all the same feelings about each person now that I did years (or days) ago when we last connected, and those feelings never change, even though I keep changing. Each person I have encountered has helped create who I am now, and I could never go forward as a soul being severed from that.
One of the things I've learned over time is that no one person can hold all my feelings. I am a wildly oscillating passion of obsessions with very little natural social intuition, so when my emotions, whatever they may be, blow up into roller coaster rides, the only way to survive them is to spread myself across as many friends as possible as quickly as I can before one unlucky person gets yanked into the roller coaster with me. I'm afraid I'm only just lately over the last few months becoming cognizant of this, so apologies to a few people who've been dragged in front of the bus with me, and especially one nobody really knows about who has actually been surviving that in real time.
I am part of what I now privately think of as a small tribe of emotional consorts. I can see now that the one person I needed and pulled into that crazy upside down fling needs to reach out and balance with others who need to know what's going on for the support system to work. I can be very selfish when I'm stuck in my tunnel vision, but to get what I need the most, I need that entire support system in place. I'm still getting used to this idea.
This is all new to me, but I think it's what I've been missing and needing all my life. I just never knew how to be part of a little group of close knit friends. It's exhilarating. And I think that's how it's supposed to be. It's not about rigid roles in labeled slots, and I don't think it ever has been. Psychological health in homo sapiens sapiens is about the connect/disconnect. Before there were societal norms, there were little groups interacting without labels, without rules about roles. Maybe aspienado kicking at the cart all these years was simply about persisting in my quest to find other brains that mine can fit with, without all the junk in the way. Like the first friend I faithfully wrote letters with 3 times a week for 4 years. She was popular and had lots of friends, and she was my only. She incorporated me, the others moved over, and I dismissed them a bit (I accepted and talked to each of them in school, just never thought of them as *my* friends), but maybe it's time to finish growing up. I run with a pack now, and we take turns stepping aside for each other. I got that a bit wrong on the medias, but I think I'm kind of getting it right now in the background. I sure hope so.
I WANT ALL OF THESE
pic clicks out to way more pink mug stuff
I especially like 'live what you love', 'prove them crazy wrong', and 'make it happen'
I'm actually back up to my 2 extra large cups of coffee every morning. I was doing really well cutting back for about a week and I guess just hit a big ol' rebound over the last few days while I was juggling a few eggs and chainsaws. One of those sucker punch weekends on all fronts, and today feels like the 3rd Monday in a row kind of thing.
I grew up in a world of stigma and have seen all the nasty things it can do to relationships and self worth. Inserting stigma into any convo is the fastest way in the world to sabotage, using stigma in social structure is the surest way to mass control.
Fuck stigma. I don't care who thinks or says what about me any more, and I'm going to keep saying honesty and transparency are the path to healing, from micro to macro. Everyone benefits from this point of view.
If you want to stay trapped in stigma (and bless your hearts, I know it is so hard), then realize that you make the conscious choice to allow others to victimize, harass, and emotionally (sometimes physically) rip you. Yes, I know that simply deciding to flip to the other side of the coin doesn't solve all the problems, but like I've been saying in public blogs since 2008- MAKE A PLAN.
Who are you?
Who do you want to be?
How do you get what you want?
What small steps will it take in between the bigger stepping stones to reach your destination?
Social mapping is foreign to me. I suck at understanding human interaction. That doesn't mean I can't learn to navigate the choppy waters, lurking undercurrents, and deadly rocks jutting up from below. I don't have to be shipwrecked because of a rock I didn't see coming. I don't have to stay beached in a place I never wanted to be. I don't have to be sucked into a downdraft and drown because someone else is oblivious or mean.
And I don't have to be mean about it myself. All I gotta do is walk away from it, float over the top of it, steer around it, and keep sailing to where I want to go with my life.
For some people this will mean literally leaving families. For others this means simply adjusting schedules. Any change is always disruptive, and sometimes our comfort zones are deep ruts carved into dysfunctional relationships for reasons. Could be money, could be physical or mental handicaps, could be anything. But tiny incremental small changes over time add up to big changes you never dreamed you could make happen.
I've spent the last 5 years blogging my way through small stepping away from hopeless helpless despair because I wanted to. I had an idea I believed (desperately hoped) could work, and yes, it's working even way better than I ever imagined. I put together my own care team, I put together a plan with clearly defined goals, and I asked for my care team to help me. This care team includes
primary care physician
chiropractor
psychologist
endocrinologist
gynocologist
neurologist
psychiatrist
physical therapy team
massage therapy person
I sought out all those people (and my family) and told them they are part of my team, and that they would all know all the things all the rest do. They all have input, and therefore I've been able to successfully stay off meds that exacerbate problems. My favorite is the neurologist wanting me back on amitriptyline for nerve pain and my psychiatrist letting me know that would make anything mood related much worse. In the past I floundered through so much confusion with only one doctor trying to handle all my stuff, and wound up so miserable and sick all the time that I literally crumbled into immobility and loss of function. Her abruptly abandoning her practice for hospital work and leaving me dangling for 4 months set me on a path that ultimately saved my life.
I crawled my way back out of that, I'm honest with all my people about all my things, I ask for very specific help with reasons why and what I hope to get out of it, and they are more than happy to help me. No more confused wandering through a health care system for me, thanx.
I am #aspienado. I know who I am, what I want, and where I'm going, and I hope to be good for other people so that my life won't feel wasted at the end of it. The legal diagnoses I listed in my last post don't mean I can't make decisions about my own health care (including mental health). Yes, I deal with a mountain of stuff, but that doesn't mean I am incapable of seeking out advice and making educated decisions about how to go forward into making my life better, and I trust my team to guide me through what I don't yet understand.
The most important thing I ever did in my life was learn to ask others for help. I don't instinctively trust anyone, and I'm super fail at reading people, so that was hard. In order to get good help, I put together lists of questions I needed answers to, and I learned to keep it simple and focused so that I wouldn't overwhelm anyone, because I really am an overwhelming person when I get going, and often other people don't realize quite where they triggered a mass of confusion in me that tips my world over. It's called the KISS method and I learned it in high school. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Random search surfing around youtube and this caught my eye. "Somebody once challenged me to make a Heroes music video to a song by Britney Spears and still make it seem badass." I had to watch it immediately.
And from there it was me and the headphones while Bunny tortured Papa after he got home from work.
I have missed so much live tweeting this year. I'm so torn.
I'm even regretting saying I was tired of so much TV last year.
Sorrynotsorry.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now it's later. Still wired on the pred, everyone else is in bed. It's so weird being pred-jacked during a crash off a long euphoric ep, even though it was semi-controlled.
I've had 8 years to think that all through. I've spent 8 years working on becoming more emotionally healthy and regaining back some of what I lost sinking into physical disability. I have worked very, very hard on not being selfish and being present in the moment for the people I love around me. I can honestly say I'm no longer hateful, but I have to honestly admit I'm still very angry, and I don't foresee ever not crashing through so many painful memories every time the first week of October rolls around.
I am quite jealous of people my age who still have both their parents. I feel very sad for people I know who lost both parents already at a younger age than I did. I can't imagine either scenario. All I can feel is jealousy, sadness, pain, and all kinds of anger.
Two years ago I wrote interpretations. My mom had absolutely no moral support raising an autism spectrum child in the middle of so much other stuff that she was dealing with. I am finally old and wise enough to see all that from the eyes of a peer instead of a child. I feel so bad for her sometimes looking back that I can't stand it, and I hide that I cry, like she used to hide that she cried. I can't go back and fix all the misunderstandings, and even if I could try, I would probably make it all worse somehow.
I spent most of my life in hard shutdown because I was very strictly not allowed to have meltdowns without what some people would now consider fairly severe consequences. I've spent the last ten years talking to a psychologist untangling so much mess, and that is very seriously only the tip of a very big iceberg.
If there is anything I can say to parents of autism spectrum kids, of any neuroatypical kids, it's please just love them. I've seen people treat dogs better than they treat their own children, and it breaks my heart. I've seen people treat strangers more kindly than they treat their children, and it shreds me. To judge anyone for something they cannot help, never asked for, and don't yet have the capacity to deal with is really harsh, especially when it turns into corporal punishment and very mean faces and words. Children on autism spectrum, especially, can be notorious for retaining hardcore highly detailed memory recordings for decades, and the behavior you exhibit might be either replayed or spelled out years later.
I'll be spelling mine out. I won't be doing it to be mean, but to be kind. Sometimes it's important to see how ugly something gets in order to veer away from it in future. And, honestly, I'm older now than a lot of the autism parents out there freaking out, and they really do need to know that giving birth to 'broken' children isn't the end of the world. We're all broken. Anyone who can punish a small child without any rescue or defense for simply being broken is broken themselves.
My mom was very broken, and I want to go back in time and scoop her up as a tiny child and rescue her. I'm very sad she never got to see me arrive to this point. One day I'll share a picture of her looking so sad as a small child that everyone will wonder what happened, and then the smiles in all the rest of the pictures after that will look different.
I drown in empathy. Don't let anyone ever tell you auties have no empathy. I had to turn mine off and get mean and cold to survive, but all the soft sad stuff is very intact and the recordings are all still there. I wasn't even five years old when I asked my mom why she was sad, and she never allowed me to ask her that again and never talked about it. Imagine what must have gone on inside of her to stuff that back in so hard and never let anyone see it. We saw her anger, yes. I've come to realize it was a privilege to see her sad. Not depressed, not fearful, not anxious, but sad. Why was it so important to hide the sad?
Dear autism parents- You have my full support. I was a difficult child, and once I realized I had power, I sometimes made it more difficult for my emotionally weak mother to function. We were quite a pair. I sabotaged her in very subtle ways, and she crumbled and did some very mean things back to me. By the time I was in high school our relationship was so broken that we never recovered from living without that parent/child bond. I felt unforgiven and she felt hated, because she didn't forgive me and I hated her.
Stuff like that is really simple to fix once you realize that's what's going on.
clicks to source I'm borrowing it a few people will get it
Wonder if that would happen a lot more if I'd boost this post. I've never boosted a post on Facebook, but I probably will once the book comes out. One of these will click to the twitter link, which already has over 400 impressions in less than 12 hours, the other will click to its new Autisable home.
And I really don't know if that had anything to do with waking up to a Google Alert that Janika Banks has been added to a German white pages listing on Denmark internet.
This is translated.
And I wanted to see if that's a real thing, and sure enough, comes up on page 3 in a Google search for Janika Banks. Brand new out of the bag.
A couple of years ago someone told me they were going to write up my Wikipedia page, and I laughed and said sure, go ahead. No one really has yet, but for some reason I've either been auto-boosted into legitimate search or manually entered by someone on a job or weirdly obsessed. I'm going with auto boost for now. There are so many automated info pages out there I could claim (traity was dumb, I had it for awhile and let it go), but that's way too much work.
Like I told a friend privately a few days ago- "If I don't get my crap done by end of summer, I'm an idiot. My launch platform has never been more visible."
So I get a porn boost right on top of #netneutrality, crack me up, and then I get a major Google Alert on top of my self-stim post. Never in any parallel dimension did I wildly dream of sex selling anything about Janika Banks. Wow.
:edit: Space Cowboy suggests putting pretty girls in vids to sell merch. Pretty sure some of us are in it for the actual music, so here you go.
Also, this is a thing. I have lifetime potential earnings of $33, crack me up. Bet that would change real quick if I could get some of my friends talking with me about Lexx and stuff. Anyway, you can get into this and click around, kinda fun checking out other channels. Very handy.
All the stuff in that article has consumed me much of my life. I've written at length on reality and perception, and have been openly being extra careful and letting people know when things aren't feeling 'real'. Friends on twitter may or may not be aware of this, depending on how often they might link over to Pinky blog, but that article kinda condenses things into a nutshell for me. This bit especially- I can tick every single one of these in this list.
What Causes Depersonalisation Disorder?
What causes depersonalisation disorder is not fully understood, but it is thought that it is linked to a chemical imbalance in the neurotransmitters of the brain. This imbalance may make the brain vulnerable to depersonalisation disorder when in states of extreme stress.
According to the Mayo Clinic, causes of depersonalisation disorder may include:
Childhood trauma such as witnessing domestic violence or being abused
Growing up with a significantly impaired parent, such as by mental illness
Suicide or unexpected death of a loved one
Severe stress such as relationship, financial or work-related pressures
Severe trauma such as a car accident
I'm noticing it's much worse lately, so it's time for #transparency while I have a little time to share. I usually handle stuff on delay because of aspienado shutdowns, where I turn into Pinky Robot and don't have to feel all the stuff going on around me. Lately, though, I'm having to crunch some of that processing through a little faster as multiple deaths are rolling out and I feel oddly situated as a major player that's mostly not really inner circle, so I can't exactly be a wall flower and let it float over me, or float over it, or whatever floating usually takes place, but still vitally connected in sometimes crucial ways.
The best way I can describe the time jags are like when I'm playing on server and there is a bit of lag and my character gets jerked back a couple of steps and has to break a few blocks over again, or the lag might even spam a little, and the blocks blink in and out of existence no matter what I try to continue to do. If the lag gets bad enough, I time out and have to relog, which is what shutdown feels like. I don't often feel like I'm in 'real time' with other people, and have spent a frustrating lifetime figuring out this is what's really going on in my brain and that it's not normal. I'm so used to it that I take it for granted, and I've only really started talking about it the last few months. I mean, I shared the big reality break from 2012 that was a result of a supervised double hormone crash off meds that took about 3 months, but that went beyond my kind of normal lag/jag stuff. I'm not having a med or pain crisis to the point of causing this again, but emotionally *bam* I'm getting knocked off track a bit more than usual and it's really catching my attention lately.
I am still struggling to keep broken bits of timelines in some kind of order around certain parts of my life. I'm still attempting to reconstruct through old bits of papers, like my college class schedules, or a list of work experience I kept around for resumes that included to-from dates, or even like the time my oldest daughter suggested I look in the toilet for the year I got married because we built the house that year and toilets are dated- no wonder I thrive on social media timestamps. I can't blame the time jags on anything specific, because my brain is wonderfully adept at some things, but time itself slips out of my grasp. Y'all know I get my days, weeks, and even months mixed up. Well, it's kinda worse than usual this year.
So this weekend has been really tough, some of it was very public because we lost a friend but a lot of my personal stuff wasn't, and today should have been a typical epic fail mode where I forget stuff and stumble my way through, but it never happened. No, today was brilliant, I got all the things done, and I handled everything beautifully. But I wasn't 'me'. At least not the usual me. The me from the old days took over, the me that got me through high school and part of college, the me that showed back up in a new morph and got me through the 5 grueling dark years before I pulled myself back together with Pinky.
I knew as I was pulling out of the driveway this morning that she was back. I was cognizant the whole time and I (the 'me' who is typing this) pretty much sat back and let it all happen. I didn't fight for control, in fact, I was relieved and grateful. I hadn't seen that side of me, to use a phrase, take over like that in a long time. The me who survives no matter what.
She has a name. I very rarely ever share it. The morph part has a very public name. I don't often use it, either. Together they are very strong, and I say they because I didn't feel like I contributed to that strength. Normally we all fit together and we are 'I', but today, I definitely switched out for awhile.
I begged my mom to take me to a psychiatrist when I was in high school. In college I walked into campus counseling and asked to be tested, because I told them I felt like I was crazy. I have been assured a number of times by several professionals that I'm nowhere near crazy (I passed an MMPI just fine in college) and that I'm handling life rather well. Inside I feel like a messy wreck, and I don't feel like I'm handling anything well at all. My current psychiatrist mentioned I'm feeling dissonance between what is real and what I feel is real. It goes a little beyond the kind of self flagellation that people do when they're down on themselves, but the weird thing is I don't do that. I have never done that. That's where the narcissism has come in really handy. I don't think I'm all that and a bag of chips, but I do think I'm an important person in people's lives, and I believe my being here on this planet is important and supposed to change things, but that only works out if I get off my butt and actually do stuff that makes a difference, so it's really rare for me to fall into a self pity pit.
I believe we are ALL important and here to change things.
I believe it's ok to believe this, and I'm pretty sure that's what's kept me going. Reality is what I make it, and the reality I create around me is my 'real'. It may not always mesh with other people's 'real', but at least I can be part of other people's lives.
Pinky has been wrestling all the snakes back into the peanut can, but I don't think that's going to happen now. Claudia burst forth today, bringing Jacky with her, and dayam if stuff didn't GET DONE. I would wish I could be like that all the time, except when I'm in Claudia mode, I'm usually pissed and don't give a f* about whatever, and I'm kinda tough for people to take like that. Jacky brings an undercurrent of dark emo med addict withdrawal kind of personality, and together they kicked ass today and told me not to worry about it.
That was my 'real'. I didn't fantasize, I didn't make up internal dialogues, I didn't think about it, I just sat back for awhile working on word stuff like I love doing. And now this is me practicing for getting thoughts organized before the book goes out. Lotta people out there analyzing autie stuff half to death, and I am soooo way past omg I'm autistic. Let's apply it to #allthethings now, shall we? And ppl who read my stuff, don't rip this off and run with it on your own stuff asplaining it all out for the noobs like you own it. Own your own stuff. This is my stuff. Everyone needs to get on personalizing their stuff. Really tired of this 'we' crap. (I changed that last word, Claudia was trying to take over.)
I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. -Kipling. My tagline since 2007. Bluejacky: Existential Aspie
One of those days where the 3 different crucially unstoppable without supervised tapering meds I'm on are conspiring to make everything worse and every jot and tittle of my entire life's collection of regrets is rerunning through a screen I'm locked in a room with and can't turn off.
One of the interesting things I go through on days like this is suddenly seeing sharply where before something was blurred, and I horribly understand the mistakes I've made in relationships, like trusting and, you know, trusting. I trust people to get to know me, and somehow, somewhere, somewhen, that becomes a sort of misappropriation that sideswipes me and tips my world over. When I'm not locked in the little room like this, I don't see ANY of this. When I'm in here, and I'm always alone in my head when this happens, there is no way out.
I know there are people who live like this all the time, because their depression is pretty bad, and from the outside it looks like self sabotage and you can't stop them from believing all the lies they're seeing on the screens in their heads in their locked rooms that they can't escape. I have been very fortunate to have an escape hatch through some of my life, and that is simply having a reflex that cuts all that off. There is a way out of that terrible room, but it's unconventional. I think that is where my psychologist would point out the narcissism comes in.
I think I read this story, but the picture in my mind is so vivid I almost think I saw it on TV. But I can't seem to connect it to anything, so maybe I did read it. A man was trapped in a small room, like a box, with no escape. All the sides and top and bottom were smooth with no openings. There was no way to break through, no way to contact anyone. He could only exist inside that box, with the proviso that if he could find a way out, some kind of wish would be granted and he would never be caught like that again. After some time, that room was discovered empty, and when the man was found again and asked how he did that, he laughed and said he thought long and hard and eventually realized the box was not always there. Since his existence in the box was forever, he figured out that technically the only way he could move was backward and forward in time. He went backward to before the box was built. No one had ever thought of that before.
If anyone reading this actually knows that story, please put it in comments. I'd love to read it again, but I don't remember who wrote it. I think it was part of a collection of short stories.
I can usually sort of do that with that room in my head that sometimes makes me feel trapped. There is a way to just flip it inside out in my mind and it no longer exists. The depression still exists, but I'm able to cobble my day together, sometimes only a moment at a time, but I'm getting very good at not being trapped in it. Once in awhile, though, I have a really hard time doing that, and then here comes that screen and the reruns and the highlights I missed about what was really going on when I wasn't paying attention or the world was looking too blurry to catch it at the time.
When I'm not in that little room, I don't care about any of that stuff. I figure half of what I feel most of the time is pure chemical imbalance anyway, so why fret about it? If it's a wonky brain thing to be like this, I can usually just set it aside and do what I want, even if it's very restricted and I can't really do much. I can still choose it. But for awhile today, I was stuck. The only way out was to start writing.
Why do brains do that? Why do they rerun stuff and make us look at the things that make us feel terrible? I've wondered for a long time what the positive evolutionary adaptation of that happening to all of us sometime in our lives could be, because I see nothing positive about it. Why are we so good at feeling guilty or self recriminate or seethingly and self pityingly accusatory when we wind up in that little room? What is it about living under that kind of self torment that makes or breaks us?
I know who I am. I know what I want. I know what I need, who I love, and how to manage my life. But when I'm trapped in that little room, all of that becomes muddled and questionable and possibly even unreal, a sort of fabrication or dream, a lie that we tell ourselves when reality just really super sucks. But then when we're not trapped in that little room, we can see it for what it is, its own great big lie in a stewpot full of uber negative emotions. It's like a special sort of hell that we fall into and have to find our way out again, like a changing maze or labyrinth, and oftentimes the only way we can manage that is with some kind of medication and loads of support from people we can't see that we are repelling.
What gets really stupid is when medications tip you into that hell room and lock the door. Surprise! There've been a number of times that what got me through the day was realizing early on it might be the meds I'm on for something else, and then I can watch the clock and hang on to a countdown till those meds are more out of my system.
I am currently on THREE meds that I absolutely cannot stop taking cold turkey without winding up in a hospital for something very serious. Top of the list is the kind of seizures that can kill you, and right under that is psychotic episodes. Wheeeee. I'm in a little hell room on meds that can make me psychotic, yay!!!
I'm not very nice on days like this. I'm also not very good at juggling convos on the internet like this. And this is on top of autism spectrum. I reached a point earlier today where cognitively I could barely even function enough to write a short reply back in a game chat.
When I am like this, the best thing anyone can do is just hang out with me. I have a friend who is an expert at that, and today was fun because there were experiments blowing up zombies going on, and I enjoyed just seeing the reverb roll up in the chat. It was the perfect distraction. I have other friends and friends of friends who wanted to try to help me do something complicated, and for some reason when stuff like that comes up, it's always a right now drop everything else I'm doing multiple convos kind of thing, and there is just no way any of us would have survived that without me mutilating a few people. There is absolutely nothing anyone can do to help me fix that, and although it's very natural for people to want to jump in and be helpful, mowing me over in the process without understanding what I'm having to process through will only end in weeping and gnashing of teeth on my end. Every time. So the best thing I could do was keep telling people thanx but maybe not right now, keep my head down, and ignore the sad feeling overwhelming me because even though I'm in the middle of whatever, I'm actually the one being left behind, and no one understands that.
I'm coming off of one of the cruddiest weekends I've had in months, one of the emotionally toughest couple of months I've had in awhile, during one of the most challenging med years I've had in ages. I mean, good thing I'm in as good a shape as I'm in to handle all this, because I'm walking an edge that would have flatlined me a few years ago, and I'm not joking. That's not a joke.
I don't interact well on bad days. Some people know me well enough to say I can go downhill pretty fast even on good days. Yeah, I write millions of words, but I think maybe 6 people have ever heard how fast I can crash and burn over a phone just trying to have a real-time convo with one person. Now imagine an autism spectrum person living with a nerve disorder in her clumsy arms and hands and severe depression on a high pain day and meds going wonky trying to type quickly enough in two different group chats and one or more private messages while all the words are rolling (thank goodness I'm a speed reader) to have meaningful interchange with people who are shortcutting their thought processes and carrying on several other convos themselves while they multitask. It's almost absurd that I can kind of fake keeping up with all that. Throw in a misread or missed sentence, someone bypassing direct interaction with me and hooking me up with someone else who was told I need assistance with something I'd already told 2 other people I won't be doing right away, and there I go, full blown aspienado balking to a dead stop asking for more detailed info on who said what where and why, and alla sudden I'm a bad guy and no one's talking to me.
At least, that's what it feels like.
Enter little room from hell.
I won't share what went through my mind in there. I'm just glad I caught it as quickly as I did. The meds I'm on are a very bad combo, and I moved up a follow up with my primary care to talk about starting at least one taper asap.
I wrote this on Sunday afternoon of the 28th when Pinky blog was still closed.
click for wallpaper
So I put myself on bed rest, because I'm terrible for grinding myself to an actual standstill even when all the sirens are going off and defcon warnings are going on system wide. I've made it, what, about 3 years now since an autoimmune flare? I'm in severe fibro flare, and some kind of spinal nerve trunk flare, because my left leg and foot ache really bad and all my toes feel like I broke them on a coffee table or something, but so far so good on appetite, sleeping, and the usual restlessness. I'm trying to medicate more, y'all know I really hate that and any doctor would heartily laugh and then go, Yeah, NO, like this, and then triple everything I'm taking and then I'd morph into a lethargic reptile. I mean, no offense against reptiles, but srsly, I'd be like that.
Played single player for a little while in between surgey power stuff because big storm last night shredded the forest a bit and threw a few branches around, hit a bored jag and dug through wallpapers for awhile, then played around with the search bar, plugged in variations of Pinky, by the way here's other Pinky if you really wanna check her out, she's actually pretty cool.
Anyway, I'm flipping search engine pages and run right into 'pinky, guerrero, hypertorus, rulz- giphy' and thought, hm, I've never loaded anything to giphy, what's up with that? So I went over there and saw that, indeed, there was Pinky blog listed as a source for this thing.
And it does click to the post I used it in, but MY post sources it correctly from blingee. I don't know how and why stuff like this happens, no idea if it's auto curated or someone manually loads.
K, just discovered I have more followers on Quora... I never go there. Not even going to link it.
Yeah, I know I'm talking to myself because Pinky blog is still dark, I'm just waiting for it to flatline. I mean, srsly, my stats have looked like a heart rhythm for months. Too bad most of it was from one source or that might've been cool.
Personally, even being a search engine queen and a super lurker and part time stalker, I have *never* opened up anyone's page multiple times a day, certainly not for several days in a row, much less for weeks and even months at a time, and even though I have actually been lurked hard in the past (my heaviest lurker back in 2008 opened my blog nearly once a day for 8 straight months, and I had full stat details every single time, including location and service right down to street address) by a number of people with no idea how in the world I could possibly be that fascinating, ok long run on sentence where was I. Oh, yeah, even with my own skillz, I've never been obvious. I imagine there are a couple of people who have noticed me because they're like me and pay attention and I was actually stalking a little bit, but dang, I never did it like anywhere even close to this level. It's completely not like anything I've ever seen in all the years I've been blogging. I'm very experienced with stats and being super lurked and even stalked.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now it's Tuesday.
Monday was hard.
Ok, Sunday evening I got some stuff thunked out. This last month I've been snacking. A LOT. Especially this last week. On carby stuff. A LOT. Years ago before I got my diabetes dx, I remember all my joints hurting real bad and feeling miserable, and my doctor back then kept throwing prescriptions at me instead of letting me see an endocrinologist (she finally relented after several months and we discovered my TSH was horribly flying right out of the solar system), and it helped to get that med adjusted FINALLY, but it didn't fix all the things. I remember back then that she wasn't worried about my blood sugar reading, which surprised me looking back once I discovered she had noted my ketones were high. A new doctor in 2011 dx'd diabetes and my whole life changed and I started feeling better, and everything since then has been about recovery and healing and coming back from years of immobility and excruciating pain. My diabetes has been well controlled for 5 years.
Until now. I checked my fasting glucose Monday morning, was 110. There are jobs out there requiring their workers to keep their fasting glucose below 100, so you KNOW that's the best predictor of lost work hours. I started sliding all through May, since my empty nest routine has been skewed into a whole new lifestyle and I'm surrounded by high energy people eating very high energy food. If I really look at what I'm doing, I bet my ketones are going back up and that's why I hurt all over and feel so tired. I'm dragging through sticky blood sludge and backed up getting the trash out of my body, and simply calling this a fibro flare is just me being stupid. Time to get back on track.
Point blank, I did this to myself, and I know better. I created this internal misery that affected all my systems and other health problems and threw my psychological balance off on top of it all because I felt so rotten. I felt in the way, got super crabby and peevish, and we can't just blame all that on autism spectrum complicated with anxiety and depression. Diabetes affects brains. If I don't want to be a drag on my family, NO MORE JUNK FOOD. My brain cannot handle carb loads, and woe be to ye if that's what I'm doing.
Aside from that, Monday sucking was a whole lotta neurodiversity hurricanes going on in my area that would make for great TV. I just stayed out of it as much as possible. I know the brains around me only see the klumsy outside of me, and I don't always make sense, and I don't emotionally connect well, so they can't believe that on the inside of me I really do get how their brain styles shape their world views and that they can't see several moves ahead on the chess board like I can, and they don't remember and learn from the past the same way I do. They don't see themselves objectively, the way they assess their situations is different from the way I assess mine, and their missing gap is a vital problem solving skill set that I was born with because I'm autie. ADD and autie working together makes a great team, but when we're all stressed, it can be pretty disastrous. I know I'd have handled things better if I'd been taking better care of myself physically, and I see controlling my diabetes as first line of defense against life sucking in all other ways. I cannot have a good life if my brain is flailing around in sticky blood sludge and I hurt all over.
THAT is aspienado's problem solving skills. Start with me first, assess, organize, prioritize, schedule. Get my own stuff lined up before I step into trying to fix anything else. Other people's lives are their own business, but I can make things easier by smoothing out the wrinkles as they fly by, and that makes me valuable. I like being a valuable person. I can't be valuable like that if I'm stuffing my face with crap.
So here we go, #transparency. Going to spend the summer getting the fasting glucose back down, shedding a few pounds, getting my workouts going again, and focusing on positivity and feeling better. That's my job. Sliding into depression fueled by carbing out and chain reacting a serious disease across all my other issues is stupid stupid stupid. It's one thing to live with depression, it's another thing to coddle it and support its cancerous growth.
That was fun. What else is going on? Hang on a sec, I need to say something, if stalker person ever actually reads all my stuff instead of just poking me over and over. Dear Person Doing This- I'm not a mind reader, and I don't do head games. I'm busy. You could be Christopher Pike stuck in a chair pushing a button, or you could be a brilliant psychotic enamored with Pinky, or you could be a 5 year old with someone's stolen phone, or you could be... you get what I'm saying. If there is a point to this, it's getting lost. But if this is what I think it is, maybe this (below) will make sense, and if it does, then I hear you. And that is all that needs to be said as long as this continues without real change. All I care about on my end is what I got out of the flatline and then the resuscitation.
I banished myself to my room for the rest of the weekend. My biggest challenge is not being able to Pinky in real life. btw, all pix click to sources.
So it was like when the Master kept hearing that beat over and over and it drove him mad. I just had to turn that off. Statcounter is gone, the blogger page count is gone, it's all gone.
In the interim, I lost it over a cupcake joke and turned something tiny into something really big and stupid, and all sifted out, I'm pretty sure the root of the big meltdown was pain management fail and me trying to keep covering and doing instead of timing out earlier and saving us all a lot of awkwardness.
It's been a long chilly very damp spring during a tough life change event now being loomed over by an impending death event, and I broke away from my focus into meltdowns left and right. I've gone back to super core dark corner on the ol' PTSD coping skillz, and I'm basically just not talking to anyone.
But I am reading the internet. It's a nice compulsion in a pinch.
Sorry, got distracted, but this next click is so worth getting lost in.
I'm not sure when I'll turn Pinky blog back on, but I'm still in here.
:edit: 5-29-17 I meant to stay banished longer, but I got a sweet inclusion in an official autie blogger list, what kind of timing is that. The cosmos kicked my butt right back out there.
Sorry about that, left you guys hanging for a few days. Yesterday was one of those marvelous dives into aspienado obsession along with real life ironies like Scott's ex hanging out in our house and laughing at Bunny antics over a cheese sampler plate. Despite every kind of awkward that a pending cancer demise brings upon a family, I appreciate foremost that, being the one who has learned to step back the most, awkward social situations is something I now see the older women on my mother's side conquering most graciously when I was a child. Etiquette under pressure is a skill I've fled most in my life but funnily happen to be kind of good at. Also, it helps being utterly obsessed with a misguided notion that someone could conceivably mess with my villagers on an ungriefable claim, which kept me busy and way under the radar for hours while other people around me coped with very hard stuff.
This is probably hard to see, but that is a double fence row. We're supposed to keep 250 blocks between us when claiming, but I'm already claimed out and can no longer expand, so I allow other players to build near me. I've even said go ahead and claim right up to my lines. I like that I have neighbors, and you can see that cute house in the distance, right? That little house is between my big Yablo claim and the village I claimed that I'm currently standing on a little platform over. To the right of that is a big build by a player who has already been banned, and the big build to the left is a player who has actually been getting free fence from me without mentioning it was going all around my village claim... joke's on me.
Time flies on a server, and I was off doing other things while these big structures went up near me. I didn't even see them until I ran into them yesterday going to check on my village, which used to be out in a rugged wilderness and now seems to be a rugged outcrop in New Jersey, possibly just outside Philly. I actually like it, not complaining at all, because it makes my builds look way more metro and cool, considering we're only a short distance from my huge claim with the big glowing TV glasses and the big sculpt glowing in the sky.
But. I also discovered that all that player has to do to get into my village now (formerly impenetrable since grief proof means no one can open a gate and no one can break blocks near it without claiming blocks) is place a dirt block next to their fence to get on top of their fence, then simply jump over both our fencelines onto my claim. I have no idea if from there they could mess with my villagers at all, probably not, BUT simply being near or in there would have all the mobs spawning in the vicinity, and mobs kill villagers. I was down to 3 by the time I went there yesterday checking on them, and I know I had at least 7 a coupe of weeks ago, and that they were having babies, a first for our server where other players have really struggled trying to get their villagers to reproduce.
How to prevent further deaths and still retain aesthetic integrity... I elected glass dyson dome. Yes, I know, my default sux and you guys have cool mod packs, go suck it, ok? Also, I turned down an offer from an architect on server to turn all that into an invisible barrier. I spent DAYS collecting sand and smelting it into an uber treasure of glass blocks and then HOURS yesterday placing all those, there is no way I'm throwing all that work away for one fell swoop of invisible barrier. I want people to SEE the work I put into that, sheesh.
Oh, you noticed. 😋 I'm mocking the economy by converting the temple into emerald blocks. The entire village will slowly convert into a fun little place, but for now, it's mostly just on hold.
I probably shouldn't reveal his whereabouts, but what the heck.
Couldn't resist.
And since we are the BEN clan...
And I got a little subtle, this is a fave Ben Stiller character.
There are a few more. OriginalSteve apparently got mobbed, but Jeff survived
along with a couple others I didn't name and don't think are cool enough puns to share, so. OH, and BenedictCumberpickle is gone, too, wah. Oh, well. It was a cumbersome name... get it? Nevermind.
I'm a bit rankled last few days and kinda cranky online, but so is everyone else irl in between crying jags, so I don't feel like talking much. I know people wanna help, but I can't handle when it comes from all sides. I can't pretend to be sweet when I'm going pure shutdown and all I see through the flames is other people not listening to what I really really need, like an hour of quiet time, because y'all don't see a very busy tiny person zooming around my house and I'm just trying to stay sane without small talk making me crazier because I'm on the edge of internal meltdown. The autie stuff I read doesn't even begin to cover this level I live with in my own head and begs off with too much disclaiming and redefining, and I'm here to say hellz yeah I'm obsessing because it's my frickin escape from flaming everyone into charcoal. Escapism is real and it's good for the soul. And relationships. Plunging into rabbit holes keeps me from blowing everything up between me and the people I love while I'm having trubba coping emotionally because I'm in core meltdown and hard shutdown and the words don't come out my mouth and fingers right in real time. The only way to stop it is for *me* to stop talking, and that's what I need to do.
This was me last night not doing /abandomallclaims and deleting moc off Jawn's hard drive. My mood was horrible.
