hybrid- how robots go on

I wrote this last night.

She's right.

I deeply appreciate and respect people who devote their lives to standing up for something extremely difficult to talk about, and not only speak for people who can't yet handle speaking for themselves, but spend swaths of quality time helping them take those first steps out into public view. I've never known why Rachel followed and linked up with me across our medias, but, unlike so many other 'big' people, she never dropped back off as she has grown. She's been amazing to watch.

I'm floating somewhat aimlessly through email alerts full of links while I listen to a song over and over, softly ricocheting around the webs in what seems like haphazard wanderment (that's a real word), and realize when I see Rachel floating by on still another feed page that I've come full circle.

I didn't know what to write. How does a person write the numb. The pain that is so old and still so consuming that it's just part of you now. Part of every cell, every breath for years and years and years.

Because I found this today.

The woman who didn't make it in that story looked like this in school.

One of my top posts this last month has been Force choking hazard. Thank you for that. I know too many, too much.

This is one of those nights I could slip away quietly into the depths of the net and not come back. But I ran into Rachel. And then I remembered other people watch me the way I watch her. We watch because we need someone to say what we can't say ourselves yet. We hide in shadows and watch someone grow bigger than the shadows. We start stepping out because someone else showed us how to step out.

Imagine the world if we all stepped out at once. Maybe that's a thing that's already happening. Maybe #PinkyRobot's revenge will asplode the world the same way I see other people asploding it. I want so badly to blow the world up and change ideas. But a really clever robot goes slowly, moving pieces one by one, getting that pawn across the board through raging wars and bloody battlefields, ducking in and out, waiting and darting, diverting and charging, until the time comes to regain the Queen. And then words can shoot like lasers all over the board, and no one is immune.

lyrics


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And now it is this morning.

Pinky was already a robot when that happened, and it was the biggest shutdown I ever went through. How do people become robots, anyway?

Childhood Trauma Leading to Adult Emotional Shutdown

Why is #PinkyRobot trying so hard to stay public?

Emotional and Social Isolation

And now Pinky is finding all the pieces that were lost and putting them back together.

Emotionally Closed Off: Healing Pain and Learning to Love

And learning how to have friends again without scaring them away.

People Whose Feelings Have An On/Off Switch Are Terrifying

It's better to be silent and stick around saying "I don't know what to say" than to pour out support and suddenly walk away frustrated. The first action says "I love you", the second says "You're hopeless and my love is conditional."

How To Talk With Someone You Love When They Are Depressed

#Aspienado finds all this brain stuff fascinating.

Psychologists reveal how emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge

How do #PinkyRobot and #aspienado coexist?

I Have Two Personalities I Switch Between at Will

I have joked for years about Spock and SpongeBob in the same head.

Survival is always top priority. Never feel guilty for surviving. We do what it takes to survive. That includes self medicating, reclusing, masking, obsessing, and all kinds of other behaviors.

Once you become aware that you are doing behaviors to survive, you are at a good place to make decisions about stepping past those behaviors and recreating yourself. You might be really good at walking a tightrope blindfolded, but you might fall trying to step off the tightrope, so phrases like 'support network' and 'safety net' are something to think about. Make a Plan. You're not alone (not really), and there are all kinds of people who are experienced and trained to help people figure their stuff out. If you don't have family and friend support, you still have professional support.

If you have reached a point where you feel desperate and don't know what to do, all you have to do to get the ball rolling is walk into an ER and say Yes when check in asks if you have thoughts of or want to hurt yourself. It doesn't matter if you're not suicidal or not a self harmer, what matters is that you feel desperate and need help NOW. If you feel desperate and can't even do this much on your own, call 9-1-1 and they will be awesome helping you get there.

If there is no way you'd ever do that, that's cool. Go see your regular doctor and say you'd like a referral to see a mental health specialist. That's how I got my first appointment with my psychologist. I had realized on my own that I have a history of losing friends and that I thought it had something to do with communication problems, and the reason I wanted help was because it had happened again and I was so sad over it that I almost couldn't function. I needed to solve a problem that was gunking up my robot gears. Over several years we have uncovered and solved several problems directly relating to this reason for coming in, and I'm much happier and healthier now, and way more functional. Some of you watched part of this process after I committed to public blogging.

In case you're curious about what happened up there and feel brave enough to learn more, here is more. Please don't talk to me about it. You can see I'm clearly not ok. You already know I'm back in therapy. If you do one thing for Pinky- open your eyes. I understand if you don't want to see this stuff all around you. I even understand if you walk away from someone convincing yourself everything is fine and you didn't just see something bad. But keep your eyes open. Don't take the blue pill and go back under.

Guzman murder case hearings reopen old wounds

Crime's Ripple Effect

Woman furious sister's killer fathered kids in prison

Remembering Homicide Victims
Here we learn why April affects me so badly. Remember how I angsted on Pinky blog why April was always so sad for me? You guys watched me go through uncovering a repressed memory. start here for the rerun And then you watched me tie that into another friend who helped me bridge past an emotional wall 8 years ago, and I spent the summer finally dealing with losing that friend, too, although, thankfully, only because her survival mode kicked in and she kind of had to extricate from Pinky going through an existential crisis and deal with her own stuff. I still love her, and I totally get that now.

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She was a huge John Denver fan. My first 'live tweet' was us on the phone watching a John Denver special together.


She saved me in my childhood sadness. Another friend saved me in my grown up sadness. And now Pinky is figuring out how all of us can save each other in our sadness.

compromising pictures of people in my past

Tomorrow is my first day back with psyche guy. How synchronous was it that I ran into some old photos in a drawer this weekend as I was making a new place for Bunny's books and activity supplies. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Not these. These are the kinds of pictures that inspire questions. @bonenado saw one and wanted to know who that kid was. Nothing terrible, just a pic of someone's little brother whose underage sister I ran around with for awhile during one of my darker years.

Then there are the words with no pictures at all. No one even knows to ask because there's no available prompt. No one knows how many lines I crossed, and how far I crossed them.

I spent 6-7 years on a little room with a man who still doesn't know all those things about me. I frustrated his time with what I call defensive misdirective chess playing. It's kind of like playing drunk pool, people assume you're crap because you can't hit a straight shot sober, but you clean up when you get a little wasted. I also used to dazzle a few really drunk friends standing with a basketball at half court with my back to the net, and after a few practice tosses up in the air to get my feel for the weight of the ball and what I'd need from my arms given the trajectory I could see in my head, I'd send a clean shot through the hoop without ever even looking at it. But I had to be drunk to do it. I'm a born klutz deluxe. It's like I don't have access to what I need in my head unless I can bypass some sort of conscious effort. The more spaced out I get, the brainier I get, the more magical I get. It's like having super powers. But that was a long time ago, and even aspienado hits the wall getting older.

Last spring aspienado gloriously crashed through a particular wall right here on Pinky blog and all the wrong words started coming out. They weren't supposed to come out, but I couldn't stop them, and over several months they started painting a big beautiful picture of my head, and for the first time in my whole life I finally saw all the stuff in there the way I'm supposed to see it. The way I will be able to share it now with psyche guy.

I'd like to say I'm a little terrified. I'll be sharing things that could have put me in jail, things that could even get me killed. I'm not making it up. I'll be sharing things that shut me down so hard that ten years of my life turned into a confusing soup of elusive memories, and that was before the brain fail. No, I'm not terrified. I'm excited. I will be saying things for the first time to him that I've never said to anyone else, partly because of the Aspergers and I never thought to, partly because I didn't know how to sift out what was important because I never really talked about personal feelings with anyone, and partly because there's so much sad mixed in with all that glitchy memory stuff that it felt like too much work to do it.

Pinky blog broke me open, a sparkling mess of me scattered out like gems over the weeks and months, and without warning memories left and right started clicking into place. If it all makes sense now, why do I need psyche guy? Because I've still never said so many of these things aloud, even if I have vaguely written them down somewhere. I've spilled to a couple people, yes, but not enough to matter that much. I casually toss out bits of shock like someone tosses socks into a hamper and keep walking to the next convo about dinner and the mail.

It's funny to reflect on the question of Why are we here? and the meaning of suffering when we know deep inside the incongruity of all the secrets we keep. Maybe we are here to learn how to stop keeping secrets, learn how to stop forcing others to keep secrets, learn how to recognize how all the pain on the planet begins with secrets- everything from governments to people sitting alone in the dark because deep down, we all know secrets get buried, and more secrets get buried if we tell secrets. Secrets are the Vashta Nerada of this world, eating us up.

Every old photo holds secrets. Maybe pictures tell a thousand words, but they never tell the ten thousand more that lurk behind them.