Rosie

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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

little green dots

Changing my wallpapers. That one above clicks out if you like it.

If anyone is really playing attention, vs just freaking out on twitter and facebook, it looks like martial law was finally put into writing just before Christmas, and there are all kinds of interpretations going on about what's going to happen next. Well, we are preparing to go to big war again (per people we know being called back into training), and I've been saying for years we'll eventually be living in a nationalized police state. Those of you who watch scifi have seen how this works in shows like Continuum, so it's not a new idea at all, and even part of our entertainment. I've been saying for years that TV prepares our minds for change by slipping in ideas over and over, and scifi is a major vehicle for that. Stuff doesn't happen overnight and most people's lives won't really change that much (just like all the other incremental changes we've gone through over the decades that we've already forgotten about), and life will go on. How we want to continue is up to us. I personally don't want to be a big drag, so I try to stay focused on my own microcosm, which includes my physical and mental health. How can I be good for people? That is a question I ask every day, and every day I find a way to be good for someone. I may not be able to control the big scary stuff, but I can certainly paint the smaller stuff around me any color I want.

There are no good guys up there in the scary stuff. The only 'sides' involve millennia-long bloodlines that control the world moneys and the people they front as governments. We are already living everyday lives underneath a broiling civil war above us, and you can guess at what's going on all you want but you'll never see the answers until you understand the biggest picture. Having answers won't change a single thing in your life. Obsessing and worrying and ranting will only bring people down all around you and make you more depressed. You are a 'prole', you always have been, and you always will be, even if you think you are white collar in an upper crust job. You will always be one of the cattle beneath the biggest picture. You mean nothing more than that, so you may as well calm down and create your own meaning.

I've gone through my own evolution over the years. I've come back from soul-draining illness, I've wrestled the blackest depressions and floated around in gurgly bubbly euphoria, I've been through brain crash and world crash and server crash and life crash and very real nasty car crash. I've lurked through the depths of despair on the webs, watching people like me finding ways to survive. And we all want more. Who am I ? What do I want? World of Spin

2016 was hard. I slipped backward into more depression and lost my focus and my discipline and 2017 started off with uber pain and I spent 6 months going through med fails, and finally wound up in an unrelated surgery last month. Through most of 2017, my life has been upside down helping other other people adjust to life crash/change, and there is nothing like everything in your world being fail and upside down to sift out what you really WANT when things start calming back down a little.

I want my focus back. I've got my discipline, big time. I grew wealthy on a game server through constant internet glitch, and that was a focus distraction through depression from real life that I was accidentally thriving through just running to keep up with daily chore grind in all my pain, and I come to the close of the year with not just a will of steel, but a diamond tipped edge on discipline. I look around me and see a jumble of junk because that's what life is like with a 4 year old, but I look inside of me and see everything in order, all my junk sorted and organized and ready for action because I've been so focused on surviving real life daily/weekly crisis management through real life pain management, and I'm getting goooooood.

Now, to turn all that back around and apply it to my original focus out here. I am equipped like I never was before, bulked up in metaphorical armor and weaponized with god enchants like infinity power punch flame smite knockback looting efficiency fortune feather-falling depth-strider projectile-protection blast thorns. I'm so good in game that I'm like lemme finish chopping this tree first while mobs bite and sting me from all sides, then casually turn around and pop them all into little green dots that roll up into my experience and level me up some more.

If we could see that happening in real life, all the crap and junk would feel more fun, wouldn't it? We'd be able to see our advancements and achievements even if everything was feeling junked up and stupid. We'd be able to show other people our metaphorical coolness and say Hey, wanna band up and go conquer? I need a badass adventure for a cool power boost.

And that's what life is. On our dumbest days we can't see that we are having badass adventures. We are conquering the toughest demons and leveling up all kinds of little dots we can't see while we wade through stupidity and sad. We feel alone while other people all around us are doing the exact same thing.

We're not alone. And we are badass because we're still here.

2018, here I come. Throw snakes and spiders at me and I'll give a hearty laugh. Show me an impossible mountain and I'll say Hang on, lemme get my gear. Glitch my flying pet out of existence in mid air and I'll go find another one and level it up. You can't stop me.

I'll find my way

I'm inserting random pix off my photobucket for no reason at all.

July 2007
Scott has no fear

So my internet is slower than a slug in an ice storm right now. I can't pull up a game server or youtube or facebook or anything on search, and not even blogger. So I'm on notepad. I wonder if I'll be able to paste it over later. I hope it keeps this font, I really like it.

April 2008
Steve the duck, turned out to be a girl

I'm in 'flat effect' lately, likely a survival mechanism for holidays, and my emotional interaction is at one bar out of five. It doesn't mean I don't care, it just means that if I start feeling the care stuff, I'll cry easily or get upset over stupid little stuff. It's easier to just not feel while it all passes over.

March 2009
vulture right by the house

I don't have big plans for Christmas. Scott will be on vacation from work in a couple of days and be hanging around through the new year. Bunny's school vaca will coincide nicely with his. Even though I'm recovering very well from surgery- wow there's no scroll with this... hang on.

June 2009
for real, in my henhouse, this snake was 6 feet long all stretched out

Dang it, I lost my font. }=l Lemme see if I can manually recode it here now. Oh, cool, I fixed it. Weird, now the wrap is off. Oh, ok, human error.

December 2012
feel lucky not to live inside a city

Ug, now it looks awful in blogger preview. It's daintier in the editor. Hang on again. Ok, at least breaking it up in colors helps.

November 2011
I found myself! Pinky Robot

My eyes have really changed this year. I'm having difficulty seeing colors on black. I used to have so much difficulty seeing black on white. Honestly, I can see colors on white the best. Wonder if I can change the background. Ew, total fail. I need the entire background blanked out. I'm too tired to dig around in the advanced editor. I'm going to re-black it out, apologies to those of you who get Pinky posts in emails. I don't know yet if this will turn out really hard to read like that.

November 2006
coming back from Dogwood Hill

And now the code is so mangled in my html (that's so laughable, I hafta use CSS for a lot of it nowadays) that I would be a fool to go back in there and try to fix anything. So, I'm going to stay out here in the 'compose' editor and hope I don't super screw anything up.

March 2008
we still have this truck

I really don't know why you're still here reading this, but in case you are, I'm about to get back to Christmas, lol. And I guess I'll just stick to this color now. Where was I? Oh, yeah.

October 2012
along my street

Even though I'm recovering very well from surgery, I'm not perky enough yet to jump into Christmas, and since I'm not that terribly helpful (except keeping the dishes and laundry done up kind of thing), I'm mostly stepping back out of the way and everyone can do their thing and not worry about me. I am pretty much doing my usual bowing politely out of plans and just humming along in the background helping some of the chaos run a little more smoothly, which I'm really good at most of the time anyway.

March 2008
from my back yard, high up on a flint ridge in the Ozarks

So on Christmas, I won't be cooking much, won't be going anywhere, and will likely be focused on the Mo Creatures server and the Doctor Who special. It's looking like we won't be getting fiber hooked up by Christmas like originally planned, the crews are going a little slower now after breaking water lines twice, and every home will get two visits between strategically mapping best hookup and then testing actual hookup once the lines are finally all in the ground. So between electrical brownouts and weather affecting my router, work crews blipping my existing wifi here and there (radio interruption is horrible around here, doesn't take much at all when your neighborhood is laid out along a flint ridge), and my usual chaotic real time interruptions because life and people and stuff, I'll likely be popping on and off, afk-ing, and intermittently checking my social medias on my phone all through Christmas Day.

March 2009
also from my backyard

Well, that's about it for now. Maybe I'll try to share more pix through 2018. Hope you guys are having fairly decent holiday seasons, and if it's stupid and hard, let's just keep ourselves distracted and busy and checking in, ok? I'm sticking around, and I'm already slamming 2018 up against the wall and telling it I'm the boss of me, not the whimsies and fates of a world around me freaking out over every little thing. 💗 

lyrics

just enjoy the game

you get far enough down 'thanksgiving walking dead meme' in google search, you forget why you were even there

I got lost in that search last night before I caved and went to bed. I think I'd go to sleep faster with a brain chip letting me mindlessly cruise nonsense.

So last week today I was 203 pounds and super calm before surgery. Within 24 hours I'd zoomed up to 215 on IV fluids and whatever my body started hoarding because it must've thought I'd been attacked by ice picks and had a piece of me stolen slick as slick. That was a little alarming so I looked it up, guess it's common to do that with surgeries, basically just take good care of yourself and let the fluids sort themselves back out. Today I am down to 206, which is fantastic compared to some people in the med forums, and apparently means my kidneys are in great shape chugging it out, yay! And that is why you wanna take care of your kidneys, people.

Another thing I learned, since I'm not a surgery queen and usually stick to the more mundane whiny chronic stuff, is that an ileum is about the last thing to come out of the whole knocked out stupor, and everything trying to leave ahead of it is like the worst traffic pileup you ever saw. I wasn't given after care instructions on anything diet or digestive except start slow and eat what I want. By day 4 I was becoming an expert on looking all the things up, and after all the stuff I've read from every point of view imaginable, it really doesn't matter a hill of beans what you eat and you should always have a bottle of milk of magnesia on hand anyway. Softeners and hydrating didn't work at all, moving around more while slacking off on pain meds backfired into every conceivable regret, all the correct food in the world can't make a difference if it's at the back of the line, and probably the only thing I'll do next time I have surgery is stick to clear fluids the last 12 hours or something. At any rate, we're all very happy now. If you've got a friend or family member going through surgery and don't know what to do for them, trust me, a bottle of milk of magnesia is pretty wonderful and will make you the hero.

And then of course, I just started typing in whatever question popped into my head into the search bar. How long do my incisions hurt after gallbladder surgery? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people had asked the same thing. Some people hurt for weeks when they sneeze or move wrong or sit too long, so grain of salt, I'm keeping in mind that I got stabbed by ice picks and there are lots of little nerve endings in skin and the tissues underneath because being able to feel stabs kept our ancestors alive longer and they probably fought back, ducked and dodged, or ran for cover while I was knocked unconscious and purposely stabbed under some big lights. That stab memory will probably always be there locked in the tissues now, and it'll just become part of my overall nerve pain disorder if it becomes bothersome. Other people yapping about weeks later sneezing took a big load off my mind. It's easy to imagine the worst when someone else pokes a hole in you.

And I got to thinking, it's funny that people will let their gallbladders go defcon and become emergencies while they ignore them, but then fret over ever little sensation while they heal after surgery. Humans are weird.

Bottom line, if you're not taking good care of yourself before the surgeries start rolling in, don't expect to heal on demand kind of thing. And the opposite is true, too, ran into a lot of people getting back to their workouts too quickly and winding up back in surgeries to fix rips in what wasn't done healing yet. Y'all need to chill. Just because you think your body should such and such in your mind doesn't mean you're the boss of reality. Just because people are going back to work in 3 days or a week doesn't mean everything super healed super fast and you're a chump because you can't live up to a rumor standard. As far as I can tell, it all sucks, we all suffer, and it all takes time.

When I was in ER earlier this year, hanging out for a few hours in the waiting room, there was a guy dripping blood down his arm who had managed to elude everyone and went straight to the public coffee cart. I was mind numb with pain in a wheelchair after an ambulance ride, still waiting to get triaged, everyone around me pulling back from this guy and I'm parked right there. I just smiled and said You need to keep pressure on that. I mean, crazy or not, I'm probably crazier, so who cares. He got bashful trying to cover the blood dripping and getting coffee at the same time, evidently priorities are a problem in his brain, and he said he pulled his IV out. I laughed and said It's not like TV is it? I did that once, ripped it out in a bathroom, blood everywhere like the zombie apocalypse. And then everyone around us started relaxing and people finally found the guy and got him to the police desk to get his arm bandaged, and someone else cleaned up. I cleaned in hospital one year, I had no problem with that blood. I am OSHA trained and cleaned stat contagion many times all over the hospital. I was also the only one who talked to that man like a human being. The rest was just funny to me, but I thought that part was sad.

Around Thanksgiving, Americans make big deals about going to homeless shelters and feeding people. There were plenty of people in need around me in that hospital waiting room. One woman was clearly homeless but very organized. She had a travel case with wheels and a couple old pillows tucked into the pull out handle. Everything she needed was in that bag, including a book. I take a bug out bag with me nearly everywhere I go, too. I feel safer when I have all my little comforts with me if I wind up stuck some place waiting for something, like having my car worked on. When pre-triage came out to get her vitals, she clearly stated she was there because it hurt to pee, and apparently knew how to get help about it, was probably the best behaved person in the whole waiting room because she knew how to stay out of trouble. Conveniently, it was also better than being outside in the cold. I'm sure she knows every public area open through the night all over town. On my own really bad days when I can't stand being alone, I take my bug out bag and go hang out at the library or the hospital, some place big where I can move around a bit and still have facilities and people around me. I used to hang out at the airport when I was younger. I don't think I'm alone doing that. I think a lot of people hang out all over town like that. Some people go shopping and don't realize they're using the excuse to be doing something when they really just want to not be alone. When I retailed, there were customers who knew the store better than we did.

If you don't know what to do with yourself or your life and you want to be helpful, go hang out at a hospital on a holiday. Just move around from one waiting area to another, check out the coffee shops and gift shops, notice the families camping out around births and deaths and horrible accidents and cancers and stuff. And then go check out the opportunities board and ask about volunteer positions. Volunteers are awesome in big buildings. They train you to help move patients in wheelchairs after check in, or answer questions at a desk, or other stuff. A lot of places have volunteer programs. You don't have to just do it on holidays and twiddle your thumbs the rest of the year.

This meme cracks me up because I saw someone actually do this on a minecraft server, just purposely dump a lot of leveled up diamond armor and weapons into a deep ocean after a bad day. Sometimes you let go of the material stuff and just enjoy the game.

click for diamond memes

I've got Bunny tomorrow while her mama works, and Papa's work is having an employee cookout, so I think me and Bunny are going to try making shortbread cookies. I'm stuck with gluten free flour and no xantham gum, and it hit me that shortbread might be the ticket. There are no eggs or leavening, just 3 basic ingredients, and from there I can add gingerbread spices or melt chocolate chips into butter or whatever, and we can do cut outs and colored pinwheels, and I also found a shortbread spritz, so we can get the cookie press out, too. I haven't had a real cookie day from scratch in a long time, and I think tomorrow will be a really good day for that.

I've also been getting my own Turkey Day menu assembled, getting that cooked up today so I'll be out of the way tomorrow. I'm making cornish hens with homemade herbed biscuit and cornbread stuffing (yes, all gluten free, super allergic to wheat), a mashed tato and steamed broccoli. I'm going to record Macy's parade on Thursday in case Bunny misses the balloons, because she's high energy and will probably be too excited to be that patient. I stopped my pain pills so I could save one for tomorrow and one for Turkey Day, so today I'm having a little bit of a withdrawal headache, but I'll be ok. Me and opioids probably go back through several lifetimes, I'm pure addict on those, and have mentioned my love for vicoden in the past outweighing my love for anything and anybody else. If you know someone who has quit drinking or doing drugs/meds over the holidays, please be kind and gentle with them. They won't be feeling well because it's a real bitch dealing through that thick haze of suck, and it takes awhile to get through it. I still crave every single day and it's been at least 25 years since I quite drinking and smoking, plus here I am back on an opioid for surgery and doing low dose xanax this year staying mood stable (I check in regularly with both psychologist and psychiatrist). Holidays are very stressful. If you're stressed out, then you know the person in withdrawal is very stressed out, too. Not the best time to talk politics and religion. If you can't just enjoy your family over a nice meal, maybe make other plans that are healthier for your mental and emotional function.

Sorry so wordy, this might be my last chance to hang out on Pinky blog for awhile. Not sure how the rest of the week is going to go.

Love you guys. All my people. You know who you are. 💕

it's all right

the description when you click is sad 😢

When this post elicited this response yesterday, I burst into tears because I knew someone actually heard me.

I've said before that sometimes my worst days are also my best days. This comment happened a few hours later.

There are days where family and friends don't know what to do with me, and I withdraw for all our sakes because my world is so black no one can handle me. Thank goodness for this distraction, which happened in the nick of time. Not sure if you can see it without a facebook account, although it is public.

I rarely reach a point where I'm listing possible names to grab on some kind of call or private messaging, but yesterday I was down to 3 names and ticking a list of what each person could probably handle on short notice without it actually killing a relationship and coming up empty handed. Having social media accounts on the internet was that little ledge I hung onto with one last claw.

Thank goodness time passes, but I wasn't released until I made it through the kind of long and detailed nightmare that spits a person out on Monday morning feeling really crabby. Thankfully, crabby is one of my salvation modes, and then there was coffee. And then I got busy and now I'm mostly ok.

#transparency My world doesn't feel ok. I'm pretty sure it's a virus and my nervous system is doing its best, but in my brain (nerve central) it feels like everything is so sad that I can barely make a plan, and I think I need to leave the house in 30 minutes for an appointment. I'm pretty sure my mood swings will be off the hook until this virus is over, and I very naturally fell into a writing rhythm dealing with it, like I have trained myself for years to do when I don't know what else to do.

On days like this, tears just stream down my face nonstop. Sometimes I don't even notice. I don't actually cry or weep, they just stream. When I think about it, I'm actually thankful because the nerve damage was bad enough for a couple of years not to be able to make tears at all in one eye. Tears are good.

I don't worry about what people think. No one asks, usually. I'm alone so much that there is no other outlet. People are busy and my stuff is overwhelming and transitory, and I know I can make it to another point in time where I feel better, because I have before.

All the same, I'm very tired, stuff looks and feels very hard, and I don't know if I can be good for people right now, so I'm winging it. I'm keeping it simple. I tell people around me to just tell me what to do and I do it. Tell me what time it has to be done, and I make sure it's done. I don't try to think beyond that. I trust that being told what to do and when it needs to be done by will be what I need to get through the day. Today I have several things to execute in a certain time order, and those are my stepping stones today.

This is the black side of autism spectrum egocentric narcissism in a spoonie body on a manic dip into a nonexistent abyss that feels really real. These are the moments where the word 'friends' doesn't save me, where my love for my family can barely shine a tiny light in a far off distance, and where I am the only one I can count on to save me.

God bless fans. This song has been saving me for so many years.


Time to run out our door.

honesty trumps stigma

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.

So I really went there yesterday, not a clue for hours that it was #WorldMentalHealthDay, lol.

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.

I have to run out the door, laterz.

a sprinkling of brain things

I came out a little over a year ago in this post with my diagnoses on my disability papers. I didn't link them to anything, but I'm doing that now. Each one will click to an explanation or article.

• 2007- Axis I clinical disorders of adjustment disorder with anxiety, axis II deferred but with narcissistic feature, axis V GAF of 60.
• 2008- depressed mood with congruent affect, Asperger's, GAF of 50.

My psychiatrist would like a harder diagnosis since I've progressed into dissociation issues with my psychologist, which I've basically lived with my entire life but never talked about. He asked for it last winter, and my psychologist said not yet because I was up and down dealing with pain med adjustment problems, and he said that could affect the testing and the diagnosis would be permanent. My psychiatrist reminded me again lately that he'd like that done, and now that I'm more evened out with the pain med situation and another successful set of physical therapy visits, I guess I'll see what my psychologist says.

There are a number of brain things sprinkled throughout my family. On my mom's side are Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, depression, Munchausen by proxy, OCD, and personality disorder. On my dad's side is a strong inclination to autism spectrum.

I am of the opinion that anyone on the planet could be diagnosed with some level of mental illness under the right (or wrong) circumstances. I knew I was having problems as far back as high school, and I walked into MMPI testing of my own volition in college and apparently passed just fine. Years later I asked my primary care doctor to refer me to a psychologist after I learned about Asperger's. Anything mentioned in between to family or friends was mentioned back as me being a hypochondriac just wanting attention, to which I replied I actually dislike attention anyway, so to purposely seek out negative attention seems a bit stretchy, especially since I'd been corporeally punished and lectured at length throughout my childhood and never got enough positive benefit from that to want to seek out more. Well, I didn't say it like that, but you know what I mean.

I have never been hauled in for evaluation. I have never caused disturbances that required interventions. I have never self harmed (typically, visibly) or harmed others (in ways that would get me caught). I was rigidly raised to obey, behave, and don't be embarrassing. I took longer than most kids to catch on, but because of that, I learned to self monitor and avoid unwitting consequences.

I have developed the opinion that beating, humiliating, and scaring children into submission is a very big mistake, but I can see how mentally ill people living in dysfunctional families manage to survive in society that way. Being raised to have too much pride to wind up in jail was a powerful motivator for me, although that was never said in so many words. I actually turned down a lucrative offer based on the fact that I'd eventually wind up in jail, because I personally detest being confined and told what to do. I didn't choose correctly on moral principle or because I might lose custody of my child over it, no, I chose correctly because I had a deterrent I didn't want to tolerate. I was smart enough to at least avoid that by walking away from the offer (which was actually a dangerous thing to do, and I knew it, but I had such a flippant attitude back then that I didn't care).

I'm old and wise now, like Gandalf. I see people all around me who are like me but toe the lines so their lives don't get stupid. They stick to rules and reasons for why they have those rules. I personally think most of the rules are rubbish because the reasons are even more rubbish, but whatever works, right? The goal is to function successfully enough to survive, not win a logic debate. It's easy to see how not toeing the line can go all bad real fast, and that implies stupidity, and many of us would rather not be caught being that stupid.

I've noticed that very few people have actual moral principles, and even when they do they betray them without an eye blink if it serves their momentary purposes. Human mental health is relatively new on the long term scale of human development, and survival traits often include the more cunning virtues, like being able to lie and cheat well, learning when to fake or steal without being caught, jumping into opportunities without sharing them, and more. Part of human intelligence is cunning, and cunning isn't necessarily emotionally healthy.

I think neurodiversity is in it's infancy, and I really hope it doesn't go through a sweeping genocide because of 'mental illness'. It's possible that some level of mental illness might actually be a positive survival trait for some people. For instance, my narcissistic attitude as a child about other people being stupid kept me from self destructing into self deprecation and the nasty consequences of self harm, corroding addictions, and suicide, as per discussion with my psychologist. It's true that some people benefit from help with tweaking brain chemicals, but it's also true that some of our greatest art, literature, and science leaps were borne in mentally ill brains.

I am not ashamed of a single one of my diagnoses. I didn't even know I was this much of a mess until I sought out help for a very real personal problem that bothered me very badly. I wanted a friend. A real friend, a friend who would accept me and respect me and care that I walk this earth and not just toy with me or use me. Real life isn't like television for most of us. Most of us feel lonely a lot more than TV says we should. Most of us don't have laugh tracks following us around like we're so cute even when we're dumb. Most of us live like facepalm cliffhangers that never get resolved because the show got cancelled.

Most of us remain undiagnosed.

Side story to make a point. @bonenado has shingles. He is dealing with a level of pain I've been living with for years. He has suddenly taken an interest in a little research, so I sent him a link with a list of shingles symptoms. I have been living with every one of those symptoms for years, minus the rash. I am not afraid of shingles. That doesn't mean I ever want them or that I would blow them off if I got them, but it means I'm a seasoned veteran with experiencing nerve pain and therefore don't feel that tingle of fear around the word shingles.

The idea of being mentally ill doesn't frighten or upset me. I have apparently been living with all of this for a very long time without knowing there were names for it. My life has gotten better and even easier since I found out about them. I was struggling so hard for years with why is it so hard for me to be nice. I really did try, and everywhere I went, one hour into whatever and I was in defcon migraine level hate and badly needing escape. Why? Once I found out it's because my senses are so easily overwhelmed and that my natural coping mechanisms are faulty, I stopped being so hard on myself. All I have to do is simply remove myself from a situation before it gets overwhelmingly ugly for me, and people all around think that I'm nice.

Learning to live with mental illnesses is like learning to live with chronic illnesses. You develop rhythms and lifestyles that help you stay balanced and learn to navigate the disruptions that upset that balance. I happen to need a lot of quiet time in order to cope well, and when that becomes impossible, I have fallback modes I can go into to focus my way through until I can reach a place of quiet. A lot of it is about preplanning for sensory overload, which triggers all kinds of personality issues when I don't stay smart about how I want my day to go.

It's not a piece of cake. I live with both mental and chronic illnesses. Sometimes it's really hard to get through life sucks, but sometimes everything goes all wrong and I'm fine with it. The most important thing about each moment is keep moving. Keep breathing, keep minecrafting, keep doing my laundry, keep checking on people I love, keep keeping. Enjoy the little things, treasure the moments, love all the nouns (people, places, and things).

I don't know if this will help anyone, but I believe honesty and transparency are becoming even more rare and precious in this super socially saturated world, and the more we just say our stuff, the more we'll not feel alone.

💟

Pinkyween commences

Trigger caution, graphic violence.

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.


Tomorrow is the big day.


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

see what I did there

Everything I'm doing in public online is normalizing mental health stigmas.

If you are an avid reader of Pinky blog and possibly even super lurkers continuing from previous blogs, you probably already get this.

If you are new to Pinky blog and it kinda looks all over the map and wtf, I am openly sharing what the inside of my head is like. This includes things that most people would never dream of sharing because they fear ridicule, haters mocking them, and judgment from loved ones and friends.

I'm not just writing words about it.

I'm not just posting memes and youtubes and resharing other people's words.

I'm not just compiling analysis and assessments and pov and judgments based on a personal agenda, i.e. asplaining to 'normals' what it's like being whatever dx they're curious about.

I am a complicated mashup of several dxs that include physical and mental disorders. Basically, I'm an autie spoonie depression blogger with some atypical quirks for autie spoonie depression bloggers. I grew up with questionably mentally stable parents (I'm putting this kindly, I hope), with religious culture clash, with social culture clash because of where I lived, with added traumas from my childhood lifestyle and a friend being murdered in college, with multiple injuries from a nasty car accident, with a first marriage to a very mentally ill pedophile, and with loads and loads of other things that are part of my life because family and friends have their own stuff, too.

The reason I'm sharing this way is because I realized a few years ago that simply writing out all the words that I think is explaining things actually epic fails to successfully reach the general public at large. Simply talking about autism barely even touches all that, and I'm pretty sure that is where we're all missing the boat conveying autism experience to the general public. I use my autism as a survival mechanism, and it seems to be working very well, although, yes, I have outstanding fails in my personal history.

I'm watching auties all over the world doing that now, writing millions and billions of words explaining.

I think we've said it. It's all out there now.

Now it's time to sift your personal stuff down to demonstrating. Show the world what is really in your heads. Don't just explain it. Don't stifle it all into "I'm autistic". Turn it into "I'm human."

I've said this many times. We all have something. Some of us live with multiple somethings. No one escapes this. Every single one of us on this planet is hiding a stigma of some kind, is living with something hard that goes against mainstream grain, is dealing with life and death and allthethings, and is going to die. Other people blaming conditions as being problematic things to solve is our mission- Change the world so that stops. Change that pov into loving acceptance. None of us actually asked to be here, none of us controls what we are born into, and I'm pretty sure the whole point of that is for us to make it to our final deathbed leveled up into wise wizard changing the world with miracles of attitude.

We are here to do something, be someone.

Don't dream it. Be it.

That came from a wise crazy person in a TV movie (I've never seen the play) and was originally ripped from a magazine. trivia

Now, go blog like someone's life depends on it. Lotta really sad and anxious people out there looking for ways to stay here and not opt out of life. We are the light shining in the dark for each other in a great big web world connecting all our brains now. We can do this.

When you're autie with multiple dxs

This is something I've been bringing up for a long time, just not in these words.
Depersonalization Disorder: An out of body experience

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

pink stultify

Burned out tedium, basically. I can't believe this is part of a real pronunciation series and that they spent a whole minute saying this word over and over.

This clicks to much less 'reimaginative' than the article purports.

I mean, I really was looking up 'pink stultify' this morning. That clicks to a wild assortment of imagery and even more new words. I was so surprised. Anyway, here is your basic stultify definition.

I have been feeling like this for awhile. I know a lot of it is adjusting stupid meds and being worn out with real life flinging me around and slapping me against buildings, and it's not anyone's fault. It's not the same thing as feeling bored. Also #transparency, kinda dealing with the death thing on several fronts, so aspienado shutdown is in full effect. Lotta emotional juggling going on.

These are the current repeater hits (hi, France) and they are stultifying to see, so I'm playing games, like how many sentences can these titles create if we smoosh them all together?

summer syllabus
swearing off
resuscitation
brain coffee
Vivendi
shut up!
vigils galore

Although Vivendi is swearing off a summer syllabus, brain coffee resuscitation is helping him yell shut up! through vigils galore.

Anyway, 98% of my traffic this last week as been that France thing, and Brazil and Ukraine barely even blip once in awhile any more. It's like being in one of those weird super obsessive relationships where you find out the exes quietly got axed or something. It's also opening my eyes to the kind of wonky reward systems I create for myself, and how personally I take mundane things getting in my perceived way.

the room

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.