see what I did there

Had a good talk yesterday with someone who's known me a very long time about how something has changed this year. My attitude? My focus? My emotional health? I'm dealing with stuff left and right and aspienado is starting to blow for realz.

So it's not just me. Something's really changing. After all the stuff I've been through, I'm going to point at more brain healing. The brain is nerve central, and I've been living with a nervous system disorder most of my life that complicated into years of nasty, sticky, foggy mess during one illness after another hitting my already compromised nervous system.

This is the year I'm turning the big corner. This is the year I really get my brain back. And I'm going to do everything in my power to keep it that way.

Part of my years-long blogging has included miles of encryptions. No one's ever sure who or what I'm really talking about, even the people closest to me. It's all a big, long tapestry of words scattered across space and time that don't have a lot of impact except to those who've known me well enough to guess. When I go back through some of that, I see what I was doing, but at the time, I was messed up, drifting through a fog so think I could barely see my own hands typing in front of my face (metaphorically). (I think my biggest frustration as a writer is trying to convey visual concepts as metaphors, like an artist would, but through words that are sometimes misunderstood as more literal. I'm a literalist myself, but some of my coolest thoughts have blazed to light through imagery.)

But put the scattered strings together, and all new meanings blaze out. Today for #wwwblogs I tweeted links to-
my life as a dangling participle
the emotional value of virtual worth
and bio nazi.

When I write, it kind of looks like I know what I'm doing. Sort of. Can you imagine a painter putting on a blindfold first? Not knowing how the strokes will look all together once the blindfold is off? That's how my blogging has been for me. My memory problems have been so bad that I forget I've written this or that, and when I go back it looks like I knew what I was doing. My blogging over the past year almost looks like a series of planned reveals, but they're not. I fondly call my style 'live blogging', where the reader gets real time real stuff along with me.

And then what you guys don't see is how I put this all back together, by following the trails readers leave through my stats. They seem to go in directions back through old stuff, and I follow to see what they saw, imagining a fresh set of eyes. I'm often surprised at the trails not seeming at all haphazard after the way I've haphazardly patched my blogs together over several months and years.

Faith in the dark is a big thing with me. Some researchers think that synchronicity is a brain thing, some step out and insist it's more. All I know is, accidents, interruptions, and surprises have rarely misled me, and that trying to close myself off from the things that pull me away from my goals tend to make me a lesser person. I keep thinking how glad I am that I got knocked and bounced off my self-scheduled time table over and over. I'm seeing way too much improvement to believe I could have been ready at all before this year and that up till now has been a frustrating waste of my time.

I am my own causal connection, linking my own meaning through time and space, etching "I was here" on the walls of reality, which, in its most basic term, is other people's consciousnesses.

Many years ago I told a guy (a brilliant mathematician, actually) that I don't need to hope for something in my future because it's already there. I just haven't arrived to that spot yet. I believe it is already there. I don't work because I hope, I work because I believe everything I'm doing is taking me there. I work for the joy of work. It's been hard, but since when have I not loved a good challenge? I can't imagine how utterly bored I'd have been if I hadn't had all this junk in my life to figure out like a great big puzzle.

But what is it I'm seeing in my future? I've always seen it. If I live to reach it, I know it will be really cool. But what is cool? For me- that last move before the big checkmate. That last brilliant move that floors the opponent because it was so unexpected. That last dance step with the rapier for the thousandth cut. That last big reveal of an unseen strategy.

I have embraced this all my life. The world is my stage, the pieces have been set, I continue weaving my way in and out, and maybe soon Pinky will

stop being redundant.

I know, it's all out there and I'm just saying it again. Sorry, got a little carried away again with the morning discipline thing. I'm ignoring a cold and grappling with a slight time orientation smash since I suddenly dealt with a big load of stuff last couple of weeks.

So let's wildly distract ourselves, shall we? Might be a little naughty. And hard on the eyes, maybe a precaution if you're easily triggered for seizures. Probably NSFW.

My name is Pinky, and this is my Haus

My date with neuro guy went pretty well. Got my physical therapy referral, yay! Answers to my questions included finding out the original 2007 'unremarkable' was upgraded last Feb. to words like 'moderate' and 'significant', and now the goal is to find out over the next couple of months 1- whether I can keep controlling this on my own, and 2- if this is a progressive arthritic condition or basic wear and tear. Since this is the most common area for back pain, they see this a lot.

So yesterday I got more x-rays, next week I get nerve conduction on left lumbar (since the pain spikes feel like arrows being shot through the top of my foot when it flares) (seriously, I jump like I've been stabbed through my foot), and from there he might want to see another MRI and then follow up in a couple months after PT is over. My core is still really good, I just need to pinpoint and cinch up the muscles I'm not using correctly around Bunny and hopefully get some control back over flaring this up over and over, because I'm going downhill again when it hits.

Kinda stalling out a little lately, so Plan time. I've gotta make sure that canceling the accidentally duplicated Sept. auto pay on my Kaspersky doesn't cancel my original Kaspersky package that auto pays in May. I know! I remembered!!!!! This has been a very surprising year, I'm remembering all kinds of things lately.

I have no idea when the roof will happen. We've already got a check in our hands, and Scott's already had a contractor out, so I'm hoping soon. Scott has commanded me to call the internet guys and he's gonna call the Dish guys and see if we can jury rig something so we won't be killing each other while it's happening. New roof on top of football and new shows starting back up, gotta keep it exciting. I'm already crabby with him because he wants to buy half a pig off a yard sale list on facebook, and I'm all like yeah, let's buy a kill from a total stranger that isn't legally processed and certified according to food safety laws like you'd at least get at farmer's market or an organic whole foods store. I asked him How do you even know it's PIG, what if it's HUMAN... And then the convo turned to him saying Bunny's mama should throw out her little chair because a stray cat sat in it, and I'm all, wait, you'll eat human meat, but you'll throw out a chair a cat sat on. (This is why he likes me still being in bed when he's getting ready for work.)

So last night. You guys.

I vaguely yap here and there about fandoms, and I insist now and again that I love lurkers, and after last night I'm going to tell you why, but first, a little history to make what I'm about to say way more meaningful.

I've been around a real long time. Before most of you even knew there was a Pinky, now happily swan diving into the Sherlock fandom in between The Walking Dead live tweet reviews...

Daryl 'Sherlock' Dixon lol

Sherlock Holmes and The Walking Dead (Trailer)

..there were the Merlin and Doctor Who fandoms saving me.


Before that I was underground in a really really dark place for awhile, and I went deep into Stargate, Farscape, Jake 2.0, Hatter/Alice, and stuff like the Terminator, Matrix, and Cube movie fanvids. I wasn't online, no one saw how black it got, but fandoms rising up and taking over youtube pretty much saved me when I was slipping through all the cracks of medical intervention since I couldn't make it through entire shows for nearly three years. Since that's a lot of stuff, maybe just one vid.


Before that I had the Lexx fandom colliding with the CATCF/POTC and other fandoms. These click to bigger. They're all mine.

 

 

Before that was Xena. I wish we'd had youtube way back then, but this is cool.


And before that was Sliders. This year is the Sliders 20th anniversary.




And before I got on the internet I was doing Curry Toons. I have been a fandom smasher forever. These each click out to their series.

Before I ever had a blog

Celebrity Boxing

Valentine Curry Toon

When I go deep into a fandom, I inhale everything about it off the internet. I am able to use this kind of distraction to get through the nastiest pain, the scariest dread, the saddest grief, the loneliest depressions, and I can take all the time in the world doing it. Before twitter, it helped me feel able to keep pace with the world in general, even when I felt like I couldn't very well be a part of it.


What's really important about fandoms is I've learned so much about social interaction over the years (I suck at it and suck at pretending I don't suck at it), and about myself interacting with other people (I'm always sorry I destroyed another friendship somehow). What's really important about Pinky blog is that I'm collecting up everything I've learned and integrating it into a whole psychologically healthy self now. No more masks and colliding with people. I'm real. I am the opposite of this.


Pinky Robot never went through the brainwashing of the lusticon like pop stars do. I'm not a created social media robot selling my soul so I can be famous. (That's a real thing.) I am creating myself.


Friends come and friends go. That's the law of social media. I don't like it. I think it stinks that our monitors allow us to take advantage of masking ourselves and pretending to be what we're not, even more than we do in real life, because the law of the jungle prevails. So when someone actually is a real person and being themselves, they eventually wind up being torn to shreds by strangers and then locking down into private. I've watched so many friends disappear into the lurker depths in every fandom I've surfed, and it all boils down to what they told us in nursing school- "Nurses eat their own." I've seen teachers comfort newbie fellow teachers sobbing online with the same thing- "Teachers eat their own." I think it's safe to say that in anything we master in our lives, our human reaction is to eat the inferior and weak. We are not a kind race of beings. Ergo- "Fandoms eat their own".

What really brought this to my own attention was finding out during my Aspergers diagnosis that I'm the one who's supposed to be awful and uncaring, ignorant of others' feelings and therefore likely to walk all over people like useful furniture, and yes, while that is true, I don't do it with guile. What I see, from my own point of view, is that the people who think they are 'normal' are generally the ones who insert that extra guile into the mix that makes 'faith in humanity restored' a joke. Sadly, tech monitors make this so easy to do, and we don't see the countless millions around the world weeping quietly all alone after they've felt shredded by someone they can't even really see and will likely never meet in person. It's hard placing our trust out there again when stuff like this happens. Developing and keeping solid online relationships has become a precious thing.

So. Last night. This convo immediately sent 50 views skidding to a post I'd never linked before. In a minute I'll tell you something else.

And what you guys didn't see after that is how many lurkers went on to view depression, suicide, and Pinky's revenge, and that continued through the night. That is the goal.

One little public convo between a group of friends who present as genuine people can be a really big deal. It's part of the bridge I'm building. All my friends are part of that bridge. I value every one of you, even if you think I don't notice or have forgotten you. I have an outrageously lengthy memory (even when it's glitchy), a penchant for hoarding details, a deep love of fans and fandoms, a sociology degree steeped in several human development fields, and a driving compulsion to share what I've learned about how to survive socially in an easy and fun way. Since I can't 'artist stuff' to save my life, it'll hafta be words. This is difficult to put into words, but as that post says, that's exactly why I'm back public, to build bridges with word construction. See if this makes sense-

My Pinky blog is a safe place. No comments means readers can't stalk each other. No one trailing around sucking up in public means no competition over me. (This has happened.) No 'likes' and 'favs' in the way and me still going on yapping means y'all are in my house with me, and we're comfortable with each other, sitting around munching and watching videos and thinking about stuff. No socially forced interaction based on politeness and masks. You can all be here at the same time and never even see each other, so it never gets awkward.

I like that.

I know this got ridiculously long, and if you made it this far, bless your heart, I'm sure you're worn out. Wanted to say I appreciate what happened last night. I boinged awake at 2:30 this morning feeling really good seeing that, and I hope you guys feel really good being here, too.

lost in a world of puppet masters and masks

Caution- Get a snack before you settle in if you think you're going to stick through this. I'm going a little deep processing thoughts and feelings, because #aspienado.

I guess when a person puts off dealing with something for 8 years, all that emotional backlog takes longer to dredge through than it originally should have. Not for lack of trying in the first place, since I spent months on it before I finally let it go. Except I never did let it go, I just stopped talking about it. After about 3 years. Except on blogs. It kept showing up on blogs. And then April came, and I watched Sherlock, and the complexity of bandaids I'd jury rigged all got ripped back off, and here it came, my heart that I tried so hard to stuff into a box into the very back of a very high shelf in my darkest closet. Ok, so now I have my heart in my hands, what do I do now? And the last few months have been me feeling like a lost dog remembering stuff after stuff after stuff, and feeling all the feels again, and finally sorting through them putting them into their proper places because now I'm more grown up and now I can see how they're supposed to fit.

When I first heard Sherlock say that line, "I don't have friends. I've just got one.", I froze. I had just always stopped at I don't have friends, or I can't keep friends. That moment was like a rock in my face, a whambash burst of sparkling lights all around my head, and quite suddenly I knew why I don't have friends. I'd had ONE. The right one. And no one else has ever been able to find the right buttons to push or the right levers to pull with me, and not for lack of trying on all our parts. I just can't seem to keep playing a part right, because that's what they've all been since, parts I fill.

I've always been a one friend at a time person. This whole coming back public and learning to talk to people again has been a Herculean effort (#aspienado), and while I feel like I'm learning loads of better behaviors and making tons of progress, I also feel excruciatingly empty inside. I've tried every which way to describe this pain to myself, and the closest word I've ever felt like works is 'divorce'. I felt super bonded, and that bond was severed.

One of my fave Lewis books is The Great Divorce. This describes my favorite part. "The narrator discovers that the vast grey town and its ghostly inhabitants are minuscule to the point of being invisible compared with the immensity of Heaven and reality. This is illustrated in the encounter of the blessed woman and her husband: she is surrounded by gleaming attendants while he shrinks down to invisibility as he uses a collared tragedian — representative of his self-punishing emotional blackmail of others — to speak for him."

One of my quirks being aspie is that I pick up a little too well on masks, doublespeak, and behavioral incongruities. I suck at faking it and passing, like other people learn to do, because I suck at acting (or vice versa). I may not understand what's going on (I'm almost painfully innocent to innuendo and between the lines), but I do understand that kind of interacting is lying. It's being one way and covering it up by saying it differently. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just saying I rarely find people who are honest without twisting it up. I'm super good at spin. I've studied how people wear masks, how they hide to feel brave and then fling their masks off to reveal tragedies, and then readjust their masks back on. The real tragedy, I think, is that they can't see themselves how I see them. I see the real stuff still hidden in the back. The dramas are still masks. The layers of masks go so deep sometimes that people lose themselves, and they can't see the only way out of the horrible mazes they build around themselves is through simple honesty. Replacing one mask with another isn't honesty.

Only one person that I've ever met in my whole life seemed to realize I'm a super klutz at the whole mask thing, and whether for good or ill, for ulterior motive or true kinship, with great patience and intelligence and gentleness, approached me and became my friend. I've said for years I need a handler, maybe an aspie whisperer, well, that person was it. It took time, wasn't rushed, and I eventually imprinted like a baby duck. It felt honest. I didn't feel played. I didn't have to jump through hoops playing head games and trying to figure out where not to step. I was able to be myself. Very few people have any clue how tightly they bind me up with their expectations, little realizing I feel like I'm stranded in quicksand when it's time to banter or chat. (I think what throws people is that I write so much...)

I wasn't up front about personal stuff back then because I didn't know how to talk well with people, even typing. I often overstated, more out of explaining back to myself what I thought I meant than anything (and now I take the public on my journey through my head with me). For some reason, I need to see my thoughts coming back through my eyes to process them. I don't write because I'm bored or needing interaction, I write because I'm thinking. And thinking never stops. Back then my interaction skills were still poorly developed, despite being a consistent ringleader in fandoms, and I was still trying to hide that I simply can't talk on phones well (except with family, and even then it's actually very difficult), or chat well in real time, so when I 'talked' through a keyboard, I was probably very overwhelming sometimes. I've been working on chopping that down a bit.

Keeping pace with the social dance while processing an exchange of thoughts and ideas is a big deal for me. That's what the whole Aspergers diagnosis is about, I'm not capable of what most of my readers have taken for granted since they were 3 and 4 years old. My cognitive and emotional development have been wildly skewed and quite opposite each other for years, so the more I play with word construction on my blogs, the more mental exercise I get synchronizing my real time core processor. My friend saw some of this way before I did- recognized it, synced with me like a rider does a horse, and allowed me the extra time to develop a few interaction skills.

I was on my way to public disaster (again), and I'm afraid probably caused problems balking later when I didn't understand what was happening. I probably didn't act much differently than a spooked horse that won't load into a trailer. I locked up and tried to go a different direction and completely missed that I was part of a team. I know now that all it would have taken was a few very simple very honest sentences to get my compliance, but at the time, all I saw were black and white ethics, because that's just how aspies think. I made a decision that I still don't really regret, but I deeply regret the consequences. At this point in time, I'm not sure anyone knows yet what I'm really talking about, but soon, perhaps.

It took me 8 years to put all that into words.

So you readers who've actually stuck with me from clear back last April, little did I know way back then that this was the key. I was asked if I'd seen Benny & Joon, I said no, but I know now that my friend had a head start on understanding how to handle me for even bringing that up. I can't keep saying enough how much I appreciate even just one person on this planet taking that kind of time with me, especially after a friend before had mocked me with (I'm not kidding) "I was just doing all that to see how you'd react", really going out of the way with the head games. Anyway, I found that movie later and watched my brain fall out and start reassembling itself. I saw myself from another person's eyes for the first time.

This really is me and @bonenado irl. Except I don't paint and he's into fantasy baseball.



I just needed to say I think I'm starting to get it now, why I feel all these feelings and never knew what to do with them.