Wonder if that would happen a lot more if I'd boost this post. I've never boosted a post on Facebook, but I probably will once the book comes out. One of these will click to the twitter link, which already has over 400 impressions in less than 12 hours, the other will click to its new Autisable home.
And I really don't know if that had anything to do with waking up to a Google Alert that Janika Banks has been added to a German white pages listing on Denmark internet.
This is translated.
And I wanted to see if that's a real thing, and sure enough, comes up on page 3 in a Google search for Janika Banks. Brand new out of the bag.
A couple of years ago someone told me they were going to write up my Wikipedia page, and I laughed and said sure, go ahead. No one really has yet, but for some reason I've either been auto-boosted into legitimate search or manually entered by someone on a job or weirdly obsessed. I'm going with auto boost for now. There are so many automated info pages out there I could claim (traity was dumb, I had it for awhile and let it go), but that's way too much work.
Like I told a friend privately a few days ago- "If I don't get my crap done by end of summer, I'm an idiot. My launch platform has never been more visible."
So I get a porn boost right on top of #netneutrality, crack me up, and then I get a major Google Alert on top of my self-stim post. Never in any parallel dimension did I wildly dream of sex selling anything about Janika Banks. Wow.
:edit: Space Cowboy suggests putting pretty girls in vids to sell merch. Pretty sure some of us are in it for the actual music, so here you go.
Also, this is a thing. I have lifetime potential earnings of $33, crack me up. Bet that would change real quick if I could get some of my friends talking with me about Lexx and stuff. Anyway, you can get into this and click around, kinda fun checking out other channels. Very handy.
In case some of you think I go straight to minecraft nowadays when I wake up, this morning my first laptop venture was looking up Dezi Arnaz, Jr, jumping over to Dean Paul Martin, and then on to Olivia Hussey. The whole Lucy thing happened before I was born, and for some reason, very first thing this morning I wondered whether Little Ricky (from the reruns I saw) was really their real life kid or a gimmick for the show. I knew he was Desi's kid. And I've been noticing 'old' music in Walmart this year, like The Four Seasons, which pretty much also goes back past my babyhood, so I grew up with their music. I'm near the tail end of the baby boomers. "Baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values." Some of my more recent discussions with my psychologist have been about being part of the sandwiched gen that bridges over from the older gens to the younger gens. Those of us caught in the middle pretty much flipped everything, and our society here in mainstream American has evolved from robotic patriotism (and all its accoutrements) to a big colorful mishmash of people and ideas and the hope that one day we'll all love and accept one another. I still don't see that happening without global enforcement of some kind, sadly.
So yeah, mind still blazing around, but I just don't take the time to write it out much any more.
Today is my kiddo's birthday. This is her at the same age her little boy is now.
I am diagnosed autism spectrum, pretty sure my dad is super autie, pretty sure my daughter is on spectrum, and her son definitely is. He qualifies for social integration and speech therapies (he goes to pre-pre-K) and is part of ongoing research with a doctor documenting nutritional impact on autism spectrum in babies, toddlers, and kids. I think the big idea is omega-3 boosting being a good synaptic catalyst in brain development. So far, so very good. I think she's a way better mommy than I was, although she insists I was a good mommy, too. I never bonded with my mom, and the epic fail she felt was very sad, especially without any moral support from society and family at large. My daughter super bonded with me, in spite of me seeming to lack emotional instinct (I know what is *right* and stick to it, but the feels just weren't that prevelent), and she is like super mom with her kiddo in my eyes. She has so many cool ideas and ways of doing things that didn't even dawn on me. I can see now my mom tried and even went extra lengths, so she was on the right track, just in the wrong time period for acceptance and support as a parent of autism spectrum. I see a lot of parents on medias bemoaning their bad fortune having autie kids, and I just wanna say at least you have a much more positive support system around you now. My kiddo loves her kiddo just the way he is, I loved her just the way she was, and I personally think that is the key to everything in the whole world. Look around you at all the things. When you see sadness, it all goes back to not being loved and accepted for who we are, in every country, every religion, every skin color, every body type, every brain. If we want the sadness in the world to change, it starts with us allowing and embracing differences around us, not compelling others to conform to ideas in our heads, and standing up for each others' dignity and right to be here on this planet.
Question 33: When helping others I prefer to assist with physical tasks rather than offering counsel about their feelings. Fact: Yes. Truth: OMG, can we please stop obsessing about feels? It’s distracting and it keeps us from actually solving the Real Problems Of The World. I sometimes think that neurotypical life is centered around relieving the pain they’ve caused themselves, and all they really care about is making themselves comfortable, while their lives go to hell. Rearranging the chairs on the deck of a ship that’s not being steered… as it drifts right into an iceberg field. But hey, at least they have a good angle towards the sun, so they can work on that tan that will get them laid. Right?
LOL, nailed it. I will clean your house, do your dishes and even scrub your toilets, but having to talk through the everchanging emotional slush with someone peels my eyeballs like hard boiled eggs. I personally sifted it down to I suck as a friend, which I've blogged about a few times.
My absolute fave part of this last year on social media has been watching #oddizm rise up and conquer. Finally! About time, guys. I have a couple faves, and like me, they each keep a fleet of blogs. Unlike me, they are waaaayyyyy more prolific in the whole aspie/autie asplain-all-the-things stuff, which makes my self obsession look comparatively really mild, so emotional health context gives me an A+ there. And to be fair, one of them is a real doctor with intensity I envy, the other is an exceptional writer/reveiwer, so I'm actually feeling challenged by betters now, yay!
Regular readers know I'm a neurodiversity advocate, point blank. I don't just talk about autism or compare my pov to the world at large. I'm only here to tell a story, to take readers on my journey, a path I hacked through a jungle to a better place of understanding the ultimate question for the ultimate answer of 42, regardless and inclusive of all our points of views. Regular readers also know I'm a fan of the fans, and I love seeing all the cool stuff people do in their fandoms on the webs. I believe fandoms are what build cohesive communities of acceptance across borders and languages and neurodiversities. I believe the creators of content for entertainment are leading the way to a bigger, better world.
In the meantime, we all struggle with our own stuff, and the best way I've found to survive is to concentrate on myself and not other people. It's not my place to judge, but it is my place to be smart and share what I've learned. I am no one's tool, but I am a good tool wielder. I think the most important things I've learned in this lifetime are actual real forgiveness, actual real patience, and actual real charity. Not the fake stuff. It's very important that we drop the fake stuff, because that's what's messing us up inside. Having said that, going back to question 33 up there perfectly saying how I feel in autism spectrum point of view, I'd like to add that I actually do like humans and all their funny little ways, and y'all are doing fine as long as you can keep up a little courtesy and respect among yourselves. Also, lengthy blog posts are the same as obsessing about feels, so you understand the tongue in cheek part, right? Good. Some of us 'yap' a little differently than others, and I enjoy seeing other writers expound on thoughts I've had for years.
I'm also learning I myself don't need lots of words to say these things. My personal struggle is with summarizing and condensing, which I think I'm getting the hang of. 😊 Thank you for letting me practice on you guys. Those of you who've actually read every word I've ever written (there really are a few), bless your hearts.
How else do I say this. I believe in all of us arriving together to a more beautiful place. Hang on with me.
Wake up at 2 a.m., drag into the kitchen wondering what to do, and the Lexx world is exploding with news, so I just spent an hour working- linking and sharing to #allthethings- without coffee. That's right, completely *forgot* about coffee.
I've been following several aspie/autie bloggers all fall, has been interesting watching them hacking paths through the same jungle of self discovery vs societal expectations that I've come through. A few of them are even my age, way more eloquent, and much more self aware. Seeing them gives me more context on myself and 'waking up' to self awareness. Mine was a much slower process, and happened so late, even after I made it through my diagnosis and later a disability hearing, it still took more years to process what that really means. I am a legit challenged survivor, and seeing the blogger noobs processing is showing me I'm one of the really lucky ones walking that line. The ones I'm watching were able see they needed to hide their stuff, pretend to play a social game, at least try to toe expected lines, and they're talking about how hard it was. Imagine not even knowing what all that stuff is or why you're being treated poorly by everyone around you. I was so lacking in self awareness that I couldn't see that all my oddizm glowed like neon, and I didn't have a single person to go to for any kind of solace. Because of my life experiences, I feel I have grown much more aware of differing points of view, having to work so hard trying to figure out why in the world people are like they are. I honestly didn't feel like I was meant to be human for a very long time, like I was an alien trying to pass off as human and not getting it.
Hanging on till I see my psychologist tomorrow. I've been counting down. Two different people who know me in real life have let me know over the weekend that I'm doing empathy wrong in convos that were 'just venting' and 'just worrying', so that's it, I'm holding everything down to simple sentences with short syllable words this month. Not even going to try to pretend to empathize the rest of 2016 because it's like I keep saying, I suck at it. If people wanna dump their venting and worrying on me, go for it. Just do it. I'll step aside and you can let it all out while I walk off and get a cup of tea or something, maybe offer an emoji cookie.
Advice to people who know oddizms in real life- if we're actually trying to communicate some kind of compassion, maybe just take it for what it is. Explaining what we're doing wrong instead of sharing what you actually need from us is you doing it wrong. While you're venting and worrying, please note I'm handling stuff, too, and I'm doing my best not to dump it on people. Two people actually noticed and got the subtext behind the remark I made elsewhere about donating my body to science. That is all.
I still have a very long month ahead of me. Maybe I should try getting a little more sleep.
I started this yesterday because I felt so crap I couldn't watch TV or do anything or even lay down for awhile and I was doing my best to focus and concentrate on doing something through pain, so unless you're desperate for something to read, save yourself and flee this post.
There is a place on earth worse than the DMV, and that's the social security office.
I saw a lot of all kinds of people today. I sat in a hard chair for nearly 90 minutes waiting for a turn I thought would never come, and I listened to a guy behind me talk nearly the entire time about everything in his whole life clear back to the 90s. I know his family ancestry, his work history, where he banks, what the inside of his home looks like including detailed descriptions of his furniture, where he actually lives, a number of people he's met, how various family members died, whole convos he's had with landlords, and through the entire thing he never once mentioned a spouse, children, or pets. Not once. He never shut up for well over an hour and never once brought up a relationship. And that whole time I couldn't tune him out because super aspie's so aspie, and the pain running along the nerve paths in my shoulder and neck ramped up into a delightfully nasty headache, and by the time my name was called, the people near me were actually leaning away, I'm sure probably because I looked like that one person in the entire collection of mentally and physically disabled specimens that might actually pop a cork and have a real meltdown. I did my best to sit still and not look like I hate the whole planet, because I really don't, it's just the pain, but I was this close to tears and the only thing holding them back was allowing myself to be pissed that the guy just wouldn't shut up.
I was the scary one in the room. The quiet type who visibly struggles to hold back whatever is fighting to get out.
The guy who finally called me back was awesomely nice. He assured me that I had the short form, and that simply mailing it back at all with any kind of noted touch base with a real doctor in the last 2 years was all they wanted, because so many people get their disability settlements and disappear. He looked up my stuff and was surprised I got the short form, because at this stretch of time people usually get the long form, so he looked some more at the notes about my disability hearing and was impressed and said no wonder. I said yeah, I'm one of those that got it on the first try, both cognitive and physical, and part of the visit today was making the mistake without supervision before I mailed it off. He assured me again it would be fine, and not to worry about that triggering a more lengthy reevaluation or stopping my payments. At first I was a little confused by the continued reassurances, but I guess he didn't understand- I was there because of typos. I told him I wasn't worried about another evaluation, hadn't even thought of losing the financial support. My medical file isn't growing any thinner. I was there because my cognitive disability compulsed me to freak out about typos. I'm an autism spectrum freakazoid who can't live with something written down wrong on a piece of paper. I have piles of spirals all over my house full of scribbled notes, years and years of spirals, and no matter how many notes I write and how many blogs I have, I still make stupid mistakes on simple forms and never even notice. There is something about filling out forms that shuts my intelligence center down. I'm professionally trained to assess and care plan and tech talk, but hand me a form and all I have to do is write down a number and sign it, I get it wrong every time.
I don't say that much about what really motivated me back out on the webs. I've mentioned just missing being in an accident that would definitely have been fatal, but I barely mention the stuff that happened afterward, or all the stuff that was going on around that time. No one saw my world blowing apart.
You know how I start time skipping in June and think I've missed the 4th of July? It got really super bad in 2012, which I've mentioned, but the irony behind it is all the real life stuff I was juggling with the people around me by the time the 4th really arrived, and all the stuff that blew up over the next couple of weeks among them afterward. I handled so much stress for so many other people, and no one had a clue what it was doing to me, or that I'd already had what most people would call a nervous breakdown. I'm nice enough not to spill too much for public, but all the same, that was a pretty tense tightrope at first.
I am here because I started blogging publicly. Bluejacky blew up with one survey after another that summer, grandfortuna came back out of oblivion, I reopened new twitter and facebook accounts, and I held on for dear life staying as public as I could with a plan I devised, because this is what my real life was feeling like.
I saw that full screen in a theater, and I'll never forget how shocking it felt to suddenly realize what it must feel like being the aliens crashing onto an unfamiliar planet. What only one person at the time in 2012 actually knew (I confided in @bonenado) was that I had reached a place where I wasn't sure I could stop myself from a compulsive leap into the fuzzy unknown, because I had so little grip on what was actually reality for a few weeks that summer, and I didn't want to be labeled a suicide just because my head was melting apart. I might have been vehemently against my own suicide and still not been able to stop it. I had to create another reality to be present in, to show up for. I had to come back and be my avatar. Sometimes it's ok to escape real life like that, as long as I stick to my preset guidelines and focus on my goals. Every bit of this was supervised by my psychologist. What those of you who've watched all this have seen is genuine live blogging through very real crisis.
My ship had already gone down years earlier, and although it was a somewhat controlled crash, it was much more devastating and destructive and very pre-psychologist. That crash lasted for 3 years, and nearly everyone who was in the Lexx fandom back then had no idea this is exactly what it felt like was going on in my real life for that long.
My whole life has been a series of crashes. My car wreck is obvious, an actual crash. I've talked about the monitored double hormone crash in 2012. I've been through some debilitating systems crashes that nearly destroyed me physically and some devastating losses that broke me emotionally, the bulk hitting in 2004 nearly all at once. I've crashed off addictions like alcohol and medications. I've been through a very long string of friendship crashes. If there is anything I know how to do, it's survive a crash, but knowing and experience doesn't make the next crash any easier.
What's different now is I'm coming out of all those crashes. I've been doing physical therapy for 4 years for old injuries from the car crash. I've been following a whole different lifestyle the last 5 years for the plethora of chronic illnesses that crashed me. I've been seeing a psychologist for 9 years now after the several really big emotional crashes (losses) happening all around the very physical crashes. Maybe I'm almost ready to talk about the real real stuff that goes on in the middle of crashes, like how I keep kicking when I know another crash might just be the last if I don't keep hanging on.
While some of you pinball between trying to figure out the disparaging meaning behind mass shooters and the sadness of suicides, I'm treading what feels like an ocean full of gunships and subs, helos flying over, on alert for missile launches and air strikes in all directions. It's not so bad nowadays, perhaps going public really was the life preserver I needed in all the chaos, because I haven't been so immediately and continually summoned by people around me nearly so much since then. The pressure has definitely lessened, and I've been able to start processing my own stuff instead of constantly swooping in for others blowing drama into crises. One of my rules for public blogging was it has to be about ME. My stuff. Not their stuff. But one of the clauses is that when people intersect in my life, it becomes my stuff, doesn't it? I think that's why several people in real life suddenly backed off. We've got some spectacular laundry that I keep saying would make great TV material.
Something about sitting at the social security office has triggered all this, so I'm trying to work through it here on Pinky blog. This post is getting way longer than I intended, and I'm not sure of the direction, so I'm just letting stuff flow out.
My mom made me learn to hold things in growing up. If you have an autie/aspie child and you are familiar with meltdowns, imagine what it would take to force that child to learn to never display their real feelings. (Some of you just did a quiet omg what happened in your heads.) Imagine someone like that under a great deal of stress holding everything in for many years because they'd been pressured all their lives to do that, maybe by another person who'd been pressured all their life to do that, maybe by someone who was just plain mean or ignorant. Imagine that you have no idea how many people like that exist around you on any given day. Unless they talk nonstop about their lives like that guy sitting behind me at the social security office, you have no idea what kind of person they are. They can be clean and dressed decently and quiet and polite and you'd assume that person couldn't possibly do whatever it is that people say surprises them. You'd never see it coming.
I'm not the only one in this world who lives a normal life in front of a lot of bad memories. I can't speak for other people, only for myself, but as I stand up and speak for myself, others may feel like I also speak for them. Inside of me there are flames and horrors and screams that no one ever sees. There is cruelty and meanness and great swaths of sadness that could swallow a universe.
But inside me there is also an ability to let it all go in an instant of distraction, or a few moments of quiet. All it takes for me to survive is a time out. I time out as often as I can as long as it's safe for me to do so. I did my best to time out over and over at the social security office today. It's so easy to click-lock my eyes onto sunlight filtering past leaves or blinds, or an odd color or pattern on a wall or floor, but it's really difficult to do that with rows and rows of a hundred people lined up to face each other. So many faces in the way, trying not to see each other, feeling out of place, looking anyway and recoiling or pretending to smile. I'm usually pretty good nowadays about being able to look up and smile, but I just couldn't yesterday, and I couldn't just let the pain dictate how my eyes meet other eyes. Humans are so good at killing with their eyes. I was in kill mode. For most people, that's simply just a hateful look. For some of us, it's a warning that meltdown is imminent. The last thing other people need from me on their own bad days is a meltdown. I've had a couple of public meltdowns, but the disclaimer in me needs me to say I was legally stoned out of my mind on pain meds and muscle relaxers and still so terribly miserable, and I couldn't stand looking back at myself behaving like that. One of the big reasons I cleaned off prescription meds is because I don't want to go to my grave with people thinking Thank God that's over. It's an awful thing not to be able to control your behavior and realize it makes people wish you weren't around. I have a mean enough personality without meds as it is. When I lost my best friend over this stupid conundrum, I spent a year grieving and then set out to change my life.
I have to insert a disclaimer that on good days, I can carry on convos with strangers like we're best buds, as long as it doesn't last too long, but if someone I know is with me, they get squirmy because I am a little too friendly, and I think it gets creepy or something. Like, Scott pulls me away and steers me clear of people handing out pamphlets on my talky days. I'm creepy. You'll wish you never handed me a pamphlet.
I would like to describe what a time out feels like. It's a literal time out. There is no time. Even just a moment of time out feels like a different place, and I'm really there. It's not an imaginary place, I don't invent it or visualize going to it. It's just there. It's always there. It's like the flip side of here. Here is always here, there is always there. When I am there, it's just me, no one else. There's no hint of all the here I disengaged from. Sometimes I can keep both open, but usually I space out to the point of completely missing what's happening right in front of me. I imagine that makes me look fairly mental. It's kind of a joke between me and @bonenado. If I'm spacing out while he's driving, it's a very good thing. If I'm spacing out while I'm driving... not so good. I have to stay vigilant and self monitor when I drive. I've tried telling doctors I need to legally become a nondriver, but so far no one has taken me seriously. I'm a great driver, no accidents for decades, no problems or tickets, but 2012 broke and I haven't 'come back' in my car yet. That year, though, I did have a good delayed Tourette's related PTSD in my car convo with my psychologist. What super triggered the old crash memories was flying. I came back and couldn't make myself touch my steering wheel for a solid month while I was driving. I haven't flown since.
Back to time out. There, light is a thing. Colors are things. They don't need to be part of anything else to be defined or to even be. I go into light and colors a lot. Colors are like a different language. I'm not talking about frequencies and vibrations, but maybe I am. Maybe I can see the sciencey things differently in my head. I get other dimensions, too. If I let go and don't think about it, I can watch how other dimensions work. I've never been able to describe what I get in my head, and I realize it's because they need to be described in relation to something tangible, so there's no context for sharing. I recognized fractals when I first ran into them because I'd played in my head like that when I was a kid. I recognized Smale's horseshoe because I think about that kind of stuff all the time in my head. I was thrilled when multi universe theories started coming out because I'd already played with the 'fabrics of spacetime' in my head. Parallel worlds and alt universes are think tank toys I played with growing up. By the time string theory rolled in, I was already past turning music into light into objects into effervescence in my head. Once in awhile I'd try to describe the cool stuff I could see, but people say things like "You think too much" and shut me down. I wasn't exactly thinking, I was free associating through thought. Thinking is focused, time out is just floating through the nirvana of all the things. I've never told anyone light can talk, and I don't mean like we talk, but I bet science would back me up if I said it differently. That kind of stuff.
I would never be able to talk for a solid hour about my family history and work history and my bank and my furniture and the convos I've had with strangers, but it's a fair bet that guy from the social security office is on a spectrum like I am. He's a living recording machine and I'm guessing he can't stop broadcasting long enough to develop relationships, so he fills his voids playing his recording to everyone he meets. Maybe he's incapable of timing out. He mentioned being able to go days without sleep, even on handfuls of sleep presciptions, yes, which he named off, dosages included. Whatever his soul is on this earth for, he has done it all through a brain hard wired to record and play back everything that's ever intersected with his life. What impressed me most was he seemed so nice and sociable in spite of all that, like the absence of time outs didn't phase his demeanor while he could rattle off every bone and cartilage and process in the human body, there was no hint of ill will or even opinion, just the constant regurgitation of experience. That doesn't mean he's not a ticking time bomb, and eidetic memory doesn't always equate to being capable of advanced theoretical discussion, but his brain chemical cocktail was obviously way easier to live with than mine. The more he talked behind me, the more I slid into hardcore shutdown trying to stave off meltdown, and even though everything he said was actually interesting and pleasantly shared, it was all I could do not to turn around several times and ask him if he never shuts up, and knowing that could be part of his disability is the only thing that kept me sane through it. I'm pretty sure I'd have found him delightful as a people watching study if my pain level hadn't been shooting holes through my head.
~~~~~~~~~~
Ok, this is today, Friday.
That was a lot of stuff!!!!
Now we need way different stuff. I've probably shared this one before, but bless the fans who do this stuff. You save me like nothing else in this whole world.
K, I've got stuff to do, need to get order pulled together before Bunny spends the night tomorrow, get back on my work track, the usual basic stuff. I just wanted to say, I'm still here. Despite how it looks sometimes, I truly am grateful for every single person who has ever interacted with me online, and you guys need to know you've been meaningful enough to help me stay focused on more healing and hanging in through all the pain, both physical and emotional. I made a Pinky promise not to disappear off the webs again, and that's a real thing. Yesterday was really hard again, this whole week, month, and year has been really hard again, but I'm on a calmer ocean nowadays and I just need to remember to touch base and be the avatar I created. We can do this.
Lost 4 pounds so far in the last 7 days. I'll take it. Had my first blood work up in a year yesterday, got 106 on glucose, yay! Last year got right up there on the edge again (126), hadn't gotten that bad since I was first diagnosed and changed my diet, so I was slacking last year.
My poor little brain is barely working, though. I mean, I can go deep in my head and type words, but interaction has been really hard this week. I don't think it got this hard all winter, and winter is usually when it's the hardest. Was feeling like a loser flop when @bonenado pointed out how well yesterday went compared to years past (I was his driver for medical stuff), and he's right. Even on my worst days now I am so way better than when I wrote The Nerdist Score- aspie spoonie Lexx fan on a mission 2 1/2 years ago. It feels longer ago than that. And of course, when I wrote it, I had no idea how involved our lives would be around Bunny and several other things, so I no longer think in terms of going off track or time schedules. Priority is enjoy. If I'm not enjoying something I'm doing, then I'm doing it wrong. Keeping expectations in the back of my mind to gauge progress is only frustrating me. I wouldn't trade a thing.
Bunny at the circus
Batman Bathes
I have a hard time with mediocre. I'm a perfectionist, or at least obsessive, and one of the biggest lessons learned last few years is it's ok to slack off. The idea is sifting in that it might be ok to not feel at all satisfied with the book. I'm not enjoying it. I love writing words, it's my favorite thing. I'm not quite sure when this whole project became work, maybe over the last year, and work is not how things get done with me. I grew up breaking child labor laws, ground my head through a degree, and I can't go out like that.
Blogging has been work, yes. So has physical therapy. But what always gets me through is the running dialogue and theme music going on in my head while I do everything. I broke through to my reality last fall and crashed into sad (and hostile), and I look back now and see I was doing way too much. No wonder I couldn't keep my focus. Had to let a few things go.
7 years ago I could barely even read between occipital and trigeminal nerve pain and severe headaches. I lived in sunglasses and needed assistance with nearly everything I did, including self care. Life was so awful I barely had a reason to live. I created this internet project to keep my mind occupied on a goal so I could have something to focus on through ungodly pain.
And now I'm kind of on the other side feeling like a flop because my brain fell out again and I'm a spacecase, and @bonenado reminded me I'm flying now. I'm way up in the sky looking down on all the things. I'm not a worm crawling on the ground any more.
I can't thank her enough for catching my soul before it fell out of the sky. RPG in oddizm Some might say just close my eyes and don't look, but I have to look down see how far I've come.
Yesterday's vid from my 'StarStruck' world was captured full screen and took for-EV-er to load, and then spilled over on my phone so I could only see one section of the vid on my screen, so today I vid capped on shrunk screen, hopefully that problem goes away. I carried my mountaintop house idea over to 'Pinky' World and turned it into a hunting lodge. I cannot say enough how wonderfully absorbing this was for distraction. Didn't need anyone to talk me down or through anything on a phone, didn't crave more than a couple of touch bases (apologies to the person who suffered the written wordiness) (remember I'm home alone 12 hours a day through the week, I don't have coworkers or customers or any other human contact), so in future if you don't see me much here or there on social media, if I'm not working on a writing project or going to appointments and running errands I'll probably be somewhere on minecraft, thanks again to Kai being so super patient with me helping me transition over. Aspies can get very stuck in ruts and everything new is stubbornly resisted until it flips into obsession. Those of you with autie kids will totally get this. This is your autie kid all grown up now learning to slide into a different interaction mode that also helps distract from or navigate through anxiety. I used to game alone and people have actually and quite literally dragged me off a console in the past because I go down that hole so hard, so I stopped anything games for several years (along with weaning off other addictions), so now I'm learning how to game in a healthier way with real people.
Honesty is key, isn't it? According to this logic, the guy who called me an f-ing psycho on a public feed and then blocked me was a true friend, because at least I got some real closure.
Some people don't give you real closure, even if they've been part of your life for a very long time. I'll call that bluff and raise it, because no more head games.
Moving on. Part 2 is going out of control. The whole Vigl thing is just a delight, the jealousy in the political ranking is intriguing, and basically I just go full blown psyche analyzing Mantrid. If I say any more I'll wind up doing a lengthy summary right here right now, so best stop. Here, have a screen cap from old lappy that I'm not going to use because I started all over again on Jawn.
Oh, what the heck, have another one.
Feeling silly today, but this vid is so wonderfully done. Need to get my workout going and get all over a project.
First 6 straight hours of sleep I've gotten in at least 8 days.
Killed a spider as big as me yesterday. That's right, the first thing I do on Jawn is go all victorious. Ok, it was in creative mode so I had no fear of death, ergo no anxiety spiking me into major freak outs. Sooner or later, though, I'll hafta face the spiders for real. And the zombies.
I told you guys I'd be better for you with her. After all my years of real life RPG in oddizm, she was the social plugin that interfaced me, and I'm no longer stuck in the portal between two timezones. I'm plugged back in and my soul sings.
My first intro to being unstuck was Babylon 5 in Babylon Squared (Babylon 5).
These were big deals to me because I'd never told anyone I feel 'unstuck' sometimes, or very very stuck. I finally saw Girl, Interrupted a few years later and realized my jumpy memories had something to do with emotional shutdown. (wikipedia movie info)
Consequences of Emotionally Shutting Down in a Relationship
by Giovanna Capozza "the purpose of a relationship is to grow us up and out of our stuck places, to help us heal the parts of ourselves that get triggered by the other and return to love, always back to a place where each of us is innocent. Places of insecurities, lack of love, trust or feeling respected, loss of control, fears, and of course the parts of our masculine and feminine energy that need healing. When we each take responsibility for our own triggers and “baggage” then we can keep an open dialogue. Then we don’t need to shut down. Sometimes what is required is that you speak openly and give the other person space to heal, but shutting someone you love out is not the answer. What we’re doing here is actually keeping ourselves from experiencing love, the punishment here is directed back to ourselves not the other. If we continually take this direction we risk repeating or attracting the same things over and over again in a partner until we learn what the trigger is showing us about ourselves."
It took me decades to get through, and one person was the key. Because one person was honest with me, patient with me, and dear to me, I am arriving out of a dark place into a wonderful place I dreamed could exist but daren't to ever hope for. I wrote lengthy essays proving happiness wasn't 'real' because it was just a concept that had been adapted to capture mass illusion. I'm thrilled to retract that and say I was so wrong.
I'm in the next part now, learning to pass that along. It's hard. I wasn't born to be a sweet, kind, easy person, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. After I stick a claw in an eyeball nowadays, I hand it back instead of eating it. Progress.
Ok, one more.
:edit: 4-22-17 The clue behind this last vid is hidden in this survey.
You guys know the drill- skip this post because ~long~, me practicing rewriting old stuff I've said before, yada yada.
When I was a kid we didn't call it RPG or larping. We just did it. I think just about everyone on the planet has done RPG of some kind because that's how humans play, isn't it? We mimic behavior previously modeled for us somewhere, and we aspire to become the icons that dazzled us. And then we hit middle age and all the walls and sink into quagmires of depression over all that bedazzlement not being what we thought, so to save ourselves we turn around and live vicariously through our kids doing the exact same thing.
Except me. I've never stopped role playing. I never got to be myself in the first place. I was different and punished or tortured and picked on continuously for it, so I developed a stoicism at such a young age that other adults weren't quite sure what to do with me. I wasn't quite sure what to do with them, either. "How are you?" (It's just a greeting, I know that now.) "Well, my life sucks and""That's nice"moving on to the next person.
When you see a child at a birthday party sitting perfectly still and being either a perfect gentleman or a perfect little lady and not joining in the festivities or even talking to other children, what is your first thought? I asked my psychologist that the last time I saw him. Most adults walking by would say "My, what little angels you are" to me and my sister, also sitting perfectly still. Do you know how outrageously abnormal it is for young children to not act like young children? We performed.
It's like horses. People go awwww when a tiny child walks around the legs of a great big horse and the horse doesn't move. They think it's precious. Some of us know what goes into breaking a horse to not move even when it's being bitten by horseflies and teased by dogs and other people. They perform.
I share a story sometimes of other girls trying to get me to react, dumping their lunch trays on me and staining up my white blouse, then jerking me around until that blouse ripped, having to go to the office and ask for a needle and thread to repair the blouse before I went back to class because the rip showed my bra, and saying "No" when the shocked secretary asked if I needed anything else. Sitting quietly in the bathroom sewing my stained ripped up blouse as quickly as possible before the girls found me again. Sliding into my seat in the nick of time and pretending like nothing had happened.
What I don't share is that the reason I didn't react at all, the reason I stood so still and let them do it, the whole reason for the performance was because I knew how much trouble I would be in if I reacted and it got back to my mother. I knew exactly what I was capable of, and I knew exactly what my mom was capable of. I never broke anyone's nose, but growing up shoving and killing animals much heavier than my tiny little body, I'm sure I could have drawn some spectacular attention to myself, and that would have dominoed back out through the family in the form of my mom being a bad mom and my behavior was proof that she should never have married my dad and the only way for her to regain any control over the fear of condemnation would be to once again put me through a private hell of her anger ricoheting back through the severest corporal punishment she could hold out through herself, and I don't mean emotionally, I mean physically.
I'll pause a moment because that was a really long sentence.
It takes me a really long time to process my feelings about things because I've been trained all my life to shut down when anything happens. That was important because I was the sort of kid who attracted a lot of attention when I got upset. When I overload I become irrational and hysterical, even nowadays. No one knows what to do with me. (Thank goodness the big stuff is fairly rare.) It's up to me to control myself so I don't hurt other people during a meltdown. (I once broke out a door frame.) Sometimes I'm so busy controlling myself that I don't see what I'm missing all around me. Outside of meltdown I'm fine. Once meltdown hits, there's no logic in the world that can rescue me or save anyone else. So, I either just shut down and 'go away' emotionally and mostly no one notices, or I trigger into meltdown and everyone around me cringes and I have to figure out for myself why because it pisses me off when I see that happening.
A few years ago I had an opportunity to win a really big game. I didn't know I was set up to be one of the pieces, or that I was even on a board. Even though I was somewhat unaware of the layered undercurrents, I knew exactly what I was capable of, and I balked at the little flags waving that I couldn't figure out, and instead of simply asking questions like any socially normal person would do, I put the brakes on and went into control mode (like aspienado pre-damage control), and by doing so wound up controlling the entire outcome, and that turned out to be unfavorable, to put it simply.
I wasn't a winning piece. I'm not sure it would have mattered in the long run, because I still don't have enough information to assess that, but I know what I lost personally because of it. I also know it would have all gone very differently if I'd had a little more information or had known I could trust a team to help me handle a trigger. The big challenge that none of us saw coming was that I would be physically present for a real performance for this plan to roll out, after months of having only online contact. There was no practice, no heads up, no warning. I actually went into full aspie overload shutdown in the middle of a very public venue with all eyes literally on me. I didn't follow through because I saw in a flash what the layers really were in the moments as this happened, and deviated immediately into my own fail-safe reaction and did what I'd been trained to do from very young childhood- don't spotlight myself, don't respond negatively, don't show off, don't cause trouble, don't point and blame, don't whine, don't be a baby, don't create conflict, and I could go on for miles. An opportunity was lost for my team because there was no preplanning or contingency for me having a meltdown or a shutdown, and how could they if I never talked about anything? I wasn't even diagnosed yet, although we suspected Aspergers was my thing.
Sometimes a horse is standing still because it doesn't want to be treated badly for acting like a normal horse, but sometimes a horse really is a nice horse and doesn't want to hurt anyone. It's so hard to tell, even for the horse.
My dad rarely gave me anything. He wasn't the sort of guy who believed in birthday and Christmas presents or splurging on a soda pop after a long and thirsty hike. He rarely interacted with me at all except when we were doing chores or to play chess and teach me debate tactics, but he did give me a book called Smoky the Cow Horse. I think I remember Mom telling me he picked it out himself. She built on that by adding Walter Farley and Breyer to my growing interest, and my best friend in the fifth grade showed me how to draw horses.
I get horses. I grew up extremely ticked off that I wasn't born a horse or a dog, and took it very personally as an affront from God himself that I was born a human. I figured out at a very young age that I need a handler. I'm the sort of person that needs to be part of a team. Unfortunately, I didn't grow up around anyone else that understood that, and no matter how well Will James could write and how much my dad loved his books, it didn't seem to sink into an application format in real life. I wasn't handled so much as simply broken, and not to pick on him because it seemed all the adults around me agreed on child rearing methodology. I grew up not trusting anyone. You know why a horse whisperer is a big deal? Because a horse trusts that person so much it will do anything that person asks without so much as a quiver of hesitation. But if you can get the same results with negative training, why worry about it?
Several years ago I wrote of horses and ACT scores. I was still just finding my feet as a writer-blogger. People make a big deal about people like me on TV nowadays. I'm sure there are lots more like me that fell through all the cracks. You guys are surrounded by us, and you have no clue. We've all been broken to hold still, except those of us that bolted and either holed up or wound up in jail.
If I could go back in time, I would go back to that day and change the way I handled everything blowing up. (Full confession here.) I would go ahead and allow myself to react normally like a real person and let everything fall into place the way it should have. Who knows, I might have remained a useful person in a team, and I might have kept the best friend I had. Even though I still disagree with the motivation and the method, I'd have cooperated.
I'm still playing. I never stopped the RPG. I know they didn't understand back then that's what I was doing to survive, but maybe now it makes sense. I sucked at pretend RPG back then, clearly, but the fallout from that confusion isn't lost on me at all.
After about 250 views on my PinkyStuff thread at SyfyDesigns in the last two days and 700+ views on this blog since April 1st, and especially after finally sleeping a whopping 7 1/2 hours last night after nearly 2 weeks of hypomanic writing wherein 8 pounds just melted right off me, and particularly after surviving the most difficult and challenging writing pieces I've ever done in my life, I declare today Sherlock day. Regular lurkers rarely see me get this stuck on one youtube meme, but since I've listened to almost nothing but Sherlock fanvids for going on 12 days now, it's time to reshare the love without all those wordy words in between. Plus I'm adding some more that never got shared in blog posts. Here you go, in the order of posting, from this aspie to the dark underground that watches my journey from the shadows, this is the artistic epitome of how Aspienado spends Austim Awareness month- obsessed and in a bubble. Please do NOT find a cure for me, thank you.
Others I haven't shared to this blog.
:edit: 4-13-15 I can't believe I left this one off, since it's the one that started the entire Sherlock obsession with me, leading to more youtube spoilers and deep discussions with @bonenado about everything Sherlock Holmes, despite my feelings about the whole genre.
