my point of view, such as it is

CAUTION- Graphic content.
Strong warning on triggers for rape and violence.

I know y'all know I strongly discourage comments because I'm weird and you're all cool to never comment even though that's an option, but this post has comments turned off. This is the first time I've ever put all this together in one place with real names and searchable linked content. I'm still not capable of getting through convo about this event, but at least we'll all know now where my head is sometimes.

Three years ago on pinky blog I started blogging through a daily depression trail that starts every April first through my entire adult life. I started questioning why, and you guys watched me uncover and start dealing with a repressed memory. Today is the first day I put together the bits and pieces and deal 'out loud' with what happened.

This is Julie Ann Jackson. She lived on 816 N. Watson Ave. when I knew her in school. She was my best friend from the fifth grade. Her hair was naturally golden, and she was slightly chubby in a very pretty way. I considered her my only real friend (because that's what aspienado does, one real friend at a time) even though she was very popular and had lots of friends.

Aside from biting my hand when we were ten because I was being so bossy that she had to find a way to make me shut up, she was always kind to me, and every time I showed up near her, all her other friends moved over. I never thought about why, but I knew that was my place. I know now that she knew I was different (I'm autism spectrum), and she elevated me to an intellectual status dismissed by everyone else, including my family. I was the only one in school that could keep up with her on all kinds of testing and reading material, although I never bested her at anything. She was one of those true MENSA types with a very easy personality, and she spent time not only including me, but teaching me how to draw horses and taking turns writing stories that we passed back and forth in classes. We attended all the sports events together, and the only times we were apart was for being in different classes or activities. Because of her, I actually had other friends in my life that I probably wouldn't have had without her.

My family moved to another state right in the middle of the ninth grade. I've written about how hard that was, the day I left I didn't even get to say goodbye. Thankfully, Julie loved snail mail, and we sent off letters to each other 3 times a week like clockwork for at least four years. I did get to go back the summer after graduation and visit, and she gave me the royal treatment. I was family to her. She escorted me around showing me off, took me to her house, drove me around talking about college and friends she had and her boyfriend. I was as out of the water as a Vulcan fish with my Asperger's, for those of you who know Spock history, but that didn't phase her in the least, and I let her do all the talking and leading me around while I just soaked her in. She had grown up while I was gone, and she was beautiful and charming and didn't miss a beat. After I went back home we continued writing to each other as she started college and my family moved again. I had a big box full of all her letters the night I got the phone call.

I've written in several places what that night was like, but I'll keep it simple here. Emotionally I almost instantly went into hard shutdown. For those of you who've never experienced that or know anyone who has, I very literally chopped off my emotions right then and there. I didn't cry. I didn't feel. I didn't talk about it. I hung up the phone, ignored everyone, and went back to bed. The next day I took the box full of letters outside and burned the entire thing without a second thought. I didn't feel anything doing it. I didn't reflect. I didn't have a reason.

Nearly everything that happened over the next several years was the result of that hard shutdown. I went through a bad marriage and became an alcoholic. I wound up in a big city underground of drug dealers. I met people completely off the grid doing despicable things, and I talked to people who witnessed or lived through atrocities that would make most people very sick. I didn't blink an eye.

After I stopped drinking I started turning my life around, went to college, remarried, raised kids, had jobs, met people on the internet and finally started having 'friends', although much of it went badly very quickly. I never questioned that until one particular friend stopped talking to me, and without warning I spiraled into an abyss of despair that lasted for months. I felt so desperate to understand why this was happening and why I couldn't keep friends that I started seeing a psychologist, and have spent years learning how to see myself objectively, how to assess and make goals and plans to reach my goals, and how to deal with feelings. I'm not just autism spectrum. I have a complicated diagnosis that includes delayed response, which means I just don't deal with my emotions.

So by 2015 I'd been working on all that with my psychologist for eight years. I still didn't know what the real reason was for that particular depression in April, and I didn't yet realize I had displaced it onto the friend I lost that woke me up out of that hard emotional shutdown. Somewhere in 2015, one of my sisters delicately brought up my friend's murder, saying they'd been afraid to tell me it was showing up on the internet, and she was right, I was absolutely terrified to click around and find that pain. I started going through a series of little shutdowns over and over between 'waking up' to more and more ability to feel in real time, and I guess all the stuff I should have processed through years ago started processing, and believe me, putting off dealing until later doesn't make it any easier. When I finally started remembering and as I was slowly able to start reading about this very famous case, all the feelings and emotions swept over me as fresh as they should have from the very start. I was making up for 30 years of lost time processing through all those emotions.

In case you'd like to know more you can -click this- and read an article of interviews with the medical staff who saved Colleen, the person who survived. Here is a good quote from one of the nurses.
One of the nurses in that operating room called me to say Guzman's crime was as vivid to her today as it was 30 years ago. "I remember every detail, because it was so horrific," she said. Doctors and nurses spent nearly 12 hours trying to save Bush's life, and that nurse said the experience taught her about strength and fight and survival. "It changed my life," she told me. "I made a decision that night that if anything like that ever happens to me, I'll fight to the end."

The official true crime book Escaping the Arroyo (which I have not yet had the muster to read), has a Facebook Page, and you can find author info on Amazon and her dotcom.

This crime story was also featured on Investigation Discovery. I still can't bring myself to watch that.

Here comes the graphic part. This is the part I live with in my head now that I've put nearly all of my pieces together.

This last week was Julie Jackson's death anniversary. On April 5th I kept triggering into a memory of my dad and a sheep. You see, I've seen a living body stabbed. I'm about to tell you a story about saving a sheep's life, and after that I'm going to get really rough. I'm making sure you really want to be here reading this... It's ok to stop if you want.

When I was around ten or twelve I think, making my next sister down about 8-10 and my brother 5-7, Dad found a sheep loose in the alfalfa field. Sheep will gorge to death sometimes, but my dad was able to force her out of the field and up a little hill before she flopped over gasping for breath. He ran to the house, called us kids to follow him right now, and as we arrived was already commanding us where to sit on different parts of that sheep, to hold her down at all cost, don't let her move at all, and we obeyed immediately because we had been taught like that. As soon as we got square on pinning that sheep down (who, incidentally, wasn't moving much at all because she couldn't), Dad whipped out his big knife and plunged it into her belly, then dropped the knife and pulled the wool apart on both sides of that big hole and barely got his eyes shut before he was sprayed all over with the vilest smelling stomach spew you ever saw. He never once let go of keeping that wound open while us kids were instantly working very hard to keep that sheep down in one spot, because naturally every instinct in her body would be to fight whatever punctured her.

After that was over, which didn't take long, we were almost too cramped to stand up because we'd locked her down so hard, and Dad was just nasty. The sheep got up, shook off like a dog, and trotted off, feeling much better. We had to hose Dad off, and we didn't get an explanation until that stuff was off his face so he could talk.

It's not very often you see someone stab something out of the blue, and it's probably even more rare to see children help hold a living being down to be stabbed. We didn't whine or cry or question. Our dad could do anything in our eyes back then, and even if we didn't like doing what we were told, we did trust him to know exactly what he was doing.

And that is leading to this. (I know, you're thinking that wasn't graphic, but if you get queasy or cry easily, you do need to leave now.)

I grew up helping butcher sheep. I know how to hold a very heavy body down, how to drain its blood with a little nick, and how to keep it from automatically thrashing while the blood drains out. This is very important if you don't want the meat bruised up and you want all the blood out. Blood will spoil much faster than the carcass and must be gotten out so that the meat doesn't spoil if it has to sit.

Since I sat on sheep and helped skin them from childhood, I know what blood smells and feels like, I know how heavy dead body parts feel (especially the head), I intimately know how bodies feel while they are dying with all the tiny little muscles twitching for awhile, all the jerks and gasps and groans. All these things are automatic reflexes a dying body does, desperate for oxygen, working hard trying to increase blood flow. When the brain is still alive and the body is dying, the nervous system comes on full blast trying to stay alive.

Imagine what it must feel like to be raping someone while you feel all that happening in the other body against you. Imagine being able to smell the blood gushing out all over you while you keep stabbing. And it's not just blood. What we see on TV shows and in movies is so clean compared to real crime. Being stabbed in different places pops open different kinds of fluids along with the blood. Imagine smelling bilious stomach contents while raping someone. Imagine smelling intestinal content, being slimed with it and blood while you're raping someone. Imagine the jerks and gasps and groans going on all over the body while the eyes roll grotesquely around, all the smells and sounds and all that slime...

Imagine being all done and staggering back to the open the trunk of the car to start over on the next person. Imagine finally being satiated and driving off, thinking no one would ever find your mess out in the desert like that. Imagine someone actually living through being stabbed 30 times and crawling up the side of an arroyo to a highway. I grew up in the desert southwest. I can imagine a bloody slimy body being caked with dirt and grime and full of weeds and ants by the time it got to a highway, and I can imagine how terrifying that would look to someone stopping at the sight. And that was before cell phones. All that time that passed. All the grit and work and waiting it took to LIVE. And hours and hours of repair with a medical team. All that recovery. And then living with the memories the rest of your life.

I emotionally shut down when I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I never thought about any of that because I just couldn't go there. I had already grown up with so much experience with death, with seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling death.

So all week long in my head, I have been there with my best friend. I have been feeling her body being violently punctured, I have been smelling her life fall apart into slime all over a nasty person's raging body, I have been hearing the squashed grunts and gasps and wheezes, and feeling every muscle strand in her body straining for oxygen as her blood drained out, the muffled frenzied thrashing being held down for the rape as her consciousness slipped away.

I cannot stop crying.

Friends, when I give you a heads up that it's a bad week and beg you not to take me personally if I fail, please understand hell is filling up my head, and I can barely hear or see you over the pain I am in.

Here are all my posts with the tag #sadness.

I have to run out the door. If there are typos I'll fix them later.

Rosie

click to purchase this print on canvas, metal, wood, or greeting card

Woke up from one of those very long tangled dreams to Barry Manilow singing a new Christmas song about superheroes, and thinking ok, that lisp of his is getting way worse...

I was at a friend's house up the road after not visiting for a very long time. For some reason, I needed to use her shower, and only very briefly saw her to ask, because she had to rush off, but handed me a folded note. I didn't open the note right away, just wanted to get that quick shower and go home, because it's always weird taking a shower in someone else's house.

By the time I got upstairs, the house had grown a bit bigger, added rooms, appointed details, and naturally I had to slow down and think Wow, she always did love her house. I made it in the upstairs bathroom, but for some reason I had to go back downstairs and outside real quick. I don't remember why now, but this happened over and over and over umpteen times, and each time going back into her house, the house kept getting bigger, more people kept showing up, until the entire building was nearly as big as a small shopping center, and every bit of it was still her glorious house, decked for holidays and people everywhere.

She wasn't the sort to have loads of guests, but very quietly the genteel artist type who loved Americana and flowers and the good life, excellent with complex recipes and always a picturesque purebred dog by her side. I didn't think about any of that in the dream, which would have thrown it all off. None of it seemed out of place at all. Everything that kept adding on an becoming more detailed and thronging with more people seemed right. It felt like exactly the kind of holiday party she might love if she had been born a very wealthy person. It had her spin on it.

I don't know how many times I made it back upstairs to that bathroom, which also kept getting bigger and more elaborate, but I finally opened the note. The topside was typed, and I don't remember much of what it said, but it was to me from her. Then I realized the underside was handwritten in felt tip pen, and oh no, the bathroom was damp (the shower was steaming it up), and a lot of it was running onto my hands and my clothes. Most the words were on me by the time I tried to decipher it, and the harder I tried to read it, the more it faded until it was gone.

I realized about then that I was in my shabbiest jeans about to get a shower, and there were dozens of people arriving all around for the start of the party, all dressed up from where they came, like one big family had just come from a ski slope and were all laughing and red from the cold and in matching sweaters, and another family had just come from a big church service and were still all dressed up and looking for the wine cellar (I don't recall her having wine around either in real life or the dream), and many other groups, and I thought Wow, she has a LOT of people connected to her. She'd always seemed so quietly reclusive to me, but I imagine I saw only a glimpse even though she was right up the street.

So I left the bathroom again, intent on going home to get better clothes, but it was too late, the party was starting, Barry Manilow was singing, and I woke up.

My very first thought this morning was maybe she had died and that was one of my heaven dreams, so I did quick recon and she hasn't, whew (although now I'm hoping there isn't something else). Yes, even though she moved far away a long time ago, I know where she is, what her house looks like, and a tiny little bit of how she's doing. I don't deep lurk very often, but a handful of people have never left the back of my mind, so once or twice a year I check on them.

So, psyche analyze this dream. Barry Manilow singing a Christmas song about superheroes. A friend's house growing very big and luxurious. Me trying to get a shower and being embarrassed about my shabby clothes. A note I couldn't read.

I have lately (this past year) become a bit self aware of how public I am. It feels awkward, and even though I'm not bothered by it most of the time (in my aspienado mind I'm just an avatar living a story), I've been feeling a little bit shy for possibly the first time in my entire life (I'm diagnosed with a mild to moderate level of narcissism, thankfully not dinging the psychotic bell or anything, but this is thanks to the childhood I survived as I've pointed out on facebook, you can find tests online to see how you rank, as well).

Ok, that was a stretched out overly-inserted paragraph. I'll just daintily step away from it instead of trying to fix it and move on.

I don't know yet how I feel about being aware of feeling sorta shy. It's not the kind of shy that people automatically think of as shy. I'm not afraid of anyone seeing me. I think it's more like I'm shy of seeing myself. I'm shy realizing I'm in this role I'm playing out. I'm cognizant of being ME.

When I was a child, I'd have very disturbing moments, almost out of body experiences, about being a skeleton walking around, about living in a skull, about my arm not being 'me', about my legs feeling like doll legs that I moving around from the inside. I know now that is a dissociative disorder. Not feeling in the moment, running all the incoming through filters, losing track of time (quite badly sometimes), and delayed emotional response most of the time come from this dissociated thing. I am often walking beside myself, following behind myself, distracted away from myself, coming back to myself. I am often not in the moment.

I love that I had that curious dream at the very start of 2018. I love that I have another mystery to solve about myself. What was in the note? I already know why Barry Manilow. My best friend that was murdered later gave me her double best of Barry albums before I moved away when I was 14. Christmas over the last ten years has very much become about superheroes, we are inundated with merch and entertainment on all sides. The beautiful house growing larger and more detailed was actually all in my head. More and more people arriving is me connecting, while I hide out in a bathroom. Click that. It's very pertinent. As for the shower part, that's baptismal, like washing off the old and putting on the new. Cleaning off. Refreshing ourselves. Maybe it's time I faced this.

I've still never reconnected to that friend. I've not reconnected to a lot of people in my past, but that particular friend had a very strong impact on me. You guys know how I feel like I'm walking through people's minds when I find their artwork somewhere. She takes photographs. I've seen all the public ones. If she reads my blogs at all, and I know she did in the past, then maybe she'll find this post and feel a little hug in her mind. I wasn't able to be what she needed when she was here, but I understand now. And that is the way our lives work, isn't it?

She was one of the very rare few who knew me in real life.






:edit: nearly 6 hours later- I burned 4 1/2 years' worth of correspondence between my best friend from school and I after I heard she was murdered. Clearly that is a horrible regret I live with, the note I can never seem to read in so many of my dreams. THIS TIME- the. words. got. all. over. me. That just screamed through my brain just now. The words are IN ME. I was handed a note and the words got all over me.

I'm not in the mood for a psychotic break right now, so I'm going with this is all normal and it's cool because I'm going to write a whole bunch of words this year that are totally going to vindicate that sad ritualistic grief burn.
Creating Rituals to Move Through Grief

emotional consorts

click to Get Peanutized

I've been thinking for a long time about how social media has created new ways to connect that no longer fall into traditional roles. I've been on the internet since 1994 and have seen it all in so many varieties of ways that I'm convinced traditional roles in societal norms in developing civilizations over tens of thousands of years catered to the purpose of crowd control, when all else is brushed away from the archaeological bones of our anthropological history as a human race.

I remember my mom being on the phone quite a bit on some days when I was a kid. We shared a party line with several neighboring houses, about ten miles out of town along a rural highway. Back then we didn't know anything about depression and how connecting helps people get through rough days. Telephones were probably a godsend to her on some days, but none of us really understood the need. Our world was pretty black and white back then.

I was in the 9th grade when we moved to another state. My best friend and I snail mailed each other faithfully 3 times a week for a little over 4 years. I'm not exaggerating that at all. I had a huge box full of letters that documented her half of our unending conversation, and when that conversation ended, I was so lost that I completely shut down emotionally. It took me years to understand why that particular friendship was so deep.

In the mid 90s I jumped into the email trend, which was basically a lot like twitter in slo-mo, and wound up in fan groups and forums quickly after that. I had never had so much connection in my whole life. I cannonballed with so much gusto into connecting all over the place that I irritated a few people with my splashing, but I loved every minute of it. I didn't learn how to emotionally connect, though, until real faces started showing up with all that connecting. I had no idea what to even do with that, but I learned very quickly that's when it starts to hurt. It took more years to figure that part out. I had to learn to be more careful and play nice, and I'm the first to admit that my idea of careful and nice back then were not careful and nice.

I ran into a wall one year that disconnected my whole world, and everything felt like the rubble in the wake of the Nothing in Neverending Story. Several horrible years of rubble went by before I decided to give up and walk away. I was on the verge of deleting the very last of the rubble when Something Happened and shook me awake in seconds. From that moment I have intensely interrogated myself and studied how to get what I want.

I made a Plan and got back into the internet, learning to swim all over again, trying new ways of connecting. People are real, and I need people. I've spent most of my life so alone inside of myself. I have felt several times like if I didn't find a way to connect to my own humanity I would wilt and die inside. I cannot connect if I'm alone.

Part of my motivation was unclear at first. I had to keep reaching deeper and deeper inside myself, pulling out ripped up shreds of cast off emotions I never dealt with. My survival skills were a lot like the Walking Dead, shoot first and walk away, or just go another direction and disappear so no one can find me. I've done that both in real life and on internet. I am really good at knowing how to just go away. Part of my intense self questioning vomited up a very ugly self righteous gloater that didn't have a clue how to care about other people (my narcissism diagnosis, guys), an emotionally distant loner buried deep in obsessions (my autism diagnosis), a sad cynic who refused to believe happiness was nothing more than a lie invented by social structure controlling people (severe depression), a tiny child terrified of monsters and shadows and water and death (anxiety and dissociative disorders), and an overlord squeezing all of that together into a tightly controlled survival unit that blew apart after a string of viral illnesses affected my brain.

I watched everything about me fall apart as I raced time to keep dissecting, keep laying it all out in autopsy, keep looking for all the pieces I need to make all of this functional again, because without a coherent goal, 'I' simply have no meaning. My soul is a tattered shred on a crusty plain in a very long night. There is nothing else laying around inside myself that I am able to see that gives any part of me a tic mark in a box that doesn't say 'FAIL'.

Except to tell the stories.

There is redemption in honesty. I think that is inside all of us. Humanity is a story. We are all stories.

HEAR and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild--as wild as wild could be--and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

That paragraph clicks back to source.

I need each of my people in each of their individual places. I can no longer slot people into categories like a tackle or embroidery box. Each person I connect to is unique to me and in their very own slot in my mind. Each slot has its own kind of personal reason we are connected, and I will never be able to go back to the traditional slotting of genders and roles and whatever else people get labeled with. Each and every person I've ever met seems to have grown into their own thing inside of me while I have taken myself apart, and as I put myself back together I can see now that the only way any of me goes all back together is by intersecting the connecting lines of other people with myself. I still feel all the same feelings about each person now that I did years (or days) ago when we last connected, and those feelings never change, even though I keep changing. Each person I have encountered has helped create who I am now, and I could never go forward as a soul being severed from that.

One of the things I've learned over time is that no one person can hold all my feelings. I am a wildly oscillating passion of obsessions with very little natural social intuition, so when my emotions, whatever they may be, blow up into roller coaster rides, the only way to survive them is to spread myself across as many friends as possible as quickly as I can before one unlucky person gets yanked into the roller coaster with me. I'm afraid I'm only just lately over the last few months becoming cognizant of this, so apologies to a few people who've been dragged in front of the bus with me, and especially one nobody really knows about who has actually been surviving that in real time.

I am part of what I now privately think of as a small tribe of emotional consorts. I can see now that the one person I needed and pulled into that crazy upside down fling needs to reach out and balance with others who need to know what's going on for the support system to work. I can be very selfish when I'm stuck in my tunnel vision, but to get what I need the most, I need that entire support system in place. I'm still getting used to this idea.

This is all new to me, but I think it's what I've been missing and needing all my life. I just never knew how to be part of a little group of close knit friends. It's exhilarating. And I think that's how it's supposed to be. It's not about rigid roles in labeled slots, and I don't think it ever has been. Psychological health in homo sapiens sapiens is about the connect/disconnect. Before there were societal norms, there were little groups interacting without labels, without rules about roles. Maybe aspienado kicking at the cart all these years was simply about persisting in my quest to find other brains that mine can fit with, without all the junk in the way. Like the first friend I faithfully wrote letters with 3 times a week for 4 years. She was popular and had lots of friends, and she was my only. She incorporated me, the others moved over, and I dismissed them a bit (I accepted and talked to each of them in school, just never thought of them as *my* friends), but maybe it's time to finish growing up. I run with a pack now, and we take turns stepping aside for each other. I got that a bit wrong on the medias, but I think I'm kind of getting it right now in the background. I sure hope so.

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. 💕

'Murican conspiracy turkeys

There's a room I keep in my head where it's always this. No matter what else is going on in real life, this is tucked away from the first time I heard it many years ago, and every time I play it back in my head I think about all the people I've met (both online and real life) and how glad I am I got to know them.


I'm the sort of person who took a very long time to figure out I actually had friends whether I realized it or not, and I usually didn't because I'm such an aspienado pinhead. I spent years autopsying every relationship I went through until I finally started noticing that I'm the dork who takes dolls apart and sets them on fire. If you translate this to people, I do it while they're still alive and trying to be friends with me. I'm sure it's been a little odd at times.


The comments on that vid are delightful, btw.

• I'm pretty sure this is how they greet you in Hell.
• This is the one song that will be burned into my mind until the day I die.
• I love this, subtly alluding to the children being lured to their planned deaths.
• I remember the first time I saw this movie I laughed like a madman at this part and my mom was so concerned
• 1:03 a reference to laughing in ''I am the walrus''
• Is it me or do the instrumentals for this song sound similar to the Silver Shamrock song from Halloween 3? They're by no means identical but for some reason that's where my mind went during this scene. -Me too.

Anyway, I'm coming off a week of coasting through brain fragments on happy pills, and I can't help noticing how much I deeply care about all my people lately. I struggled for years, some of you saw that happening on twitter and this blog, and it's like this year my junk finally settled into place and now I kinda get it all now. I get me. I get that I'm a roller coaster slinging around other people's heads and I'm the one who looks blurry, not you guys.

Context relies on experience over time. I have 5 years under my belt now, my glitchy head is getting more reliable, I'm remembering better who everyone is and where they're from and what their situations are, and most of all, I'm managing to organize this info into my memory closet in real time nowadays. I have these friends here, those friends there, we like to do this and that, and it makes a nice little spreadsheet of activities I can look forward to each week. So much of that was a mixed up blur for so long, even at the beginning of this very year I could still barely keep names and locations straight, much less other kinds of stuff that makes hanging out better. I remember when I thought Penny was another child, kind of a private joke going back a bit. But yeah, it's like years ago asking people in real life at work or down the street about something they said and they look at me weird because they didn't realize they left me dangling assuming I understood, when my brain was naturally concocting more interesting stories about their lives behind their backs just to fill in missing info. One person was shocked when I asked whether her daughter was her husband's daughter too, or someone else's. I get very hung up on pronouns and names not being used interchangeably to denote shared relationships because hey, autism, so little things kinda made me the weird friend people wound up tiptoeing away from eventually. I have no problem accepting that everyone's got some level of hash slinging slasher in their past, so it's up to you guys to make sure I'm not running off perpetuating myths of some kind.


Well, ok, except for Mike Bilinski. He might really be some kind of *cough* interesting *cough* or something, so always keep your spatula handy.


Now that I've explained myself, I feel more comfortable asking these questions about some of my sketchier friends-

• Does Kurt keep *ahem* guests tied to, wait, I mean locked in, no wait, I mean on an extended visit plan, yeah that's it.
• Is Phil one of those retired dudes who runs a barside pool party? Because I wanna be where he is.
• I'm kinda getting the feeling Jinni knows where all the good dumpsters are for body emergencies, and always packing cute little cookies and a thermos in case the nights get long.
• I find it comforting that Lisa could be part of the mass brain training entertainment wave before aliens really do take over and recreate our society without a Vermont. Except I'll miss Cabot seriously sharp cheddar cheese. I wonder if she knows Benedict Cumberbatch. Pretty sure he's one of them.
• Are Chris and Tammy siblings? Cousins? Secret agents spying on us?
• Is Cindy in league with the Martians??? 😲

So in a few days it's a huge holiday in the U.S. and nearly everyone will be busy or comatose on the feasting, so before y'all hit the highways, I just wanna say be safe. This has been a challenging and sad year for a few of us already, so pleasepleaseplease stay safe. 💟💖💗 Especially you fun grillmeisters trying out turkey frying equipment for the first time. Show me some purty turkeys on facebook, not big lumpy bandages or something. Get those turkeys thawing! Do NOT toss a frozen bird into a deep fryer!!!! Yes, I feel like I have to say that. This year has been a little too ripe for facepalm. 🦃

gotta see your face some more

*floating*

My first opioid since the 5 mg shot of morphine in ER last year that sent me straight into PAWS hell. Post surgery medication this time sent me super floating straight into euphoria. I. love. EVERYONE. And now that I've been intro'd to high dose vicoprofen, I'm already planning strategy getting back off it before I abruptly run out. Can't break them in half because enteric coating, so trying to stretch them out longer in between. So far handling nearly 6 hours between doses now. I know they want my pain well controlled but I started with only 20 pills every 4 hours and that drop off is going to be pretty evil.

And my dreams are wildly unreal. Everything disconnected the first night, literally watching myself doing cartoon dishes in a cartoon house, everything in my dream was animated and blinking back and forth between minecraft. Cartoon, blocks, cartoon, blocks, I finally just got up for awhile. When I went back to bed I started having memory dreams from being under anesthesia, like when my airway was put in. Felt my teeth clonk, abruptly woke up. It was fake. Felt a knuckle bump on the top of my head and abruptly woke up. It was fake. Kept falling back to sleep and abruptly waking up as I relived some of the prep before the really deeper going under, so just staying up nearly all night was easier. Couldn't really function, so just played on facebook. Sorry if I flooded your feeds with super share, lol.

The really cool thing was pre-op before anesthesia. For the first time in my life I had absolutely no anxiety at all in a medical setting. I don't know if I finally just reached a state of too tired and didn't care or what, but nothing at all bothered me or stressed me out. I knew I'd be knocked out soon and was looking forward to it, answered questions over and over again like a string pulled doll. I managed to do the smile and eye contact thing, everything went smooth with interaction, yay.

Pre-op was sad for the people around me though. A much older guy on my right was there for lots of lymph removal around his face and neck, would be a long surgery, and he rattled everything he knew about American presidential history, all the places of historical significance he'd traveled. Heard quite a lot about Andrew Jackson before someone asked him if family members were there to drive him home, then he stopped and there was a sad no. Was anyone out there for him? His pastor... Did he not have family living nearby? A son and a daughter, and neither one made the time to be there with him. He's obviously end of life in a high risk surgery and his own kids weren't there. He stopped talking after that.

An older woman on my left just quietly cried. Not quite sobbing, but nonstop quiet crying. She was asked if she'd like family to come sit with her, said no. Was anyone out there for her? Yes, her mother and her daughter. Was she sure she didn't want anyone? She answered with a very miserable sounding quiet no. I guess the relationships were better held at a distance. She wound up having a very horrible surgery involving vulva repair after leg loss, and we wound up in recovery beside each other. She was right, both her mother and daughter were emotionally distant. At least they were there, though. She got a call from her husband on dialysis during recovery, and she asked how much he'd been drinking before dialysis, sounded like he made it to fourth in a bottle of fifth and it wasn't even noon. She got after him, hung up, rolled on her side facing me and shut her eyes, didn't talk to anyone. At least he called, and at least they were there.

Through all this I reflected on my own life. I have family who loves me. We're not perfect and quite a lot of our backgrounds are highly dysfunctional, be we love. each. other. We are there for each other every day, we talk and say I love you every day, we care about each other having sucky days. And I felt fine in pre and post op knowing I was loved and I loved my people. I was truly at peace.

It's really nice to reach a place in aging life where you realize you don't have any sadness left in you about relationships. I've reached out, done what I can to heal with my loved ones, let go of the rest. Every day I do my best to reach out to someone, be there for someone. I don't always feel reciprocated, but I know those are my own brain chemicals, not theirs. I know all I have to do is say "I need help" or "please help me" and they'll be right there. If I feel blown off, I don't sit and sulk like I used to when I was younger. I ask the TV to be paused and I start talking. We talk until I either get tired of my own voice or feel like I said what I need to say. No one yells at me, and I know my own tension is a burden so I try to reign it in. I don't put head games on my people because I know I'm the one with the personality problems from my mental health diagnoses, and I do my best to communicate clearly, effectively, and succinctly. I need you, I love you, thank you.

And then realizing all the changes I've been working on also helped-

• I changed my diet in 2011 and started healing my diabetes damage
• I started physical therapy in 2011 and worked on better mobility and endurance
• I have been working with a psychologist on depression since 2007
• CPAP has been wonderful helping me get my brain problems under better control as I'm learning to sleep properly
• Being on gabapentin has helped so much with the nerve pain that my anxiety levels have gone down in general
• Being able to see success in what I'm doing through stats gives me goals, something to work on, so I feel productive. I hadn't looked at stats on wordpress in a long time, so when I got a real question asking for help yesterday with a real problem, I got to work focusing on helping someone instead of whining about myself after surgery. And then I looked up my stats and was blown away. Aspienado is my most viewed wordpress blog. I don't like using wordpress and rarely check stats, and Aspienado is a work blog for my first book and mostly private. But what is available to read gets found, from all over the world.
• I also spent much of today downloading and reading a new book that I'm writing a review on, and I want to do a good job because I know it'll be seen over time by thousands, including a handful of directors, producers, actors, and a worldwide fandom. It's important to feel successful doing real work, and opioids through pain have made it really easy over the last 24 hours to focus on work. This is how it was for years, opioids and pain. I remember feeling good about being a difference to someone even with so much pain. Lately I've diverted into genuinely enjoying playing and being creative on a game server with a family of very diverse people, some with their own physical and mental/emotional challenges, but it felt really good getting back into writing over this last 24 hours. I'm glad I have built all that up to fall back on. I've come from hermit to twitter gang to facebook groups to #clanfam. I have a large network of people who care if I show up, and I love seeing them online, as well. I even got a phone call today and was elated. Barry is glitchy, too, like me, and we're both working on reconstructing how our friendship started. Imagine years of memories just falling right out of your head. We both know what that's like.
• And most of all on my list of how I've come to be at peace is my joy. I was depressed for so many years, at times quite severely, and I hung on so hard. Bunny's little face very day is my joy, and I'm glad I'm still here every time I see her. She's my baby's baby, my pet kid, my challenge, sometimes my boss, lol. It's very fulfilling when a little kid genuinely loves you. I guess I was needing that.

Through all these things I've been learning how to balance my natural innate negativity through embracing publicity, challenging my baditudes and praying to be good for other people. I have prayed for 2 things for myself through the years. Usually prayers are for other people or all of us or something, but 2 very definite things I have prayed for myself.

• Years ago during my worst illness and growing ugliness (hair loss, weight gain, attitude affected by meds and pain), I cried and told God if I must lose everything else, at least let Scott come home happy to see my face. I looked pretty rough for a few years, and I had to stop fixing my hair and wearing makeup. I couldn't afford nice clothes with all the money going out for medical, and we went bankrupt before I wound up with full disability. I was so depressed. God, please let Scott be happy to see my face, because I don't know how he can stand to even look at me. Well, my hair still hasn't gone gray and I barely have a wrinkle on my whole face and I'm 56. I've been told that being on estrogen therapy for 20 years can do that, but was also told I'd start aging very quickly after getting off those in 2012. Not really holding my breath resisting, still can't wear makeup, but I've been able to grow my hair back out and Scott and I laugh together about something every day. I'm glad to see his face because he's my best friend, and I guess and hope he's still glad to see mine, even when I still have bad days and get very cranky with him, and he doesn't deserve it. My brain is my enemy on those days, not him.
• I also reached a point where I prayed for healing. I was raised stoicly believing that to pray for one's own anything was vain, so I've never really prayed for my own well being. We are all here to learn through our suffering, right? Well, after some deep thought just before I met my latest doctor in 2011, just before Christmas of 2010, I prayed for healing. I had come through some very hard years of months and months of back to back viral illnesses on top of severe nearly unlivable nerve disorder pain, and I was reaching a point where I wasn't sure I could keep hanging on out of spiritual duty. I was breaking inside and could no longer hide it. I reasoned for a few days that if I really do pray for healing, I mustn't be stupid about it. God doesn't work miracles for us to toss it back. If I commit to that prayer, then I commit to true healing with everything possible I can do to help take care of myself. I wouldn't get better to be stupid about it and ruin my health again. One day I was ready and I prayed. The next day the holes in my pierced ears had both closed up. They had never done that in 20 years. I immediately decided it would be blasphemous to get them repierced and gave all my earrings away. From then on has all been positive progress. It has been long and hard, but I wound up with the best possible primary care doctor, got diagnosed immediately and fast tracked so the right specialists and physical therapy. Years of doctors before him were just struggles with very addicting medications and the long slow descent into the hell of premature aging, without hope.

So laying there in pre-op, I knew I am ready now. I've done what I've apparently set out to do in this life coming to this earth, and I felt at peace. I've learned how to heal relationships, how to take much better care of myself, how to network with other real people with success and hope in mind for all of us. And I want to continue that. I know I'll have brain crash days and be very mixed up and brain chemical spills splashing on others, and I hope they can keep forgiving me. I'm facing a future of dementia as I age, and since brain problems run in my family, I've accepted the idea that I need to keep brain training now while I can to be good for people before I lose more control of this wonderful machine I live in.

This is very long and right now my brain is tired. I've made it through nearly 24 hours of fairly high dose opioids and enjoyed it immensely, but soon I let it go again. Addiction is a bitch, protracted withdrawal will make me mean again, and I wanted to write these feelings out before I forget I had them.

5 years from now

When I first came back out public I had a 5-year plan, and so far it's going ok, just on a slower track than I originally envisioned, but a much richer and more vibrant track, so I'm good with it. It hit me today that I haven't thought much beyond that, and here I am already past the 5 year milestone.

So- Where do I want to be 5 years from NOW? This is a game I've played with myself for a couple of decades, and it actually works because it makes me think about priorities and goals and stagnation and stuff like that. I got the idea from a survey I did once.

1) What were you doing 10 Years Ago?
Wow, the nursing school year.  I remember the big mystery over who was smuggling mummified cats out of lab, and practicing catheterizing fake people.  My favorite word was auscultate.

2) 5 Years Ago?
I crashed into the fabled midlife review crap I used to ridicule others for.  Can’t wait to find out why old people are saying “60 is the new 40″…  Sounds like a very loaded statement.  Let’s see how gracefully we can hit brick walls every other decade.  Heads up to the mid-30′s crowd.

3) 1 Year Ago?
Wasted out of my skull on medication just to be able to walk, heartbreaking end to an awesome friendship, discovering the joys of the empty nest, and plunging headlong into youtube fanaticism.

The year I took a break from the internet I did a lot of deep thinking about that stuff in reverse- where do I want to be a year from now, 3 years from now, 5 years from now kind of thing. I stopped at 5 because I really couldn't see past it. So many things in my life have abruptly changed or cut off and you never know who is next on the ol' chopping block and all the changes things like that entail, so I didn't force it.

I've done plenty of looking back and assessing how far I've come posts. I haven't really done any going forward that far posts. Part of looking and planning forward is assessing right now, and I think I pretty much assess right now to death, don't I? I'm done with physical therapy unless something changes, I'm continuing to self monitor with a medical team, OH, Scott's job finally sold so there's a little bit of a snip in the annual income, kiddos are in my house, and we're dealing with even more hard stuff, so this post is more an exercise in focus than actual planning, but this is a good way to lay down a foundation and set up scaffolding for that.

Let's get a direction. I could go in any direction, and a lot of it depends on financial independence (which my original plan was intended to help push). I have kiddos in Houston, I have people all over the world I'd like to see, plus things I'd love to do if I were able, but if I've learned anything it's Keep It Simple, Stupid. The simplest thing to do is sift top priority out, and that's kiddos. In the last 10 years I've seen my Houston kiddos what, 3 times? I think in the next 5 years I'd like to see them at least a couple more times. If I'm going to do that, I have to be able to travel and survive stepping out of my own routine and comfort zone into a different environment, and I'd really like to do that with more brain on. So of course, top goal for the next 5 years is be ready to travel. NO JUNK FOOD, no stupid mistakes like what happened with the new shoes being laced too tight, no wasting my money or energy on things (or people) who will make this priority drop into a lower place. And anyone who expects that will need to understand I might feel very crabby about making that kind of a choice. I used to be able to jump and go be with people through crises at the drop of a hat, and I did it all the time for a number of people, and I just can't any more. I need to be ready to say a polite NO and stick to my guns if I want my own kiddos to stay top priority.

I know this sounds trivial, but I want to be done with the junk in my room. Every time I've started going through this old stuff that has piled up (and a good chunk of it isn't even mine), more gets piled up on me. My room is like a catchall in a family of packrats. Granted, @bonenado is a very neat packrat, constantly rearranging the entire basement and keeping a spotless closet, but a lot of this stuff is pure junk in my eyes, and we're so busy sifting through more junk (Bunny is a funny cosmic joke on this whole thing) that I never seem to get back to the original junk I keep trying to get rid of. I used to have to keep organized piles of stuff from the bankruptcy and my disability case, just piles of EOBs overtaking piles of other stuff that never quite got done for Christmases and stuff, and it's just ridiculous now. It's been so long since some of that happened that I can now just burn whole sacks of stuff, but they're buried under more sacks of stuff that needed sifting out, including baby stuff and my mobile office stuff that keeps getting bombed apart. I finally taped my publishing contract up on the wall. I see it every day. I lost that piece of paper so many times because suddenly people in my house in the middle of sorting and writing. I need a whole room I can spread stuff out in that can be guaranteed no one will ever touch, but I have basically 2 feet of kitchen counter I've commandeered, a corner of a table, the dresser in my bedroom, and a strip of wall by my bed. Oh, and a corner in the closet I won't let @bonenado touch. I can't even tell you where my stuff is in the basement any more. I have entire music collections probably worth some money that have been engulfed. Everything ever done by the old guys like Bach, music from all over the world, a collection I dreamed of growing up and to this day have never enjoyed. I don't have the kind of life that allows me to have my own record collection out where I can get to it in my own house where no one will destroy it or move it or bother it, and it has sat for years down in the dark with the spiders. To get it all out now and listen to it- I'm trying to guesstimate how long it would take to listen to the entire collection in the few hours a day I actually get to be home, and that is usually interrupted somehow. 2 months? I'm guessing at least 2 months to listen to all that. Maybe 3. Chopin, Schupert, Rachmaninov... Yes, all the Beethoven, all the everything you ever heard of. I own it. I've talked before in the night was smashy about how I don't get to run my house the way I want.

dragging brain back into focus

Actually, that all reminds me of a very realistic dream I had a kind of long time ago that stuck with me and helped me let go of fighting for all that stuff.

I was a very old woman, at least for the time, and fashionably modern. I had all the latest in clothing, home decor, and lived very comfortably. In the dream I just knew this, I didn't see a lot of it. In the dream I was dressed to leave, in a sitting room detailed with brocades and dark striped wallpaper, velvet covered mahogany stuffed chairs, patterned prints and lots of lace, and I was dressed to the hilt right down to the latest dress boots, gloves, and hat.

I was looking around at all of it. I had to leave it. Something had happened (what?) and I had to leave all of it, and I detested the future that lay before me. Someone else would have all my nice things (the grand piano! the drapes! the imported carpeting!!!), and I was galled that I would be forced to step down into squalor. I kept looking around the room, cherishing the finery, cherishing my 'place' in the world, cherishing the quiet wealth dripping all around me. Cherishing my buffer against all the dirty world outside.

A carriage was coming to pick me up. Men would come into the house and escort me into the carriage, and I would leave this place and never come back. MY things. MY life. Another family would come in and mess up all MY stuff like a bunch of heathens. But I felt fine, even smug. In the dream I thought and felt all these things, and I felt smug that they would never take them away from me, never really force me to leave.

In the dream it was about sitting in that posh room and waiting. No one else was with me, no words were spoken, but deep down I knew that was me, and I watched myself like that, an ugly soul inside a beautiful home. Not one thought was wasted on remembering a person, not one moment of cherishing was about someone who was loved, not even a pet. All that went on while the clock ticked was looking around at the wealth and feeling smug that they couldn't take me from it. I realized after waking it was because I had overdosed on something and timed it for when the carriage would be arriving. They would walk in to find me dead, which would create a whole other fuss and stir, and technically I'd never have been forced to leave my house. Bah on them!

O_O I know, right. What a biatch. Well, I'm not sure what's up with the vividness of it and it really feeling like it was me unless possibly that's a past life or someone else's memories floating around in the night or a remote viewing kind of a dream, which I've done a few times, but whatever it was, I feel very strongly like I dreamed it for a very good reason, and that's NOT to make the same mistake again. In this life now I'm still very drawn to nicer things (not like I wish I had them but more like I feel that it's familiar) but shun them almost with repulsion and live a mostly immaterial life. I'm in a nice house, yes, but most of it is filled with hand-me-down furniture and decor, and not much of it matches. I'm not house-proud. I could (and have) easily lived in trailers and much smaller houses, and even slept on floors and in a car. I just have this really strong feeling that wealth is a trap for the mind, and that it ruins what we are supposed to be doing here.

I think the missed point is that every person is important. Every person is a wealth of potential. Every person is why we're all here, and it's the only common denominator in every other possible variable in our existences. To shun other people for things is to completely miss the point of existing as life. We may be autonomous beings, but we are still an interwoven part of each other in so many ways we can't even imagine.

For instance, I'm very aware in this life that other people create the things I enjoy. Other people labor over the food I buy, other people labor over the clothes I wear, everything I touch and see all around me is because other people are living lives and laboring. To cherish finery without acknowledging that people create it is, honestly, a bit silly. To hold oneself above others over materialism is about as silly as it gets. The materialism wouldn't exist in the first place without other people, the being above them certainly wouldn't exist without them, and the above ones can be ridiculously estranged from the very essence of humanity if they can't see this.

If I really was that old lady in a past life, I'm grateful I got past that. I'm glad my idiot choice to kill myself before I saw other people take my precious finery didn't ban me from going on to live a full life of loving people around me and learning to work together to solve our daily problems.

That was a bit off track of where I want to be 5 years from now, but I'm suddenly leaping to wonder where I'll be 5 lives from now. o_O Wow.

I know what I don't want 5 years from now. I don't want to be an idiot. I don't want to lose people over petty selfishness. I don't want to grow bitter and I don't want to wallow in being sad. I'm going to do a bit of thinking this month while I deal with this tummy ache that won't go away, and maybe I'll have some cool dreams in the meantime.

I want to still be here in 5 years. I want to be a positive force to reckon with.

gathering moss

I've been making time to sit around with my feet up a lot more last 3 days, so it was apropos running into moss covered cobble for my player shop- all the metaphorical moss in my stagnant life, lol. This next is pretty much how my connection looks all the time. I hit one bar and start blinking off the server like a transporter glitch. I finally shared today that my wifi provider is negotiating with my electric company to upgrade equipment support for fiber upgrade, and after that happens (crossing my fingers it won't take all winter) I'll likely apply for mini-mod. I've got 1500 hours on server, makes sense I'd use being around so much to be more helpful. Kind of impossible, though, if I'm suddenly disappearing in mid sentence all the time.

My birthday is tomorrow. I will be a tetrahedral number, a sum of 6 consecutive primes, and more. Have a ball with that. I've been told many times I don't look my age. I never have. They say you're as young as you feel. Since I've felt like I have full body arthritis since I was a kid, and since so many have told me I'm an old soul, I sincerely doubt 'feeling young' has anything to do with it, because I've never felt young. If were such a thing as soul police, they'd never find me in this body. I feel like an impostor in disguise.

I'm on the 5th Tremors movie tonight while my people are scattered doing their things. I love that this movie series took a more serious turn than the usual shark and monster one-offs. The filming is good and the survivalist slant is credible, and the Burt Gummer character development has actually been fun to watch from one movie to the next, and each movie is progressively very different from the last. Here's more on Burt.

I'm not sure what is happening but I feel like I have finally clicked into place with who I am. My years of angsting seem to be dissipating and I can look back now and see how so many pieces fit. I was on the right track all along, just couldn't pull back and see bigger picture very well. I understand best when I see a flash of all the things, which makes me a bit of a savant, but only if I'm in exactly the right position with the right slant of light hitting the right tilt of my head and my line of sight at exactly the right height, so I'm mostly crawling along blind and stupid until that hits. I often feel like my mind is in Flatland, and my brain is dimensions above where I'm rarely able to actually use it, but when I get that click, #allthethings. And it's brilliant and wonderful and so satisfying, like suddenly I'm using my brain like Flatterland. And I mean that metaphorically, like applied to my emotional and social life. A particular person who talked me through falling apart in 2007 would appreciate this visual, I think. I saved the words from back then, and I can reread them now and see that I instinctively knew what I needed but was so mentally blind that I couldn't see or say them correctly, and they had to wash over me, over and over like waves along a shoreline, before I could go back and understand them for what they were.

I know now why I needed her, and why it was so important to have her back so I could solve myself. Sometimes a key doesn't know why it is the one, even if that key is the most important one because it's the only one that worked in that lock.

I was locked out of myself. The key turned. Everything opened up. I got stuck because the key was stuck in the lock. I had to be able to pull the key out of the lock to go on. And now I keep the key with me. I might never need it for the lock again, but it was important and became precious. The key to who I have been able to become, and hopefully even more, may have been a representation in my mind, but could only be used in the form of a very real and genuine person. We can't just imagine ourselves into being more than we are without other very real people making our hearts credible. Inventing and reinventing ourselves falls short and very flat without the warmth of another soul to care that it happens.

I used to believe I didn't need anyone to Be. I started a story a very long time ago about that. I think I'll be able to finish that one now.

~time passing, playing with filters~

~more time passed, need to let this one go~

lyrics

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.

dragons are not shy

One of those bring a sandwich kind of posts.

There is a very big difference between shyness and reticence. I'm not at all shy. I am so obnoxiously forward that I embarrass people. I myself don't embarrass easily because I'm acutely unaware in the first place. (Everyone who knows me in real life is vigorously nodding.)

Reticence is "a lack of willingness or desire to do or accept something" according to Merriam-Webster. If I am reticent about something like joining in a convo or going somewhere with a group, it has a lot more to do with being able to see a long list of disastrous consequences from blown off misunderstandings and me becoming agitated, if not severely pissed (making whatever problems arise much worse since I'm not good at real time feels), and has absolutely nothing to do with anything shyness is automatically connected to. Shyness is about being too aware of peers and an inward difficulty with handling one's own feels about other people's possible feels, maybe even a sort of dread. The only thing I dread is coming to my senses with bloody skin in my mouth. I'll believe I'm simply explaining something and the recipient will feel shredded and never be friends with me again.

Over the last 5 years since I've come back out public, I've been invited to several introvert groups and lumped into the 'shy' thing multiple times, based solely on minimal observations, leaps to conclusions, and shortcut explanations. I know it's difficult for some to understand that jumping to a word like 'shy' as a shortcut for 'extremely reticent about commitment to interaction that I know could turn sour with me as the bad guy' makes me kinda crabby because it automatically denotes a whole slew of behaviorisms not like me at all, but there we go, for lack of better verbiage in a quick way, what the hell, I'm shy. 😠

The truth is that I am a stupid person. Really stupid. And I'm not shy at all about owning this. In fact, I think it's crucial to understanding why I'm NOT shy. My social intelligence quotient (the capability to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments), called an SQ, is so bad that I constantly misinterpret not just social signals, but everything being said in the actual words because typical humans don't use words logically but emotionally. Most people have an inbuilt translator that interprets all the incoming into how one should behave in response. Basically, a bunch of happy bubbly people on a road trip will have gone silent long before they've dropped me off, and I usually won't have a clue why.

As far as I can tell, it begins with me not behaving properly, and they receive the wrong signals from me. If I'm not bubbling along with a bubbly group, they automatically think something is wrong. If I'm being quiet, someone might think I don't like them or I'm not having a good time. If a brave soul tries to interpret FOR ME to the group without having any kind of real clue, I'll become hostile without even realizing it, and I've been told I even scare people, which confused me for years because I've heard this even when I didn't feel angry or raise my voice in any way. I think it's because I can twist blunt truth through emotional guts like a hot knife through butter and completely miss the empathy part while I'm doing it. It usually hits me a few days later and I quietly die in a corner all alone facepalming, because by then it's usually long beyond repair.

This is my point of view on how humans see things. Apologies to the friend I'm using as an example, but it's spot on. A dog can be really cute tilting its head and looking at you funny. Personally, I don't see 'cute' when I look at animals. I grew up with animals and can read them very well. So a person sent me a pic one day of a dog and was all awww, and I was like are you sure the dog is feeling ok? And sure enough, within the hour the dog puked big time. Why I was able to get that from a picture, and a person living with the dog couldn't see it?

If humans can misinterpret a pet, they can certainly misinterpret me. A glance at a person doesn't mean anything unless you really know that person. You cannot tell by looking at someone or by how they're behaving whether they are suffering something inside that you can't see. I worked retail for years, and many people go shopping to relieve stress. You never know when a person is hiding fear of a dental appointment, or sadness and dread about an upcoming funeral, maybe even just lost a baby, and when they snap at you in a check out or return line, you can't assume they are always hateful and mean like that. Well, you can, you can assume all the shallow you want.

Deep down we are all hiding something. When I am surrounded by bubbly people, I don't for one second believe they are happy just because they are bubbly. I don't believe they aren't shy just because they're behaving like they're not. I believe the quickness to judge the outer cover is an automatic defense mechanism that most people don't even realize they are utilizing to justify their own points of view on how they think something in the world around them should be. Many people behave in response to perceived peer pressure, real or imagined, and go along with the bubbly bit because they're supposed to. I don't think most people are even cognizant of this process, stepping into rhythm with others like that. I'm very aware of it because I don't seem to have the wherewithal to get into step in the first place.

I don't pretend well. I don't play 'happy' to an audience very well. I can't keep up the tone, the rhythm, and the banter and still keep up with the convo. That doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the convo. That doesn't mean I'm shy about talking. That only means I have a cognitive disability to juggle all the eggs in a social situation without dropping any. I could care less what someone thinks of this, and it doesn't hurt my feelings at all to be the autie on the fringe, but I cringe when I hear "she's shy". I especially hate when it backfires and full attention turns on me to oh don't be shy we won't hurt you. That has really happened. The irony is how close they come to a tiger claw in the ol' jugular when that happens.

If I quietly sit on the side of a convo, believe me, I am enjoying the people doing the talking. If I weren't, like if I were bored or not interested, I'd be gone really fast. I don't hang in there for chatter I'm not interested in. I actually miss a lot of chatter I *am* interested in because I can't keep up with all that. My incoming pile for 'talking' lasts about an hour, tops. After that, nothing makes sense any more because my real time starts lagging and skipping. When that starts happening, I tend to drop off because it doesn't make sense trying to be polite going drrrdrrr in my brain. That's not a reflection on the people doing the talking at all. That's my brain.

Yes, I do feel like I miss a lot. Yes, sometimes I do wish I could jump in and keep up. Yes, once in awhile I feel a little sorry for myself. But you know what? I have a sweet advantage over a lot of chatty people. I remember what I've audio processed for a very long time. It's like how I can remember something I've seen on twitter years ago and find the timestamp. I said something to someone just this week about such and such, and they'd already forgotten that only 2 days before they'd said such and such, and suddenly it was almost a weird insult coming out of my mouth because they had no context and thought I was being snotty instead of adding to something funny after the fact.

I wouldn't trade that kind of memory for any amount of bubbly happy. I like that I remember the people I listen to, and I like that I can see discomfort behind staying in step with social pressure. The empathy I've learned has come from the outside like this, and sometimes I can tell when someone might need to puke and keeps smiling anyway and no one else ever picks up on it. I may not be able to pretend, and I may not be able to keep up, but I'm human too, and I know there's a lot more underneath words flying over my head and behind cute faces looking at me.

Wild subject change, but one I deal with daily and so I think about this a LOT. Time passes, people forget, I don't feel time passing right, I don't forget...

I'm blocking out a little background chaos at the moment, getting through this in snatches as I can. 2+M views can't be wrong.