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. ðŸ˜
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.
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.
I dreamed last night that way in the future, a really old library in St. Louis had the last remaining section on twitter, and it was devoted to Star Wars tweets. They were divided into 3 sections- parody accounts/tweets, movie quote tweets, and fan gifs, which were randomly playing around the library aisles like full adult sized holograms. I blame this dream on a few twinges of possible (but not really) regret during my recent mass unfollowing of useless Star Wars accounts and an article I ran into last week about how the Library of Congress actually attempted to document twitter and gave up after a year saying that our millions of thoughts would need far too much work and storage space and could never be properly reassembled into archives outside of twitter itself.
I also dreamed about living in a really old building that was rotting out, and a giant tree limb had grown into one room over a dining table and was covered in a big web with millions of spiders and other bugs. It bothered me very badly that as bad a shape as this place was, it still commanded a high price as living space. I sort of blame this dream on a combo of playing minecraft and watching both Divergent and Insurgent within a 24 hour time span.
And then I dreamed both these things were all actually one big place over time, and I got to see how it became demolished bit by bit and renovated into futuristic new materials and hallways and furniture and people, and I'm going to blame it on this cool tweet I saw come through last night, because I have always loved anything timey wimey since I was a little girl. It's up to you how far you want to take the emotional metaphors in my dreams, since I am spending my month redirecting out of a rut and creating a new work plan for this year. You can check out the book on Amazon and click this snip to get to his account on twitter.
And then he tweeted this. Yes, it clicks back.
One direction I'm definitely staying away from is not being truthful about who I am, especially on networking sites. It's one thing for people to make parody accounts, which I find entertaining, it's another for people to actually list specs and credentials about themselves that are erroneous. I've openly stated I use a pen name registered with a publisher, and at one time paid to use it as a business name. However, I don't appoint titles or descriptions to myself (so many entrepreneurial CEOs of startups out there), and I don't say I'm somewhere I'm not (it's cool if people want to identify with 'the biz' in Hollywood or the UK or whatevs, but allowing others to believe you're actually there physically when you're not is called 'conning'). I am a real person in a real place dealing with real stuff and trying to do real things, and I'm still just discovering how much my own reputation has been dented by connecting so deeply with a few others that don't seem to understand the value of social media cred beyond being popular for talking a lot.
Before some need to protest, I know all about juggling a public social media presence with a dangerous past, so yes, I don't think people should publicly share physical addresses unless they are real business locations. That being said, there was a person once about a year or so ago that suddenly blurted something on twitter that I had to ask be removed, and that person knows better. So I find it interesting that person still lists erroneous info as legitimate business cred.
Part of my problem lately with this big flip into a new direction is the anger I've bitten back for a long time about not being taken seriously. I finally just had to spell it out- I felt duped. I felt baited and reeled in like a total noob, and then my sense of naive aspie loyalty was played until I was so confused that I got stuck in philosophical self questioning. So while some of you are wondering what in the world is going on with me suddenly diverting into minecraft and seeming to be going nowhere, I'm wrestling with some very emotional depression over the winter and being guided into calming down between a psychologist and a good friend who knows how to redirect and keep my mind on something in lieu of self destructing. That's important.
Part of the big change is friendships. I am totally on board with social media saving lives. Sharing and touching base are pretty awesome when you need them the most. However, becoming dependent on social media as opposed to getting real help (supervision, meds, actual real people looking at your actual real face and smiling actual real smiles at you and actually listening to you actually talk) can be like spiraling out of control down a black hole. Twitter is not a cure for depression, guys. It's a crutch. Yes, it's a very good crutch when we need it, and some of you saw me tweeting around the clock for months at a time there for awhile, but it's still a crutch.
It takes a few guts to step out of your real actual door and find real actual help. I totally understand that. I have lived through unimaginable anxiety and PTSD. It has gotten so bad in the past that I'd pull out of traffic on major highways just to get out of my car, or drive in freezing sleety weather with my windows down because my claustrophobia would be so bad. It's gotten so bad at home many times that I'll suddenly drop everything I'm doing at home and drive into town (that first 15 minutes on a highway is horrible) just so someone will see me die if I drop dead, and I won't be all alone (because depression lies, especially in the middle of having a nasty anxiety attack), and sometimes it's so bad that it's all I can do to lightly touch my steering wheel with my fingertips over and over while I chant or something because I'm so terrified of my car.
Depression and PTSD are horribly very real. I've lived for decades with stuff that people still don't know the half of, and I've made it this far. There comes a time when a person finally just has to admit that some people don't help make this better. People that hide behind masks and smooth things over and tell me in private what I can or can't say don't help make this better. And finally realizing it's like the blind leading the blind, the severely depressed coaching other severely depressed on how to HIDE being severely depressed...
Guys, that's dangerous.
All the big thing on social media now is talking about how hiding our depressions behind smiles is what is killing us. Believing other people telling us we have to smile is what's killing us. Letting other people tell us how we have to play head games with them is dangerous.
I've had one of my best winters in at least 12 years. Best Christmas in ages, best health in forever, and what you guys didn't see me grappling with nearly every single day was pop up suicidal thoughts. I don't want to die. But I have PTSD and severe depression, and several people on social media were triggering me over and over and over, and after weeks and even months of asking them to stop, I finally just lost my temper on 3 different people, 2 of those were pretty public.
I don't want to die. Neither do other people who are hiding severe depression. Not everyone is as brave as me asking 'friends' to back off. It takes a lot of guts to stand up to people who are used to tagging you a lot. My anxiety was going out of control again, especially on major highways. I was once thrown from a violently flipping vehicle. You guys have no idea the trauma I'm still working through from my dad pulling me out of an ER and taking me home with internal bleeding without a single x-ray. I had absolutely no mental, physical, or emotional support from my own parent through a car accident that should have killed me. I've had to deal with aging parents and my stupid childhood flashing back while I'm trying to write a very honest book, and through all of this, I have yet to hear one word of comfort about finally dealing with the loss of my friend to a murder or watching my mom die very slowly from a person who claimed to have read everything I blogged. Is it any wonder I blew up on Christmas Eve after being PM'd about someone's one of two moms taking some Christmas presents away. I wanted to say grow up, but I realized I was the one sticking around for that drama. Maybe it's time for me to grow up.
Friendship is about balance. I am trying to find my balance and keep working. I'm dealing with cognitive disability doing it. My last attempt at honesty was returned with being unfollowed on other accounts and no closure. You know what? I would be stupid to take that bait and pursue answers. There are no answers except that I was gullible again. If I'm the one making the same mistake over and over believing people when they say they love me, then I'm the one who needs to take at look at why that is happening. I'm easy. I make a good pet. At first...
And then I start digging holes all over the yard and leaving half eaten mice in shoes and taking off through windows and fences, and the head games pivot around who will last the longest in another unbalanced relationship before the explosion happens. And it did happen.
My job on this earth is to put stuff into words. That is my natural inclination, to wrestle with how to say the stuff that's hard to say, how to make it easy for other people to understand another point of view, how to share ideas that are difficult to talk about. I believe I was born deficit especially for this calling. I've had to work so hard to get to this point, and I know what I have to share is important. It's worth the work and all the time and effort, and everything I go through and learn about myself adds depth to what makes what I need to say so important.
Depression is not a game. You don't ice it over like a cake. You don't tell people they have to keep their masks on. That's conditional love. A lot of people don't seem to understand the concept of conditional love. Don't even call it love, ok? Stop baiting each other with the word 'love'.
True love is doing everything in your power to break down the walls that are hiding what is killing people.
Been awhile since I was called psycho, lol. Too bad the tweet is gone. Yeah, yeah, the mutual block thing, we've both still got other accounts. He knows I know he knows I know he deleted the psycho tweet so I couldn't screen snip it and frame it somewhere.
he probably really has one
One of the things I brought up with psyche guy this week was how a few people mistakenly think that just because I keep staying friends with them in the shadows of their depressive debaucheries, they conclude it must mean everyone else will surely find it amusing, and suddenly they come out of a closet and start publicly destroying themselves like it's entertainment. I truly apologize to the internet for that. I've really got to stop talking to people on twitter, just stick to the little hub of sane friends I already know.
why yes, yes you were *running away really fast*
I knew I was an alcoholic. I went to church wasted and dared anyone to broach the perimeter and actually deal with me, and no one ever did. I was stoned out of my mind one day showing my little girl how to push a chair up to the stove and put her dolly pan on a burner and I really put food in it and turned the burner on. I thought it was so cute. See, drunk and stoned people think things are cute. It's hard to grasp how far over the line one gets when one can't see the line to begin with. I'm like that with legitimate prescriptions, too. Doctors pull me back off stuff so fast that I just stopped taking anything. Some people run naked up a street (srsly know someone arrested for that), I just start smiling at people and wondering where the knives are. My family will vouch for that. You don't wanna see me get happy on meds. It means my inhibitions are gone.
big red flag if a twitter follower is actually doing this
if you don't comply you get called psycho and cussed out
rage on, tweeps
I think the cruelest scariest thing about me is that even with a glitchy brain, my memory is fantastic for things I see written out, especially with time stamps. Being able to pull up convos for people who don't remember having them in the first place goes back years, and it's always the last straw. It creeps people out that I remember stuff they wrote in forums and chats and twitter and they don't even remember writing it, and bing, I find the proof really super fast. The maze of words on the internet is my home. I live in here. I watch the bugs crawl and the people blink in and out and more and more words show up. I'm that part of the Borg mind that never lulls to sleep.
I've mentioned a fan actually showing up at my house, right? 50 Things About Me (number 7)
there you go, something to read
the point is I wrote that in 2008
it actually happened in the 1990s
I've had internet friends hanging on me for many years
you're not my first, you won't be my last
That being said, a few of you know I'm trying really hard to stay away from the Pond of Death and clearly failing, so it's probably best to just stay focused on the Lexxversary and keep following Kai around for awhile in minecraft. The hardest things to catch on about me for non blog readers (and even some regular readers)- 1- I have Asperger's and I'm not talking just a little, my diagnosis is "Autism Spectrum" (yes, I have a legal diagnosis from a real psychologist) and my GAF score on a good day was 51-60 so if I'm not talking, just keep walking 2- everything about me comes through a thick static of nervous system dysfunction and pain from both fibromyalgia and a really bad car wreck plus years of brain fail recovery from a nasty virus that hit my brain in 2004, imagine that on top of aspie overload, and if you can't, like I said, keep walking 3- everything you need to know about me is already on the internet, and there's a featured post to the right if you really really really hafta know more, plus a nicely organized list of archives and other blogs I work on 4- if it's bugging you that you don't know right now about what I'm doing right now and what's happening around me right now, maybe it's not me, it's you. Because that's weird. I've said several times I'm not an emotional butler who answers to the whole world tagging me in notifications, and if anyone wants to know what's going on, Pinky blog is here for that. It's clearly linked in my twitter bio. The reason I networked ALL of this stuff is to make it easier for family, friends, Lexx fans, other fans, Pinky followers, other aspies and auties, basically everyone to find who I am, what I do, and where it's all going.
I should probably note here that I'm actually not a cat person
I think I'm confoozing ppl with cat pix on my blog
these are here to be amusing
they also click out to more amusing stuffs
I do have friends on the internet. They're awesome and check up on me when they spot the floundering in the water part. They know me well enough to do that. How did they get to know me well enough to do that if I don't talk to people? Good question. Being observant is a good answer.
If I put everything out here on the webs (which has been a lot of work, but necessary to the overall goal of conveying what it's really like being a person like me, because some people out there actually want to know because they have friends and family like me that they don't know what to do with), then everything you want to know is here or linked from here. If you are too lazy to click a link and read, I am too lazy to talk. Goes both ways. Besides, the people who really know me know I never shut up once I get going. You could be trapped in hell with me forever and I'd keep grinding away at your brain, like some kind of Sarte experiment. I call it Pond of Death.
ppl who know me irl know the trewths-
I'm a sucker & easily manipulated
over & over & over
there is a pattern...
if I'm not a cat person, who is the cat???
I've been called psycho before. That part doesn't bother me. I've been called different and weird all my life. I've been picked on, beaten, humiliated, mocked, walked on, used, manipulated, left behind, abundantly lied to, and a gun held to my head, much of this by people who have called me friend and even some family, so excuse me if I feel jaded. However, the reason you're still here is because I was sweet to you once upon a time, perhaps even for a stretch of time, and you thought that was nice when no one else was talking to you. Because that's my ultimate failing, you see, noticing when other people need someone to talk to them. And that is the error of my ways. I genuinely like people and care enough to take a little time, and for the love of God, why it keeps backfiring is beyond me. I've been working on this problem with a psychologist since 2007, and I'm starting to sift down to maybe I'm super deficit noticing that little red flag waving around saying this is a bad idea...
I mention sometimes that there are people who watch everything I do
that wasn't a lie
I see humans the way humans see dogs and cats and other pets- you're all part of a quirky thing that I enjoy watching. People watching is a real thing. And I have a sociology degree. If I were a little pixie floating around in a ball of light, I would be attracted to emotional strays. I would adopt them and make them mine and we'd all be snug and happy in a nice little place called the internet, loving each other. But there's a risk with bringing home strays, isn't there? You never know when a dwarf rabbit will suddenly morph into a 'giant' breed. (That actually happened in my life.) You never know when your dad is going to shoot your dog while you're away at college. (That actually happened in my life.) You never know when a fox is going to trot into your yard and kill a mama hen and orphan all her chicks. (That actually happened with Scott right there in the yard.) See, people are like that, too, full of surprises. You can't tell looking at them or talking to them on twitter what things will be like down the road. Sadly, I love my humans, and when it gets weird or sad or even ugly, I really don't know what to do with them, because they are autonomous beings and the reality is I allowed another person to get into my head and my heart and mess me up. I have a long history of that, because I'm aspie and have a legitimate social deficit and actually believe people when they tell me stuff.
we're all magical on the internet, aren't we?
Imagine if your dog or cat could talk and you find out they'd been lying to you all this time about something like preferring the neighbor or really hating the way you do something around the house or feeling disappointed in you about something. Imagine them smoothing it over with cheery lies, not to make you feel better, but because that's the way things are done in 'friendships'- everything depends on lies to keep working out.
Aspies are like Vulcans. We suck at lies and abhor them. We don't get why there are two sets of everything, one is the lie in front of the other that is the truth. And then when we point it out or want to know what's really going on, we lose friends.
if u cannot survive w/o lying to urself, plz to seek professional help asap
if u cannot survive w/o lying to ur friends, the word is not 'friends'
How am I doing? I said it right there on twitter. "Get in line Im having a shit week 2". I'd rather not have to say that on a public feed, but that's what happens when people get pissed about me shutting them out from private access to me after they've demonstrated that they say one thing and do another twice in a row. For that I was told I'm a fucked up psycho. How am I doing? I'm not going to explain my head to a random question in 140 character convo threads, that's ridiculously lame.
I'm actually doing quite well. Got a fantastic starter post out last night for my Mantrid character 3-parter summary, my pain level is down a bit (yay!), yesterday was just plain funny because it felt good to be called a psycho again after all these years (by someone who still has no clue who I really am, bless his wasted egocentric heart), and I have Valentine sacks for the kids if they come over today and The Walking Dead is on tonight, huzzah!
By the way, I'll use anything and everything for writing prompts, so that's basically what this was. Keeping the ol' bean oiled up and worked out. This vid was restricted for awhile, seems to be back. Enjoy it while we have it!
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.
This is a continuation from the nuts before Christmas- part 1, part 2, and part 3. I ran my data plan out and couldn't get this really long HD vid loaded until it rolled over again, router refused to handle it.
If this is your first jump in, my family is ASD, and @bonenado's family is ADHD, so it was really interesting getting Bunny and Batman together in one house for the first time. Parts 1 and 2 were watching the kids acclimate by running around, part 3 was watching Bunny experiment on my dad (super young ADHD + super old ASD). Part 4 here is Batman retreating into the laundry room, which makes a really good cave for kids and pets who come into our house, and Bunny adjusting back down from the wild activity when he disappeared.
I've noticed with Bunny being super social (I'm not, I've had to adapt) that keeping a running dialogue with her works really well, and apparently Batman picked up on that and even adapted to it himself. Bunny has a much bigger vocabulary and was speaking in complete sentences by the time she turned 2 like her mama did (they're both 2 1/2 here), but Batman is more inward like his mama was at that age, and I don't remember her talking a lot with me until 3-4 years old, and anyone could tell when she didn't pay attention on purpose because she preferred being in her own little bubble. Bunny kind of walked in all over Batman's bubble because she wanted him to come back out and run with her again, and I got a kick out of how their communication signals crossed and then started smoothing out. I think this would be a great intro vid for child social psyche students. I felt kind of like a brain interface for awhile, but it's something I've become used to. I'm saying that last bit because the simplistic narration I use in the beginning actually annoys me silly (ASD), but it really does work when one can be patient enough to handle 20 minutes of interface adjustment, like I was doing here. My opinion is that neither barking orders nor interfering work well with neuro collisions, and that patience and narrative are key to same-paging, essentially lining up our brains. I can imagine teachers and daycare workers not having the time to apply this on more personal level, so I applaud programs that help begin integrating neuro atypicals together before they slam through the culture shock of suddenly going to school. I'm pro neurodiversity, and I believe all of us have talents and skills that we can find niches for.
The first two posts were about the kids. Now let's take a look at ASD from the old days, before it was even a thing.
This is my dad. He grew up with simplistic little kid interaction and thoughts because the ASD range was common enough around him growing up that it was normal, but remember that ASD kids sometimes super plug into acedemics later. By the time he graduated the 8th grade in a one room rural school house, he was acing tests about government structure and economics that they don't give kids today until they're in college. One of the first things I learned from him was how to count, because numbers are behind everything that goes on in the world. He doesn't know Bunny already counts to 20 (at 2 1/2) and is just watching to see why he's even acting like that. Bunny's ADHD is going full blast in her head right now, super focused on studying how to socially interact with this guy. An ASD kid would have just ignored him unless he/she were interested in actually doing something.
Bunny has got my dad figured out, and without any words at all (funny to us because she's normally a nonstop talker), spends a little time manipulating him without him even knowing it. When I first met Bunny's mama (at that age), I was nearly still as rigid as my dad in the way I saw the world and what I thought of things and how they should work. I think Bunny wanted to see how complex my dad could get because he'd been doing the same simple thing over and over trying to get her to repeat it.
On the other hand, my dad knew what to do with Batman and actually got positive response. This behavior in a 2 year old wasn't at all considered deviant or abnormal with him, this is just what 2 year olds are like and they click in later and get real smart.
One of the reasons I got a sociology degree was because I craved to know what I still didn't understand about how humans work. Group interaction and individual acceptance is a really big deal everywhere you go, especially on jobs and in families. A person who doesn't feel accepted in a group can become despondent (depressed) or despotic (bossy), both of which can have sad and bad consequences, or inspire them to leave to find another group, but not everyone is strong enough to leave a group on their own and seek a better fit.
Being different from one another wasn't acceptable when I was growing up. We all had to think the same way, behave the same way, even have fun the same way. I was unable to fit in with people everywhere I went. I found a few here or there that I could kind of be part of, but never quite fit all the way with. I think it's human nature to want to fit in as oneself, to be useful and cherished as unique. Sometimes it's difficult to find that when the world around us is very rigid about who we should be and how we should act. When the world is like that, it loses great opportunities for creative problem solving skills.
'My people', as I generically and fondly call people whose heads work like mine, are everywhere. When you travel from city to city and find comfort in familiarity in a franchise, that was probably one of my people. When you zip into a store for something and rely on super organization for easy and quick shopping, that was probably one of my people. Every time you use your phone, some of my people helped make that possible. The rest of us don't have to worry about satellites in orbit relaying signals and the obsessive number crunching that goes into maintaining the information and entertainment tech that services, thank goodness, but if you do ever wonder about it, well, that's my people.
I come from a people with a very long history. They go back to the Anglo-Saxon days like the King Arthur myths. They go back to the Goths and Frisian. When Hitler was scourging the earth, he praised the Prussian Mennonites. ('My people' in that article wound up routing through Russia, thanks to Catherine, and then on to America.) It was my good fortune to have a Mennonite college professor (author page) who remembers being 12 during the time of Hitler and questioning his father over why they supported him. That boy wound up becoming a secret envoy to China, helping bring out the historical traditions and stories to a world that still didn't know much at all about what was really going on in China. (book) He knew my family name and asked me in front of the whole class (World Religions) if I knew so and so on the Navajo reservation, and it turned out I did, I'm related to him. My people are all over the world, and some of them keep track where all the rest of us are.
When regular people think of Mennonites, they assume tight knit communities on farmland. They have no idea we are floating like cream to the tops of everything around them, in industry, medicine, education, government, even the entertainment industry. I have some profoundly astonishingly amazingly intelligent cousins, and you would be surprised what all they do.
My dad is a little more close minded. He is very suspicious of government and was convinced college would brainwash me. He wouldn't allow me to see a psychiatrist as a child because psychiatry was invented by government (think old Germany) to brainwash citizens. If you can survive talking to my dad long enough, you find out he knew everything about Illuminati as a child growing up in a wheat field long before they became a whisper and then a conspiracy theory and now a hushed reality. I won't go into that right now, but some of you have seen my dabbling in that sort of information gathering. I have a sociology degree steeped in world religions and political science, and I quietly research at home for my own amusement.
My point is that ASD isn't a scary thing. Our modern society is no longer supportive of functional ASD. In the old days, there was no time table for social and personality development, and kids developed naturally in their own time. Sooner or later, most ASD kids find their niches, and they immerse themselves in the glory of problem solving. They love complexity and patterns and winning the game. They may not be cute little dollies as tiny children, and they may not be very cooperative for awhile- remember, I started out a screamer, and I never hugged my mom or told her I loved her or went to her for comfort, and here I am coaching people with anxiety and depression on social media.
I am writing a book about BEING an ASD child, what it was like from my point of view, the things I thought, the feelings I had, and how I finally figured out how life works. It's taking awhile because I'm not closing myself off from the world and just doing it, because I'm making myself available to the public, and I'm told privately by several that this has been very encouraging.
Survival is key. Mental health wasn't a thing back in the old days, but now we know how important feeling secure and accepted in groups is nowadays. We have broken away from our natural daily survival busy-ness and problem solving to live our separate lives not really plugging in to society around us any more (it's ok, I don't trust my neighbors, either), and kids wind up with their heads in gaming consoles or getting into trubbas. Childhood depression is a real thing, and parental support is out there. My mom didn't have the support when I was growing up, and I watched it devastate her in ways other people didn't really notice, because back then admitting depression was extremely taboo and she never let people know how bad it was for her, even when she tried to communicate it. Your ASD children are like recording devices, and if you give them enough time (took me 3-4 decades), they will remember all your words and feelings and turn them around into a sweet empathy that will sweep you off your feet. Your job is to live long enough to see that happen. I've already lost my mom, she missed most of it, but she knew it was there. She never stopped believing she could find a way to push me into seeing the bigger picture, although I frustrated her all my life.
ENJOY YOUR CHILD. Just love your child. Be there and don't worry. When it all boils down, our last thoughts before death are about our relationships. Learning to love is why we are here, and ASD kids have a long and winding road learning it. I was not born with natural empathy and rarely cared about anyone for a very long time.
Because of my experiences, I very much enjoy people in my home nowadays. My home is my sanctuary, and the people who come into my home are in my sanctuary.
Yes, there is very definitely a part 4 coming. My internet has been glitchy for several days and my data plan is critically low, so loading HD vids is slow going. The best and very cutest part of the Bunny-Batman ADHD-ASD collision is yet to come.
So everything turned into a letter, and then I wanted to put a p.s. on, and still every day I want to go back in time and hug her. Her. How will I never not be consumed.
I used to be a really mean person. I didn't know I was mean. I could be cruel without blinking an eye, never realizing I was holding someone's heart in my hand, pulling eyes out one at a time like toys with a sharp claw.
I know she cried. I never knew if she knew I cried. I still don't know. One other person held me together through several months of agonizing over her and couldn't take it anymore, and then I floated away.
I'm beginning to understand that the scars I helped create might be too deep and still too painful to allow anything more than ce message dans une bouteille.
"My name is Karfo Mashet. The children of my planet are dying. My people, the Vorm, have launched me into the unknown vastness of space in order that I might contact intelligent life, who can help us learn how to fight the devastating Macomarian plague which threatens our entire race with extinction. My body, frozen in this suspended form, will drift through the cosmos in desperate search for a cure. Please, kind strangers, help the children of Vorm."
"(The capsule crashes into one of the Lexx's eyes, and is totally destroyed)
LEXX: Ouch!"
Aaaaand the cryopod blows apart unnoticed on Lexx's hull in much the same way people used to crash right into #aspienado. (By the way, I have closed captioning, pretty sure that's the Children of Guaram. One of these days I'll go plug it in and look, but it's 6 a.m. and I'm being lazy getting stuff off the internet.)
That's not what happened, but it's a picture of how oblivious I used to be, and sometimes still am.
A handful of people will see my stoicism as they watch the coming year unfold. I will keep going back out there, alone and naked on a world stage, believing with all my soul that it's important and that I need to be good for people. Mentally, very deep inside my head, she's holding my hand. I'm believing with all my heart that I'm not really doing this alone, and I'm praying good thoughts go with me.
I've done and gotten through much harder things than this, but that doesn't make this less hard. I can do this.
And Plato is a bartender... Hang on a sec, we need a piano man. Or something.
I had a eureka moment this morning after that last post. I've been struggling for at least two months with how to handle letting someone with severe depression know I'd like to stop being tagged in certain convos without triggering problems and without encouraging private messaging to do it. I really need to be done with private messaging. It all suddenly came to me in one sentence- "I'm not on twitter to promote religion." Once that gets said, I may ask to be untagged from those convos. I believe in tolerance, but I'm to the point of extreme impatience after several polite hints and finally just flat saying in private that I'm not going to retweet certain things and then being very publicly poked with tags afterward, as if there were a leveling up kind of game.
I have a big variety of followers, many different religious and political beliefs, many different agendas, all ages and sexual orientations. I believe in people first, ideas second. I learned growing up watching other people that it's kinda stupid to condemn other people for not agreeing with one's own point of view, especially when that point of view is first and foremost based on the concept of forgiveness. Several religions promote forgiveness and tolerance, and this can be practiced by anyone, even without religion. All the same, one person's obsession with what I can only think must be an attempt at something humorous can get a little tiresome, and I can tell a few friends have been keeping an eye on my tag feed and are probably wondering how much longer I'm going to put up with this. Some people enjoy poking other people to respond, and I tend to let it go on way longer than I should because I can't tell if it's deliberate obnoxiousness or sarcasm or friendly and possibly even innocent annoyance by someone who genuinely likes me as a person and doesn't know how else to interact. I compare it to feeling like a tiger in a cage being poked by a little kid, which I've actually seen happen, and the parent didn't stop it, and none of the onlookers said anything, while the tiger on display actually took it really well until it abruptly turned and sprayed pee all over the kid. I'd rather not sink to that level, but basically that's what I do, isn't it, in the form of nice words molded around me grappling with a problem. Imagine if the tiger could tweet how it was feeling to the world or blog about its life.
I have an agenda, which I don't bring up very often. My challenge is sales without alienation. If what I intend to sell heavily depends on my personal honesty, and my targets are emotional crises subjects with interpersonal relationship challenges (or the families of such) (delicate wording is like a game to me, I can't help but love this sort of mental wrestling), how do I be myself without harming my own agenda? Because I'm really super good at rocking boats until they flip everyone right into the water. (And don't protest just because you've never seen me do it.)
Everything I'm practicing now with Pinky is about not rocking boats. I'm practicing and getting good at handling not only staying public, but balancing interacting with a variety of personality types on social media. I know crossing the streams can be bad and that one set of friends might not mix well with another set, and I do everything in my power to keep it fairly cool and non confrontational.
One of my biggest problems both online and in real life is being a sucker. According to my psychologist, I am easily led. My aspergers diagnosis has legal connotations, and a panel of judges appointed a payee to oversee my finances. If I hadn't been married, a legal guardian might have been appointed over me. "People with an ASD respond and perform neurologically inconsistently depending on emotional state, familiarity with the people and situation and various sensory experiences. For example, they may be very talkative in one setting at a particular time and later be UNABLE to speak well in the same setting."
That document should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to remain public with me. If I really do wind up 'out there' in interviews or whatever (notice I'm not rushing this, egads), I may actually lose a few friends if they are that clueless how I might be in real life, even after knowing me so long on the internet. It's not that I'm a regular jerk about stuff (anymore), but if I'm going down a rabbit hole right in front of you and you do all the wrong things trying to pull me out, you will find out exactly how much chaff is being burned down to the gold in your heart in the ugly fire I set on you. I've been told I'm scary by people in my own family, and it's because I'm unpredictable when I hit meltdown. I'm so afraid of meltdown myself that I have contingency plans in place for any given moment and every conceivable scenario. I can look intensely hateful and draw blood with little flicks of words without even trying, and you will think the rest of your life that I must really have hated you all along underneath everything. Very few people survive being friends with me if I'm caught not able to hole up in a corner for a quick braincation. The only way I survived as a child was my mom beating me until I learned to turn into a rock. If I turn into a rock, you best be scattering. If I turn to stone and stop responding, that's your signal to step back. Fortunately, I'm usually over it pretty quickly, and I can be bribed with food. Well, unless you haven't been paying attention and stick something in my face that I'm allergic to, then whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul (and I'm pretty sure Baphomet won't.)
That's a significant paragraph up there because I keep trying to positive image myself getting through a book signing. I will be pretty incoherent in a matter of minutes (an hour, tops), might be able to fake my way through another hour, but after that I'll need complete guidance to keep me focused and moving. By the end of whatever public session I'm dealing with, I'll need trusted people to lead me away. Yes, my aspergers is that bad. I become nonfunctional. Whatever brilliance I might occasionally display in print will be lost in the idiocy I descend into as I fall into shutdown. Staying on social alert is very different from spazzing out through college classes or automatically cycling through another day on a redundant job.
If I want to succeed, it's important that I communicate well to people on social media. My friends generously allow me to practice on them in public. New people that come along don't realize that my social media intentions are exactly that- practice with my social deficiencies. They bumble right into me and usually never have a clue how I feel about it. I can't even imagine what it's like for some of my better friends to watch it happening again. It's either hilarious or scary, but either way, there are a handful of you that I notice showing up, and I thank you guys immensely for your instincts and watching out for me. Just me noticing you noticing I'm walking into another awkward pickle is usually enough to help me focus nowadays on self monitoring and backing off again before I go into a crouch and launch.
Life experience helps, getting a sociology degree has helped, and a past rife with fandom squabbles has helped. My psychologist has helped immensely, and what really turned it around for me personally was Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist Way. I'm becoming very experienced at monitoring and managing myself nowadays. That doesn't mean I've overcome the autism spectrum. That just means people more and more rarely see me reacting like the very real aspienado I am in my own home, where I cycle through mini-shutdowns repeatedly, and often disappear into another room on weekends for a few minutes of alone time. If I'm sitting in a room alone with you and not saying a word and not looking at you, you might have no idea I'm still picking up on your every breath and eye roll, even if I don't understand a single nuance hinting at how awkward it might be for you if I'm not holding up my end of the convo, or worse, taking over completely in a nonstop gush of exuberance. I really don't know how @bonenado has lasted this long with me.
Ok, focus. I've been up and down doing breakfast and getting my day going and keep coming back and piddling here. I'm needing to start concentrating on actual work again, and maybe that will be a good way to ignore social media a little more again. October hit with all that finally dealing with the emotionally repressed stuff and I've been way off track ever since, BUT I have to admit this has been my best autumn in many years for dealing with stress and depression and staying pretty oriented and focused. Maybe going off track for a little while was a good thing. I seem to be in a good place in my head.
So I haven't disappeared, but I'm going to try to get back into a work schedule and stay off the twitters and FB a bit more this next month. Not ignoring anyone if you don't see me around faving or liking, just not there, letting it all slide by me while I'm busy like a little elf. I still feel driven, just in a new way I've not felt before, and I need to explore it. It's like a new point of view from a new angle, no longer feeling lost in it.
~later~ I let this sit all day because my head was such a scattered mess after Turkey Day, and I couldn't properly read back through this well enough to see if it made sense. I really don't have a clue how I'm able to write sometimes.
Again, thank you to my very tolerant friends on the webs. I have felt most extremely grateful for you guys, and aside from the usual Thanksgiving list of being thankful for health and family and a nice new roof over our heads, I really am sincerely grateful for #Snarkalecs, SyfyDesigns, #latenightmovie chat gang, my pals from Merlin and other fandoms, and the friends I still have in the Lexx fandom. I really do love you guys.
Because being left alone to our own devices is a very rare thing around here.
I'M GETTING THE HANG OF THIS
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I suggested @bonenado download a kid screen lock app like mine, but did he look for the happy alligator? NO. He downloaded something different without checking it out first and promptly got stuck inside his new locked screen for over 20 minutes. We couldn't tell if the writing was Chinese or what, but finally got a popup that asked if he'd like to be kind and share the app, at which point we kinda picked up it's probably someone's homemade app, and if he gets charged for it I'm going to lightly mock all over again. I say lightly... By the way, my Samsung Galaxy S6 trumps his Turbo for navigation options when you get stuck in a locked screen app in another language. Don't know this from experience, just couldn't believe how much more difficult his phone was to work with than mine.
This is probably what he's like at parties
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You have 29 days left from right now to stream the official rerun via BBC. Just click this snip. GO!
Couple pieces of pie sitting around and ice cream in the freezer and @bonenado and I fought over the broccoli and cheese, because it was THAT GOOD. Yes, we fought over a leftover vegetable dish. I claimed and then found out later mr sneaky pants got into it behind my back.
Yes, #BennyDepp. It was awesome. There's no telling how long this vid will manage to stay up, others were actually being shut down again within the same hour of upload. That's right, you're looking at a #BennyDepp sammy right now. CLICK IT. :edit: I am now replacing it with the official Graham Norton vid.
Yes, I went there. What gets thrown into the Pond, stays in the Pond. No, it won't click. If you don't know what the Pond of Death is by now, your loss.
Aspienado wants to live there. Pinky says no. If anyone has a problem with that, well...
I keep walking. No one hasta tag along to keep up, just stop jumping in my way like a pet for me to trip over. All my actual real pets learned real fast not to do that because I step on them. On purpose. Except for my chickens. I will totally stop for chickens and spend half my day hanging out, but that's beside the point. Anyway, I'm not fond of setting fires, and this is a really bad time of year to do it, so it's more like I'm trying to decide whether to smoke or pickle my tongue before I thinly slice it into a savory bechamel and pour it over some kind of fancy curly pasta with a grate of aged gouda.
I may hafta cave and super stream my hootsuite. I dunno. I wanna keep things simple, and maybe the simplest thing right now is put the phone down and stay off social media for awhile, but I'm trying really hard not to disappear like I did last year.
People keep telling me I'm nice. I'm not nice, I'm kind. Big difference. The reason I am kind is because I don't know if someone talking to me (or trying to talk to me) might be dealing with a giant hole in their life after someone died, or if they're in shock after finding out they have cancer, or maybe lost a child or has a child in a hospital.
I hid all my real stuff for years. No one ever knew, and I was treated pretty badly on the internet sometimes just because someone else was having a dumb day and dumped on me. I don't believe in dumping on people.
The most famous incident, if you can call it that, was MegaCon. No one ever knew how sick I was that weekend, and that over the next couple of years I really did think I might die, and I disappeared off the internet. People in the older fandoms never saw me cry over a child being lost in my family, never saw me cry why me to the heavens when I was too sick to dress myself for several months, never knew the anguish I was in watching my mom fail in super slo-mo. During all this, I built fansites, and I know from this level of dedication that most of the beautiful and wonderful things on the internet come from people dealing with anguish. We write, we create, we design, we build, we entertain because we need something to hang onto, something to help us live through unimaginable pain. Because of this, I am kind.
That does not mean I am a rug to walk on, a stuffed toy to bounce on, a kindred spirit to be pals with. Yes, I do have friends. They know me. Some of them have been getting to know me for several years, some of the deeper lurkers have known me for a decade or two. If you wanna be my friend, too, get in step. Learn where your place is with me, because it's not front and center in front of my face. I run with a solid pack, I love them very dearly, and I will love you dearly too if you take a little time.
p.s. if you dig conspiracy theories,here you go, in case you're bored or something.
Me and facebook/twitter irl. This is me not disappearing after Thanksgiving, yo.
