Only one of my friends ever gets this stuff.
This was fan made inspired by an interview answer.
All over it this morning, shower at 4:30 a.m., coffee now while I'm online getting my life in order- prescription refills, money syncing, stuffs. Flu shot today, then assess back into physical therapy after that.
~caution for triggers~
My head is way better now. I can't even blame those Halloween meltdowns on candy since I avoid carbs because diabetic. I love everyone again now. Seriously, probably another one of those repressed memories about Halloween. It's funny how my repressed memories are never about sexual abuse. Kinda makes you wonder what other horrors musta happened. I mean, besides seeing a dog nearly beaten to death, killing and eating my pets, watching puppies brains being smashed out, learning to properly kill cats, and pretty much handling 800-1200 pound animals regularly, including difficult births filled with all kinds of death and sometimes screaming animals. I was always the stoic one, now I'm the one falling apart. Like my mom did when I was a little girl. The survivalist lifestyle might look glam, but it's pretty tough on the soul. I actually jumped into an argument on FB about animal murder vs vegan and took it upon myself to explain that the exsanguination process actually isn't the torture nonexperienced people think it is, and then I caught myself because I've been experienced since I was 8 years old and I live with PTSD triggers now, and you really don't know who went vegan over something psychologically very disturbing to them. It's really not my job to get out there and educate people freaking out about death.
Pasting this over from facebook so it doesn't get lost.
I am both Irish and a dx'd narcissist. I stand for freckled soulless egocentric survivalists worldwide. Mock all you want, I can't hear you over all this me in my head.
(for some clarity, I'm also German and several other things from all over the world, so... standing up for all y'alls.)
My psychologist views my narcissism as being part of the cushion between my severe autism spectrum depression and mood swings and self harm, self medicating, and suicide, but I am one of the lucky ones. "When viewed from a certain perspective, narcissism can actually be seen as a positive thing."- fromWhy Narcissism Is a Profoundly Misunderstood Psychological Disorder
I scored a 17 on that narcissism test that was linked in that article. I was being a little conservative, but I don't have a hardcore top of the line dx, either. But celebrity level? Yep, hahahahaha.
I'm actually still dealing with a headache, so I really don't know how skewed my results are. I've had a very long headache day and I'm having trouble pulling my brain outa here. I do have this song on my mind though.
All you guys out there casting stones, both real and virtual- one of the most obvious signs of internal problems is displacing onto others, like a brain-trained puppet and a really more messed up person than those of us stepping out being targets. Whatever fear you have of things not running 'right' or being 'supposed to be', I went through that too. There is so much freedom letting go of hating people and being judgmental over others being different and having problems.
Join us. Loving is easier than hating. Hating takes way more energy and causes stuff like metaphorical fire damage and social viral entropic cascade. The entire human race is broken. We are all suffering. It's ok to admit you are flawed. I don't think God made a whole big thing just to throw most of it away. That's super inefficient and very anti-forgiveness protocol.
This post is probably a carry over from self consumed egomaniac, and as I'm setting up testing Klout scheduling again on confidence for #archiveday tomorrow, out of the blue I started noticing none of these things have the same tags to follow a thought. Major doi time. I got a kick out of running into this because I wasn't tagged.
It's weird to explain or describe this to people who don't experience it, but I'm actually in the middle of one of my destroy all the things and hide phase, and out of sheer stubborn masochism I'm shoving my face in the monitor and making myself type stuff. My mind keeps wandering off. Found another cool wallpaper site. Click these to go.
Anyway, the dichotomy of depression and narcissism is a kind of hilarious existential horror, one which I no longer blunt with alcohol, as I'm musing after scheduling another #archiveday post with Klout, hugging is weird and that's really too bad when people need it the most. I was a really fun alcoholic. Everybody loved me. And I was devious. And wound up in really bad places. With bad people. Who do bad things. But I digress.
super cool site, go see it
I think the point I'm wandering toward is that depression and narcissism are opposite ends of the same thing- lies. Both tell lies in the existential mirror. Both are like funhouse mirrors in the mind.
When I can't believe in myself, I can BELIEVE IN MYSELF. I have an edge. I can be so utterly blind to feeling stupid that I wind up charging up the hill and leading miscreants on my crazy quests. This goes way back to my aspienado childhood and is probably how I survived excessive abuses fairly intact and, oddly, emotionally healthy. I was able to balance the depression with the narcissism. The more I pull together for print, the more I realize how thin the line I walked really was. I crossed a chasm on a high wire without a safety net. I made it to the other side.
I'm looking back now and wondering if I can help other people do the same thing. This blog is me practicing.
A question comes up once in awhile about Pinky blog that basically asks- Just how much of an egocentric narcissist are you?
I will asplain. (I mention these things sometimes, but they are scattered, so here we go all in one place.)
When I committed to a public personal blog (key word being personal), I had a good long think first. Do I really want to do this? How do I do this? I have a very public history in various places, and deeply private stuff going on all the time with a number of people. If I'm not careful, I'll wind up like Vance Major and create exponentially escalating gossip to the point where followers are duking it out all over comments. He keeps posting on facebook that he stands up for what he believes while simultaneously inciting hater rabble back against his own haters. True, he's a different sort of interesting cream rising to a vague kind of cool top in facebook blogging, but he's making loads of enemies doing it, and his followers are there as much for the train wrecks he creates as anything. I've already been through that grind. The last thing I want is my personal blog becoming a black hole kind of a drag with an event horizon of followers. No offense to Vance, he's becoming a power player in his own right and he actually is a really cool and sweet guy.
Aspienado doesn't tolerate attention very well. I learned that back in my Bluejacky days. I am my most comfortable public blogging with zero comments. I have no problem whatsoever with no one ever cheering me on, although I deeply appreciate the lurkers brave enough to make private contact about something real. And I don't mean angsty real, I mean real. They can see what I'm doing and where I'm going with this.
Committing to a public personal blog requires a little more honesty with myself than committing to a themed blog. Am I going to keep a certain upbeat tempo? Am I going to dump my day? What is the point of a personal blog, anyway? Why make one if I'm going to hide some of my stuff? How do I be honest if I'm still wearing a mask for public? Lotta fine lines to cross, lotta feelings I can hurt, so defining 'public personal blog' was a big deal.
Number one, it has to be about me. It's my blog, not someone else's. The minute I drag junk about other people into my blog, it becomes about them. This is aspienado handling the day to day hard living stuff while trying to get a book written. This is not aspienado venting and spewing and opinionating. I tried that on Bluejacky, and while it got a bit of attention, it wasn't the sort of attention I felt comfortable with. It was great for gaining interaction experience and learning what kind of readership lurks around my stuff, but in the long run, it was self destructive. So the really big question is- how do I handle my negativity publicly? Because if I'm being truly honest, I'm trying to retrain a very negative personality.
I've got material in private that would outsell sitcoms. I read some of my old stuff back to Scott and he says it's better than Everybody Loves Raymond. But is that what I want? To tell other people's stories from my point of view? It wouldn't be my blog then, would it? (But they'll make great books someday...)
I've had these convos with psyche guy, about the egocentric narcissism of public blogging, and here's what I say. I was born into a religious family that didn't believe in drawing attention to ourselves (that is vanity), or making big deals about their children (we don't boast or say we are proud of each other or make a big deal about someone being pretty), or stepping into spotlights (service to others above all things), or even admitting we need help (we daren't show that our faith is slipping, plus any kind of medical or psychological help is government control and brainwashing), you get the point. I grew up in an extremely rigid belief system that doesn't allow for differences or change, castigates new ideas and enthusiasm, and allows all members to fade into group backgrounds because individuals are no more important than other individuals (unless they are male or an authority figure). I grew up severely repressed and very angry. I rebelled and questioned until I was an embarrassment everywhere we went, and my collective family was not kind trying to reinforce stricter behaviors in me.
That's kind of all changing now as generations are changing as the times change, but I grew up on the apex of that change. I sit on a fence between two very different generations. I am part of the culture that started redefining the global system versus the local system.
For years I've watched other bloggers struggle with how to write their stuff. Some repeat current topics (political and religious opinionating), some jump on bandwagons (mommy blogging, entertainment reporting, pinterest...), some wax poetic or artsy (masks), some dump feelings. Whatever. I've struggled myself. How do I talk about my stuff when I affect other real people with real lives? Sometimes when I tell a story, someone a thousand miles away or on the other side of the globe watches every single day for what I'll say next because they know I'm talking about someone they know in real life (or themselves). How do I share my stuff without embarrassing or angering or hurting other people?
The only answer is that my blog has to be about me. Not them. No names. Some readers figure out certain parts, yes. Other readers are glued thinking more reveals are coming (they're right), but I'll never name names. I'll never point at anyone anywhere and do to them what has been done very publicly to me in the past.
Several people privately push me to 'name and shame'. Ok, how about I name all the names and shame all the shames? You have no idea what aspienado will say. I was raised (and beaten) by the most judgmental people on this earth. I still have all that pent up anger swallowing my soul. Do you really want me blackening your skies with my negativity? I can't live like that. I cannot heal heart, soul, mind, and body while I'm focusing on orchestrating a cheering section for execution festivals. I really don't know how Vance handles that. My depression won't allow me to heap coals without burning holes in myself doing it.
Besides, to give you an example, I love my mother. I don't want the world hating her. I don't want my family feeling disgusted or angry with me for telling stories on her. I want the world to understand and empathize that it was hard for her. I don't want to throw her to the raving wolves spewing hatred on people they don't take the time to get to know and understand. What in the world is my sociology degree any good for if I can't learn to see my mother's perspective? We were both miserable growing up. It's ok to say that. It doesn't mean we don't love people or that life was horrible all the time. It's just honesty.
Pinky is finding a way to be honest without sugar coating or train wrecking. I'm oscillating between taking masks off and blowing up more bridges. I want to be genuine without hurting anyone. I need to be real without inflicting pain on people I hold dear.
Part of the egocentrism is me learning to consolidate myself into a psychologically healthy person. But the narcissism is a whole different animal.
Narcissism is a necessary ingredient in being public. There are all kinds of public jobs, but maybe the easiest to understand is actors. Actors must be narcissistic to sell themselves and the products they represent. They voluntarily become the faces that take the brunt of the entertainment industry's roller coaster ups and downs, everything from the fawning to the egging. Before I committed to being a public person, I had to make some decisions about how I would handle this or that happening so that I could remain public without alienating readers, followers, lurkers, and family. It's hard finding that kind of balance when you can't really step off and hide once you've put stuff out there. I have cringeworthy days where I can't believe I hit the 'publish' button and reel away into anxiety attacks no one ever sees, shutting down the tech for hours and keeping myself busy doing chores around the house or running errands. You know what? That's a good thing. Some people just spill without remorse and very little thought to consequences. Others live in a continual dread of 'what if' and never spill at all. I hope I'm learning to spill gracefully. I'm practicing on you guys.
I'm sure we all imagine a glory day where we're cool and the world loves us, but then we come back to reality and go on with our ho hum lives, thinking they're all pipedreams. Or we imagine stepping out and everything going all wrong and never being able to show our faces again. My biggest nightmare is winding up on Oprah and being publicly humiliated for not naming and shaming, and therefore not being able to say I wrote a legitimate autobiography. (I imagine aspienado and Oprah being in the same room is a paradox that will explode the world.) Any thought of actually talking in public about myself to anybody is a nightmare. I can do it, yes, but I've been practicing for years with a psychologist. Before I started talking to him, I talked to no one about all my stuff. Not even my own husband. If I was an egocentric narcissist before I became a public person, it was more about me being right in an argument about something around the house, but outside my home I'm more the type that pulls levers behind the curtains. I push other people into spotlights. I manipulated vortices and dangled the participles for years without people knowing it was me.
Some of you are asking, "What about Vance? Didn't you just name him?" Quite right. I actually like Vance, and have even told him he inspired me to be more. I love his enthusiasm and tenacity, and especially his honesty. I don't care for some of this methods, but I can't fault them because it's not my stuff and he's doing just fine, even becoming somewhat of a star in his own right. I think that's really cool. I love watching people become and grow and inspire. He's been an inspiration to many, and I respect him for that.
I'm just saying I'm not going to throw people I care about to the wolves just because they disagree with me and worry for me and fear for my safety and my soul. I know it's going to be hard on some of them if I do break out and wind up publicly discussing real life beyond this blog. I'm going to do my best to be as respectful as possible of their beliefs and methods because I actually do have a degree saying I'm capable of being professional about how groups and individuals in those groups affect one another. I'm egocentric enough to use myself as an example in a discussion and narcissistic enough to believe what I'm doing is right and will be good for other people.
I have some ideas. I don't want to whisper them from behind a curtain and hope a few books sell. I want to stand out like a sore thumb and draw all the attention I can to the kinds of ideas that I hope help change our future as a world people to something better. We're trying. It's hard embracing change and accepting differences, and some are dragging into the future kicking and screaming. I understand those people because I come from them, but I don't agree with them.
Aspienado has been learning how to say the right words. Pinky has been learning how to share those words the right way. All the fragments need to come together into a beautiful new sentence that makes a beautiful new paragraph. There's a new way to draw lines, not in sand, not around us in salt, not in fences and border patrols. (I have worldwide readers, please do not mistake this for sidetaking in an American argument.)
When lines are crossed they turn into Ts. When a dot shows up it creates an I. While old schoolers fuss on facebook over whether schools should continue enforcing the learning of old fashioned cursive in the curriculum, PinkyBluejacky is creating a new cursive that joins all the things into a big new sentence.
Please excuse my sense of humor if you are new to me.
Putting stuff like this into words has been very challenging, but I think I am coming close to more easily talking about who I am now. I've been watching other people write lots of things about religion and politics and mental illnesses and awareness stuff. Have you ever wondered how we arrive at our conclusions? How we come to decide and define what is right and wrong? How we come to believe what we believe?
We (I and all the people who know me in real life) have been dealing with me having what's basically called an emotional switch that gets flipped when I get PTSD triggers. I'm still discovering exactly what these triggers are. I became aware during high school that I go in and out of personality modes that handle different kinds of situations, but mostly I stayed in what I call shut down mode, a flat personality that doesn't get emotionally involved.
As I've progressed through adulthood, I've learned to develop more personality modes so I can better control who I am and how I present, although I didn't realize at those times that's what I was doing. These were most easily seen on the internet as I went through my Yablo, Janika, and Bluejacky stages, which are the most visible.
Pinky is turning out to be an interface for all the modes, much like an office coordinator. As Pinky is going through all the files in the other modes, my psychologist and I are discovering that I have PTSD triggers and different ways of handling them, like adjustment disorders, delayed emotional response, PTSD Tourette's (sort of like an aspie super stim that I can't stop, especially when I'm driving so it gets a little scary and sometimes I have to pull off the road), pain disorder with psychological factors (and that on top of documented nerve damage), and yes, a little bit of narcissism, which actually isn't a joke since it has loads to do with how I survived years of emotional and physical abuse. For example, turning 'what's wrong with me' self harm and suicidal thoughts outward to 'everyone around me is so stupid' is what saved me from the kind of self destruction that a lot of people don't understand. Fortunately, I managed to veer away from what people think I'm joking about when I call it being an evil villain fully intent on revenge.
I started openly bringing all this up on Pinky blog last year, and then started specifically defining it in hybrid- how robots go on (more links there). Later I openly shared the diagnosis documented as part of my disability.
I'm NOT talking about dissociative identity disorder. Despite have some mixed up recall during the roughest PTSD triggering memories, I don't have a dominant personality that takes over and lose actual time, although I do go through time orientation loss jags from stress, which isn't the same thing because I'm able to reconstruct. When I talk about shut down, it's an autism spectrum emotional shut down that allows me to keep interacting on a very low level automatic function so that I can make it home with groceries kind of thing. Shut down helps control meltdown, which is emotions going out of control, another thing autism is famously associated with. Developing personality presentations has helped me step into a sort of acting role as needed so I would be able to handle jobs and stuff, although sometimes this has backfired in unforeseen and sometimes hilarious ways. Pretending to be a Vulcan at all times doesn't actually help a person work well with others on a job...
So I'm essentially a real life role player. I learned at a very young age to be a 'doll', to 'perform' or be punished, sometimes severely. It took a few years, but I learned to staunchly control my natural autism spectrum inclinations, not by understanding either them or anything else going on around me, but by strongly stuffing down any and all feelings I might be having and turning into a stone. I survived.
The reason this is important to understand is because a lot of people don't survive. There are too many people who are on the edge of self harm and suicide every day who aren't getting the help they need and who haven't figured out how to survive like I did. They don't feel safe with themselves. They are like ticking time bombs walking on eggshells and hiding all their stuff from people who don't understand and fail to comprehend. I call this the yawning chasm, the lack of real connectivity with others. We might be interacting with others all day long in one form or another but never find that connection that helps us feel stable, or validates our difficulty. We feel emotionally abandoned and ignored.
I had two modes I clicked into throughout childhood, and they both had names. I wasn't particularly aware I was doing it, but I knew the names. I never told anyone those names until I became Pinky and finally brought it up. If I was talking to anyone, it was usually in mode, because deep down I actually prefer not to talk at all, even though I love brain sharing in print. I know, that's funny, because I actually don't shut up once I start talking. It helps to understand that I never saw my mom as a mother figure and never dwelled on how that made me feel. Yes, very seriously shut down emotionally.
I had a secret friend name in high school, essentially creating another me that talked to me. I never really shared that beyond very briefly bringing it up a couple of times in my life. That split helped me keep my balance in a world that was crumbling all around me after we moved to another state and things got really stupid between my parents. When I talked about this part with my psychologist, he became very interested in how I could change reality in my mind and believe it, a sort of consciousness of reality toy I played with without realizing it (which later grew into a love of philosophies). That link goes to a list of links. Essentially, because I couldn't look at faces at all one year and was so disconnected from other people, I reworked reality to be more like an alien world and I was the visiting alien. The halls were sloped like a stream could run down the middle, so I had to stick to the sides by the walls so I wouldn't slide in, all the glass was pink and everything I saw through them was pink because of that, my line of sight was knee level and I got to know people by their knees, and talking sounded like gibberish. I carried this out for a couple of months until I realized I was kind of stuck in it and it had become tiresome, so I snapped back to 'real' and started looking at faces again. When I did that, I also snapped into a personality mode and got kind of mean and secretly destructive, pretending I was a spy and committing sabotage that backfired on other people. I never got caught, but looking back, some of the fallout wasn't cool. Very real consequences were inacted on wrongly accused innocents, although I thought it was funny back then because I intensely disliked them.
I didn't think very much about that stuff in my 20s, which got pretty chaotic from the poor choices I kept making, but by my 30s I was back into mode switching so I could handle being married and raising kids. From there on out people have known me as Janika and Yablo. Bluejacky came a little later, and Pinky is the last. There may be a couple more very minor nearly inconsequential modes tucked here and there.
Janika is like a baseline, an umbrella over the old modes, a central hub of sorts, and eventually an epic fail. Janika history is volatile and never had a direction goaled out. Janika was stuck with Yablo's mess and Bluejacky's anger and didn't see a way beyond any of it, so Janika disappeared.
Pinky is an Idea. Pinky thought long and hard about goals and plans and modus operandi. Pinky wrote out a mission statement. Pinky incorporated all the modes into one whole and is mapping how they all became part of a survival story. Pinky sees the bigger picture and brings all the things into focus. Pinky named Aspienado and created a direction for all the modes to go in together. Pinky is sharing real life stuff, what's really inside this kind of head, because it's important for other people to see that 1- kids like me can turn out ok, 2- honesty is what saves us, and 3- kindness is logical.
There are others out there arguing semantics about whether or not it's acceptable to say someone has autism (which sounds more disease-y) vs someone is autistic (which sounds more label-y), among many other things. I don't take sides because I don't care. I have it, I am it, I am living and breathing it, and I know that the bickering is borne of being who we are- super definers of all the reality around us. We are the brains that want specific answers to vague questions, that want words to be used correctly while we simultaneously don't understand how the way we use our own words mixes people up, the brains that thrill to find and point out flaws and figure out people puzzles and solve problems all around us by thinking of better ways to do things while we gunk up our own days getting too caught up in these things. We are glorious spatters of thought that either reclusively don't share or just never shut up.
Everything in this universe is a spectrum. We are all waking up to that, some more slowly than others, but eventually the entire world will learn to stop rigidly defining and start allowing variance. Where in the world humans got the idea that things have to be rigidly defined is probably a Hitler thing, or the Ancient Aliens telling us what to do and how to do it. Who we have to be laid over who we are born to be is the modern conundrum in philosophy. Who is to say what true freedom is if we keep fighting over every little thing we are supposed to do and think? We are free to fight, wheee...
Someone shared a thing on facebook last week about how if we had big old fashioned porches around our houses like in the olden days, our world would be a friendlier place, or something to that affect. Please allow me to point out the flaws in this thought-
Being stuck in low tech nearly nonmobile society in a hot environment with no air conditioning was why those big porches were a thing.
The cost of building houses with big wraparound porches nowadays generally precludes wasting materials on 'dead space' unless a person has the money to blow on it.
Bugs.
The views pretty much suck unless you're lucky enough to live near a nice vista, a water front, or a cool skyline.
The TV is inside and the neighbors are irksome.
Sweet memories of big porches might be a little skewed...
Those kinds of old houses are nowadays becoming synonymous with drug dealing and weapons caching, at least in popular entertainment.
Need I go on.
It's about perspective. What one person thinks cannot apply to all brains at any given time. It's only been in the last 10 years that brain variance is becoming recognized as 'ok'. I'd love to posit that 'neurotypical' is a widely overused and misconstrued word, and that we've got this weird neurotypical until proven otherwise thing turning mental hypochondria accusations into a circus. Yes, there is abuse of entitlement, but people actually do need help, and the ones needing it the most are having to fight through a barrage of hate trying to get it, which seems a bit odd since the hate is springing from standing up for - ok, that's dumb and I can't even go there saying it. I watched the same fight over ADHD, it was like a witch hunt, OCD people are rising up now (about time), and basically everyone with even a hint of probably need for diagnosis is finally standing up for themselves. YAY, *finally*. If we're going to complain about NTs defining atypicality, let's keep in mind that NTs are slang for haven't been dx'd with anything yet. Their turn is coming. Everyone on the planet has *something* wrong with them, be it physical, mental, emotional, whatever. Not one person on this planet is a perfect specimen of humanity. The idea that we've got to measure ourselves against each other is a bunch of hogwash with a sales pitch behind it, and I wish everyone would stop falling for the pausing to argue thing. Go enjoy something today.
When I was little, if I didn't 'behave' properly, I got punished. When behaving properly gets judged by someone who is having a succession of very bad days around very unsupportive people, things can trickle down onto a child like a break in a dam, and then justification sets in and then recriminations abound, and pretty soon it's not about the child needing help at all, but about other people desperately needing help themselves and not understanding why their worlds are screwed up.
So to sit around arguing over semantics seems a bit time-wastey to me. Sitting around defining religion and salvation and the world sliding into a big black hole seems a bit displacing coming from people whose lives are messes.
Aspienado was spawned out of a really big mess. Aspienado is tired of the words. Pinky says we must keep using words, so Aspienado wants to use words in a really big way. Pinky says WE'RE WORKING ON IT.
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.
One of those days where the 3 different crucially unstoppable without supervised tapering meds I'm on are conspiring to make everything worse and every jot and tittle of my entire life's collection of regrets is rerunning through a screen I'm locked in a room with and can't turn off.
One of the interesting things I go through on days like this is suddenly seeing sharply where before something was blurred, and I horribly understand the mistakes I've made in relationships, like trusting and, you know, trusting. I trust people to get to know me, and somehow, somewhere, somewhen, that becomes a sort of misappropriation that sideswipes me and tips my world over. When I'm not locked in the little room like this, I don't see ANY of this. When I'm in here, and I'm always alone in my head when this happens, there is no way out.
I know there are people who live like this all the time, because their depression is pretty bad, and from the outside it looks like self sabotage and you can't stop them from believing all the lies they're seeing on the screens in their heads in their locked rooms that they can't escape. I have been very fortunate to have an escape hatch through some of my life, and that is simply having a reflex that cuts all that off. There is a way out of that terrible room, but it's unconventional. I think that is where my psychologist would point out the narcissism comes in.
I think I read this story, but the picture in my mind is so vivid I almost think I saw it on TV. But I can't seem to connect it to anything, so maybe I did read it. A man was trapped in a small room, like a box, with no escape. All the sides and top and bottom were smooth with no openings. There was no way to break through, no way to contact anyone. He could only exist inside that box, with the proviso that if he could find a way out, some kind of wish would be granted and he would never be caught like that again. After some time, that room was discovered empty, and when the man was found again and asked how he did that, he laughed and said he thought long and hard and eventually realized the box was not always there. Since his existence in the box was forever, he figured out that technically the only way he could move was backward and forward in time. He went backward to before the box was built. No one had ever thought of that before.
If anyone reading this actually knows that story, please put it in comments. I'd love to read it again, but I don't remember who wrote it. I think it was part of a collection of short stories.
I can usually sort of do that with that room in my head that sometimes makes me feel trapped. There is a way to just flip it inside out in my mind and it no longer exists. The depression still exists, but I'm able to cobble my day together, sometimes only a moment at a time, but I'm getting very good at not being trapped in it. Once in awhile, though, I have a really hard time doing that, and then here comes that screen and the reruns and the highlights I missed about what was really going on when I wasn't paying attention or the world was looking too blurry to catch it at the time.
When I'm not in that little room, I don't care about any of that stuff. I figure half of what I feel most of the time is pure chemical imbalance anyway, so why fret about it? If it's a wonky brain thing to be like this, I can usually just set it aside and do what I want, even if it's very restricted and I can't really do much. I can still choose it. But for awhile today, I was stuck. The only way out was to start writing.
Why do brains do that? Why do they rerun stuff and make us look at the things that make us feel terrible? I've wondered for a long time what the positive evolutionary adaptation of that happening to all of us sometime in our lives could be, because I see nothing positive about it. Why are we so good at feeling guilty or self recriminate or seethingly and self pityingly accusatory when we wind up in that little room? What is it about living under that kind of self torment that makes or breaks us?
I know who I am. I know what I want. I know what I need, who I love, and how to manage my life. But when I'm trapped in that little room, all of that becomes muddled and questionable and possibly even unreal, a sort of fabrication or dream, a lie that we tell ourselves when reality just really super sucks. But then when we're not trapped in that little room, we can see it for what it is, its own great big lie in a stewpot full of uber negative emotions. It's like a special sort of hell that we fall into and have to find our way out again, like a changing maze or labyrinth, and oftentimes the only way we can manage that is with some kind of medication and loads of support from people we can't see that we are repelling.
What gets really stupid is when medications tip you into that hell room and lock the door. Surprise! There've been a number of times that what got me through the day was realizing early on it might be the meds I'm on for something else, and then I can watch the clock and hang on to a countdown till those meds are more out of my system.
I am currently on THREE meds that I absolutely cannot stop taking cold turkey without winding up in a hospital for something very serious. Top of the list is the kind of seizures that can kill you, and right under that is psychotic episodes. Wheeeee. I'm in a little hell room on meds that can make me psychotic, yay!!!
I'm not very nice on days like this. I'm also not very good at juggling convos on the internet like this. And this is on top of autism spectrum. I reached a point earlier today where cognitively I could barely even function enough to write a short reply back in a game chat.
When I am like this, the best thing anyone can do is just hang out with me. I have a friend who is an expert at that, and today was fun because there were experiments blowing up zombies going on, and I enjoyed just seeing the reverb roll up in the chat. It was the perfect distraction. I have other friends and friends of friends who wanted to try to help me do something complicated, and for some reason when stuff like that comes up, it's always a right now drop everything else I'm doing multiple convos kind of thing, and there is just no way any of us would have survived that without me mutilating a few people. There is absolutely nothing anyone can do to help me fix that, and although it's very natural for people to want to jump in and be helpful, mowing me over in the process without understanding what I'm having to process through will only end in weeping and gnashing of teeth on my end. Every time. So the best thing I could do was keep telling people thanx but maybe not right now, keep my head down, and ignore the sad feeling overwhelming me because even though I'm in the middle of whatever, I'm actually the one being left behind, and no one understands that.
I'm coming off of one of the cruddiest weekends I've had in months, one of the emotionally toughest couple of months I've had in awhile, during one of the most challenging med years I've had in ages. I mean, good thing I'm in as good a shape as I'm in to handle all this, because I'm walking an edge that would have flatlined me a few years ago, and I'm not joking. That's not a joke.
I don't interact well on bad days. Some people know me well enough to say I can go downhill pretty fast even on good days. Yeah, I write millions of words, but I think maybe 6 people have ever heard how fast I can crash and burn over a phone just trying to have a real-time convo with one person. Now imagine an autism spectrum person living with a nerve disorder in her clumsy arms and hands and severe depression on a high pain day and meds going wonky trying to type quickly enough in two different group chats and one or more private messages while all the words are rolling (thank goodness I'm a speed reader) to have meaningful interchange with people who are shortcutting their thought processes and carrying on several other convos themselves while they multitask. It's almost absurd that I can kind of fake keeping up with all that. Throw in a misread or missed sentence, someone bypassing direct interaction with me and hooking me up with someone else who was told I need assistance with something I'd already told 2 other people I won't be doing right away, and there I go, full blown aspienado balking to a dead stop asking for more detailed info on who said what where and why, and alla sudden I'm a bad guy and no one's talking to me.
At least, that's what it feels like.
Enter little room from hell.
I won't share what went through my mind in there. I'm just glad I caught it as quickly as I did. The meds I'm on are a very bad combo, and I moved up a follow up with my primary care to talk about starting at least one taper asap.
Most of my life has been spent in an extreme lack of self awareness, so I never expected to hear words like 'narcissism' and 'exhibitionism' from assessment professionals, even long before I started blogging publicly. What used to be considered flaunting has become a vital self selling skill during my lifetime, and as this goes against every grain in my natural born Mennonite background and Asperger's diagnosis, I've worked very hard over the last ten years to overcome the inhibition against sharing myself to the world.
I have an edge, thank goodness. Stage fright means nothing to me, because I can't see myself. I seem to have been born without an inherent self-correcting feedback system that helps me socially map where to fit, how to behave, when to prompt, why a cue is important, all lending to a bungling social klutziness that makes the rest of you seem like idiots in my straightforward black and white world. Learning that my egocentric tunnel vision has likely been my strongest ally in surviving abuses and neglect was eye opening. Basically, I have survived rather intact because I'm too socially stupid to get it.
Hang on, we need a big-word break. Where did I put the latest motivational poster I found? Here we go, click this for gigantic, in case you need inspirational wallpaper.
Everything I am doing online is for me. It started a long time ago with boredom and massive amounts of pain, and if I couldn't find something to amuse myself, I created what I wished was out there. Back then I never thought about who could see what I was doing, didn't care if I got comments and usually turned them off, and more or less giggled my way through the neverending internet gif joke, stickman death, Easter bunny zombie creations on deviantart, and practically absorbed youtube into my brain like an amoeba sucks little dots into itself.
My turn. I'm not good at all that stuff, so sometimes I felt sad that I couldn't add to the things I so much enjoyed. What I'm really good at is being irritating. I love to pull a string here, flicker a flame with my breath there, watch other people come alive when I touch them. I suppose after a lifetime of reclusing like a hermit, it's good to feel like part of the human race on our special little planet.
I've been extra special weird this month. My hardcore lurkers are probably picking up on the encryptions, easter eggs, and operatic formula, the rest of you are lost. I usually make it easy- you come and go as you please, not a big deal if you miss something. Not this month.
As I was working out a new writing style last year for my actual BOOK (no, it's still not done yet), I lightly bemoaned to myself how much more fun a book would be if it could be more interactive, like I make my blogs. Well, guess what- I'm apparently pre-interactive. When the book comes out with its own encrypted sections, they will tie in directly to my blogs. Does this mean the reader must work harder? NO! This means the book will also contain easter eggs, and readers who have gone on this journey with me all these years (yes, believe it or not, a handful of my lurkers go way back, and no, they're not family or friends) will have ohhhh moments as they read, remembering stuff I'd hinted at in blogs now being hinted back at in the book, put the them together and voila, mysteries solved.
Don't worry, the blogs and book will still be able to remain standalone for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about. You know, stuff that happened long ago in a far away land, rippling up spacetime and tearing up lives.
However, since I've wrung this latest epiphany half to death lately, I'll most likely be going back to the regular blogging as a distraction thing while I work privately underground. I'll end now with a brief power point back into real life, real time. Thanks again to everyone who has checked in keeping up with all this. MWAH, love you!
No, I'm still not sleeping. The night before last was a fluke, apparently.
My eyes are making little picket signs.
My house is full of baby cave crickets.
I'm still in love with Sherlock. I know! Sherlock!!! I'm still as stunned by this as you are. Fans are so adorable. If you need some really fun vids today, I piled some up yesterday. You're welcome.
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.
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.
I had vowed some time back to stop mentioning stats because it's too easy to misunderstand it as narcissism in lieu of it being more of an aspie train obsession, which some of you might remember branches out to an avid interest in polychorons and other related hyperdimensional structures (including but not limited to translation to real time charts and graphs), but in a wildly unexpected turn of events, the views on this particular blog have surprisingly jumped 25% over its total history just in the last month.
I could attempt to interpret this and blame it on maybe hitting a lucky combination of Sherlock vids and #MondayBlogs retweets on twitter, but my hottest days seem to happen out of the blue in spite of a serious lack of real time retweets, and I'm pretty sure most of my followers have never seen BBC's version of modern Sherlock and could care less about it since the States have had so little exposure. (omg, I've discovered Sherlock-Khan crossover memes, and the night is good, yea verily.) (You guys need to question the synchronicity of someone playing Sherlock, Khan, and Shere Khan.)
I know I hardly compete or even compare yet with established popular bloggers and authors, but anyone following me around knows I love blogging, and I've gone out of my way to avoid monetizing on purpose, digging into my own pockets and spending horrific swaths of time on saving much of my internet content from vanishing as hosts and their tech upgrades continue to obliterate stone age and even last year retro into code smashes that frustrate all of us attempting to keep our grip on the right to share our journeys without interruptions that euphemistically equivocate to modern day book burnings. (God, I love constructing sentences like that one. #aspienado)
Of course, I could also blow it off as web crawlers and pingbacks, but my ultra conservative statcounter tracker seems to think it has more to do with you guys upgrading your smart phones. I get an actual count on devices, operating systems, and screen resolutions, but the important thing is that nearly half of you are coming in on mobile devices.
I'm not really making a point so much as saying thankyou and I sincerely hope I don't disappoint when the manuscripts go out. Above all, I'm a huge fan of fans and all the creative minds out there who have gotten me through many a sleepless night distracting me from things that go bump. There are better vids with this song, but this is the only full length, so I use it a lot while I'm working. I hope you guys are getting more sleep than I am.
I joked a few months ago about betting @bonenado I could make it to 100,000 by this next Pinkyblogversary and then promptly slid out of the fast track. On purpose. But I'm still doing ok. Last year I was at 22,300 on my one year anniversary. As of writing this sentence I'm spot on 61,600 just under a month till my 2nd anniversary, so I've not only doubled, but nearly tripled. I'm sure I could have done better, but I'm not going to kick myself. I've watched a lot of people playing the blog game over the last ten years, and I'll stick by what I've always said- this dedicated blog property is officially declared bounce rate efficient by google analytics and heavily controlled for bots and spam. Numbers are just numbers until you lay the autopsy out on the table.
I tend to let thoughts percolate for months before I finally put a finger on whatever, and I've decided lately that the narcissism jabs I see in other places should be using a different term instead of lumping something they don't like about someone else into a disorder, because that really does undermine the actual disorder and people getting real help. How about we just call it like we see it, ok? I think "attention hog" would be a better term. And I think some of the people who point are just as deserving of that term as the people they very publicly pretend not to point to.
Attention hogs butt into convos, draw comments away from the originator, collect 'friends' like trading cards, turn awareness about #allthethings other people deal with into a competition over their own growing stash of compassion, and parasite off others in order to feed themselves. It's your basic bad manners thing.
This is probably the last time I'll bring that up. I'm so done with 'friends' whining about each other and the tiffs and tussles and hurt feelings. I'm not understanding why people who've known each other for several years online can't let go of each other if a whole year is slipping by and the same hurt feelings keep coming up over and over. In one case, I feel like I'm watching a married couple pouting, but they live on different continents, so it's just weird. I mean, even if I lurk only once a month, I see the same thing over and over. Do you guys not notice how redundant you are? *wow* I'd like to think we've evolved beyond monkeys flinging poop and acting surprised if someone flings back. Just because we do it digitally and virtually now doesn't mean we've risen above exactly that.
But maybe you're not supposed to notice. The whole point to social media is brain training the masses.
I don't care about either side of the argument in this vid, I could care less who is right or wrong, because I've been saying all this has been part of human history for so long anyway that it's already who we are. What this youtuber missed, though, is how smooth doublethink is. Every bit of this is about embracing 2 conflicting ideas at the same time. It's not about awareness and beliefs and truth, it's about being so slick that you don't realize you just agreed with something you disagree with, and now you'll go around reinforcing it because you don't realize there is a double meaning. I'm not talking about the Illuminati or the alchemy blurt or Stefani's confessions or hidden meanings, I'm talking about the researcher himself making it through this entire discussion without once realizing the doublethink was already planted. He thought he caught the alchemy, big deal neal. He didn't catch the concept that speaking to preformed society about freedom to choose is a controlled guide through a cattle chute. There is no freedom. If there were true freedom, we wouldn't even have the need to bring up freedom to choose being an option.
There is fear out there that Stefani will be murdered like other big stars for spilling the beans and rising up against the fame machine that made her. I see her still playing the game here. She didn't once cross the line. All good players know what lines not to step over. She is speaking to an audience who have been playing the game since birth. I mean, look at the college they're in. And I don't believe for one second that Mark Z. wasn't pressured on all sides and had the choice to say no.
All the moaning and fussing and flinging going on out there, all the emotions sparking- you guys are being brain trained to react certain ways on purpose. The more something or someone on social media (or talk radio, or whatever) affects you emotionally, the easier it is to create doublethink in your head. Pictures of animal abuse and political hate scroll by. "I hate people." A kitten or ducklings are saved on a highway. "Faith in humanity restored." Do you not see them doing this to you... Srsly, that is so ridiculous it's all I can do to stay on social media at all sometimes, but dang it, I'm on a mission.
As long as we snark out things like 'narcissist' when someone doesn't respond to us the way we want and then turn around and share loving all the beautiful things memes, we don't see that we are literally being split in half. We become part of the big machine, jerking each other around in rhythm, all because social media brain trains us to step up and play the game and shit on those who don't, even if they are polite about saying 'no', the way Lady Gaga was modeling for us.
She knew going into this that the industry training was a one-way ticket, and she still pays the price. There are so many people out there caught in the giant web of pretense and allegory, and now it's shedding down to us at the street level, and we're all caught between this pressure to perform and the belief that we are free to choose not to.
You know why so many people are critically anxious and depressed? Because from the very start, we've lived this dichotomy and don't know how to reconcile it. Fortunately, aspienado is like the Electric Monk and has no problem believing many mutually exclusive yet coexisting ideas without frying circuits. You know, like knowing when a meme is just a meme, not a trigger.
I really wish the youtuber doing the narrative about his research (and pushing his book sales, don't forget that) had done something with the 'digital matrix' phrase of the facebook part of the discussion. How long have I been saying one day we'll be using brain chips to tweak brain waves to control depression and anxiety?
Some of you are going oh thank god this wasn't minecraft, the rest of you are grumbling go back to minecraft. Or something.
I dug my bitch music out today for the road into town. Got more thinking done.
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
Had to make that.
