Through the Rain

Letting Them Go   I thought this was going to only be about my dad until I wrote the title, and then I got goosebumps. Let’s start with my dad though. He raised my family as strict Pentecostal, evangelical, charismatic, kind of difficult to describe, but bouncing around church to church if he found teachings he didn’t agree with and the pastor wouldn’t budge with agreeing with them. And he always seemed to be friends with the pastor. In short, he was a strict, rule-following, but narcissistic father who worked hard to provide for his family. In doing so, for most of our formative years, he was almost never around. That, I can easily forgive. Later, when he was around, it was always about chores and doing things “the right way” which was his way, and doing them perfectly. I am trying to forgive him of all the ways he traumatized us as kids by explaining away his behaviors, but there are some things that I just don’t think can be explained away. I honestly haven’t worked as har...

Work Stress   Something I don’t know how to do is release work and just relax. It’s Friday night, the last night official night of training, and I’m already thinking of Monday and how that’s going to look different. All the cases I will see, all the steps I will take, my supervisor, my trainers, etc. This is what leads to burnout: not being able to shut your mind off from work and being able to switch to relaxing mode. It’s a skill I have yet to develop. I don’t even know where to begin. Already my mind has run through the day, the possibilities of the weekend (as short as my mind can come up with), and is back to Monday morning and onto the work week. I was hoping that writing it out while listening to some calming music would help bring me into the present moment, and somehow it has. My mind is tugging towards Monday, and I don’t know how to stop the pull. It reminds me of the pull I felt for so long towards friendship and the feel to be needed. I craved and needed attentio...

The Opposite of People Pleasing I’m brand new to this theory. I’ve barely dipped my toes into it, and I may just do that. But it may just change my life forever. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Mel Robbins and her “Let Them” theory, but it’s seriously as easy as it sounds. It’s taking the age-old philosophy of the only thing you can control is you and your responses to things, and putting it into two words: let them. Someone doesn’t want to do something you want to do? Let them. Someone wants to complain all day and not take your relationship seriously? Why have it? Someone wants to thank you and appreciate you? Let them wholeheartedly! Again, I’m no expert in this. What I just said kind of sounds like reacting to people’s actions, and maybe that’s the whole point. But it’s a way to get away from the mindset of always worrying about pleasing the other person. If they don’t like what I think, let them. And it’s not some passive-aggressive, grand-standing act of defiance. I think of it m...

Disabling Autism   Did you know that the phrase “give it 100%” doesn’t actually mean give it your all 100% of the time? It means give, like, 60-65% of the time with breaks and talking and stuff, still get work done, but don’t over-tire yourself out by giving your it your all at all times???? DID YOU KNOW THAT???? I didn’t. I just found that out. Now imagine yourself burning the candle at both ends because you’ve been told all your life “you’ve got to give it your all” “give it 110%” etc. Can you imagine how exhausted you must feel??? No wonder the burnout rate and the difference of burnout of autism is different than that of neurotypicals! I mean… mind blown! Sorry, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it and it has been a day or two. That’s not the main highlight of this blog post though. I went through Deaf Studies and American Sign Language classes in college, and it taught me that Deaf culture is a culture, but technically hearing loss can be “a disability” and...

Selfishness in Friendship (Edit at the End) I have been very selfish in my friendships lately. Nobody’s noticed because, well, I’ve had an autistic meltdown and nearly nobody has talked to me in days, weeks if you don’t count the dental pain and the literal not being able to talk. Around mid-March, I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism, and the way they phrased it was… not very nice. It was very clinical, and I made the mistake of reading some of it last night or the night before. The sleeps have me all confused. Basically I don’t communicate the way that other people do. No, that is putting it mildly. There is the way that everyone else communicates over here. And then waaaaaay over here in this distant corner is me, wishing I had friends, relationships, anyone to love the child who so desperately needed communication with someone that they would take anyone. But then my mother died and I pushed everyone away because everyone was going to let me down. Eventually I let in church...

Selfishness in Friendship   I have been very selfish in my friendships lately. Nobody’s noticed because, well, I’ve had an autistic meltdown and nearly nobody has talked to me in days, weeks if you don’t count the dental pain and the literal not being able to talk. Around mid-March, I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism, and the way they phrased it was… not very nice. It was very clinical, and I made the mistake of reading some of it last night or the night before. The sleeps have me all confused. Basically I don’t communicate the way that other people do. No, that is putting it mildly. There is the way that everyone else communicates over here. And then waaaaaay over here in this distant corner is me, wishing I had friends, relationships, anyone to love the child who so desperately needed communication with someone that they would take anyone. But then my mother died and I pushed everyone away because everyone was going to let me down. Eventually I let in church people ...

Sensitivity   My whole pain scale has been redefined, yet I don’t know how yet. How do you go from a “pain level 8” is not being able to get up off the bed because of chronic pain throughout your body because every muscle is tensing up to “the sensation of your lower jaw feeling like one giant exposed nerve with a hurricane over it every second of every day for over a week at a time to the point where you’re falling asleep even with that pain and drifting off and having that pain on and off and working and having conversations and functioning daily as if nothing is wrong and yet your body wants to scream and be asleep simultaneously?” How do you define that? A 9? I leave a 10 for being pregnant, something I will hopefully never feel. But it did feel like unimaginable hell. My jaw and cheek swelled up as well as the actual tooth. There were three teeth, but it was the lower left one that caused the most pain. I was even told during this that I was in too much pain. That I shou...

Pain   We all talk about bringing ourselves into the present moment and experiencing the present moment better. Well, nothing brings us into the present like pain. I mean, we aren’t really experiencing the present, but we are living in it. Every single millisecond of it. I’ve had toothache pain that’s been growing. Wednesday I left at 9:30am because I couldn’t concentrate. The pain in my tooth was like a raw nerve was exposed and being jackhammered on. I went home and looked to see if what dental insurance we had. Fortunately after a while my husband joined me and helped me find the information I needed to make an emergency dental appointment. I went, and they said they couldn’t take the teeth out themselves. I would have to make a consult with the surgeon, and the surgeon was closed for the day. They prescribed antibiotics, and over an hour after my appointment ended, the prescription finally made its way to my cute little pharmacy a couple miles away so I could get my pain ...

Please Forgive Me   I realize that the entire way I relate to people has shifted over the years into an unhealthy state, and I apologize for the way it has come across and for what I have done. Once I started learning right from wrong, I think I kept wanting people to fall into the right category, to “help” them in their lives. But it’s not up to me to help them. Sure, I might be able to think “oh I would feel the same way if I might be in that type of situation,” but I can’t therapy them out of it. I am not a therapist. And it’s time I stop treating myself like one. I need to learn how to relate to people and just be. Heck, I need to learn to relate to people without their emotions affecting my own for hours at a time! I need to learn to relate. And I was never taught that. It would be easy to point fingers, especially at my parents, but the truth of the matter is that nobody knew I was autistic, and nobody got me tested. All the signs were there, but nobody knew how to re...

My Diagnosis   I feel like the further from the diagnosis I received about my “high functioning” autism, the less “high functioning” I have become. A few weeks before my diagnosis, and even before the almost month-long process of getting the diagnosis, I started getting more sensitive to light and sound. I thought it was strange, but that was it. I’ve had too many things happen to me for a little thing like light and noise sensitivity to register as something earth-shattering. It could be related to the trauma or the PTSD or the medication or something else. The something else was probably the autism that I ended up receiving a diagnosis for later on. My husband said “it was like as soon as you received your diagnosis, you started pointing out all these autism videos and it became your whole identity.” I had to explain that no, I had been watching them for weeks and weeks, identifying with what they were saying. The Facebook algorithms had picked up cues weeks before I was di...

Two Open Doors   We like to think of a relationship as a two-way street, but I was reminded lately that sometimes it’s like two open doors. One person says “I’m free whenever you are!” and the other person replies “same!” Nothing ever gets done and bugs get inside both houses with doors wide open. Nobody ever initiates the conversation. Nobody knocks on the door. It takes walking to the other house for a conversation to happen. For the longest time, I was the one initiating conversation, and I loved doing it. I would see a face pop up on Messenger or on my texting app and start with a “how are you?” I really wanted to know how my friend was doing. If they were doing well, that was great! I had no saving to do! My work was done, all was right with that corner of my world. Nobody went into detail as to why they were good or great or fine. They just were. If someone wasn’t fine, I could find out why not and try to offer encouragement or counsel or at least just be with them in s...