Through the Rain

Plant-Killer   I’ve been sitting at my desk this past month writing blog posts so wrapped up in blogs and autism and numbers of budgets and spreadsheets (my new special interest apparently) that I’ve neglected my poor little bamboo. Watered two or three times total, it wilted and died, like any plant does without water. I’ve killed dozens if not hundreds of plants by now. I can’t even keep cacti alive. They require so little water that by the time they actually need water, I’ve forgotten. I enjoy succulents a lot though. They remind me of myself: prickly but beautiful—you can enjoy from afar, but don’t get too close or it might hurt you, or you it. I think I need a different plant to identify with. Some might suggest a very high-maintenance plant, and I wouldn’t take offense to it. I feel so high-maintenance without even meaning to be. I like bamboo. Something about how it comes neatly in sections, you might be able to slowly bend it to your will over time maybe, but it also ...

Taking A Beat   The birds are chirping. I should actually say, the birds are fighting with each other, but that doesn’t have such a peaceful, eloquent undertone to it, does it? Nobody likes tension. They just like noise. I am basking in the sound of birds and the typing of the keyboard, but trying to stay as quiet as I can because I like quiet. Silence scares a lot of people. Oh, they say they will like the peaceful quiet of a calm afternoon, but give them just that and a few minutes in, they will be talking someone’s ear off to fill the silence. Or worse, be left with their own thoughts. I wonder if that’s why I’m writing this… to get my thoughts on “paper” so someone might see them. Okay… yep… I lied. I told myself that I was okay with myself, but the truth is, I’m not, and I guess I just have to be okay with that. Taking a beat, taking a moment, stepping into the peace for as long as you can handle it is enough. Why am I always searching for enough… Am I good enough. Do ...

Stepping Into What I Learned   I’ve been talking a lot about the Let Them theory by Mel Robbins. Basically, let them do whatever they want to do, and be in control of yourself, for you can only control yourself and your behaviors, not anyone else’s. I failed to do that today. And it wasn’t until venting about today that it really hit me that I let people pleasing and fear of others’ anger get the best of me. Today I became an actual caseworker. Out of training and brand new caseload, I started with 17 alerts, which may not seem like many, but when each of them can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or longer, especially to a newbie like me, plus I had cases I was working on to wrap up, cases from my supervisor to start, etc… it was already overwhelming! I looked at the first alert, seemed pretty easy, but it was from over a month ago… uh oh! It snowballed into a mistake that was about to cost this client dearly, and it was my first day with this case! Alert after a...

Needing People or Wanting People?   I always thought it was a romantic notion to need somebody to love. I read romantic stories mixed with fantasy and always imagined that someday I would fall in love with someone in a way that made my breath catch and my heart beat. I came out as celibate when I realized that I didn’t feel sexually towards women whatsoever, so finding a mate was out of the question for me. I had to give up the true love’s kiss notion that, let’s all agree, society love’s to tell over and over again. So I thought I would find it in a strong support system of friendships instead. I would have a group of friends so strong, a community so great, that it wouldn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. But nobody offers that, at least not that I’ve found. The church lies if they say they do. I haven’t met a church single’s group that’s not disguised to try to get singles to not be single anymore or to find “wholeness in God” while really telling people “find a s...

What Do You Value?   You know at different parts of your life, you have different epiphanies. You hear the same thing twenty times, but it’s not until you’re in the shower or wake up at midnight that it suddenly sinks in, the lightbulb clicks, and you GOT IT?! Values and morals, moral compasses, every analogy of values this and morals that, and it takes a worksheet of twenty-five or so values, and I have to pick the top ten and rank them in order of my life. How do I want my life to be driven? It sinks in again. How have I let myself drift so far away from any goals I had at one point? Did I even have goals since being an astronaut in kindergarten? When did all my dreams and aspirations get side-tracked, and I just let it happen? Is this what happens to everyone? I’m certain most of us don’t wake up living the dream we dreamed of five, ten, twenty years ago. But how did it happen? For me, I feel like I started as a bright-eyed little boy with big potential, and I’m just now...

You, Me, and Everyone In Between   I’m learning a lot about the relationship with myself first and foremost in this spiraling mess of time since coming out as autistic. I say coming out as autistic, because much like a lot of people “know you’re gay” before you do, I had A LOT of people tell me “you might be on the spectrum” which made me get tested. And much like coming out as gay, it affected me long before I had words for it. Just finding the words have been a relief, and yes, I acted a little gayer when I first came out before I settled in. And no, I DID NOT mean to “act all autistic” when I was diagnosed. It just sort of hit me like a house falling out of the sky hit a woman who was in a wheelchair who finally got to walk again after getting magic shoes! The more I put it together, the more I wonder… did my early mental health issues come from actually having mental health diagnoses, or did they come from being autistic and from being placed in a new environment away fro...

I Don’t Know   I think that’s the whole point of this post. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know why I posted that last post. I still don’t know if it was a mistake or not. Part of me believes it still is/was. I hate being vulnerable like that. Disabled people aren’t allowed to hate their disabilities like that openly. We are supposed to accept it with quiet dignity, perhaps complain about the struggles that come along with it. Certainly never scream “I hate autism!!!” I thought the night would give me more peace, but the more I think about the incident, the less peace I feel, so I have to let it go for good. You would think by this time that I would be good at letting things go, but I don’t know. It gets a little easier, but mindfulness and meditation have made the relaxing pretend to be easier. I don’t know if that means the forgiveness takes place or if the body is just tricked. I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going from here. Part of me wants to see th...

It’s Going to Be Okay   It’s going to be okay. Maybe not in this moment. Maybe not today, or even this week or month. But eventually, it will be. I’m not saying it’s going to turn sunshine and rainbows in the next second, because that’s not how life works, but there are ebbs and flows to life, and it will eventually be okay again. It might take some elbow grease to dig out the stains that life throws at you, but if you love deeply and let go freely, the tides will eventually turn. The mind rebuilds itself. The soul can learn how to pick itself up shattered off the ground and make itself anew. Like muscles that grow stronger (gosh, I really, REALLY hate that analogy), things that are torn can, in some instances, grow back together again. I would say with support, but I no longer believe that to be the case. You see, I wrote this long speech about how I was going to mask better for the sake of the community. I did it today, and my husband seemed happier with me. I was happier w...

What Happens When Safe Isn’t Safe Anymore   I don’t know how to write this, so I will hurry before I lose the nerve and write it quickly. When I got diagnosed, I had no choice. All the social pretending I had done my whole life fell apart and I became a new person in a split second. That wasn’t my choice. That wasn’t anybody’s choice. If I could take it back, I would! If I had known what this would bring, I never would have asked for an autism diagnosis “for funsies.” But I was tired all the time and the depression and meds weren’t explaining it away. The light and noise sensitivity were getting worse. The social fatigue was getting a lot worse. It was all coming to a boiling point, and I knew something had to give. But I was high functioning. I wasn’t showing most of this on the outside. My husband saw that I was more tired and chalked it up to stress about the new job starting soon, which I had no reason to be anxious about. “It’s all in your head.” “It’s all in my head.” I...

Autism in My Own Words Part 1   I don’t know how we do it. Or how “normal people” do it… they gather, have parties, talk, drink, eat, “mingle,” etc. I find myself talked at while I find a person’s eyebrows or lips moving and try to lipread to help decipher through the noise what they are trying to say. I thought I was the only one contorting my face in a carefully practiced dance of lips, cheeks, and especially eyebrows to make level expert look what everyone else looked like what level easy looked like. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and I’ve been doing it so long that I’ve forgotten I’ve even been doing it. Until I got diagnosed with autism and found others like me. And my mask slipped. Suddenly I was “being autistic” and “not who I was before.” Everything was harder, and my eyebrows took more energy to move, my eyebrows could hardly stay awake, and so many more things took so much more energy. I have hardly been to a social gathering since then. But today I was talking ...

Calm   Yes, I am up at 5:15am and have been since I got my usual 4:30 email called Bridges of Light. It’s a positive outlook on life by Dr. Shawn Chapman Brooks, and I’m glad I randomly ran across it. It’s a free daily newsletter that is also on his page on Facebook, so don’t feel like you have to get his newsletter like I do. But the main reason for bringing up the time is that I feel calm. Yes, of course I am a little tired, but I am calm and at peace. I put on my headphones to listen to some music, but I have nothing planned today. I feel like I can finally leave most of the past behind me. I can take a few breaths and decide to let the weight of the past go. That doesn’t change who I am as a person. It doesn’t change the voices in my head, though another lesson will be learning which voices to listen to and which I can politely ignore until they quiet down. For now, I will just wait until my husband wakes up to make us coffee and have coffee. I am still debating on a sp...