Through the Rain

The Right Word   I am listening to a podcast called On Purpose with Jay Shetty. I’ve been listening to several of Jay Shetty’s works now, and he’s a person of interest for me. He has a lot of interesting things to say about being present and saying the right words at the right time. It’s also a bunch of therapy type stuff which is right up my alley. My therapist sent me this podcast because I asked her about communication because I’ve been having extra trouble communicating since my diagnosis back in March, but mostly with the people I know the best. The episode I believe is called “You Are Not Responsible”, and of course it’s about things you are not responsible for, one of which is helping other people. I know, I know. I’m super guilty of this. I’ve been trying to work on it. I even just stopped communicating to people altogether “until I could get a handle on it.” That’s a bunch of crap, right? You can’t just “get a handle on something” without trial and error! So with a l...

A Community of Burnout   It’s becoming a struggle to know which aspects of my life to write about. There are so many and so few things going on that it seems like such a blur before the next day hits. I’m meeting new people every day and honestly mostly hitting it off with people from my generation. I don’t know if the generation after me thinks they hold too much wisdom or are too far ahead in their careers to help someone just starting out in theirs. Either way, the online community that I’m a part of is quickly becoming a lifeline for me. We are all going through some of the same core struggles. The Zoom meetings are filled with heart emojis, Amens, and resounding affirmations of struggles and proud wins, no matter how big or small. We’ve been there. We know that. One thing we all know is the toll of burnout. It’s the place where we think we hit rock bottom and then our mind and body drop us a whole new level downwards. Regular burnout is the worst! It leaves people with...

Autism in My Own Words Part 2   I can’t believe it’s been exactly three months since Part 1, and I had absolutely no idea when I was going to do this the time frame. I looked up to see what I had written to remember, and it said June 3. That’s three months, right? I talked about how exhausting a half-hour conversation was and to mask for that long, even though I wasn’t trying to mask in front of my friend but “in public.” I talked about how each individual THING was broken down into step-by-step instruction manuals, and that there weren’t really muscle memories for some autistic people. Parties were overstimulating because I was trying to filter out one sound in a sea of sounds of the same volume and no, my brain couldn’t filter out the background noises. Today’s life looks much, much different. I’m part of several online Facebook groups, one community that has some of my favorite people in it, and have accidentally found a few people where I live who are autistic, just by be...

Why Can’t We Be Friends   I spent so much time trying to be friends with people that for the first time last night, I called myself an extrovert, and it seemed true in the moment. I want to connect with people, yes on a deeper level, but also on a positive note, whether that be a smile and a good morning or whatever. I may not be the life of the party, but my facial expressions always seemed to make me one of the most dramatic when I had something to say. What I wanted to say was this morning I happened to stop chasing friendship, and it found me. I started a few conversations with guys from the men’s chat from the NeuroSpicy Community group last night, and one lives in Australia, so of course the conversation ran a little later because he’s 14 hours ahead of me. 9pm my time was 11am the next morning for him. Then the next morning for me was the evening for him. We talked about autism and how it affects our health. He has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and a lot of our symptoms ov...

The Big Questions   In search of my identity, I’ve run across some of The Big Questions in my last couple posts. Life-changing questions that have made me pause writing and really think are rare. I know you can’t tell from reading, but there are autistic pauses where my mind goes blank for a second, and then there are these pauses. My whole paradigm shifts, and I can’t make sense of the world anymore. I can’t expect to run into them all the time, but having a glimpse into the depth of reality and asking the hard questions of the truth of why I’m doing what I am doing… I thought I could answer them with some thought and journaling in a day. Hahahahaha. Ha. Ha.     Ha. Ahem. My ego grows large, and I am appropriately cut down to size hopefully quickly for it. Sure, it smarts in the moment, but I have been cut down for much smaller things, so I am grateful for someone looking out for me when my ego grows too big. Or when there’s something I haven’t realized my ent...