Through the Rain

Hello everyone! I apologize for the late notice, but I have decided to move my writing to Substack to try to monetize some of my writing. This is needed for my financial situation. I understand if you cannot be a paid subscriber. I will try to post at least one free blog post per week but cannot guarantee it. Things have been in flux for me recently, and once they stabilize, I will have a better understanding of what I can and cannot handle. I thank you for your patience with me as I undergo this venture, and if you'd like to subscribe, please do! It would mean the world to me to have people actually value my writing! I believe it is strong enough to warrant this next step, and I hope you agree with me. I love you all. Thank you for your support! Below is the link to my Substack. https://marklaure.substack.com/ Thank you, Mark L.

“You Hold Nothing”   Part of the unbinding ritual in Agatha All Along is chanting “You Hold Nothing” at the person who bound your powers until you believe it yourself. Today holds significant purpose for me, and it has held me back for too long. It is the anniversary of my mother’s car accident many, many years ago. It seems like no matter if I remember or forget September 17 th , it always comes back to haunt me, being a bad, unlucky day. Today, it holds nothing over me. I declare it to be true. I’ve had trouble with pain and exhaustion the past few days, pushing myself past my limits, yet as I type this, I feel a surge of emotional energy reaching out through me to all of you declaring it has no hold on you. What has been holding you back? What have you been afraid to let go of? What has been deep inside you all along that you have been afraid to unleash or have given that power to someone else? It’s time to take control back. The time is now. Take a few deep breaths. C...

Blogging   I found one of my passions, and I’ve been putting it off the last week or so, partially because I’ve been feeling bad about myself, partially because I’ve been afraid I had nothing to contribute and that I would fail. Writing, and blogging specifically has become a passion of mine. It is my outlet through which I reflect on myself and into the world key questions (I hope) that get people thinking. I know I’ve thought a lot about the questions I’ve posed recently. I was afraid that without a specific topic in mind at the start of each post, that I would turn into a puddle of goo. “Obligations” was one of my favorites though, because it offered insight into my passions without me having to do a deep dive into my psyche, a thirty minute mindfulness meditation, or being yelled at by anyone for being selfish and wondering if I truly am selfish being stuck in the inner thoughts of my life. Another form of writing I have “taken up” seriously in the last few weeks and mont...

Social Paradoxes   When I was diagnosed as autistic, my whole view of the world changed. Gone were relationships that I was struggling with and instead were relationships I was struggling unnecessarily to try to make work. I was diagnosed, and instead of people I had connections with, I saw the connections as strings of pure moments and strings of struggle that I had brushed to the side as “normal.” Everyone brushed them to the side as normal, and instead of getting help understanding what went wrong in those moments, I had to retrace my steps once I got diagnosed… once I had more information and keep getting more information… to make sense of what went wrong. It's not just my identity that’s wrapped up in “autism.” It’s my connection to every individual in my life. I have to go over each with a fine-toothed comb and figure out how much of the relationship was “us” and how much of it was their desires and me struggling to fit in with them. That is why I saw every relationship...

Obligation   I am writing to you today out of obligation. I don’t really have anything poignant to say, unfortunately, but I’ve been making a post pretty much every day, and it’s been a day or two since I made one, so it’s long past due. I’m realizing how much of my life has been made out of obligation and how much of it has been made out of wants and desires. Giving what I had started out as a desire to see everyone equal and happy. Nobody else seems to have that desire. The outrage over the latest assassination over a person who spewed nothing but hate from what I have been informed tells me that this country of “nice people” only care about their morals and values, not what led a person to do what they’ve done. That is pathetic. You want to talk about empathy, start there. Every human matters. EVERY HUMAN. And no, I don’t care if you think what you’re doing is right. Unless our choices harm another human being or our physical or psychological selves, not what you deem “our s...

The Walls We Build   Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? I’ve gone back and forth on my answer to this question. The romantic in me says of course loving is worth it! But then the hurt part of me says that no, it’s not worth it to be hurt like this when they leave or by death. I’ve been thinking a lot about the different friendships and types of relationships I’ve had over the course of my life and how being gay and being autistic and especially how being diagnosed autistic has affected all of them. Being diagnosed was like a light switch went off, and not always in the best of ways. Some people have described it as a complete change in me. Most people I know now I didn’t know then and most people I knew then I don’t talk to now. Few understand. Heck, I don’t even understand. It seems easier to get to know someone these days than to talk to someone I knew pre-diagnosis. It’s like the walls I kept building higher and higher around my fake perso...

What the ‘Tism?—RSD   So I thought I was alone in something really, really bad that happens to me, and it turns out it’s another autism thing. It’s a little complicated to explain, so please hang on. I’ll try to make this as interesting as possible. I like my day to be pre-planned. I like to know what’s coming. Free time usually means a nap is coming or that I need some sort of spontaneity. This is where it gets… weird. You see: I can’t handle other people changing plans, but I can handle myself making plans on the fly. I don’t know why. I don’t know. Don’t ask. It’s an autism thing. The thing is, sometimes I get these overwhelming urges to be social, and when that happens, I reach out to a bunch of different people depending on who I think will respond, schedules, etc. IF I DON’T HEAR BACK FROM ANYBODY within a predetermined timeframe, a primitive part of my brain kicks in and tells my whole body that nobody loves me. It tells me I’m not valued. My self-esteem plummets to ...

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...

Rewriting the Story   I’ve started making a couple new friendships, and with these friendships I’ve started something new. With the first friendship, instead of deep-diving into my story of pain and suffering and suddenly becoming “that guy,” I let him talk. Two hours of him talking about whatever he wanted to talk about. No, it wasn’t a monologue; it was a conversation infodump with him at the helm, and I was so glad to listen to his passion about work and his family and comics and books! Those two hours flew by! For once, I got out of my head and into someone else’s. I got out of “feelings” and into something new… excitement! The second one happened recently. I know I need work with boundaries, and this was a fellow who knew he was on the spectrum also, so I felt comfortable shooting straight with him: these are the boundaries. We aren’t going to make it about pain and suffering. It’s not going to be about tragedy. We are going to keep it lighthearted! You cool with that? I...

Finding Passion   Passion is something you usually don’t think about until you see it or experience it. It’s talking about that first sip of coffee in the morning that makes your soul just feel alive on a good day. It’s your “hobby” that’s actually your obsession that other people have told you to shut up about, but you don’t want to because it is just SO INTERESTING and you want the world to know how cute baby sloths are and that sloths poop only once a week and sleep curled up hanging under branches and awwwwww…. Ummm… Yeah. It’s when your friend’s face lights up and fifteen minutes have passed and they apologize for five more minutes for rambling, but you don’t care because you were so caught up in what they were talking about, whether or not you were interested in paranormal gay fantasy comics before, you sure are now for twenty minutes because gosh darn it, someone you care about has a heart for it, and it’s important to them, and you can see their heart pouring out over...

Proud of Myself Again   I’m super nervous and fidgety, yet I don’t know what to do and run out of energy and get overstimulated often, so I will do what I do best besides eat (since I fail at sleeping now). I will write. I don’t know what I’m going to write about. I was going to go ahead about my love of writing, but that seems so trivial. How does one put into words the overflowing of cursive on a page when a story comes to life and a “two-page assignment” turns into a ten-page story about Thanksgiving, or a haiku turns into a twelve-verse haiku about Jesus healing the sick in a nursing home? I used to love a challenge. I challenged myself all the time. I want to cry thinking about how passionately motivated I was, because all I can think about is all the extra work that took and for what? Was it really for myself? I think part of it was. I was proud of myself. When did others being proud of me become so stupidly important? I want to be proud of myself again. I want to be ...

Campy Comic Books   I was trying to think of a “cool name” to call this post, and I had to laugh when I stumbled across this pun. I was reminded today of my love of comic books. In finding my identity, it’s been suggested that I go back to my past, before I started mixing who I was with who I was supposed to be, and remember what made me happy. X-Men always drew my attention, and Storm was always my favorite of the characters. I don’t know what it was about her, whether it was the way her cape connected at her wrists, that she controlled the weather, that she knew from an early age what her power was and was revered/respected, or that she could give two craps what other people thought of her powers because she knew she was a freaking awesome beast with absolute control. Or that her eyes just turned white and you knew “ooooooooh, no! Something baaaaaad’s about to happen!” But that has nothing to do with camp. Who I’m talking about was one of my all-time heroes: PowerMark! You ...

That Sneaky Little D   Depression. What did you think I was going to say??? The awful truth of the matter is that I couldn’t talk to anyone about this. I couldn’t find the words. That’s what some people don’t understand is that sometimes depression doesn’t have words. It’s just a presence. It just IS. The ugly truth is, we don’t talk about it because until someone finds the words to explain the… the… even now I can’t find the words. It goes beyond a feeling and can only be explained by what it leaves in its wake: tiredness beyond comprehension that reaches into your bones and sucks not only the energy but the life out of you, the meals lost to the sleep and the pain, the embarrassment over having to tell someone, or worse yet not telling someone, then them finding out later and blaming you for not telling them. The mortality rate of an autistic adult is staggering. Don’t Google it. Seriously, don’t. We talked about it in one of our groups, and at the time, I hadn’t noticed ...

Connection   The biggest thing about receiving the autism diagnosis is that I felt like I had been people-pleasing my entire life. At first, I blamed everyone else. I cut off most people that I hardly knew and only added because they were acquaintances, and I felt sorry for them. Then I trimmed even more of the friends I hadn’t talked to in forever and those who hadn’t talked to me in quite a long time even after I went radio silent for weeks. I focused so much on the outside to avoid the gaping hole on the inside. With this new void of friends, I started making new ones in Facebook groups of autistic people and at a group I had to pay for exclusively for autistic and autistic (with ADHD) people. I thought I had finally found who I was searching for. But I started filling in the same gaps that I had done when I was people-pleasing neurotypicals. I would ask when something was wrong and then try to help the person like a therapist would process the person’s feelings, see what ...

Friends   I haven’t known what to write recently. I haven’t really been inspired when my days have been being awake for a few hours in pain and exhaustion with no motivation, then sleep for a few hours, rinse and repeat. Not only do the days blur together, but the day and night time do too. I see the sun, I see my husband. I don’t see the sun, I retreat. Even my friends have helped me tell time by when which friends are awake and which ones are asleep or unavailable. I’m always excited to talk when I have energy and can hold my phone up or when I can physically sit up and speak to my husband. I do a lot of listening these days. There is no point in speaking when there is nothing new under the sun. That is mostly why I have not written a blog post, between that and lethargy. I did have something important I wanted to talk about though, and it’s probably something you’ve heard about a hundred times, but it takes on a much deeper meaning when you go through something like chroni...

Happy to Be Alive   It’s been over a month of constant pain, and by constant, I mean even when I said I was in constant pain last time, there were a few moments of relief. Not this time. This time something has hurt at all times. The past week or so, my joints have decided to ache as well as my muscles, and there has been joint weakness as well. So imagine holding up your phone for five minutes. Easy task, right? Wrong! It takes wrists and finger joints moving together as well as just your arms working correctly to do that simple task. I always took it for granted until this past week. There have been hours where I couldn’t pick up my phone like normal. I look like an idiot trying to respond to texts, which is the only thing I try to do during those times. I went to the doctor. I, who am so tired I can barely leave bed, much less the house, went to the doctor because I was feeling so bad. This was one of the few exceptions where I could actually make it out of the house BECAU...