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...

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...

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 ...

Every Day The Same   I don’t know how to pass the days anymore. I don’t want anyone to get concerned, but my body has almost literally shut down. Most people when I describe my days might seem like I am lazy. Heck, I feel guilty and feel lazy while my husband works his butt off while he needs rest just as much as I do, but my body is at the point of literally shutting down. I don’t use “literally” as everyone else does in the figurative sense of metaphorically shutting down. I mean, I’m typing as fast as I can and already my eyes are starting to droop a little bit. It’s okay when I am doing very, very low energy things like “listening to music” without any words and not really listening to the music. Watching TV engages my mind too much that after fifteen to thirty minutes, my brain starts to drift. I have fallen asleep during texting conversations now. I set it on my chest. My arms hurt literally too much to get it off my chest to look at it, and before I know it, hours have p...

Worth in Doing Nothing Usually there is a story or a nexus that happens that leads me to a blog post, but this time it’s just several thoughts swirling together, so I hope that’s alright with you. I recently told a friend who said he was bored that it was okay to be bored. In the United States, it seems like boredom has become an unacceptable pastime. I hesitate to refer to the past as being better, because we always strive towards progression and change for the betterment of society, but I think we just need to be bored sometimes. Put away our phones, our laptops, our TVs, everything, and just be. I’ve been trying to do this in my own life, and it has been a struggle. Two minutes in, and I’m looking at my phone, turning on the TV, and/or looking at my husband’s chair as he’s gaming. I need alone time, yet I don’t know what to do with it to recharge my batteries just yet. I have started talking to friends and encouraging them. There is nothing inherently wrong in doing so, but it turns...

Breathing With Your Heart This has been a long time coming, and I almost let it go, but I was up with a nightmare anyway, so it’s time I write this. I’ve been having a hard time being kind to myself. I beat myself up on a continual basis for never doing enough and it never being perfect enough. It started in childhood, but I let it continue into adulthood, and I have let it ruin the way I view myself. A couple things recently changed the way I see myself. My Facebook reels had been flooded with therapy videos to the point where I had been therapied out. Me, therapied out? I know, right!!! It happened. But a series that I first thought was really stupid but couldn’t stop watching was the Drew Barrymore Show. She talks a lot about being kind to yourself and really being enough to the point where you don’t need another person to fulfill you. She’s single, so she’s always taking dating advice, but her guests usually turn it around to self-compassion and being okay with being yourself. So o...

Rest This will be short but might take me a while to write. I am burned out trying to make myself productive. I still tie my productivity to my worth, and I don’t know how to stop it. I’m going to bring it up yet again to my therapist tomorrow. It is this constant cycle of everything that I do for fun eventually turns into an expectation, and once that happens, pressure builds until it turns into something I hate. So every hobby turns into something I hate. I don’t hate blogging. I think I just need a day or two to rest. I have been writing letters to my family since the beginning of December, and then I started writing this blog, at least one post a day, sometimes three or four posts, and I love doing it, but I don’t know how to stop. I told my husband that I’m over my past, and then the past two nights, I’ve woken up multiple times to my breathing being highly erratic and strangled thinking about the job I left. I’ve fooled myself. I have put most of my past behind me, but have just ...

Uncluttered I don’t even know how to start this one. I just spent a couple hours decluttering my house like I usually do through the course of the day, and it’s only 9am. I tried starting a blog entry when I first woke up about listening, but it all just seemed overwhelming. I overwhelmed myself within the first few minutes of waking up! Whatever voice is pushing me to do something, do more, do it right, do it perfectly…it’s not shutting up. It’s out of control. Breathe. Deep breaths. I’m going to do a candle meditation, and I invite you to do it with me. Hold out your finger in front of your mouth as if it’s a flame. I know you look silly. So do I. Breathe in for the count of four…two. Three. Four. Hold. Two…three…four…Breathe out two—three—four. Suck in like your life depends on it slowly two three four. Hold two three four. And calmly out two three four. Imagine you are taking in the air of the fire as a fire-breathing dragon…three four. Hold that fire in your belly… three four. And...

Did I Just Hear That Come Out of My Mouth? I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last week or so, but three really stuck with me. Three different women with three very different relationships in my life, but listening to each of these conversations was wildly different, and it showed. I am not proud of the way I handled all of them. I am going to be upfront and honest and say that. But I hope we can all glean some wisdom from these. The first one I want to talk about happened with someone where my defenses were up. I was ready for boundaries to happen, not a fight, but an assertion of my rights. In the past, I didn’t know how to make requests of this person to stop things that bothered me, and I wanted to try. I did not expect it to go well, but I never expect anything to go well. She knows I have a religious background so she brought up a famous religious person whom she adores. “Do you know so and so? I love him!” My face dropped. “I hate him.” The next however long it took for th...

Be I woke up like I usually do, barely conscious, reaching for my meditation, hoping that would give me insight to the day. My brain has been in panic mode even with the solid meditation I had last night. This morning was no different. I kept trying to center myself and clear my mind. People aren’t perfect. They get it wrong. Towards the end, I decided to let go of having “the perfect session” and just let be what was going to be. My mind fog cleared a lot, thoughts ebbed, and I was able to just be. Even though the Bible still triggers me, there is a verse that mentions “Be still, and know that I am God.” It is very simple, yet very profound. Be still. Take moments out of our busy day to clear our mind and just be still. And know. Know the truth. Know justice and mercy. Know love and compassion. Know kindness. BE and KNOW. So I just sat there for a while after the meditation being. I wasn’t “trying” to be anything. I was just being. I am still learning my innate worth in being a human....

What Had Happened Was… I just came from a great guided meditation, and I feel like my calm self again. I feel like my family riled me up and I had to put on a protective layer to “be who I needed to be” in order to show my authentic self, and I hate that. It makes me sad. So I’m going to walk you through a little of what I just did. I would send you the meditation, but it’s specifically for trauma and PTSD and panic attacks and copyrighted, and I would rather not mess with their research nor start my own. Do you have a few minutes for yourself? Let me walk you through a meditation. The first few minutes is slow, and is centered around your breathing. Breath is basically the most important thing in mediation work. It’s the easiest voluntary thing you can do to change the physiology of your body to relax. Once you think about your breathing and only your breathing, think about slowing it down and pulling the breath from deeper in your body. Some say from the diaphragm, others say from th...

Putting the Self Back in Self-Care I need more self-care. I was doing a meditation, and all I could think about was other things. I berated myself thinking “you’ve been doing this for a while now. Breathe in through the abdomen, let the body relax itself. Let the mind clear." But the mind didn’t clear. I didn’t make space for myself. Perhaps I still had too many unprocessed thoughts still wandering around from sleep, but I couldn’t center myself. Even this post has been hijacked by worry instead of by positivity. Let me try again. I am going to try to take care of myself better. My two aunts lovingly but without personal boundaries messed with my hair last night claiming it looked better swished to the side. They encouraged me to take just a little more time with myself, and I would be looking better than ever. I was too embarrassed to admit that if I had a few more minutes that I wanted to devote to myself, I would try to work on flossing more and shaving more. Basics. Not hairst...