Through the Rain

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...