You mean the SMBC one? You know, for a guy who puts out a new comic every single day of the week including weekends, I am constantly amazed by the high quality of his material. I definitely can't match it and I only make new comics now and then when I feel like it.
This morning I woke up depressed. Very depressed. About a lot of things. I spent a good deal of time crying before I even got out of bed. Then I read some comedy online and I'm not crying anymore, but I can feel that I'm just trying to bury the problems because I don't know how to deal with them. They're still there, waiting. If I don't keep myself busy enough, they'll leap out and hold me down and beat the shit out of me all over again and I don't know how to stop it.
And I'm not talking about irrational depression that makes you feel horrible for no obvious reason. I have reasons. Most of the time I'm able to shove them aside and get on with my life and make a joke about it and focus on what's good, at least enough to not burst into tears. But today that doesn't seem to be the case. This morning I woke up and the depression took its opportunity to jump me and torture me for a while, to the point where I hardly felt I could get out of bed, soaking my pillow with tears in self-pity over how unfair life is.
Maybe if I write some of these things down it will help. Feedback accepted, possibly even appreciated, but not really expected.
I am autistic. I am a great person with a lot of strengths and good qualities. I am funny, very good at imitating people, an excellent proofreader, a good writer, very intelligent, very kind-hearted and open and giving. And I am autistic, and I will always be autistic, and that is never ever going to change. I will never be able to read other people’s body language or facial expressions. I will always be overwhelmed by sensory stimulation, loud noises, bright lights, too many people, too much to process. I will always experience sudden rushes of anxiety when I encounter something I haven’t prepared myself for. I will always unwittingly do inappropriate things and no one will ever tell me when I do so because they will assume I not only am aware, but am doing it intentionally. I will always be awkward.
I do a pretty good job of hiding my problems, blending in. I’ve spent years honing my social skills and no one would guess I’m autistic without me telling them. The downside being that I’m held accountable for all mistakes I make. And I make so many.
Generally I walk through life focused entirely on the details of my immediate situation. Remembering to make eye contact. Trying to actually hear what other people are saying. Responding appropriately to questions. Pausing occasionally while I’m talking so the other person can react. Being aware of whether the other person looks interested. Remembering to stand up “straight” and keep my shoulders from rolling forward all the time. Not knocking things over or walking into door frames. Introducing topics of conversation that will actually be interesting to other people. If it seems I might be doing something inappropriate, offer an explanation for my behavior so people don’t think I’m being intentionally obnoxious.
I’m so focused on the details of each moment that I don’t notice the patterns and trends over time. I keep introducing that same “interesting” topic and now people look tired of me constantly talking about the same thing. I keep offering the same explanation of my behavior and it seems like I’m a hypochondriac complaining about an ailment no one can see.
Now and then I get a sudden moment of awareness of what I must look like to other people. It is never positive. I had one such moment this morning as I was waking up. Last night at my conditioning workshop I was going on and on about my sleep problems, trying to explain my fatigue and weakness. I’m pretty sure my face looked awake so I was afraid I looked lazy, or like I didn’t really want to be there. People’s reactions to my explanations were not really positive. They were polite but they were not interested in my apparent sleep disorder. One guy heard me say I want to visit a sleep center and he asked if I want help getting to sleep or staying awake. I responded with a brief description of my sleep problem and he said “Oh, that’s interesting” and immediately changed the subject and started talking to someone else. (Why did he ask if he wasn’t really interested?)
Now I’m overcome with embarrassment. I will never be able to figure this out. How much information is too much to share? How can you tell? What should I do when I’m feeling awful but I don’t want people to think I’m a lazy slacker? What do normal people do? Do normal people just not have these problems? Are they really good at hiding them? Am I supposed to be hiding them? I feel like everything about me is just an annoyance to other people. Like they all wish I would just stop existing so they wouldn’t have to deal with me.
It will always be this way. It will never get any better than it is now. In some ways it’s even getting worse.
I’m so tired. I’m fucking exhausted, in fact. Exhausted from trying to follow all the rules, from the constant effort, from constantly trying to hide things or explain them. I’m exhausted from the constant fear that I’m going to do something wrong. And even more exhausted from the constant realization that I am, indeed, doing things wrong, all the time.
There’s a moment when you realize that, for all that you are a great person and you love who you are, you realize what you actually look like to other people, and you know that you wouldn’t want to hang around you either. That’s a horrible, horrible moment.
No one ever believes me. Growing up, no one believed me when I complained of sleep problems and depression and constant confusion. I kept telling people, parents, teachers, school therapists, that something was WRONG with me and I needed HELP. They never believed me. I didn’t get my autism diagnosis until I was 23 years old, far too late to avoid most of the damage.
Now I’m scared. I’m terrified, even. I don’t want to go to the doctor. Something is wrong with me. I’m falling asleep all the time. I feel disconnected from the world, often unsure whether I’m awake or asleep. Whenever I get stressed out, my body feels weak. I feel terrible pain from simple pressure, like kneeling on the floor (knees), sitting cross-legged (ankles), doing push-ups (hands), lying on my side a hard surface (hips). My back hurts most of the time, pain radiating out from a single point along my spine, and no one can tell me why or how to fix it. My hands turn blue when I get out of the shower and my extremities are always cold and clammy. And I’m seeing things, sometimes. Mild hallucinations on a regular basis.
Either I’m very sick, or I’m going insane. I don’t want either of those things to be true. And after years of being dismissed by doctors as a hypochondriac or pushed out of an office with a bottle of pills, I don’t trust a doctor to help me.
I can’t trust anyone to help me. No one believes me. I’m focused on these problems, trying to solve them, which means I talk about them too much, which, combined with the fact that I try to always look pleasant and friendly (and not like I’m suffering or miserable because I know that drives people away), means I sound like a hypochondriac. And everyone is tired of hearing it.
Why do I talk about it all the time? Because people need to talk about these sorts of things. I’m convinced of that. Normal people need to talk about them too, but most people have someone to talk to. Family, usually, or close friends. I’m not close with my family. I don’t have any friends who are willing to listen to this. There’s no one in my life who cares enough about me to be truly supportive. The more desperate I get for attention, affection, the less likely it is that I will ever find it.
Most people like me never move away from their parents. They’re not able to function without that help. But my parents never helped me. They were abusive. I had to get away. They were making it worse. Now I’m alone. I have friends, great people who care about me, but no one invested enough in me to really be there for me during this period in my life. That is not their fault. I don’t blame any of them. I’m needy. No one wants a needy person hanging around all the time needing up the place.
I have a lot to give in return. Oh my god, so much. When I care about someone, I’ll do just about anything for them, and almost never expect anything in return, other than maybe some small acknowledgement of appreciation, a thank you, a smile, maybe a hug now and then. But real-life relationships don’t happen all at once like they do in fairy tales and movies. They take a lot of time, and during that time you have to sort of keep your distance (and keep your needs unmet). I’ve never been good at knowing how much distance to keep or how quickly to close the gap. Inevitably I frighten people off by getting too close too quick.
The cold hard truth of the universe is that I will probably always be alone. I would make an amazing girlfriend/wife/partner/whatever, but I don’t possess the necessary skills to begin that kind of relationship with someone. It will probably be just me and my cat until he dies and I have to get a new one, and so on until I die and my cats eat me.
This is not the self-pitying ranting of a teenager who is just getting her first taste of unfairness in the world This is the fully self-aware admission of a person who’s been in partial denial for her entire adult life, naively believing that if I try hard enough to do everything right, eventually I’ll be good enough and someone will want me.
This school year, for the first time in the 5 years since my diagnosis, I had to admit, out loud, to my boss, that I have a disability. I had to admit it because I needed to reduce my work hours, because although I was certain I could handle a full time job, it turns out I can’t, and I was having meltdowns at work. I am disabled. Gifted too, sure, but also disabled. There are normal everyday things that I will never, ever be able to do, no matter how hard I try or how much I practice.
I’m so exhausted and so lonely and so disgusted with myself for feeling the need to dump all this on the internet for strangers to maybe read, if they feel like it, because that’s the only avenue I have left. I don’t have anyone in my life I can just cry to.
So that's that. I'm not going to training this morning because I'm too embarrassed by how I acted last night. And too afraid I'll burst into tears in the middle of it, or collapse to the ground. If I start letting this leak out, even to the people in my taiji group (who are friends but we haven't known each other that long), it'll all just come pouring out in a flood of unmet needs and despair. I don't like people seeing me cry.
I guess that's all for now. I'll get to the business of distracting myself from the truth of my life again. Maybe make a cup of tea, read a book. I'm still on Children of Dune. Very inspiring. The main characters are so different from others that no one can understand them and they constantly have to adapt to the world which wasn't designed for them. Sounds familiar. At least they're twins, they have each other.
"The chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is say hang the sense of it and keep yourself busy. I'd rather be happy than right any day."
"And are you?"
"Ah... no."
EDIT: It occurs to me that one of the reasons I love Taiji so much is all the physical contact. When we do push hands, we're grabbing each other, holding on to each other, focused entirely on feeling the other person's movement and reacting to it. It's the closest to cuddling I've gotten in over a year.
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Topic: Sappho Experiments On Herself - And You! [Summer Vacation!] (Read 40338 times)