I successfully avoided my feelings all day, until my sissy of the heart told me how I was really feeling.

I managed to hold onto my denial until Keith came in and started infodumping about German goth rock. Bless him, but I have no audio or visual for many of the words he dumped, and trying to picture and hear things I can’t picture or hear made my brain tune into my feelings instead.

So after the meltdown, crying jag, et merde, in the recovery period, I started singing.

Singing with an open throat forces the body to relax.  And instead of picking a cathartic song like Alive by Sia or Human by Christina Perry, I decided I wanted to skip straight to feeling loving.

So the first song I sang was, Like I’m Gonna Lose you by Megan Trainor and the famous male collaborator, whose part I also love to sing…but I don’t know what he looks like.  I should watch the video, so I can remember him and his name too.

I told Keith I needed to sing to feel better, and he turned off the lights and closed the door and played with the boys while I checked into my inner sanctuary and belted my songs to the bad guy I’m befriending in my imagination.

Then I put the playlist on random, and I felt like Dad was sitting next to me, putting songs on to tell me what I needed to hear.

More than Dad. All my ancestors, maybe.

Safe in my SongHaven, my ancestors rocked me and held me close and heard my song, directed it.

I sang: “No one can change your life except for you…”

“But what do I need to change?” I asked, mid-song.

The next song felt like an answer:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=IXXxciRUMzE&feature=share

I don’t know why the video won’t embed. Awesome song. So fun!

I need to go out and do all the things I love. That was the message I got last night, from filling up with song after crying my heartbreak out, some.

Some wounds can’t heal without help.

Everyone needs help. All the time.

Independence is a myth that hurts disabled, young, old, ill, and otherwise disadvantaged people.

Everyone is disadvantaged from time to time.

I miss the America that bragged about helping other people out.

I think it was mostly immigrant families who told me those stories, in hindsight.

Kindergarten in California made a big impression on me. 1986. Our school sang The Greatest Love of All on stage for our families. The crowd seemed huge to my tiny self.

We also sang This Land Is Your Land, This Land is My Land.

I remember comics with Superman and Captain America talking to kids about fighting fascism and helping each other, because that’s what Americans do.

When we change as a society, we need to hear every voice and discuss every problem. We have to do that at the local level, so it works its way up the the state level.

We can’t save Florida if we can’t talk politics. Our kids, and we, and our elderly…we all deserve better than what we’ve been pushed into and have had taken from us.

If you can’t deal with other people’s words or tone or volume, that does not make the disregulated person “bad.”

Nor does your lack of knowledge or skill make you “bad.”

When we hear each other’s feelings without taking offense at their tone or word choice…we are well-regulated, at least for the moment.

Humans gonna human. Stop expecting superhuman levels of self-control. Start admitting you eff up all the time, too.

Start thinking what world you want to live in, and be as you will be in that world.

I want to live in a world where my sister can’t just block me for a year because she doesn’t know how to process her feelings and doesn’t know me well enough to know how easily I could help her…if she’d let go of her need to feel victimized by me she we could have a real conversation for perhaps the first time in our adult lives.

Oh well. I live in this world. I’ll have to create a character I can play with her that will make her feel safe.

That’s how autistic people like me survive this empathy-bashing country we struggle to survive all our lives.

We look lazy. Clumsy. Crazy. Not disabled…

We have to suffer permanent injury or find a great lawyer to get disability, if we were able to hold onto jobs long enough to EARN survival funds as people who are supposed to be protected but in reality, how do I prove I was fired because I was autistic? 💁

This is all over the place, huh?

My brain always is. Even in my dreams.