Thinking about myself as a teen college student and feeling like I should send some professors apologies…lol
If they are still alive.
Sadly, most of my favorites have died.
I thought I sounded excited when I sounded arrogant.
I thought, when they said treat them as peers, that I should treat them the way the adults around me growing up treated each other.
Also, I had no idea I was autistic or ADHD, and thought everyone was crazy because they didn’t notice things that literally hurt me physically and emotionally, especially as my emotions are very physical, and I thought everyone’s were.
Talk about hyper empathy! I felt worse for “Cookie” than she felt for herself because I thought her heart was like mine. I was wrong. But that’s a long story for a better planned post.
I learned a lot about myself in 2020, and about what a normal human does under abnormal levels of isolation and unceasing stress during quarantine….and all while repeatedly rapid cycling from the wrong medication because I was convinced I was just depressed, not bipolar. Wrong about that, too.
I didn’t know I had a developmental disability that everyone is aware of, but even other people who have it have a hard time describing it…since it affects communication and processing of information, as well as disregulated body temperature issues, disregulated emotions that lead to meltdowns people who aren’t autistic will call us abusive or send us to jail, or kill us, beat and violate us, take all we have and leave us to the wolves while telling us we’re lying about needing help.
This is my last copy of my published memoir. It’s out of print now. Maybe I’ll try finding a new publisher…or I could self publish maybe. I think I want to add an Afterword.
And nowadays, science supports the idea that an imaginary “average human” doesn’t exist, and therefore I think it is stupid to not look at real concrete data based off real individual people instead.
I am an anthropologist. That’s my degree number 1. And The MFA in Creative Writing was hard. I owe over $230k in student loan debt, which I thought I would be able to pay off on a Florida Secondary School Teacher salary!
That’s how bad at math I am.
I took the PSAT one time. 790 verbal, 570 Maths.
When I applied to UCF, the woman laughed at me and boisterously, “Wow! Not so good at Math, are you?”
In my memory, she slaps her thigh, but I’ve learned enough about memory as a memoir writer who also studied Psychology, to figure my subconscious is exaggerating what actually happened to match the filter of how I felt while it was happening.
Humiliated. Hiding tears.
In 2011 I published my first memoir, having no idea I was autistic, or ADHD, or bipolar, or OCD, or panic disorder, or audio processing disorder, or dyslexia, especially since I read 1000 page novels by Stephen King when I was 10.
I’ve finally figured myself out.
I finally feel at home in my own body, no matter where I am. Missing teeth, obesity, awkwardness and all.
I’m writing my new memoir with a sense of confidence I faked in the first one. I’m laughing because in hindsight, I know it’s true.
When Aiden was six, a friend of mine was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
She called me to ask me to help her with her autistic children.
I had no idea I was autistic too, which is hysterical to me now.
One afternoon her 8 year old missed the bus, and I had to take his mother to chemo.
His four year old sister, six year old Aiden, my friend and I, in my little Kia Spectra, to chemo, then this huge park in Lakeland.
People from all over the world, literally at this park. And I’m trying to keep up with my ADHD child, who will rage beat the four year old if she pushes him too hard…and then the eight year old comes tearing past me. I tell Aiden and Sasha to stay right way they are, so I don’t have to find them again at this freaking huge park.
It’s a massive set of playgrounds called Community Park of Lakeland or something similar. So, what has the eight year old running as if Satan himself is on his heels?
Me, 340+ pounds in the Florida heat, trying so hard to catch up to this kid.
And this perfect Karen runs up, not a hair out of place, her makeup somehow not melting off her face like was it tattooed on???
Pulling two perfect little dolls that turn out to be her actual children, inside the freaking wagon. Why are they at the park if they aren’t allowed out of the wagon?
Whatever, not my problem. My problem is, this angry woman is yelling at me. It seems he flicked her off.
I apologized for him and explained his mother was in chemo, he was autistic, and under a lot of stress.
Now I know I didn’t owe her any of that information. I was less-informed that day.
She told me her kids were autistic and they would never blah blah…
I was just looking at her like she must be crazy to be angry at a child whose mother was dying for flicking her off.
OMG. Her poor pride.
If diagnosed and knowledgeable me today could go back in time, I would not only have flicked her off with both hands myself, but gyrated my hips and made faces and weird noises at her as I did so. 😜
And then take the kids in hand and skip off with them into the sunset with ice cream cones.
But the me back then handled it much less gracefully. Falling all over my morbidly obese dying of heat stroke trying to convince an eight year old I’m not going to hurt him, I just need him to stop running so we can talk!
We did go to Dairy Queen, after I finally had them all. And then, we picked up their mother.
She made a joke about her legs being dry and leathery. I said I knew she was part dragon but dayum…
She giggled and slapped me with her sick bag.
I took her home, and took care of her entire family including her bedridden parents until her husband got home.
Then Aiden and I talked about our day on the 90 min drive home, and sang Pink songs Just Like Fire.
And we cuddled to sleep that night, I felt blessed to have him, even though life had been so hard, so much harder for choosing life with no family help.
And I felt lucky to be having these precious hours with my friend.
Her name is Sheila and her favorite color is amethyst.
This is what a Neanderthal looked like. Give her red hair and green eyes and that’s how Sheila looks in my mind.
I tried to type this story up earlier, and had my husband read it. He got it, and I deleted it instead of publishing it because seven planets are in retrograde and my butt chakra hurts, or some shit.
I don’t know.
What I do know is, I’m sick of my angry voice.
The Rejection Sensitive Dysphoric Voice that bitches constantly at everyone she imagines doesn’t like her.
I call her Karen. She looks like this:
Notice the blank sneering gaze. That’s how she looks at everything. Nothing is ever perfect enough or nice enough or enough for the damn Karen voice.
Last time someone I loved with all my pre-diagnosed heart rejected me, I let my Karen voice speak.
And wail, and rant, and scream, and everything I’d always held back or avoided as a person who wants to make the world a happier and safer place for everyone…and I couldn’t stop.
It wasn’t just being dumped by yet another “friend” who had used up all our resources and then decided I was bad and to smear my name in my community, which I’d invited her into and chauffeured her around in.
Until I understood that I was autistic, I could not see myself clearly.
And once I understood, forty years of hardships and abuse and mistakes and dear Gods, the misunderstandings!
I mourned my whole life for over a year, trying so hard to be happy for my kids. I was being treated for Major Depressive Disorder for years, because I refused to believe I was bipolar.
Antidepressants without mood stabilizers cause rapid cycling and mania in bipolar patients.
So everytime I sought treatment, I got worse, lost everything, and had to quit.
Now I’m on the mood stabilizer, and I can sleep…most nights. Some days I can barely get out of bed…but changing meds is hard on me for months at a time, and it’s hard for so many reasons…I don’t want to risk another manic episode that costs my family more.
Well, two months into mood stabilization brings me to this morning.
I was reading, and under my breath Karen was whispering things like, “You don’t want me in your life, fine. I don’t want you in mine.”
Then this new voice spoke up, out of my mouth, and I looked at my hand like it was Karen.
“Aren’t we done being mad yet? Can’t we let it go? Can’t we take all this creative energy we’ve been putting into come backs and conversations that will never happen, and put it into our dreams for the future, and the life we’re building now with our kids?”
And the Karen voice nodded, and went silent.
It’s been six hours, and my guts are turning themselves inside out for what I can hope is one of the last times in this body…but I feel peace in my head for the first time in forever.
It’s ok to change the picture. Our old ideas were less informed. 🌈
Happier thoughts, after a few weeks of plenty of sleep.
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.
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.
Dysregulated emotion is a common disability in neurodiverse folk and survivors of trauma.
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? 💁
Because it is possible. We are the world, and we make ourselves, and influence each other, always and never stopping. Life is not bubbles sitting still next to each other until we pop. Life is flowing with each other, liquid molecules of creativity and joy and love, sometimes bubbling over with laughter, sometimes boiling with rage…we are always influencing each other, even by refusing to interact.
This longish exploration of my thinking starts sad/mad and ends hopeful. I think. 😁. Sparked by reading about Dahmer’s father…and ends with a brief thought about the Bible I’ll explore more later…
I have felt passionately, since I was a young child, that parents are to blame when children murder.
But now, at 42, I blame everybody.
All of society is responsible for future generations.
Not just the Children owners.
And we do own our children.
We get to decide everything that happens to them, unless they “win” emancipation.
Which they have no way of fighting for without adult help.
Children’s rights are the most fundamental human rights.
Until children can save themselves from terrible caretakers, no one is free.
But we don’t have to make it about control.
We can better every child’s life in America with our tax dollars.
And bettering children’s lives betters everyone’s lives.
We all have the base needs we had as children.
You don’t turn 18, or 30, and magically become superhuman grown-ups.
Here’s the secret kids: growing up just means less support mandated by society.
In poor families, like mine and most of my neighbors, oldest kids were babysitting young.
I can remember being in charge of my 5 year old sister and 3 year old brother when I was 8.
And when I was 10, babysitting 5 children, overnight while their parents were out drinking, for $20. 1991, and those kids were 9, 7, 5, 3, and 18 months.
I changed the diapers, bathed them all, bullied the oldest into bed, and stayed up almost all night making sure they slept, and made them all cereal the next morning after a couple hours of sleep. Made them watch TV. Made them lunch of canned ravioli. Their parents came home, reeking, laughing.
Told me I did I great job, here’s $20, go home.
We don’t all live in the same America.
But 70% of us know exactly what I am talking about.
And progressive politics are only one solution.
Everybody deciding to befriend our neighbors and get to know each other, in this giant suburb…it’s scary.
The murder rate is high nearby.
Which makes it even more important to look out for each other.
But also, less likely.
Scared people don’t keep friends easy.
Angry people are just people who hate feeling scared.
Still, I’m raising two beautiful, sweet, creative, fun young men who keep me immersed in magic every day.
And I married the most wonderful man in the multiverse. We have never been happier, nor more in love, year 23, and year…7 of marriage. 🥰
I believe in science and magic. I believe science IS magic. 😁
I believe people are born good, and evil can only flourish where children are allowed to be neglected.
Universal income would protect a lot more children than more police or laws or guns ever could.
Universal healthcare would save more children.
Tax-paid tuition for every American would make us all the doctors and lawyers and teachers and artists and everything we want to be.
Universal Income…there are so many possibilities!
What if CEOs made the same as cashiers?
Would we treat each other differently if we were all sharing our national profit, equally as citizens?
Would we value our time the same?
Our partners?
Before we can create it, we need a concrete example, and we have them. Everywhere. If you are looking, you will find it.
Yesterday, my sons and husband woke up to see my hair green.
After my husband got home last night, I did this.
It was still bright outside. I put on a turquoise dress, and joined them in the backyard.
After awhile, I asked if they noticed my hair.
Their faces: 😳😳
I laughed, and asked what color it was this morning.
I recently took a Wondrium class by a psychologist, which reminded me of a Netflix show I watched in 2021, which had reminded me of my psychology classes when I pushed a minor in it, class of ’03.
The more recent example of this idea that made me laugh when they didn’t notice my hair instead of becoming upset…
In a VR simulation, real pilots practiced landing a jet on a runway.
The more experienced pilots landed their virtual jets on a jet parked on the runway.
Because in real life, they would never expect to see the jet parked, their brains just show them a clear runway.
Like their eyes are on autopilot…the screensaver shows what they expect to see.
The less experienced pilots saw the parked jet in VR, and reacted accordingly.
Doctors often rely on their experience when they should be looking through the eyes of those they are training.
That’s how you stay on top of your game.
How you keep growing and developing and becoming the version of you the world needs you to be.
You look through the eyes of others, and see with them, too.
Biden has been a better president because he’s focused on helping the most he can…not just the most loud, or the most popular.
But America, we are our country.
Our leader is just the guy with the toughest job and the least support, nowadays.
I hear my friends criticize his choices, and I want to remind them to look at the good he’s doing, too.
No leader will ever make us 100% satisfied with his every choice.
And it’s naive to think America can just stop fueling war and war will end.
War will end when we put our attention into feeding, housing, clothing, bathing, and caring for everyone, together.
Whether we agree on anything or not, we’re still people. And people deserve help getting our needs met.
Because we’re people. Like us or not, like you or not, we’re still all children, all beloved.
Culture wars fizzle out of everyone shifts to solutions and cooperation, instead.
People who are struggling to survive should not bear the burden of best behavior in order to have their basic needs met.
Behavior is biological, predictable, and supremely infuence-able.
Any book on marketing can teach you that. 💁
So…how do we convince our neighbors to be friends?
How do we convince ourselves to befriend people who we know hate parts of us?
Religion does it for some.
I guess mine does too.
My religion is love. I think all religions are, on paper, if not in practice.
The Bible was the first book mass printed.
It was used to subjugate for going on two millennia now. Still is, today. But it also inspires hope and love and compassion in millions of hearts every day.
In survival brain, things are either good or bad.
But humans are always both. As are all of our creations.
Good and bad are relative, and dependent on things outside our control. How we appear. The lighting. The mood. The stories we’re all telling ourselves.
Things were not better in the 50s. TV lied. Lol
We all know it’s fake with our intelligence, but our bodies have their own intelligence, and cultures have been telling people to fight our instincts and animal natures.
That’s the only way to maintain a hierarchy in a primate society.
You have to limit resources to keep the majority fueling while a minority takes advantage.
There are a lot of smart people talking about how to fix this. I’m gonna go read one.
We celebrated by playing with him, watching Curious George as a family on the couch.
He likes chocolate chip cookies, so I got a giant one as his cake.
He licked all the icing off, and is saving the cookies for some unknown future time they may taste better, I guess.
We’ll give it another day. 😁
Then we opened presents. Grandpa Curran would have gotten him the Nintendo switch he asked for.
His retired elementary school grandmother, however, got him a bunch of Lego sets and a remote control car. All good choices. He spent a few hours building with his dad and brother.
We got the second bookcase built, and between playing and reading, I got most of our books put away and organized.
Between my last post and this one, I was reevaluated for Bipolar Type 2, at my request.
My current medical treatment is helping tame my too-big feelings, and get more sleep.
I hate that I can’t get along with my siblings. And I’m getting better at staying present with my family, and cultivating the life that best serves us and our contrary needs.
If my sister trusted me, I could just tell her my perspective and she could compare it with hers and ask questions to clear up any disparity.
My best friend said she trusted me because we have so much good history, and this is the first time I have lashed out at her, ever. And we’ve been working on our repair and reconnection skills recently and for going on 11 years.
My sister and I started with bad, and have very little good social interactions.
Though the good ones were the most recent, the other night I got lashed out again, triggered.
Because she lashed out at me triggered, and that’s been our pattern since we were babies.
In my state of healing now, it’s hard to have her cuss at me without getting angry. I have to really work hard at holding onto my “loving mother” brain that sees the hurt behind the anger.
I can’t earn her trust, she has to choose it, the way I have been choosing to trust her so I could give her my whole heart, or at least that was my goal to now.
But she believes I have to earn it. And she also believes that I am abusive and untrustworthy. Which I proved, out of my hurt and feelings of rejection and outrage.
So I can never earn her trust.
That hurt to understand, again, because I chose to trust her, and I thought she did the same.
And in this loving space I am in writing this, in this space where she’s my hurting baby sister, I’m still afraid I’ll lash out at her again for rejecting my most recent bid for connection.
Being autistic for me also means figuring out I did something worse than I meant to about a day or so too late. In this case.
So I feel guilty. And anything she says to me when I feel guilty will make me defensive.
I need more loving memories of her to hold onto. Like a Patronus.
We grew up beating each other up, but she remembers it as her finally having enough of my abuse and defending herself.
I was trying to explain to her how it triggers me when she pulls away and shuts me down, while already triggered by her passive aggressive behavior back in March, in the upstairs room…which triggered me into a meltdown that I couldn’t stop.
This is not to blame her. To explain why I was triggered. To process the trigger with her so it doesn’t set us off anymore.
I didn’t know I was going to lose it again.
Until I was too lost to remember my system with Keith to help me calm quickly. Also, I could have taken deep breaths. I could have done so many things, I couldn’t think of any of them, because it was too late.
But she can’t hear that because I don’t want to hear about how I traumatized her and Violet anymore. I don’t see trauma in her pattern. I see emotional distress that I already learned how to navigate, and for three months I have ached to navigate it with her.
But I reached out with sarcasm, thinking I was being playful.
In this headspace, I see a mom who hasn’t learned how to help her kids feel safe while she’s panicking, who feels shame, and blames me because she doesn’t trust me to help her navigate that, or anyone like me.
I was that mom until I got stranded at the airport in Portland early in the morning with eight year old Aiden and 4 months old Dylan.
She’s never experienced anything like that.
Hopefully, most people don’t.
I think my job is to get to know my healed story so well, her victim story can’t trigger me anymore.
In my healed story, I see two normal humans, stressed, hurting, angry, and feeling rejected and abandoned…acting just like two normal humans under all that act.
That’s what humans do.
I’m not upset that we’re both human.
I’m not hurt that you don’t see my love for you when I’m showing you anger, disappointment, resentment, irritation, disgust, or whatever I reflect at you in response to what I feel in my real time.
Which is not your real time. We process differently because we process separately. We can’t get in sync until we work on processing together.
She doesn’t have my skills.
She can’t make herself trust me, so I have to earn her trust.
The only way I can do that now is to get to know myself so well I believe wholeheartedly that I can reliably anticipate my emotions, before they take over.
I learned to believe in God from a short diabetic wrinkly witch in the floor of a Catholic poser’s Pagan shop.
I’d taught myself tarot at the age of thirteen. Six years later, having failed out of the honors college and almost all of college entirely, I decided to put more time and effort into my studies.
My spiritual studies.
Because my depression and trauma were all consuming and I couldn’t leave my bed for months after surviving a string of rapes, nothing felt more important than talking to my mom.
Since she’d died when I was twelve, I was training to be a psychic at nineteen.
I took so many classes with my mentor, I can no longer recall with confidence which was first.
But the first time I thought Angels might be real was during her class on Archangels.
I need to draw this story. I can do it so much more justice in a few weeks when I have some graphics and maybe audio or video.
Adventures of an Earthborn Alien 