Adventures of an Earthborn Alien

Show, Don’t Tell.

I would love to credit this, but I downloaded it irresponsibly and am too lazy to get off my phone and get on my laptop, because I can get away with being that lazy right now.

Did you know China restricts TikTok to show children only educational material?

Is that true?

I could look it up.

I just learned that I didn’t understand what woke meant.

I do now.

Because a friend I adore, with whom I jumped on a trampoline in my bedroom just a week or two ago, shared a TikTok on Facebook, now I know what “woke” means:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRo4mdpg/

The most important thing I learned, earning an MFA in the art of creative nonfiction…

I have a Masters in the Fine Art of Creative Truth, y’all.

My therapist laughed when I said I don’t lie, I tell the truth creatively.

And I saw my degree in a whole new way.

My skill set, which I felt so conflicted about using before…is the art of using fiction to create the experience of truth.

Show, don’t tell.

In order to exchange ideas, we must feel free to mess up.

If we are free to mess up, we can collaborate.

People aren’t geniuses.

Genius happens when free minds collaborate.

Did you know writing is only about six thousand years old?

Did you know wealthy men in mesopotamia six thousand years ago realized they could use the written word to manipulate illiterate people?

I read the Bible in college as an honors student, just before I almost gave up on life.

What I remember most about that class, is not that I almost flunked it.

Building tension by telling you the opposite of what you expect.

I could make it funny now, or I can turn it sad.

In that moment of built tension, you were vulnerable.

With me.

I was vulnerable and you were engaged, so you felt vulnerable with me.

You felt compassion.

Com means with; passion means powerful feeling. You felt my feelings with me.

We were telepathically linked by the magic of the digital written word…

Thoughts made visible.

That’s all writing is.

Thoughts made visible so they can be repeated by another, who never needs to meet the original thinker.

The Original Thinker.

Creative Writing is the art of becoming an Original Thinker. A Creator.

An influencer.

Someone who amplifies thoughts by having many minds, in many voices, repeat them…exploring them…collaborating and creating genius.

Genius is not rare.

Diamonds are not rare. Their value is completely inflated, and those who own them want to keep their value.

You own your own genius.

And it works best in free collaboration.

Too much freedom can paralyze, make it impossible to decide.

So we live our lives, never knowing which moment will be our last.

If I die in my sleep tonight, it will be with a smile on my face because I spent my day playing with my children and loving my partner.

The grief is always there to catch us when the next Beloved falls.

Great heaving quakes hiccup into sighs.

Then we’re meant to rest enfolded in the arms of someone who loves us.

I tried really hard to be an atheist.

But I’ve held a grieving daughter in my arms as her father. And I told a mother how her son was murdered as he showed me, when I meant to only have fun with my cards and a new friend…and she told me she already knew those details and showed me a photo of her son’s face.

Just before the second time I almost gave up on life, I flunked my World Civilizations Honors seminar, changing the course of my life.

The one moment from that class still so vividly emblazoned in my mind 23 years later, is of another chubby white girl with an A-line bob in Walmart clothes loudly, proudly telling our professor, “I’m not buying it!”

He’d just finished a two day lecture on historical theory about the original writers of the Bible, and showed in the Old Testament, which we read for class, evidence of a priestly class writing one style, and a couple other styles, irrelevant at present.

“I’m hearing it, but I’m not buying it!”

She and I, potential future Karen’s of America…she was raised to believe the Bible was the literal word of God, and I was…not.

I was not the Karen in that moment.

I have my Karen moments. I’ve learned to love my inner Karen, and someday soon I’ll write about why but for now, let’s conclude this telepathic journey with 🥰 to that adorable teen who stood up for her faith against the elitist educator who makes so little, he, like me, and maybe her, will likely die in student loan debt.

I could simplify this story by pretending I’m talking about myself in the third person.

But why?

I miss that girl. I want to know how the last 23 years went for her.

And I want to know if she votes.

Did her college adventure change her faith?

Does she have kids?

Does she buy them bulletproof backpacks and cry at work?

My mother was 23 when my father tried to murder her, with the gun his sister sold him, in 1984.

I haven’t read the Bible in 23 years.

I am Pagan, and proud of it. I bought the most recent, best rated translation of the Bible this year.

It’s not my most important goal in life, reading the Bible.

I want to understand my mother. She grew up singing gospel in a church where girls weren’t allowed to wear pants or cut their hair.

She converted to Buddhism in California when she was 23. The United States Air Force flew her from Andrew’s Air Force Base to a base in Death Valley, where they saved her life with blood transfusion and surgery.

In 1984 I turned 3.

I’m playing with the idea of reinterpreting Orwell’s 1984 as a graphic memoir.

Just Like My Mother, After All.

Picture it: Roanoke Memorial Hospital. May 9th 1981. It’s a Tuesday morning in the Southwestern Virginia valley town.

A 19 year old holds her baby girl for the first time, after three days of agonizing, exhausting, medically hindered and then “vacuum-assisted” delivery of the 9 pound, 15 ounce bundle.

A ray of sunlight falls on the newborn’s head. Ten years later she’ll tell me that’s how she chose my middle name.

Pretty sure my mother grew up in this house. Pretty sure I remember slipping on ice on those concrete steps that winter day, 1989 I think…I was eight, my sister five, our brother three…the day we met our grandfather. I’ll have to ask my aunt next time I get a chance.

That 19 year old woman grew up on a dairy farm in Hagerstown, Maryland, the oldest of nine children.

She was valedictorian of her senior class of three circa 1978, in her church’s school.

She’d never been allowed to cut her hair, nor to wear pants as a girl. She grew up working on the farm, and singing gospel in church with her father on his guitar.

In a recent conversation, my aunt described Mom as mean to her younger siblings until she was a teenager.

If Mom was like me, she was probably still mean as a teen and adult, just with words and laughter instead of hands, even when she thought she was just being funny.

In her teens, she got to know and love country classics like Conway Twitty, and rock legends like Elvis.

Conway Twitty, one of my mom’s favorite Country artists, growing up.

Her youngest brother told me she ran away from home as a teen once, and their father beat her with a switch until blood ran down her legs – not for running away, but for wearing pants when she did it.

My grandmother divorced him, and moved back with her mother, near Roanoke, Virginia, around 1977.

After graduating high school, my mother left the farm in Hagerstown to join her mother in Virginia.

At a family reunion in Virginia, she met my father, a much older, recently divorced former coal miner from West Virginia, also an Elvis fan with a peg leg from a motorcycle accident who, it turns out, looked a lot like Conway Twitty.

I was 42 years old when I learned that my mother got migraines from the sun growing up, just like me, but only because I never thought to ask.

When I was eighteen, Grandma gave me a box of photos that had been my mother’s when my biological father shot her.

In the box I found her report cards, and in the notes from her teachers learned that my mother had been chatty and impulsive as a child, just like me.

She’d loved reading, writing, music, and science over Bible studies, just like me.

I was young when I found out how much older than my mother my father had been, and it grossed me out.

But in recent years, I’ve asked my mother’s sister, and my biological father’s sister, about my parents and their relationship.

Both sides of the family say my mother pursued my father, and if my mother was anything like me…

Well, try telling me no.

I don’t think my father would have tried very hard to resist. But my mother’s sister told me he was concerned about their age difference, and that changed how I think of him.

My mother was beautiful, with bright blue eyes and auburn highlights in her long brown hair. Young. Strong. Playful. Fun loving. Passionate.

Our culture even today considers a 19 year old grown enough to marry a man twice her age, so even though it icks me out, I’m trying to let the age difference go…separate it from the list of “bad” things I remember about him.

I know my mother was moody like me. She had a temper much worse than mine, though, and she was bigger and quicker than me until I was in fifth grade, around ten years old.

And when I fell pregnant…

Isn’t that a fantastic turn of phrase? Like, I just fell over, pregnant, one day?

When I fell pregnant at twenty-seven, all I could think about was all the ways my mother messed up in the paltry twelve years she was given to me on Earth.

I wrote a whole book about all the ways she messed up. It was my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

In 2012, I published my first memoir. I am laughing at myself right now, that I spent ten years writing and revising a thesis about my childhood…and revised it again for publication, a whole book, all to convince myself I could be a good mom because I was nothing like my “abusive” mother.

My mother died in December 1993, and I grew up in central Florida, far from our family.

I wrote my book completely from my own perspective. It was my memories I was writing. My story. My truth. So what was there to research?

I don’t know that it ever occurred to me that I could interview my family to learn more about myself!

I only thought about learning about my deceased biological parents when I visited them, and I never developed the habit of calling my aunts or grandmother’s, or Dad, or siblings.

Why didn’t I call?

Oh, I had lots of reasons. Lots of stories I told myself to explain my mysterious behavior.

I studied psychology for fun, my whole life. If I didn’t, I may never have figured out my brain is different than most people’s in my late thirties.

My whole life, I thought I was broken because of my childhood traumas. That’s the person who wrote that book pictured about – the me who thought I was broken because I didn’t understand myself, yet.

The first four decades of my life, I believed that I needed special help from doctors and special schools to fix my broken brain.

I couldn’t afford help. I couldn’t keep a job, for reasons that were clear to me only in hindsight, and sometimes not even then.

I struggled to make enough to survive as a self-employed single mother for eight years, and thusly, I had no healthcare outside rare, only when I was scared I was dying rare visits to the Emergency room or emergency dentist for extraction.

From the day my Dad decided to teach me to “be responsible” by refusing me dental and doctor visits unless I scheduled the appointments myself when I was in ninth grade, fourteen or fifteen years old, until I married in my mid-thirties, except when I was pregnant until I gave birth and could qualify for Medicaid, I had no access to the healthcare my Dad had through the military, because he didn’t feel like adding me to his veteran’s insurance policy those years he could have was his responsibility.

He believed I could work. I was better educated than him, smarter than him, he said. He saw no reason I couldn’t work my way through college, like most people.

How I raged at him when, at forty, I found out I actually HAD been disabled my whole life, that I really was never just lazy or lying, as he’d accused me when I was a teen.

I raged at the whole world when I found out for sure that I really was disabled developmentally and emotionally, when I was diagnosed with autism at forty years old…

Autism Spectrum Disorder we call it now, on top of the ADHD, PTSD, OCD, MDD, and GAD diagnoses I have been collecting since my first major mental health crisis as an adult legally responsible for meeting my own needs, at nineteen.

on top of the ADHD, PTSD, OCD, MDD, and GAD diagnoses I had started collecting at nineteen.

When I wrote and published my first memoir, I was booksmart, super educated, and thought I was an expert on human behavior, with my Anthropology degree and lifelong passion for learning everything.

As I revised it for publication, I found happiness and purpose in my life, and thought I knew why I was here, what I want to do with my life, while raising my first son with the help of my friends.

I married my best friend. He adopted my first and we gave him a brother. In our joy, we took in a single mom and her baby, as my friend had taken me in when my baby and I were in need.

And then there was COVID.

But my life started changing dramatically just before the pandemic.

In 2018, while researching ADHD to help my son, I figured out I needed to be evaluated. I was diagnosed in 2019.

Understanding that my brain was different, that life wasn’t supposed to be so damn hard all day everyday…

In 2020, under the pressures of the pandemic, my ADHD symptoms now being managed both with medication and skill building, I was having problems that could only be partly explained by ADHD and PTSD.

First, my psychiatrist decided I was OCD and instead of having me evaluated, medicated me accordingly.

I lost 160 pounds, mostly on purpose, but over the course of eight months…which my psychiatrist, who I had to physically visit every month for my Adderall prescription because of Florida law and schedule 2 drugs…

He didn’t notice. He blew up at me when I told him I was seeking and autism evaluation, because he was convinced I would have been diagnosed as a child.

21st century America has a lot of problems. One of them is education.

Are the people in charge of prescribing Adderall and Clonazepam required to keep up their studies every year on advancements in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and nutrition?

No. No, they are not.

As adults, we are responsible for educating ourselves, and our children.

We have a horrible public school system. Especially in Florida. And every discussion involving kids gets heated.

On Jan 6, 1985 My Father Shot My Mother and Today…

…today I’m reading about the parents of the survivors of the Uvalde massacre, while my children play outside.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/21/us/uvalde-one-year-on-moms-watch-breach-videos-tws/index.html

The article is hard, but the images are only of survivors.

In 1985, my father had a handgun his older sister sold to him, when she encouraged him to shoot his much younger wife for cheating on him.

The 18 year old who massacred children in Texas a year ago today had three guns, one of them an AR-15.

No 18 year old deserves an AR-15 who isn’t at the front lines in a battle, trained and dedicated to defending their country and our allies.

We want to change gun laws so the NRA loses money and power, and our children and teachers and mothers and neighbors get to survive going to school, church, grocery stores, concerts, clubs, anywhere people gather.

All children deserve to grow up not traumatized, and without memories of being 9 years old, rolling in their dead best friend’s blood to fake death to survive, while 376 well-armed police officers wait 77 minutes to work up the courage to take out one 18 year old with an AR-15.

Love makes life beautiful.

I got too attached to writing the perfect Mother’s Day post, so it’s now a draft I’ll return to later.

Now, I want to talk about the struggle to parent respectfully in a culture that delights in disrespecting children and punishing them for their developmentally appropriate behavior.

But that sounds like a lot of work. And my kid just asked for food.

So let this be my blog post.

Brief.

I am here.

Life goes on.

Love makes life beautiful.

In exploring my family history, I better understand myself.

Perhaps, we could say, healing is choosing to change our habits in order to create joy and peace in our present.

As it turns out, my aunt had to work when her big sister went into labor with me.

My grandmother attended my mother in the hospital. She and my mother have both passed now.

My grandmother married a dairy farmer in the late 50s in Maryland. Mom was their first child, followed by twins two years later: Jeanie and Eugene.

Aunt Jeanie told me that Mom had a really high fever when she was five or six, and grandfather would not let grandma take her to the doctor. Grandfather had polio as a child. These things go together in my head.

Autism is genetic, and I suspect my mother was autistic and ADHD, like me. Her father may be too. I only met him once, and it made a big impression.

My mother grew up on a dairy farm, getting headaches from the overstimulation of the sun. She grew up with eight younger, noisy, constantly doing things they may or may not be supposed to do, younger siblings.

Aunt Jeanie said Mom was mean to the younger kids until she was a teenager. I was mean to my siblings until I was a teenager. In hindsight, I was still mean in my twenties, until I had Aiden and dedicated myself to learning gentle parenting.

I did not realize I was mean. I thought I was being a proper big sister. I did not understand my meltdowns, not at all. I thought my emotional responses were completely appropriate to my perception of what people had done to me, or not for me.

Stress from overstimulation hits the tipping point in our brains, causing us to meltdown. It happens to all humans when we get stressed enough. All animals have that tipping point.

This was an autistic meme that made me laugh so hard I fell over. I can’t explain why it tickled me so much, but I find it accurate in social settings especially.

In my first memoir, I called her Dr. Mom and Mrs. AIDS. I thought PTSD and the terror of the AIDS epidemic made her so quick to anger.

My mother wasn’t evil. She was disabled and needed way more help than she was able to get, even as an air force veteran.

One problem with being autistic is that our faces show our feelings too much, or not at all. Our bodies show our feelings, too much, or not at all. We are all or nothing people and we literally cannot change how we develop differently in the womb or throughout our lives. Our genes are coded that way.

And the part of our brain that allows us to repress our big feelings wears out quickly, especially when we can’t get quiet time to ourselves to recharge.

When I was a child, I thought my mother hated me and would kill me, even though she loved me and was my best friend.

I had my own experiences with her when we were alone to compare to my experiences with her when others were around.

Yesterday I turned 42. My mother died when she was 32.

The memoir I wrote in my twenties was her story, and my story, as I understood it then.

In the last ten years I have experienced homelessness as a single mother with a toddler, lost a baby, lost half of my molars and everything I owned, nearly died several times from lack of healthcare, all because I had more education than help.

I earned an MFA during all of that, then rewrote and published the book. But I was only able to accomplish those big goals when an individual, who was not a sexual partner, loved me enough to take care of me and my toddler so I could do those things.

The last chapter of my first memoir is my firstborn’s birth story, the day I gave birth to myself as a mother of a precious, very wanted by me, baby boy.

We’re autistic, he and I. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I think people just need to understand, so we can change the stories around our relationships, our perceptions of what is possible, and develop as a unified culture, bonded by mutual care and affection.

There are countries that won’t allow us to immigrate with our diagnosis, because they consider us inferior and dangerous.

We live in Florida, America’s Fascist HQ. A land run by unchecked greed since Disney invented vacation destination.

I never considered aborting my children, and I hate that the right to choose has been stripped from us in my lifetime.

I hate knowing that people in my neighborhood would choose abortion over having a potentially autistic child because children and disabled people are disposable in capitalist-run economies.

All because they don’t get how we’re unable to behave the way they expect us to. All they see is deficits and bad choices, poor behavior, risk.

That’s all I saw with my elitist education. I judged my family from the perspective of a child, a traumatized child who never had a secure attachment until I met mother’s who practice attachment parenting when Aiden was a baby.

My mother chased my father, who had a daughter just a year younger than her. I always thought badly of him for pursuing a child, with that hard line in my mind between child and sex.

And because he shot her. Because my grandmother paid his bail and brought him home to live with us until he was found guilty for shooting my mother, and because I have memories of him from them that made my mom cry when I told her.

I wonder if I could find records of the court cases.

My father was a teen in the 50s. Elvis fell in love with his 13 year old cousin in those hills. My father’s mother was married at 14. This is the culture of the family I was born into, in 1981.

Mom was a teen in the 70s, valedictorian of her class of three in the tiny church school in Hagerstown, Maryland. When her parents divorced, Mom stayed an extra year with her father so she could finish her senior year with her best friend, Rosie.

Grandfather played guitar, and Mom sang Gospel with him at church. Girls had to wear dresses and never cut their hair.

Grandfather beat mom with a switch until blood ran down her legs for wearing pants. She wore pants the snowy day she saw him for the last time. But she had me, 9, and my sister, 6, in matching dresses with opaque white tights, to meet our grandfather.

My youngest playing with my Mother’s guitar. Grandma made sure I got it when I was old enough.

Before they had me, my mother and father would go for rides in the car in the Appalachian mountain roads with Mom’s sister, Jeanie, and Father’s brother, Denny. Jeanie and Denny married, and they would take a dish to each other’s houses, listen to Elvis or Conway Twitty, maybe dance or play around.

I was born in 1981.

Mom gained a lot of weight while pregnant with me, as did I with each of mine. She was in labor with me for three days, and the doctor used a vacuum on my head to assist, bruising me.

They told her, after all that, that they should have performed a C-section.

My son is also autistic. He had an unmedicated home birth, and I was assisted by a wonderful midwife who taught me how to listen to my body.

My first memoir was my story while I was pregnant, wanting to be a better mom to my child than my mother had been to me.

Have I been?

He’s 14 now, and happy, healthy. Creative, playful, and he has a few friends.

He’s not depressed! That’s a win!

But I was horrified to discover I’d inherited my mother’s temper. Terrified my father, who shot her, passed evil genes to me.

I guess the book I am writing now is inspired in part by Encanto.

The glasses, the crazy hair, the not knowing what her gift is…could she be autistic coded too?

It took me over a year to understand what Mirabel meant at the end, when she looked into the reflection of the doorknob her family made for her. They asked what she saw, and she looks, and her family’s smiling faces reflect back at her, beside her own.

“Me,” she says. “All of me.”

How can I understand my world if I can’t understand the world I came from?

The dark secrets in my family fascinated and horrified me all my life.

And now I see how much I missed by not focussing my curiosity equally on all the good and beautiful experiences that made up the lives of the grown ups I came from.

Did I have to have a teen of my own, and outlive my mother, in order to see her with the compassion and empathy I have for my children?

I asked my aunt if she had any beautiful memories with my mother.

Before I existed, in that liminal young adulthood before becoming mothers, Aunt Jeanie lived at the bottom of Five Mile Mountain. It was fall, huge piles of leaves all over the ground, 1979ish.

That fall, two beautiful teen sisters enjoyed a happy afternoon jumping into huge piles of fall leaves in the Southern Virginia countryside.

View from Grandma’s porch, Christmas 2022

Empathy and Disability and Boundaries, oh my.

I’ve been “blogging” on Facebook instead of doing my morning pages, like I feel I should.

Should is a terrible word. Louis Hay says in You Can Heal Your Life to turn “should,” which implies a wrong, into “could,” which implies possibility.

If a word implies wrongness, we say it has a negative connotation, or negativity attached to it.

Growing up feral in Florida, we have too many shoulds and not enough coulds…unless we do well in school, join the military, are good with people, or get really lucky…which again usually involves being good with people.

I am good with people.

But lots of people are not good with me.

They think I don’t understand them, or that I’m bad because I have screaming fits when I get too stressed, and life without quality support for forty years has been rather stressful. Quite stressful, really.

I’m choosing to look at this as an adventure. Yes, my behavior and feelings can be toxic, too. And I still deserve care and support. Because I am still a child of God and Earth.

My dear friendly butch anarchist, I am neurodivergent. I have trauma. Do not blame me for my PTSD symptoms. Learn, grow, become someone who is emotionally safe because other people’s behavior is them communicating their reality…not attacking you. And negotiating boundaries is how relationships of all kinds maintain wellness. How bout we teach negotiation skills instead of throwing up rules for others to follow, no matter their capability moment to moment.

Yes, I recognize that I am responsible for my behavior and for behaving like I am not disabled in front of people who shouldn’t have to deal with my disability because I’m not their burden.

What if this is our circus and we are all one huge monkey population with too much fear and not enough love going around?

Love and fear are limitless, since we produce them in our bodies and can share them with our words and other sounds, our movement, expression, tone…

Members of the LGBTQ+ community argue about whether it is nicer to not tell our families who we love if it will hurt them.

Why are their feelings more important than ours?

Why do we think we need to protect people from their own feelings?

Because we don’t know how to navigate the stormy ones?

It’s so easy to get stuck on how wrong someone was to think or feel or act a certain way, because of the control and obey culture of the past.

The future has spoken, and it rejects controlling behavior and obedience training for children. Obedience does not teach problem solving nor solution seeking.

Education does. But our public education system is locally funded. So you have to work three jobs and sell your body on the side to get your kid into a good school, where they will undergo monthly active shooter drills.

That’s the world my generation created. Class of ’99. Mass murderers lately tend to be our age, and there’s even a female now!

Middle aged white women voted for the liars because they love their culture and see progressive culture as an attack on their identity.

I’m a middle aged white woman, but I dye my hair pink and dance along to music in the grocery aisle…the bank…wherever I hear music…even when I know I’m the only one that can hear it.

I’m weird. I’m loud. I have great difficulty regulating my attention, tone, volume, facial expressions, and emotional experience due to genetics as well as physical damage from repeated trauma, and because I have two college degrees, I have been told I know nothing of this “real” world working class people live in.

The real world literally hates me. It tells me I have special needs and what, do I think, I’m special? That I deserve accomodations for my disabilities but no one should have to put up with my big feelings or hypersensitivities or short memory or the behavior I perform while lost and overwhelmed.

If I hadn’t found my penguin and if we hadn’t committed to loving each other forever, I would be dead. No question.

Thanks to our commitment to love, we are still here, raising our happy, compassionate boys, making people smile and laugh every chance we get.

Mr. Rogers said "Always look for the helpers."

Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

So I have always tried to be helpful. Without knowing what I needed, I gave it all away.

42 is a good age to learn how to negotiate boundaries with people without feeling rejected. A good age to learn how to comfort myself before I ever get close to spiralling or melting down.

I learned that happiness, and friendship, and love, are more than feelings. They are practices. Habits that become more regular with support, medicine, and radical acceptance.

I accept and love you exactly as you are.

My feelings do not depend on your behavior…unless I’m overstimulated or otherwise dysregulated. But then, you just trigger them. You don’t make me feel.

But you can share your feelings with the goal of feeling better together.

When we feel confident that we’re committed to loving each other, we can stop trying to control each other’s words and tones and actions, and get straight to the communication exchange to build a better future, together.

Gentle Discipline and the PTSD Demon

2020 was a monstrous year for this mommy.

I couldn’t stop screaming at the kids.

I couldn’t calm down.

I couldn’t pause and think.

I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t eat.

I couldn’t stop crying.

I lost 160 pounds in eight months, and my psychiatrist didn’t notice…but that’s a rant for another day.

In that state of crisis, I found myself unable to communicate with anyone, even my husband.

I knew I had PTSD, Major Depressive Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I knew my brain poorly regulated and underproduced the chemicals our bodies and brains need to function, much less have peace, and the psychiatrist was a last resort.

No – the talk therapist was the last resort, because I didn’t get one until I was struggling to use my love for my children to fuel my will to survive.

My mother had a hair trigger unpredictable temper.

I blamed her temper for my CPTSD symptoms, and that seemed enough. Why look for more sources?

I identified as a Highly Sensitive Person.

In 2020, I started studying autism, thinking I was learning about my sons.

My sister is so much like me, but also very different. She was always beautiful, which has benefits my fat self had to make up for with sweetness.

We both learned to people please like customer service for the elite.

In fact we both served the wealthy in serving capacities in our careers, which though wildly different, probably felt similarly infuriatingly dis-empowering to us as Earthborn Aliens raising ourselves at the turn of the century.

I bring up my sister because I triggered the Hell out of her two months ago, triggered myself by her and my brother’s perfectly reasonable and yet perfectly inflammatory behavior.I was the villain in the story, if there must be a villain.

I’m the one that lost control and couldn’t remember how to get it back, until a couple weeks after they were back in their home states.

And a week ago, I was STILL stuck in my feeling spiral. Guilt, shame, rage, sorrow, despair, rage, guilt, et merde ad nauseum.

There is a big difference between permissive parenting and gentle parenting, but if I can’t elaborate on that difference, then I’m just parroting something I heard. So…

When I am being a permissive parent is when I don’t have the energy to get up and help, or I don’t have the peace for the patience to problem solve instead of reacting.

When I have my peace, even without the energy to get up, I can help with my hard-earned communication, empathy, critical thinking, and problem solving skills.

Turns out peace is something I have to work hard for, and the harder I have to work for something, the quicker stress overwhelms my system, until I burn out, explode, and shut down.

And I am a BITCH about it!

I tried telling all my friends what a mean bitch I’d turned into, and they kept arguing with me that I was a sweetheart.

I was so confused. So lost in my identity crisis and personal grief.

I promise, even when I’m mad I am not trying to hurt people. I am trying to get help feeling better.

Because I literally have brain damage from a lifetime of trauma, I literally need another human brain, to see where I am and where I am trying to get to, and help me organize the steps so I can get there when I am upset.

Simply put, I need someone to take my hands or my shoulders and warmly, firmly get my attention by telling me what they see: Hey, you are breathing hard and sound upset. Can I help you calm down with deep breaths, or a tight, long hug?

I need the people around me to model being calm and safely present, so I can mirror their body language and join their calm.

Monkey brain see, monkey brain do.

If I am going ape shit mode, you go human empath mode, connect with me, and then I will copy you.

Your body language, tone, and words will influence mine if you make me feel your confidence in me that I am safe, and I can calm down if I just breathe with you.

I can do that for people because people have done it for me.

Modern life has us isolated from each other. So many of us never knew what is or was like to feel safe in our bodies, and now, we can’t hide our suffering around our coworkers or customers anymore, nor around neighbors or strangers.

I live in a huge suburb and barely know a handful of neighbor’s names.

I’ve lived here seven years without knowing I was autistic, and I am only coming up on the second year since I figured out that neurotypical advice is why I’ve felt so damn miserable my whole life.

Thank you, Gen Z. You’ve given me my muchness back with your videos.

(Alice Through The Looking Glass reference 😁)

TikTok is changing my life because a bunch of teens and older late diagnosed folk are going through what I went through with and without the two decades of trauma.

And they are brilliant. Hilarious. Deep. Problem-solvers. Solution seekers. My people.

Back to my five year old in the picture way up top.

TikTok et al taught me meltdowns are not spirals, though they often coincide.

Sensory meltdowns can be triggered by emotional upset.

So my kids’ silly game of making mommy scream because it’s funny ended today, and I didn’t have to get enraged to decide to put an end to it.

I simply realized how many times I had to send them out of my room just today because I kept getting overstimulated from the noise and movement, and my room is my haven.

I like playing in my room with my family, so a blanket stay out rule, or no playing in my room rule, would not work for me.

While I was busy dreaming and blogging and living today, my youngest found his Halloween costume and asked me to help him.

He’s scared of the dark and does not like PG level violence in shows, and he loves pretending to be scary monsters. Making them adorable. Taking away their power to scare him.

Clearly, I enjoy and encourage this playful learning behavior. We’ve learned together how to navigate their needs and mine while quarantined together with no vehicle until January of this year.

My fourteen year old had a very different mom when he was five, and a very different life. He and I shared a therapist 2020, which was instrumental in me retrieving my confidence in my parenting skills and choices!

Thankfully, he was only depressed and anxious because of the acutely stressful situation that was causing my breakdown, and once my Ape Shit Persona got rid of that problem and burned every bridge it could think of and laid traps, built the strongest thickest walls and dug the deepest broadest moats…

Well, once my Ape Shit Persona finally felt safe enough to give control back over to me, I had no boundaries and no sense of self I trusted anymore.

Seeing all these influencers talking about living in this world with autism has made a bigger impact than all the books and blogs and forums I’ve read. Or maybe all that reading primed my mind to see what I most needed to see in them, so I could figure out where I keep my peace and how to make it bigger, more durable and long lasting.

Now that I’ve found my peace, I’m remembering how to fill it so it becomes my first anchor in the storm, again.

My bedroom is my haven, I explained to my mischievous demon children.

You both know I have PTSD. You both know I am autistic. You both know what it feels like to melt down, how awful that feels, right guys?

So I don’t want either of you scaring me on purpose anymore. I know and you know, and you know I know and I know you know…I made a silly face, and they laughed.

You know that I get overstimulated easy and that scaring me gives me panic attacks. So EVEN THOUGH IT’S FUN, EVEN THOUGH WE’RE ALL LAUGHING…it’s bullying.

It’s hurting me. It’s making it harder for me to stay calm for you when I most need to be, and it’s setting us all up for a hard time.

When you scare me by accident, we’ll laugh. That’s funny, and no one’s fault.

But scaring me on purpose is not ok. Even if I laugh, I need you to remember it’s not ok, and remember that game is bullying, not fun for me.

The nice thing about parenting with emotional needs right up there on the top priority list with other physical needs is that my kids have good self-esteem, and did not get weepy or defensive.

They repeated the new family story, that we don’t scare people on purpose unless they say we can, because otherwise that’s mean.

And we discussed in brief how in 2023 America, living around Orlando, scaring a stranger might get you shot.

How Having Friends Saved My Life, 3/13/2023 edition

I want to change the environment to support the needs of everyone, instead of placing the burden of being unseen on those of us with behavioral symptoms of our neurological differences.

I am 42, with pink and purple hair and I sing and dance in the grocery store aisle – not too much, not too loud, don’t want to get attacked for being my naturally playful self!

But I’m joining in making this a world where we actively teach everyone it’s okay to act silly and happy in public.

It's ok to piss off grumpy people, as long as we don't let them hurt us.

I am lucky enough to be a middle aged middle class white person with breasts. People are least likely to get away with attacking me in public.

So I see it as my Goddess-blessed moral imperative to help balance out this hypermasculinized culture with demonstrations of a world where feminine values are also revered as sacred.

I’m Never Gonna Not Dance Again.

The Goddess Has Sung It, So Shall It Be! 😁

I spent a few days in group therapy. This girl in her 20s said her mother slaps her and asks what’s wrong with her when she gets too excited in public and flaps her hands, like happy autistic people do.

I found that triggering, and a month later I can finally talk about it without getting so upset my brain shuts down. Now I am capable of working to solve the problem.

The problem is not ignorance.

The problem is mental wellness – her mother’s as well as her own, and our culture – our modern, profit-driven culture.

Knowledge doesn’t change minds.

Stories do.

So here is a story that I hope influences some minds.

I melted down in front of my sister and brother two months ago.

I thought we were close, so they must be capable of understanding and helping, but they were both terrified, and they left me in a mental health crisis.

It was not their fault I nearly chose self-termination. But that did happen. And I need to talk to them about it so it never happens again.

The need used to be overwhelmingly compulsive…the need to keep talking until I am sure we understand each other and that I am behaving and learning what I am supposed to.

But it took me two months to figure out how to reach out to my sister without going off at her.

Two months of shut down. If you know what autistic shutdown is like, I am both sorry you can commiserate with me, and relieved to know someone out there gets it.

But taking action and being authentic and careful – and choosing to put my trust in her ability to trust me – it was like cutting off the anchor that burdened me until I acted.

My siblings and I, we all have been through Hell. We all struggle all day every day with different ideas about why. We love each other and we have consistently shown our love to each other as best we could all our lives.

And I know it is on me to change myself so we can reconnect in love and trust after the disaster of their first visit since Dad died last year.

I have so many stories to share. But this is the story of how I chose life, and why I was able to, when so many like me are unable.

Autism feels a lot like being stuck all the time.

Things stick to us…labels, reputations, thoughts and feelings and experiences we can’t seem to let go or repress.

Our thoughts are sticky, but not the ones other people want us to make stick, oh no. The more we want to obey, the more we want to fit in, the harder it is to act the way we think they want us to. The harder it is to think at all.

The stress increases, the tension builds under the surface, we resist, we fight, we struggle to just keep it together until we can be alone, until we are safe.

Until we lose the ability to choose.

Anger is scary. It’s cost me everything more than once.

No one likes me when I’m angry. Especially not me.

But people still love me.

And I still love them.

I couldn’t calm down on for my siblings and six year old niece, and it was a bad meltdown, the worst since 2020.

My face was covered with self-inflicted bruises and I was humiliated that I’d done that, terrified that I’d forever destroyed my relationship with my siblings.

And in my terror, I made terrible decisions.

I yelled at my sister for tone-policing me instead of hearing her fear.

I “yelled” at my brother-in-common-law on IM for telling me I couldn’t process my feelings on Facebook because it was hurting my sister and brother, and blocked him.

I knew I was hurting them. I couldn’t stop melting down because I was overwhelmed. Adding demands to my fried brain added to the storm, to the panic.

In the storm, I can’t call on all my skills, learned so late in life. I can only fall back on the coping skills I mastered surviving growing up undiagnosed in 90s Orlando suburbs, my disabled dying mother’s caretaker, my little sister’s human shield, our baby prince’s punching bag.

I grew up feral in the suburbs instead of coddled by liberals, but when I was 12, mom died and we moved to “a better area” suburb, with well-funded schools.

And that, dear friends, is how I survived my last, final, ain’t never happening again, self-termination compulsion.

Because in the better funded schools lived families that raised their kids without violence, and some of them befriended me.

Kids that grow up feeling loved have very different lives than those of us who grow up told we’re loved by people who humiliate, beat, mock, and lie to us and about us in front of our faces to others we look up to, and in front of our peers.

And I learned that they liked it when I got us all together for a party.

So after graduation, every year for my birthday in May and every holiday season, I hosted a party, and invited everyone I loved.

My birthday falls near or on Mother’s Day every year, so people with mother’s were rarely available.

I maintained getting us together once a year until 2020.

We had a friendship habit, a tradition that united us as a group, memories to remember together, lives to update each other on.

I made it happen, but always felt like an outsider looking in.

The Earthborn Alien eats among the happy chattering humans she's known two decades and loves like siblings, listening to them talking about living their lives and I'm watching through a portal from another time, out of sync with the world around me.

But four of my friends I met in 1993-95 kept up with me through text, email, instant messenger, and or Marco Polo.

And Marco Polo lets me see myself while I’m talking. Which helps my alexythemic autistic self see my emotions reflected in my behavior.

Talking to two of my bestest and longest friends, knowing they were watching, I told them everything going through my mind, stream of conscious.

I told them I had 13 pills and they couldn’t kill me unless I took them with alcohol, and where the alcohol I’d bought for that purpose was hidden.

I thought about how they must be feeling, and what I must be feeling.

I talked about my love for my children and my husband, and how I couldn’t feel anything, so I must be dissociated.

Dissociation from my overwhelming emotional distress let me reason with the self-terminal giver-upper part of myself.

First I talked myself into telling my husband. The next time he came in, I wasn’t ready yet, but the time after that I told him to take the alcohol and dump it and hide the medicine.

If he had fought me for them, taken things from me, gotten upset with me, reacted in any way other than calm acceptance and warm love, my amygdala would have stormed again, and I might have been hospitalized, which would have further traumatized me.

I joined group therapy because of the near attempt.

That is a whole other story. So let’s end this story with the part where I reached out to my psychiatrist, my therapist, my closest friends, with my health insurance I get through my husband.

In Florida, being married disqualifies me to receive disability. So, that makes it my job to use my privileged education and skills to advocate for my people. My job is to earn money with my art, somehow.

My job is to teach myself business skills so I can help support my family with all my other skills.

Thankfully, I know of others like me who made their dreams come true and blogged about it, so I can binge read and pattern seek.

I figured out what book I most need to write today.

42 years ago right now, 699 miles north of my current home, my 19 year old mother labored for me in the same hospital in which her mother had delivered her: Roanoke Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Virginia.

I wondered if her sister was there, if her mother was. I’ve given birth; now I want to know the story of my birth.

So I wrote my mom’s sister:

Hey Auntie, how are you holding up? I’m going to write this like a short letter, so don’t feel like you have to reply right away.

You asked me if I was still writing my book, and my answer has changed. I want to write a book for our family, not about our family.

I mean, I want to collect the beautiful stories and the real stories for our kids and grand kids and use my writing skills to immortalize our loved ones the way we remember them – in love.

So if it’s ok with you, I’d like to have a video chat or just a phone call to catch up and remember together, with a goal.

I’m starting a blog that will help me stay focused and organized on this project, and I want to write my birth story from Mom’s perspective.

You knew her then, what she was like, who she was, so you are the best person to help me preserve her memory with more than the perspective I can see as her child imagining.

I don’t know how much time it will take, and I figure we can plan one call at a time.

Let me know what you think. I’d like to do a story on others too, but I want to start with Mom. I feel like I understand her a lot better now that I’m old enough to be her mom.

Love,
Ashley

She said she thinks it’s a great idea! Woot!

…

I think we could save the world, if we can fight our fears of rejection and abandonment and learn to trust each other and make up with each other when we mess up.

I spent most of the last two years battling grief and major depressive Disorder and an identity crisis post diagnosis.

And I couldn’t practice the habits I knew helped me because they required more support than I had available to me. I needed fresh ideas from people like me.

It’s a fun disability, autism.

Brilliant, talented, manic pixie dream girl/crazy emotional monster/helpful sweetheart who gives the best hugs.

That’s me! 😁

All I know for sure is that I love, and that though love is not all we need, love is how our needs get met.

By writing, we become telepathic.

With word choice and rhythm, using elements of music and visual arts and all our senses, we can transport each other into a shared world that feels real and becomes real, a real experience, shared with an intimacy difficult to match.

I earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing because I wanted to be able to use my writing talent to reach people like me, so they’d know they aren’t alone.

I want to get into their heads, man.

I want to reach them in their hearts and open their eyes and ears and all their senses and show them the world I’ve seen.

Unhealed trauma and too little support turned me into the ugliest version of myself, especially in 2020.

I hated that version of me all my life, the Beast in me that takes the wheel whenever I lose control.

This year I’m writing the story of how I learned to love the ugliest parts of myself.

Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything?

This is it.

My first blog post.

The pressure!

I relieve it with levity.

This is my space. I can do no wrong here.

So there is no punishment to fear.

And no fear to block my flow of creative expression.

This blog is a conversation with all the pieces of me I’ve held onto, that, with the input and responses of people who are not me, I am forming into my new understanding of self.

I am creating myself from the ashes of all the versions of myself I could never live up to.

And you are creating me too, with every interaction and avoidance.

That’s the nature of reality, everything unique, everything connected, everything one big mess of glorious chaos, given order by patterns and perspective.

Music is the interplay between tension and release.

Earthborn Aliens like me, we’re voracious learners.

We love weirdness. We love exploring. We love experiencing with all of our senses, as long as we are comfortable and safe.

Discomfort, we hates it! We numb ourselves to it, distract ourselves from it, avoid it, ignore it…but eventually we have to face it, learn from it, and grow.

In three days I will be 42.

My Earth Mother died at 32. My Earth Father died at 41.

42 has been an age my little heart never expected to meet.

When my caregivers locked me in the garage or a closet or outside with a throbbing ass and migraine during one of my fits, I would tell myself, “when I grow up I’ll write my stories and people will learn and they’ll stop hurting each other and me.”

I guess 42 is grown up enough to get started.