Unsurprisingly, because I had a very stressful few days, and then spent three hours playing board games, and then got not-enough sleep.
I often feel like the mushiness of my brain is completely inscrutable and random, but it’s really not that random. It’s just hard to recognize patterns when my brain is mush, I guess.
Note to self: the whole idea of being precariously verbal, that you sort of touched on in that post about identity language? That’s probably important. Revisit that.
I missed posting yesterday because of a work assignment and car trouble. (The car trouble is solved, but I still haven’t finished the assignment.)
Everyday life news:
The apartment has gone back to being cold– somewhat warmer than it was before, but still pretty cold. “We fixed the boiler” my ass.
Sparkly has started classes, and starts eir new internship tomorrow. Apparently eir new boss seems nice.
In early December I started writing a thing about internalized ableism and self-hatred, thinking I might post it for the Walk in Our Shoes blogthing. It’s still nothing like done. I have a bunch of disjointed pieces and no overall direction. So I started a blog about related topics on Tumblr, because that makes sense.
I thought some more about this, and I thought of another factor.
I choose to call myself autistic/a person with autism (I don’t have a strong preferenc between those, personally) rather than a person with Asperger’s Syndrome/an aspie/etc.
Asperger’s Syndrome language would probably give my listeners a superficially clearer understanding of me, but I prefer not to use it. It would be an understanding based on stereotypes, first of all, and it would also be superficial because the parts of me that those stereotypes describe are superficial ones.
Having a pop-culture-stereotype knowledge of Asperger’s would tell you a bit about how I talk and how I act (taking things literally, infodumping, blank facial expressions/monotone voice), about my history (being in gifted programs and accelerated classes as a child), and I guess about my interests (since I have a degree in a STEM field and am somewhat geeky).
It wouldn’t tell you anything about what being autistic is like for me, or what accomodations I might need, and those are the things I most want to tell people about when I tell them I’m autistic.
Even those things about how I talk and act are only true some of the time. I can sometimes be very verbal, I can debate, I can infodump, I can be pedantic. I also sometimes find it difficult or impossible to put my thoughts into words at all.
I don’t know which of those states is actually more common in my life, but I care more about the second one. It’s more a part of my identity, of how I think of myself. My verbalness is about other people, focused on other people– on explaining things to people and wondering whether I’m communicating effectively. The uncertainty of words, the tenuousness of words, is about me. I’m not a person who talks a lot. I’m a person who sometimes talks.
Being associated with those Asperger’s stereotypes feels acutely uncomfortable to me, precisely because they almost fit. I would much rather deal with confusion and lack of knowledge about my label, or with stereotypes that I can completely deny, than with stereotypes that don’t fit me but convincingly seem like they do.
I thought I made a post, ages ago, about transient upsetness-about-a-thing vs intractable, fundamental upsetness. Except I didn’t use those specific words, and apparently I also didn’t use any of the other words I can think of for it. Maybe I didn’t actually post it?
This space would hold a post saying more about that idea, but I can’t find the original idea and I’m tired.
Have you ever tried to clean up something so cluttered that you literally couldn’t find a place to start?
This happened to me with a friend’s desk, in college. I thought I’d start by collecting all her notebooks into one stack. But I picked up a few notebooks, and all the others were under stacks of other things. I couldn’t get them out with one hand, and there wasn’t enough empty space to put down the beginnings of the stack of notebooks, either, not without it sliding around and falling over. I just didn’t have enough hands or enough empty spaces to start organizing.
This is what sensory overload is like for me, and often also what my language problems are like. I don’t have enough mental hands to hold all the information I need.
On the one hand I love the idea of, like, camps and retreats and workshops and conferences, of focusing really intensely on something for a few days, and having intense conversations and forming friendships with the other people there.
And I’ve really enjoyed the (few) experiences like that that I’ve had.
But exactly the same things that make events like these exciting (cramming lots of things into a short time with significant time pressure, spending All Day Every Day doing intense important things*, everything being spontaneous verbal conversations) are very tiring for me, and in general not very conducive to me actually participating, thinking clearly, or remembering much of anything useful after the event is over.
That doesn’t stop me from getting everything I can out of events like these and appreciating them when I do go to them. And reading books/essays/blogs, and talking to people online, aren’t actually inferior forms of communication and I really value those connections, too.
But sometimes I do feel sad and left out when people are like “I went to this performance/workshop/etc. and it was so life-changing,” because a lot of my equivalent moments are like “The third time I read this essay I realized…” and that’s just not as exciting.
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* Extra bonus not-for-me-ness if there’s a culture of “officially the event is over for the day at dinnertime, but all the really cool conversations happen at the unofficial meetup at a bar later at night.”
for adulting/competence reasons:
I really hate my blood pressure/temperature regulation/whatever it is that causes me to get dizzy and nauseous and sweating/shivering if I suddenly go from warm to cold (or from very warm to normal room temperature, as last night when I got out from under the blankets.)
A similar thing sometimes happens if part of my body is cold while the rest is warm. Like that time I wore a sweater with a skirt and went outside in cold-ish weather, this past fall.
I have some kind of feelings, apparently, about kids innocently agreeing to things that (unknown to them) are dangerous. Especially if the kid in question is honestly convinced that what they’re agreeing to is actually something they want, something good. Double especially if adults who should be trying to protect kids in their care, instead plausible-deniability themselves out of actually trying to prevent this dangerous thing from happening.
I guess it’s related to both this and this.
Bonus rambly version:
Some Open Space 