Month: March 2013

350: Crap! I have this. That’s all she wrote.

| Aspergers Girls

Crap! I have this (too). That’s all she wrote.

PMDD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premenstrual_dysphoric_disorder

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/pmdd/AN01372

Here is a fellow blogger with Aspergers who writes about PMDD. http://worldwecreate.blogspot.ca/2013/03/how-to-deal-with-pmdd-part-2.html

And after lots of processing…she wrote a bit more!
Okay…. are studies being done about this COMT enzyme??? It affects emotions and executive functioning?? AND is thought to be possible cause of PMDD!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catechol-O-methyl_transferase

Could not feasibly the symptoms of PMDD be used as an additional indicator of Aspergers in Women, since there is the strong connection with the variant enzyme of COMT in people with autism? Yes, indeed, I believe so. I love my brain.

349: My Humaness

| Aspergers Girls

three women

I am not told what to do by my angels or given exact directions. I have free will. There are no guidelines, specifics, or deadlines given. No pressure at all. No time at all, really, as time seems to stand still with them, as if they could pour a thousand memories into me with the touch of a raindrop.

They show me coincidences all the time, too. Simple easy things, that don’t rock my world, as their intention is not to jolt or hurt or alarm. There is a gentle easiness to them, an ever-lasting presence that wraps me up in the comforting current of eternal and unconditional love.

I hear them, yes, but not in an out-of-this-world way; there isn’t thunder or chiming bells, or even the air of wings fluttering, only this gentle nudge of images and knowing. If I had to choose a word that connects the most, I would use the word telepathic. But even this found word leaves out so much of what actually transpires. There is healing warmth without heat. There is music without instrument. There is knowing without understanding. It is an injection of memories without memories.

I cannot describe the experience, and that is okay.

There is nothing I can attach to the connections that could be labeled “negative.” Nothing comes from what they “whisper” that doesn’t become truth. Just as nothing comes from them that doesn’t heal. I can’t create any aspect of the experience into anxiety or fear. And even when I speak of them, I am guided and bathed in healing light.

I have been told that the only way for me to heal is to continually connect to them. But this message hasn’t been given to me by force or in threat. I have been gently molded into this truth and made aware of this truth in my own time and reasoning, a path of connection, they have ever so softly allowed me to find on my own.
Though guided, they guide me not. Though reminded, they remind me not. As there is no attachment, no release. Perhaps it is union. No less, no more than me, and as one we walk. Yes, union seems fitting. But not “right.” As there is no right or wrong.

I am perfectly divine and perfectly okay in their eyes. They lift me to the beauty of me and hold me when I weep. Over and over they hold me as I weep. Their signs are everywhere, continually. They give me hints of what my day will be through my dreams and through my waking hours. I see symbols and lock onto images. Distinct words come to mind that will then materialize in form later in the day.

This all seems so natural now, that I forget sometimes that my world is not everyone’s world. However, where there used to be confusion and clutter in experience, there is not. This just is. This is the way I sense what is not beyond but what is. My eyes beyond eyes witness, and I am accepting that when they are closed, I suffer.

With each thought and choice, I am learning to question is this for the service of Holy Spirit, with each word I am beginning to see the extreme potential and power of the words themselves. I am understanding all of this rapidly. I know not why, and I am releasing this needing to know, this needing to do anything but be.

I struggle. I struggle internally and externally with pain at all levels. I struggle with the knowledge that somewhere a part of me knows essentially how to release this pain, yet it still lingers. And then I forgive myself for not being “there” yet, as there is no “there,” and there is no time. I get this. I see this.

Walking in this world, while seeing so much, is daunting. Even as I know fear as the invisible nothing, that doesn’t even qualify as nothing, I still feel this illusion. And even as I know the key is in unconditional love of others, and in turn the love of illusion of self, I still feel what would seem the opposite of unconditional. I still am human.

And this is my deepest struggle: my humaness.

As I am somehow connected to this universal light, whether this be the collective unconscious or Holy Spirit, or combination, but I remain this broken, frail, doubting spirit. Yet, they soothe me still, with even these thoughts, reminding me that I am as I am for reason. And they show me in a flash the way. And I am understood in completion.

Even so, to be this self is difficult—to hold this pain and not know where to find release. But yet at the same time to willingly and whole-heartedly want this pain. To sacrifice for the light they have and see in me. To sacrifice self and happiness to be what they see in me. Such beauty. And with this beauty I am able to see to the core of you, to the core of another; so simply and purely all shine.

I don’t know what the future holds, but am certain I am already there in completion smiling at this self I think I am now. I harbor these truths, and I carry them openly, not for me, and not for you, but for all. For I am not, and you are not without the other.

And still I weep. I weep inside exceedingly doubtful and scared. A frightened child wondering if all is a dream I invented. And if so, where to find escape, how to wake up, how to wake you up, too, so we both may breathe in the new day that is yet to come, but still exists.

The Box
I am
an unopened box
I sit sealed
I am also
Outside of the box
When the box is opened
And I emerge
I am nothing
I am
Indeed the box itself
And in opening the box
I see again
Another self
Staring at another box
Unopened
But who is it that sees
Who is it that opens
And who will be the last
To find nothing

~ In Peace and Love
Sam

348: I Still Have Those Days

| Aspergers Girls

Photo on 3-23-13 at 9.57 PM #2

Today I did the equivalent of stacking toy blocks or lining up cars. I spent a good three hours going through thirty posts on my blog, reading, summarizing, and reposting in uniform formation. I had to. There was no choice. I was on the couch, seated with my laptop until three pm, and that was most of my day. It didn’t matter that there were blue skies out, or that it was a Saturday full of possibilities. I knew I needed to retreat, if not by choice, then by necessity.

For despite my strong faith in God, my strong faith in self, and in my life and calling, I still have those days. Heck, I have those moments throughout each and everyday, where I just don’t think I can make it through. I don’t think about ending my life; I am nowhere near those thoughts. But I do imagine what life would be like if I was someone else, how that simplicity would feel.

There are times I savor the thought of simplicity. I recognize no one’s life is easy, but I too know that there are people who don’t worry from the moment they wake up if today they will be able to leave the house, if today they will be able to face the person in the mirror and recognize who they see, if today will be a day dominated by fatigue and pain.

Today I couldn’t stand myself; not in a large degree, actually not even in a small degree. And I guess it wasn’t really that I couldn’t stand myself, it was more so that I was weary and oh so tired of battling with my self. I just needed to stop, to turn off all of the decision-making, the have to’s, the when’s and where’s. I just needed reprieve.

I felt foolish at times, a mommy and wife, physically functional for the most part, but entirely incapable of doing anything but stacking her imaginary bricks, soothing herself through repetition, words, and numbers. Again and again.

When the stacking was through I wrote; I wrote to friends and then I wrote the previous post, because I needed relief. I wrote what I saw in images and heard in sounds, and I scribed until much of the angst was out of me. I realize I might be the only one that understands the prose, and I reasoned with myself that was okay, completely okay.

And I searched for the word okay further, to apply the word to myself like some special-ordered salve. I am okay. I am okay. I am okay. I kept repeating those three words to myself in scattered whispers.

I was so absorbed in not leaving the couch, I forgot to drink water and I forgot to eat. I just couldn’t move from the couch.

I don’t know why it is I was made the way I am, and why my life is the way it is. I know living can be hard. I know this. But somehow I keep going and keep trying. I keep looking at the woman in the mirror and saying bless you, if not in thought, then from a distant land, a place in the future, where I am aged and have lived long and well. A place where I am proud of where I have traveled and what I have accomplished.

Eventually I got up, showered, and went out with the family. I won’t say there weren’t moments I wasn’t crying in bed not wanting to leave. Because I did dread leaving. I listened to my thoughts, became the observer. I knew what was going on. They were familiar messages: “You are too ugly to leave the house. No one loves you. You are worthless. You are not enough.”

And I battled more and more and more. But in the end I rose. I bid the woman in the mirror hello, I woman I did not recognize or want. And despite the nagging voices, I wiped away my sadness and I tried. I tried to be this someone I am supposed to be.

Most days aren’t this hard, not this filled with doubt and struggle. I know part of my experience is hormonal. I know I will snap out of my melancholy when my chronic physical pains subsides some. And I know my brain is still processing a busy week past.

I didn’t want to forget this day though or leave this day out. Because in many ways these are the days that make me stronger, these are the days I look back upon and think I made it. I made it through again. I made it through to another day.

347: Woven Round

| Aspergers Girls

I feel you in me, like a trigger to my heart. That stopping point when breath is taken away by something beyond someone, and the beating of one’s thoughts stop in the silence of the lingering moment.
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I hear you and see you, in the varying degrees of your absence, your presence stolen by the invisible fear of connection. I hear you again, tapping upon our unioned cage, forged by blindness that carries out the parts two, feather by feather.
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I peck away at what should be hand, so moves the phantom through the absence of bars. I flutter, my wings upon the wooden stand, swollen from the inside, a child within begging to come out; my chest an eruption, proud and proper, a dove out of reach but swooning with hope.
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How I wish you could touch me here, where feathers attach to the skin of my riches, delicate and gathered in tender gentleness. Where the air sweeps beneath and tangles in sunlight’s whispers.
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You long to fly; I feel this spoken through your tears. To leap out of the shell without knowledge, to plunge into this something you call me. I feel you awake and sense the part of you that sleeps, the forever part that is both lost and stolen, still calling to be found.
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And I approach, my fingers claws, nestling my substance against the shadow of you. For only shadow lives where you breathe, only the coldness of forgotten, and the echo of the song I knew.
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Distance swings upon my perch, collected into a cluster of rainbow’s weeping, each droplet multi-dimensional and dripping into the canvas of you. A pictorial representation of denial fried in the pan of reason.
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Whisper to me not, I say, as your words are no more truth than the broken past you have assembled as false reality claimed true. For I have the vision of the hawk, the seeing of the owl, the knowing of the ravens’ ancestral song.
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In bitter sworded-ache, I cast out the doubt of illusion and dig with claw and beak as one, joined in ballad, two forms merged in the impossibility of rhythm and depth; stifled by the emptiness beyond.
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In yearning, I create nests of safe harbor, a place to lay both your bosom and your head, so heart may speak as river’s brother to the mind you claim as yours.
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And you stir, some secret doorway set ajar, to let the fleeting flutter of wisdom move within. And words soothe, as the truth of the long-awaited lullaby rises, like some star that has at last died to please my wishing.
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“Speak my desert heart”, you whisper, guiding me in warmth to the place of my wanting. And from there, in the magic of vision birthed into solidity, we merge as golden one. The phoenix twice-created, so dreams may fall upon the dreamers whilst we soar.
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“Speak, my desert soul, to the ache in me,” you beckon, further chanting: “Once buried, bring me forward to the weaver of love; the soul whom waits on the edge of tomorrow, pleading out cause, slumbering gateway awaiting joy.”
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And then as waterfall filled by cycle of giving skies to swallowed lands, you pour out: “Call out to me, as flight, wide and thick, in the gloriousness of freedom. Glide me to the stream of trust, to faith, to the place where I can see and I cannot. Don on me the wisdom of knowing all is not and not is all. Take me to the pool of nothingness and emerge me ripened as ink transferred into artist’s hero.
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Tall, black, stifled not by life, but by the drive to force my presence into pages, make me the one who moves the tides, who ruptures the ground, who splits open the edges of her existence and nestles between the hot molten desire. Make me the one who champions without reason. Who knows not why he moves, except instructed to do so by feathered shaking quill.
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Paint me, make me, create me, a thousand times more, in scene after scene, script after script. Pierce me with the markings of a master, shield me with the pen of making, so I might have no will but to cast out all doubt of my existence.
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Bleed me to the world on the white parchment of forever, made of the trees of the ages, and the dark petals crushed within. Exist me into existence, so I may eat away, as one eaten away, leaving me twisted and forgotten, unfamiliar with my own being.
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Recreate the passion that lives. Recreate the talisman-warrior, so I may go out into the world and feed the masses in my unified glory with one.
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I see now, the ever-present yearning to find self in the reflection of me. I see there behind and beyond my shoulder broad, feeding not from me, as much as from the memory of where I stood.
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How we have waited and wandered, in the broken thoughts of mind, only to find again and again, some sunlight forgotten, some moonshine tucked away beneath where treasures go.
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I call on you from the shattered place of reason, where the shed of light escapes inward, and for the moment I am there one made two. I call on you to break open and carve your name across my chest. So I may rise as victim removed and dance on the gravestone that was once my home.
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To rise, from beyond this dirt of flesh, no less formed than unformed, no less determined than undetermined, but much released from the agony that was once me. Given to her, as her to me, both as slave unchained to freedom. Given as wolves set out of cave. And run we do, to where we stand, our cages unemptied, as are shadow selves rest upon the time of flight.”

346: The Love I Am (A review of emotions, joy, fear, and pain)

| Aspergers Girls

I remember sitting on my bed in my early twenties and realizing with a sudden revelation that I did not know how to feel joy. In fact, in analysis, I concluded then that in the past several years I had not recognized many emotions. Generally I felt anxious, nervous, over-concerned, shy, out-of-place, insecure, depressed, sad, and worried. That was all I could feel. I could not feel anger. I could not feel love. My feelings for my significant other were all wrapped around fear of abandonment. I could feel fear.

I went from extreme emotional highs to extreme lows. I now believe this was not biologically induced. I think I made myself purposely cycle through thought-processes. If I was not extremely high (overly-anxious, overly-obsessed, overly-concerned), I was extremely low (unable to leave the house, fatigued, depressed). There wasn’t a manic high of joy, elation, grandiose thoughts, and magical-viewing of the environment and self. In the high-state there was only this inability to let go of fear, which led me to act out (OCD-like behavior, rituals, non-stop analysis) in order to eliminate thoughts. In the low-state there was the same inability to let go of fear, but my efforts to eliminate the thoughts were displayed through withdrawing, sleeping, and retreat.

I still go through these same states. Though I now know what the middle ground of emotions feels like. I think I “make” myself go through these states in an attempt to feel joy. I used to only feel joy when I was transitioning from one state (low) to the other (high). And even then, only for a fleeting moment.

In the past, and at this moment, I cannot experience this sensation of fleeting joy/happiness without the anxiety tagging along and questioning me, like some annoying tailgating friend I attempted to shake of millions of times before: “Are you sure you’re happy? Is this happiness? Will it last? How do you know it is happiness? Why are you happy? Are you being selfish? Is this self-based?”

My being seems incapable of holding onto this type of joy, and joy alone. This joy has to have companions of suspicion, dread, over-analysis, and such. And I utilize the word “have” because that is how the experience registers for me.

In the same line of thought, my extreme lows which include the inability to move, the discomfort of being me, and the fatigue of simply thinking, comes too with a posse of entities—emotions garbed as “why again,” “what is happening,” “why can’t I control my own self.”

This doesn’t feel like a mood disorder to me, though I see how my behaviors, and possibly thoughts, would present themselves as so. To me, this teeter-tottering is always pinpointed to an exact spot of awakening to the highest step of anxiety or lowest step of deep sorrow. I can find a reason. I can in retrospect see where I was switched from one extreme to the other.

Typically, I feel the mixture of joy and dread when I have 1) Accomplished a goal that I was afraid I would never accomplish; 2) Accomplished a goal in which I was fixated from the start and glad to be done; 3) Completed something I was dreading for days; 4) Received good news after worrying about bad news; 5) Received a compliment about my appearance, as I am insecure about the way I physically look.

In review, each of these supposed “joys” is accompanied by a fear or “negative aspect.” For example, in number one, “I was afraid,” and in number two “I was fixated.”

For a long time, this was the only way I could feel sporadic spurts of mixed joy: by attaching a fear or negative aspect, and then with some stimuli (another person, place, thing, event, words) the negative aspect is momentarily released and that moment of release feels to me akin to joy. For me, when the negative aspect I placed on self is temporarily removed, joy steps in.

In fact, in my mind, and in my scenario of feeling, I cannot feel this type of joy without first attaching an element of “negativity” and/or “fear.”

In contrast, in my moments of fear, in my low state, I have attached hope or the “best case scenario.” I create in my mind the release, the escape, or the rescue and I wait. I set myself in a cage, much akin to a prison, where I’ve locked myself away in darkness, and then wait. What I am waiting for is the removal of deep pain, and I have decided, somewhere deep in my mind or spirit that this removal will only happen in a specific way. For example, in sighting past experiences, this might be, this release of pain through the removal of a stimuli: an illness going away, a person coming and going, a meeting passing, a phone call received.

Here seems to be the tipping point, or the starting point of where my fleeting joy begins. While I sit readily in this cage of misery, I am creating the future of joy I hope to see. Whilst worrying immensely in a non-stoppable way and running through all the possibilities and strings of variable outcomes I can, I am in a direct way preparing to feel release and joy in the near future. This is to me, seemingly like a junkie in need of an adrenaline high. I am making myself increasingly low, so when the event or stimuli arises that apparently lifts me from outside of my self-inflicted prison, I am brought to a state of infinite fleeting freedom. In extreme emotion, I am brought high above myself and able to at last feel beyond suffering. I am creating my own high.

It is only in the in between state, between the middle part of prison and the freedom of elation that I feel the fleeting joy. I quickly rise past the joy to the state of high-anxiety, as the doubts and questioning sets in. This is why, after much processing about a possible scenario that could lead to my demise, failure, rejection or the lot, I will appear momentarily elated with relief when the scenario does not turn out in the thousand terrible ways I thought, but then I will quickly switch of the invented and created false feeling of joy and question my emotion. This will then put me in a state of shutdown, where I am wondering why I worried to the degree of physical and emotional, even spiritual ache, for the gift of fleeting fake joy brought on by a self-invented high.

Is this indeed a process I have created in an attempt to feel human? In an attempt to feel what “I am supposed to feel?” Am I lacking something or some chemical? I don’t think so.

I think this is the way my mind works itself out of confusion, in an attempt to unravel all the thoughts that are bombarding me, including all the stimuli, constant awareness, and confusion. I think this is my mind’s way of putting me into protection. I think in my cell of worry is the only time I feel safe from the world. To me, the fear-state is more liken to protection and safety than the joy state. For joy crashes and fear remains. Fear is predictable and stays with me as I loop and over-think; joy emerges as this falsehood and leaves me abandoned.

Do I like the cell perhaps more than I acknowledge? Is the cell the darkness I need to retreat to in order to renew? Am I, like the caterpillar, in need of continual metamorphoses? And if I am turning into a butterfly from the retreat out of darkness then why do my wings suddenly disappear?

In living, I have gained some recognition of middle emotions, the more subtle emotions of: satisfaction, contentment, serenity, connection, gentle-anticipation; but as these subtle emotions surface and are identified, I analyze where they have come from. I wonder which came first, my own thought, or the emotion; and often conclude my thought brought this emotion; and then I go into a place of deep thinking of when and where this thought came into existence that caused this emotion, and if this is indeed an emotion I welcome; and if this emotion comes from a place of selflessness, ego-release, and love. If the emotion/thought, both spun out together with thought in a slight lead, are not from a place of benefit for me and others, I then review why I have created these non-beneficial thoughts.

Where before for four-decades I was highly unaware of my own thoughts and emotions, and felt numb to the world, unless in a place of extreme anxiety or extreme low, now I am highly-aware of my experience, each moment analyzing and questioning my experience here, in this place I have been told isn’t really here at all. I have fed myself with so much factual data, through various sources and through moments of awakenings, that I cannot help but to try to place my own emotional/thought experience into a category.

My mind categorizes. I was built, I believe to a degree, to sort and categorize, to circumvent my emotional wiring and dig beneath and pull out what is occurring. I am a computer analyzing the computer-self. The mind boggles and I am left, wishing to do nothing but to be simple in the extreme, to wash away the complexity and start again anew and refreshed.

In an attempt to pull myself out of myself, I continually study and analyze, not just words and visual sources, but thoughts and happenings. I analyze the trees, the sky, the movement of all, even the invisible and untouchable. I analyze because I am attempting to take the moment I am set free from prison, to capture that fleeting flicker, and rise with this moment in true form of butterfly.

The dilemma is in finding myself lost in self, and reviewing the past data (Eastern philosophies of escape from mind), and then trying to understand this absence of thought, as I am built to a degree where the past ways of transcending (absence of thought; deep meditation in silence of mind) and completing the process of thought (silence and retreat after reflection) are foreign. I seem incapable of mastering my own mind enough to sit in the stillness of release. My brain appears so high-powered by some high-force that I am suited best for the prison of darkness as my retreat.

But there is hope, always hope.

And this hope is found in one way.

I have been able to at last find rescue from my own self in the act of giving of self. When I come from a place of pure intention to give without recognition or reward, I am set free. This is where the butterfly is meant to fly.

What I have been doing for so long is releasing myself from the cage and giving myself the imagined joy. I have been trying to hold onto a joy for self, and to build up self with joy, as this is what has been demonstrated by society: to make myself happy; to be happy; to find happiness. But this is not right; at least not my right, if right was to be.

I am not put here to make myself happy. I don’t need to be happy. Innately, beneath this façade of thoughts that generates a façade of emotions, I am happy. And I know this. I am not confused by self. I am confused by the thoughts and emotions, because beneath I am a spirit having a human experience. But my suit, my human suit is not adjusted, it is open enough so that the experience of human is confusing, debilitating, and disconcerting; I have spent eons, or what appears eons, trying to master my thoughts and emotions, when the freedom is not found in mastery of the invisible and illusion: mastery is found in the release of this humanness.

There is no direct way to self, as I am already self. There is no direct way to free myself of thoughts and emotions, as they do not even exist. They are not real.

Yes, I feel. Yes, I experience. But ultimately after a lifetime of analyzing my own experience, I see the illusion I have created. And though I stand in a lonely place at times, in reality, in my reality, I am finally able to grasp joy, and this joy is not fleeting. This joy does not bring out invisible scissors that eventually clip and remove my wings. I do not bleed from this joy, nor do I suffer.

I am attuning self enough to know that false joy will not last, and thusly this false, self-created, and self-wanting joy feels poisonous to me. I want to spit the falsehood out, and bring out the reinforcement of armies with swords in hand and slice away at false joy with question. I feel attacked when the questions come, when the illusion of joy is destroyed, but I am not attacking anything but illusion upon illusion. I am not attacking anything but selfish want and selfish joy.

Joy to me is only found in giving. This is my place of joy. This is how I am wired. I have been trying to live like the rest say to live, to fill myself in order to be fulfilled. But I am ultimately fulfilled when another is fulfilled. I am filled when I am able to bring joy to another. I am filled when the love I have for another is received. I am filled when I know in my deepest knowing that I am not wanting for self and self alone. There is no way around this for me. I still take comfort in the fineries of good food, decorative clothes, and good friends; these can bring me happiness. But this is not a happiness that stays. I see this. I recognize this. And thusly, my mind creates a stage of battles, where I am once again made supposed victim as the questions slice away at the supposed joy. But I am no less victim than the tree pecked by the woodpecker. I am made home for the world, for the flying birds, when I am carved out and hollowed. And in this place, when the world slips inside of me for shelter, I am joy.

And so it is my journey begins with intention. If I set out to love the world, to give of myself freely, without motive for self, then I shall receive endless abundance and joy that I can time and time again return to and tap into. This joy might waver with the wavering of my thoughts and emotions, but this joy is there always. This joy is always there. This joy is love of others, and in so loving other, love of self. There is no non-benefit to giving and loving freely. There just isn’t. When I come from a place of love, I am free. When I do not, I am imprisoned. There is no other place for me than from a place of love.

I think now that I was made the way I am to force myself into finding love. Here I have been searching to love myself, to change myself, to change my thoughts and emotions, to change my way of being, when all along the key was so very simple: love.

Here I was searching to understand love, to understand love through ownership and misinterpretation, and needing and wanting, and sometimes constant desiring, but that is not love. Love is not found in the one or in the self. Love is not found through the desire to receive. Love is not fleeting. And so often the love I have thought I have found, though unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and uncomfortable, still did not fit. No matter how hard I tried to make love fit, it did not. That is because I was searching for a suit of love for me, something to wear to soothe and protect the suffering beneath. But garments age; they tear, they break; no matter what we do they disintegrate, they become outdated, they eventually stink. The only love that can complete me must be outside the self and unattached from the self, something so immense and immeasurable that fear escapes in the infinite abundance.

I know now how to be happy.

Happiness is found in the detachment of love from self, so that love may fly freely. For it is not the butterfly I am that needs to find and wear her wings, it is the love I am that needs to soar.