yucky stuff

470: Past Twelve: Aspergers

| Aspergers Girls

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I have to say that twelve was rather easy. I was still very much a child, almost fairy-like, or elven, always into innocent mischief and adventure.

The turmoil hit at the age of thirteen. That is when my hormones shifted and life suddenly became bleak, overwhelming and unmanageable. I discovered a new form of escapism then, a more ‘difficult’ escapism than before; I became more observant of myself and actions, understanding complexities in a new degree that felt unfamiliar and frightening. Before, I would leap into my imagination quite naturally and without pretense. Now, it seemed as if I escaped to get away from some pending danger.

Wherein my world once felt light and airy, full of possibility, and all things magical and hopeful, it now felt dark, dingy and doom-filled.

I didn’t have an active social life for most of my teen years, choosing instead one girlfriend to hang out with and one boyfriend to adore. I had the same best friend from seventh grade until I graduated high school. I never thought to have many friends. I hung out with her, copied her, adopted her taste in music and clothes. I think because I was pretty (but didn’t know it), I easily found boyfriends. I tended to stick with one boy as long as I could or until circumstances forced a breakup. I too, copied what I thought he liked. I tried to appease. But with young men, I found myself continually lost and alone with a separation between us I could not understand or explain. While having a significant other brought me this sense of being less fearful in public and the ability to go out and do more, the relationship also brought me this deep seeded feeling of being complicated, misunderstood, too emotional, and never kind enough.

I could write a full book on the challenges of my teenage years. Here I have attempted to summarize some of the key points:

1. Suffering with feelings of extreme isolation and oddness, but not being able to understand or articulate why I felt this way.

2. Wanting to be like my peers but not wanting to be like my peers. Recognizing their character traits disturbed me, particularly manipulation, game-playing, deceit, cliques (groups of children that didn’t allow other children into the group), lying, cruelty, pretending and gossip.

3. Not knowing why, for most of my childhood, despite circumstances, I had felt happy and content, and that now all of a sudden I felt a deep sadness and a disconnection from the rest of the world.

4. Developing an over-analytical sense of self that encompassed all areas, including how I looked, how I moved, how I spoke and even how I thought and reasoned.

5. Developing a hyper-critical awareness of my appearance, wherein before I could care less. It was an extreme shift from being comfortable in my skin to wanting to change who I was. Along with this intensity of dislike towards my own image, I also did not recognize my own face in the mirror. I had no idea the size of my eyes, my face, my nose, or lips. Nothing seemed distinguishable, and every time I looked in the mirror the image seemed unfamiliar. I consciously did not realize this was happening. I did not understand why I looked at my image so much and analyzed it. I thought I was vain and self-centered, even as I hated how I appeared and assumed no one liked my looks.

6. It did not matter how many times someone told me I was beautiful on the outside, I couldn’t see it, and didn’t believe it. I twisted compliments in my mind. I took a sincere compliment about my appearance and truly believed that the observer was lying, blind, misinformed, tricking me or not educated.

7. I did not trust life. I began to see the unpredictable nature of adults and teenagers. No one around me changed, but suddenly an invisible barrier was lifted and I saw reality more clearly. I had seemed to be coated before, protected in some shield in which the world appeared wonderful and filled with love. I had trusted everyone and believed in everyone; yet now, I believed the world was a scary place, and thought that I had been born on the wrong planet.

8. I didn’t understand my own emotional intensity. I loved deeply. I longed. I was passionate. I was a poet. I was this exploding young woman filled with romantic intentions and the want to get married and have children. I didn’t have any interest in being a teenager. Some part of me wanted to skip from young childhood straight into adulthood. I saw young men as a means of escaping the destitute of reality. I jumped into a fantasy land of tomorrow, when I would be raising a family, and far beyond high school and all its pains.

9. I still trusted everyone. I trusted strangers. I trusted anyone who was an adult. I trusted children. I trusted my peers. I shared from the heart. I told my deepest secrets. I cried openly. And people did not respond in a manner that was beneficial to me. I was preyed upon in all ways: physically, emotionally, spiritually and logically. People could sense I was innocent, naive, and inexperienced. I was very much a victim without knowing I was a victim. I couldn’t tell right from wrong. Because I assumed everyone was good at heart, I assumed everything anyone did was ‘normal’ and ‘okay.’ I didn’t understand that concept of boundaries or self-protection. No one taught me. I didn’t know boundaries existed. I believed people.

10. Concepts that came naturally to other girls did not come naturally to me. I did not understand or follow fashion. I didn’t think to. It never crossed my mind to try to fit in and assimilate to the teenage world. I was still very much twelve inside, even as my body changed. I didn’t start dressing like my peers and learning how to apply makeup until I was ostracized, ridiculed, and singled-out.

11. I didn’t understand sexuality. I had a cute figure and was well-endowed. I did not understand how different ways I walked, sat, or bent over could be perceived as flirtatious and even labeled ‘slutty.’ I didn’t know that I had turned physically into a young woman who men found attractive. Even as they called out names at me, or shouted inappropriate comments about my body in the halls of high school, I didn’t connect the dots. I didn’t know what I had done. And in not knowing what I had done, I didn’t know how to make changes in an attempt to stop others’ behaviors.

12. I copied television and movie stars. I acted like my favorite stars. My role models were a brunette from Gilligan’s Island and a brunette from Charlie’s Angels. And I moved and acted like them, or some other dark-haired daytime soap opera actress. I didn’t know I did this, but I did it nonetheless. I needed a role model, and I found mine on television. Mimicking the traits of sensual and sexual adult females did not add to my ability to fit in; my actions instead served to highlight my inadequacies and oddities. I did things halfway, some very awkward child trying to catch up to her peers and changing body, and not knowing how to even begin, and not recognizing that her subconscious chosen methods were damaging her chances of fitting in further.

13. I didn’t understand my bodily changes and the monthly menstrual cycle. The change had been explained to me in various classes at school, briefly by a parent, and in review of some books, but that information was not enough. I think, in retrospect, I had needed someone to walk me through the process daily for the first year. To explain and reexplain, to reassure me I wasn’t dying or sick, to comfort me when the new and unfamiliar body pains and sensations came, to give me more advanced biological descriptions of what was happening to me. I didn’t do well with change. Change scared me. And here, my entire body was not my body anymore. It was terrifying. I didn’t understand the entire concepts of sex, of the ways I might get pregnant or how to tell if what my peers said was truth or lies. I didn’t understand how things worked.

14. I didn’t understand the concept of holding back. I said things like I saw them and felt them; that is until I was so shamed in school, I clamped up and hid in the corner writing song lyrics in pencil all over my desktop. I didn’t understand social rules and social games. I came across as overzealous, as immature, as goofy, giddy, and somewhat of a ditz. I didn’t understand most jokes. I laughed a lot, out of embarrassment or discomfort. I developed a nervous giggle. I seemed fake to other people, when ironically I was truly myself. People questioned me, especially my facial expressions and body language, and worse they criticized me. If I walked with my head down, with my eyes glued to the floor, my peers claimed I was rude and stuck up, too good for them. If I smiled, I was a flirt. If I avoided eye contact, I was showing disrespect or further showing I thought I was hot stuff and ‘all that.’ I didn’t know how to be. I wasn’t given the tools or the freedom. Everything I did was judged or deemed wrong. I quickly began to surmise the world was a terrible place in which no one was allowed to be herself. And then I concluded I didn’t even know who my self was.

15. I cried a lot. I isolated myself a lot. All the traits of Aspergers were triggered as puberty hit. I was overwhelmed with entirely too much for any child. Not only was my home life unpredictable and chaotic, not only was my body changing, my peers suddenly my enemies, but my own mind was turning against me. I couldn’t tell who I was, what I wanted, and had no idea where to go for help. When I tried to tell adults I was afraid to live, they claimed I was seeking attention, that I was fine, or that I was creating drama. When I went crying to the school counselor, he told me plainly that I was a beautiful attractive and intelligent young lady. And questioned what I could possibly have to complain about. I was attacked on all fronts. No one believed me when I said I felt different and alone. No one believed the deep pain and shattering of my life I was undergoing. I became suicidal, never able to go through with any attempts, but always wondering how it would feel to escape this life. I became more and more of a recluse and found small ways to make my life more manageable. I ate the same lunch every day. I kept the same routine. I knew what path to walk in the halls at school. I knew how to hide. I learned how to pretend to be someone else in mannerisms, dress and behavior. I became that which was nothing but a ghost of me, and I lived that way for most of my days.

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Everyday Aspergers the book available in 2016. Join our Facebook Clan or follow the blog for newest information on book release, including contests and give aways. 🙂 ~ Sam

poetry from my teenage years

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457: Lost Again

| Aspergers Girls

I am so very sad today.

I have been crying since last night. This is a confusing part of my life; more confusing in some ways than the rest, and less in other ways, but regardless confusing. I find myself alone and frightened, and at the same time protected and guided. I am stepping out of self, as I often do, and watching silently, as I process through what need be done. I am certainly mourning; what I am mourning is not as important, as the reason why I am mourning. I am mourning over substantial loss. The what of it? The who, the reasons, the particularities, the details, don’t matter much. It’s all the same pain. All the same tears. This sadness.

I am mourning because if I don’t I cannot move on, and will find myself in this dreadful place of sorrow far too long. And so I weep, not because I am forlorn or even truly lost, for I know soon I will be content, but because I know I need to go through this to get to the other side.

I feel misunderstood as of late, and this has been a constant in my life, this aspect of being misunderstood.

I have moments of bliss, when I connect to what I choose to call my angels or God, moments of profound insight and reprieve. I find refuge in my moments of connection with the collective, the All, the source. But the instances don’t last, and I am left here; or so it seems.

This morning I am feeling very much ‘left,’ broken and left, as abandoned debris. Even as I know this to be an untruth, I still experience it as a strong reality. I still watch as a part of me suffers so, in the regurgitation of fears and missed opportunity. I am not selfish in my dallying in pain, only staking myself here a bit, until the time comes that I can glide out and be alive again—in the light, and in accordance with my higher self.

This state is difficult to maneuver within; alongside the tears and sense of overwhelming despair, remains the long distance hope, unreachable though it be.

I feel misunderstood in many ways. And as hard as I try, this continues to happen. It isn’t that I am flawed or that the other is wrong; it’s just the way it is. And with each time this happens, I break a bit, having exposed myself fully and been knocked down dubiously. I haven’t yet learned how to not expose myself. Despite the little nagging voices that warn me, that tell me how to be, how to play, how to act—regardless I still don’t ‘act’ correctly. At least not in accordance to the mainstream, not even it accordance to the side-stream.

What is it about me that has to be this way? Why do I have to be different? And so complicated inside. So utterly confusing.
My entire life, I have only longed to be loved and understood. Loved in completion and understood in completion. I always thought there would be someone who could do this, beyond my own self and beyond God. Now I am beginning to think there isn’t anyone; that there isn’t a one or a somebody that can take away any of this pain brought on by isolation. And that scares me to a great degree.

I am trapped somewhere now, between wanting to explain myself over and over and be truly seen, and wanting to hide and not come out. Rather than depression, I would name this yet another trial of spirit, another relapse into the negation brought on by the yin and yang of life. I behold myself on that constant pendulum of rebalance. What goes up, must come down. And I am tired of the echoes that leech out of me, their sadness carried to the depths of my pores; then seeped out screaming, as my entire body washes away in ache.

I become so hopeful and childlike at times. I am this gleeful spirited one, dancing in the miracle of life, and the miracle of all, and then I am brought here, into the dark forest of dimly lit nowhere. A scope onto self and self alone, the rest forgotten and folded away, some unkempt laundry tucked out of sight. And I stand here, suffocating in my own vomit of misery: shaken, lost, alone.

I don’t understand it, why this life is this life, and why I am made as me. Why so much has been shown to me and given, and so much taken away. I don’t understand this at all, and the concept of the inability to understand boggles my brain, causing me to loop and decipher the aspects of my own torment. As if, I, as logical being, could master my own self and recreate the concept of reality, pull myself out of the burden of misery and into the sunlight of hope.

I sit here in battle with shadows, or some form of regret, and I play out this scene again followed by again.

Hello, I say to the downcast one, hidden in her corner, huddled and terrified.

Hello, I say again. My lips moving and my voice carried, yet somehow captured and set aflame before reaching the hovel where the child rests asleep in fear.

Hello, I scream, shaking the ground and the space in between us; the separation so narrow a fleck would serve as bridge.

And still she neither moves nor reckons I am here.

Instead she gathers herself as garbage and recollects the foul smell of the world must be her, and if not her, at minimum her own doing.

She is lost again, in some forgotten place, between this world and the next, trying to find her way back to a place in which she does not belong.

455: Love and Loops

| Aspergers Girls

I have been trying really hard to not loop, to not spin, to not take something that is nothing and turn it into a monster. The largest portion of this sense of self is lost in doing so, in succumbing to the voice of fear and believing what I hear. The greatest part of spirit knows that fear is all but illusion, and only love exists—prevails beyond the illusion of naught. Still I get lost in the murky waters of falsehoods, daily, if not hourly, trapped in a labyrinth beyond human logic.

Because I am vulnerable, I lose sight of my purpose. Because I succumb to this falsehood, I lose sight of the all. I become a pawn in some minions’ game of discourse and confusion as I stumble down endless reasonings leading nowhere.

I have watched myself as the observer and taken soul-notes, or more so delve through time for answers, and if not answers than at least a glimmer of insight. I have listened to my heart-mind, and focused on the powers that rest beyond intellect. And in so doing, I have found some peace. I have found some recourse beyond the dilly-dallying of the mind, beyond state of anguish.

I have discovered, with full vitality, a remedy beyond this place I am. I have seen a solution that is far more reaching than letting the pain play out to the end. I have seen: It is not that I need to seek the meaning and find the solution, but that I need to release the need for solution.

Before I believed this meant releasing to the process—to allow or give permission for my mind to go through the torment. Now I view the occurrence with new eyes. There is no need for me to wallow in this state of pain day in and day out. The truth of the mystery of release is found in not releasing, not focusing, not trying, but simply replacing.

Releasing through replacement is my remedy. And not replacing with the tools of busyness or distraction. For though they be sweet, the intermingling of heart-mind into a daunting or thusly thrilling task or adventure, they too come to a conclusion, an end that certainly leaves me back on the dock of gloomy comings. A place where I am once again triggered by an invisible made visible.

I’ve come to see that what I am sensing is not so much an intellectual attack as a spiritual attack. A dark nature of my own doing or another’s, I know not. A creation brought on by self-manifestation or a power beyond, I know not enough to ponder. But whatever the affliction, rather karmic, energetic, or simply part of my journey into greater peace, the affliction exists. A pain so palatable I can taste it—hold it in my mouth and bite down. It’s thick and dirty, and filled with deception. Trickery of what is and what isn’t. And mask upon mask of who I am.

In the end, at the bottom of all the lies is this desperation, this clinging, that makes my mind scream out. A lost woman forlorn and in destitute wondering about from that which she came.

To experience is to remember. To experience again is to cry so deeply in recognition of the unraveling loss of control that the tears become the enemy. The shell of self emptied too, so despite the remnants of what I thought I was, who I thought I was, I become something entirely altered, different even within the mirror I reflect upon. Wherein even the home in which I sought rescue and escape is shattered—no place to crawl back into, no matter if it be demolished or in disarray—no shell exists. I am left out in the open barren space of nowhere searching for a way back home to nothing.

And so I have put into practice a new approach, scouring over the teachings I have collected in my mind, and surrendering a gentle submission of knowing not enough to conquer this affliction. Instead, I retreat into a place in which I connect my heart and mind, and I give to myself the gentleness of love.

I let into my mind only one word: LOVE

And I repeat this over and over and over: Love, love, love

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

That is all.
That is the all.

And here I rest, unable to untangle my own mind with any other words, unable to be the puzzle solver or mender. Unable to recollect what brought me here again—for one solution inevitably leads to further spinning and descending into the abyss.

Instead, instead of anything else in existence, I choose love.

And there I rest, repeating the source of light over and over, until the healing waters come, and I realize whatever or whomever it was that afflicted me, be it self, illusion, or other, I am whole still. Returned to the womb of discovery. Returned to the self complete and renewed.

453: The Waterdrop

| Aspergers Girls

I have been caught in a rut. In a spiraling stream of water that is heading down the drain. I have forgotten I have the tools I need. I am reclaiming these tools today, at this moment.

Physically I have been sick, very sick. Mentally, I have been suffering. And spiritually I have been fighting some unrecognizable battle.

hospital me

I have found the answers, the passageway, my ‘out’ through careful observation of self, of others, and through letting go long enough to gain perspective.

I had a rumbling of insights that were more disturbing than pleasurable, like bad food on an empty stomach. I keep gurgling up something of self, and pushing it back down, in an attempt to stop this ghastly taste of me from penetrating my taste buds. I have been forging through the forest of reason in effort to find the end, the stopping point, the light into the resting field.

I have had no success in my futile ways. No success in the instigation of force or the instigation of spinning logic.

My only refuge has been in dismissing ego long enough to take a good look at the circumstances unclouded and without residue of pain and fear. To peek through the window as the observer and not the trembling wounded child. This has been difficult. Not an easy task: to dismiss the part of self that wants attention, recourse, answers, and love, and to let in the part of spirit that is complete. I have fought this process with clenched teeth and starving nails.

Essentially dragging my own physical self out of the cave she wished to remain within.

In stepping back and watching me gyrate, from one retched cave of bitter-pain to the next, I have noted the effect. I have witnessed how the deeper I dig in self-pity and remorse, the deeper I fall, and the more I attract further elements to solidify my pathetic state.

I have witnessed how like attracts like, how the more I became what others thought I was, the more I brought to me others who saw me the same.

Effectually, I was a metamorphosis in full swing, becoming what I focused upon.

I was told, while in a weakened physical state, that I was wrong. That I was twisted in my thinking. That I was creating my illness. I was told this repeatedly by doctors. But then the other doctors would come, and claim what illness I had. Explain to me the sickness, validate my physical pain. I could not find any reprieve. For one minute my reality was one person’s and the next the other’s.

I was so fragile in self, from the continuing weakened physical state, that I took on whatever the onlooker perceived me to be. I became a yo-yo in truth, vacillating based on a random output from others. One minute I was up with hope, one minute I was down. Of course, somewhere inside of me I became the judge and jury of right and wrong, of hope and no hope. I took the stimuli and decided within which person’s words were damaging and which were helpful.

Here was my first turn off the course of love: In thinking anyone beyond self could dictate who I was, how I felt, and how I would be.

I got caught up in the concept of time. In the clinging to output and the desperate need of outcome. I began to focus on the end and not the present. I began to fear the future and the unknowns. I forgot that there is no definite, there is not stagnant, there is no way to control anything.

Fear consumed me. And soon the past became my hauntings. And all I could here was the doctor’s judgments. I wanted nothing more than to be protected by the next onset of judgment placed on me. Nothing more than to sleep the time away and wake up outside of the hospital back in my bed with solutions, with the ability to live again, outside the debilitating illness.

My future became my only hope and my past my only nightmare. I was consumed in helplessness and dismal self-fear. I began to reach out for any glimpse of rescue. I began to panic. Terror took over, and I slipped further into the net of ego consumption. I became the feed, the broth, the stock for the over-bearing demolishing ghost of wanting. My desires took over. And everything began to collapse.

In my weakened physical state, having barely slept or eaten in weeks, I began to see everyone as the enemy. And in turn, they began to see me this way. This validated my worthlessness. This fed the fear further. Until, soon, there was nothing I could see clearly. I began running faster from my core self and began slipping further into self-demolishing-demise.

I was never depressed, but I was constantly forlorn and terrified.

None of what I had studied mattered. None of my angels could I hear. And none of my hope could I find.

People I knew found me in this state, and I became in their eyes what they wanted to see. I could feel it happening. A part of me watched as the others about me began to project their fears into me. I became a sponge of sorts, absorbing their negative energies—their shadows. Being an empath since birth this was my natural tendency. And being so weak, I had no will to protect myself from their self-reflection.

I became a mirror to everyone about me. I became sensitive to all their plights and pain. They put into me what I was putting out: disbelief, suspicion, fear, accusations, desperation, rescue. And the others, who were not in this state, the ones that were more content, more or less pleased with their world when they met me, they soothed my soul. I could feel their energy. Still it seemed some giant game of cat and mouse. I was being chased down by whatever mood the cat was in, either batted like paw to a string or scratched and scratched, the post itself.

Soon I was such a mess, I was hysterical. Fear entirely consumed me. I could not help but cry and rage. I exploded like a child. I was helpless in all degrees, every part of me severed. Still the observer of my own self watched from a distant, though he faded in and out now.

At home, the situation did not change. My children were enough dismissed by their own actions, that my mood and altercations did not affect them enough to project my fear back to me. But the adults were not as removed. They were too close to me. And soon I became what they saw, too. They absorbed my fear, and I absorbed theirs and we existed as this interchange of pain, blame, and desperation.

Had I known how to stop, I would. But I could not see the all as an extension of self. I could not see that the poison in me was leaking out everywhere. I was already so weak and afraid, and all I wanted was support, but my own power, my own ability to manifest from my emotional state my physical world, became my own greatest injury. I was limping by my own doing, using fear for a crutch, unable to look and realize the situation.

Soon more and more around me became my enemy, validating my worthlessness and fear. Soon their fear grew exponentially. At a time I needed nothing more than unconditional love and affection, I was judged, controlled, criticized and belittled. All of me became subject of fixing. Here I felt in defense and went into fight mode. Here I let fear entirely take over.

I’d forgotten how beautiful I am.

I discovered myself perpetuating this ‘fear,’ bringing this fear into other friendships and relationships. I began to spill out. And more and more ‘unfortunate’ events transpired. I don’t accept blame for my circumstance. I refuse to self-punish. I refuse to bring further fear into me. I also do not blame others. I spent enough of the past day doing so. I still have a quench of anger and a quench of distaste for those I encountered. But I recognize if others project into me, then I must in theory project into them. We are equal players. A tango exists, and neither is the leader or the follower, both trapped in this movement where fear is the dictator.

I have found my only refuge is in the continual release of all anger and blame; this means for self and others. Holding onto self-punishment or the punishment of others is detrimental.

I have remembered what I have been taught in the last two years, through readings, meditations, dreams, and daylight visions. I have been shown how to alleviate my pain and suffering through the release of past and present, through the release of all emotions not representational of love. I cannot go back and fix what has happened, nor can I make amends for what was. I only can stitch my own wounds back together with the thread of awareness and growth and confirm to self I did the best I knew with what I had. I can treat myself with self-respect and enough love to dispel the fear. I can let go of what will be of the future and what will come of the past. And stop replaying the ghosts in my head, the ones feeding me horrible lies of self. These are in my control: letting go, being in the present, focusing on love and love alone.

This is my life boat. To be. To love. To live.

home me

I have had a hard time of it for certain. In some ways, I know I created the chaos. In some ways, I know others were active participants. Where I end and others begin is still a grand mystery to me. Many a reader has told me I read his or her mind when I write. That I seem to capsulate the aspie experience. But what if they are reading mine? What if we are one mind? What if this is just one giant stream of consciousness, and I’m just a water drop with a voice?

424: To the Girl in the Altered State

| Aspergers Girls

To the girl in the altered state

Every once in a while, about six to ten times a month, I enter an altered state in which I cannot recognize or reason with myself. Mostly this happens during the week before my menstrual cycle, but also occurs sporadically throughout the span of a moon-cycle. I am not separate or without consciousness of experience during this altered time, but I am definitely separated from a healthy self-image and from a sense of hope. Partially, this state of being can be explained through the symptoms of PMDD and/or severe PMS. Partially, this altered mood state can be explained through environmental influences, such as exposure to people, foods, weather fluctuations, and events. Causes of the root of these states can also be found through the intake of others’ words, actions, body language, moods and emotions. These altered states are intensified, if not jump-started, by the complexities of my thoughts, including my innate ability to scaffold one thought upon the other, and then root my ideas through advance complexities of processing equivalent in design to a skyscraper building upward and outward with exploding and expanding firework-like threads.

Inside my mind is a jumble of ideas edging their way through to exactness and refinement, entering a filter of dissection and biopsy, spit out into a conveyer belt which feeds each piece with microscopic filaments of possibility. As my mind functions much like a separate entity of its own, I get carried away in the potential outcomes, swept into immensely thick images and awakening, I can both feel, create, and to some degree control.

Here is the only place I find a semblance of control, and because I can find this peace, this place of no unexpected upset, but instead a returning again and again to the matter at hand–this machine of causation digesting and reproducing with each throb of my heart—I can remain here unaware of the happenings around me, the things occurring outside of my own thinking.

This serves me well, my thinking-machine, in times of deadlines, needed production, problem solving and sorting. I have the capacity to debate both sides of an argument with ease, essentially seeing with expansive foresight the end-trail of either avenue taken. Whether I be supporting myself or another’s endeavors, I am more likely than not to typically find beneficial solutions and make beneficial progress with any given task. I am able to mass-produce with focused concentration and powerful self-drive. Nothing is forced, induced or made to happen; the output of self happens instinctually and naturally, the process akin to the effortlessness in which a flower unfolds. I am neither under pressure or in a state of panic. More so I find myself in a blissful alleyway of escape with my troubles blocked out on one side and my worries blocked out on the other. I have managed, through simply being, to slip past both the mundaneness and challenges of life, and bask in an inner-state of creation. Here, in this creation state I am blissfully working. Pouring out information in graphic and written form, both in hardcopy and in my mind. What I see is transmitted and then drafted. Draft upon draft is reassembled and reconstructed, both internally and externally. I am me, yet I am not, producing with an extremeness I am familiar with, a rush of production that seems to resemble an urgency and need, though, to the creator resembles a necessity of action—something one was born to do and must do to survive.

Given a subject, I can learn mass amounts of information in a short amount of time, not because I am told to or want to, but because I am internally driven to completely fill the vacant spaces in my mind with input. I am taking in what I crave, as if the newness was the exact food I needed. I have nothing to prove to anyone. And thoughts of improvement of self spurs feelings of the potentiality for pride. This pride feels like poison to me, indigestible and damaging to the whole of self. I create with passion and fever, but not for the reasons others might suspect. And the suspicion, the judgment, the expectations of onlookers, is the first part that disturbs what I take in. The latter part which causes disruption being the layers of guilt I wade through for being what I am in the way I delve into the alley of reprieve. Together, the meanderings of thoughts, including the knowingness of what I am and who I am (in the way I deviate from the world-proclaimed norm), the indigestible thoughts of feasibly self-filling through prideful ways, the known ways in which I appear to others through my behavior, and the guilt which soaks through, leaves me in a split state—one in which I am in the alley of reprieve but pushing back a self-punishing voice that regurgitates what I have been shown and told through experience and exposure of normalcy.

It is the processing and creation that occurs within me that both feeds me and causes the worst agony. Yet I can discard of the self-defeating thoughts most of the time, except the handful of times in which I am in an altered state and feeling low self-worth, as previously mentioned above.

During these moments, which I have called altered states, when I am emotionally at my end, sad and what could be labeled ‘depressed,’ I am tested by my own thoughts and circumstances, inventing ways to end my agony, and undoubtedly coming up empty with possible recourse and explanation. My mind takes off again, as if bound to creation with engines revved. Only this time I am digesting bits and pieces that don’t make sense and leave me suffering. I am stuck on the loop, a conveyor belt that keeps recirculating with the same information over and over. I keep misfiring inside, keep trying to solve the unsolvable, and inevitably end up disappointed and forlorn.

I can step back while in this state and feel myself adrift, unable to help or pull myself outside of a surrounding feeling of doom. Not one to dismiss possibilities or explanation, not setting aside feasible reasons, I keep forming hypothesis and testing theories through personal trial and error, digging myself deeper into confusion and darkness. The only way out is to sleep, to process verbally with another, to create through writing or art, or to cry. When I am on overload, having reinvented the same scenes again and again, dizzy and upset by my own making, I might have a panic attack.

During these times of reconstructing the same thoughts over and over, I cling to my greatest fear of the moment. For me this is usually attached to abandonment, sickness and death. I see these fears in full picture, too. And having died a thousand ways through various ailments or found myself worthless in forever isolation by all I love, I become exhausted. In theory, I suppose, I climb into a storybook of sorts, living out alternate lives again and again, wherein I am not the heroine but the doomed sufferer. If not a storybook than a vivid horror film in which the characters all dissolve and I am left alone in a sucking suffocating darkness that breathes me into a state of hopelessness. Because my mind is the way it is, for whatever cause or reason, the very tool that creates masterpieces is the same tool that creates my demise. In this way, the same control I lack in being swept into the alley of reprieve is the same tool I lack that keeps me from being sucked into crushing isolation.

Having tried various measures to offset these altered-states, I have found that some things can make a difference. But usually these measures are unexpected, unpredictable, and cannot be created through planning or intervention. The only thing that stops my altered-states is the unexpected. A few ways I am pulled out might include circumstances such as a joyful surprise, a state of urgency in which I need to help another or solve a pending challenge or expected occurrences such as a good friend visiting from out of town or a celebrated accomplishment.

Time and time again I have wished I had a letter to read to myself during this altered state. Ideally, I would benefit from videotaping myself reminding myself I will be okay because during the dark hours it seems nothing will ever stop the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain.

Dear Girl in the Altered-State,

You are here again, and you knew you would be; even though you think this is a new thing, it’s not! I know this time you think this is it, the end, the worst, the real test you will fail, the trial that will end you. Again, it’s not. You are fine. You are momentarily lost in a loop like a time traveler who has lost her way. The key word to remember is ‘momentarily.’

‘This too will pass. This too will pass.’ You aren’t going anywhere. You aren’t checking out. You aren’t crazy, and you are certainly not dying. No more than anyone else on earth, anyhow. You are a mortal and a human being and you are affected by so much in this world. You take in mass amounts of information, much of what you can’t even recognize until it is spewed out the other side through you, like some salmon flying upstream and landing on shore.

You are enough. I know you think you are not. But you are. You are pretty and smart and lovely. You are sweet and kind and caring. I know you think you aren’t good enough, no matter how hard you try and that you aren’t worthy. But you are.

In a few days you will be smiling again and loving life. Here are some important things to remember. The rest let go. All of it. I mean it. Let go of the worry, fret, regret, upset, and all that makes you mourn. Cry if you need to but don’t hold it in, and follow this list like a trail of breadcrumbs that will bring you home.

I love you. I love you so very much. You are brave and my princess, and you are never alone. You will lose your faith during this time, but the angels are still here. You will lose yourself, but you are still here. You will question everything and everyone, and not believe a positive word out of anyone’s mouth, including mine, but that is okay.

Still with all of this said, you will think this is it, the very last straw, the end of it all and the beginning of everlasting suffering. That’s bull. It really is. It’s a dark voice invented in some alley way in your mind. We don’t know why it happens, but it does. Probably a side effect of all your processing, like the sludge overspill form a well-greased engine. That’s all this is: an end result of your mind at work.

Don’t trust the negative messages and don’t make any decisions. And believe in us, in you, and finding your way back. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to fix yourself. You are perfect. And you don’t have to search for a way out. It will just come. The custodian is in there right now cleaning up the gunk with a mop. Just wait. That’s all. It’s okay if you are impatient and you don’t believe me. All is okay. I know that anything on this list will take all of your energy, but doing just one will help you. Remember I am here waiting, and you will come out of this altered state soon. For now pamper yourself and know you are loved.

1. Shower or take a salt bath. You will instantly feel better
2. Walk and if you can’t walk then dance to music. Move. Just move.
3. Accomplish one small task, like emptying the dishwasher, one little thing will show you that you are okay and capable of productive activity.
4. Create through your sorrow: dance, paint, draw, write, or do something that spills the emotions out of you into reality.
5. Process aloud with loved ones how you feel.
6. Treat yourself to food, you will be starved during this time, and that is okay. In a few days, once rebalanced, your healthy eating habits return.
7. Avoid the mirror and taking photos of yourself. How you view you is not reality. You are creating flaws and negative messages when you see yourself.
8. Go outdoors. Even if for a moment. Let your feet touch the earth.
9. Get in contact with nature, feed the wild crow or pet your crow, stare at the water, breathe in the air, soak in the green of your surroundings. Don’t hide out in your house, you will suffocate.
10. Allow yourself times of no production. Just be. And don’t analyze. If you need to listen to the same song over and over do it. If you need to watch a movie over and over, do it. Don’t judge yourself, your actions, or what you are doing. You are enough, and it is okay to rejuvenate.
11. Avoid triggers that increase anxiety including gluten products, coffee, and exposing yourself to people that drain your energy.
12. It’s okay to say no.
13. It’s okay to let go of your responsibilities, slow down, and take care of yourself.
14. It’s okay to cry and to be afraid.
15. Don’t try to solve, fix, or understand what is happening. It is out of your control and that is okay.

I love you, my precious one.
You are enough.