yucky stuff

Day 163: Super Freak

| Aspergers Girls

I’m a SUPER FREAK this morning. I am pretty sure my youngest has restless leg syndrome. And he definitely talks, moans, and moves a whole lot in his sleep. Oh, yes…..traveling once again, and so very much reminded of my human condition. This time an eleven hour drive to California with my three boys, ages ten, thirteen, and fourteen…..oh boy! Literally!

Just pulled this writing up from early May 2012. Today, again, having slept in a hotel (sigh) I am dealing with much overload, lack of sleep, exhaustion, and grumpiness. Hope to have a happier disposition tomorrow after a decent night’s sleep. If you see a woman having a meltdown on the side of Highway 5 in California…that would be super freak me!

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On the first day of our trip to the Island of Maui, I was reminded of my over sensitive system. I hadn’t imagined the plane fight would be such an unpleasant experience. I’d forgotten, or more likely, I’d hoped for change.

Many people with Aspergers, if not all, are extremely sensitive. They feel emotions and feelings in great depth. Likewise, their senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are very acute. Often, a person experiences sensory overload when he or she is outside his everyday environment. In some cases, home or perhaps nature, are the only places that are tolerable to the senses. Outside of the comfort zone, a person with Aspergers can likely feel an overwhelming degree of agitation, pain, and misery. This is one of the reasons I prefer to spend more time at home than in public places. Sensory overload can lead to meltdowns—which are akin to adult tantrums—a screaming out for help, when one does not know how to help one’s self.

In considering sound, where many people can block out background noise and focus without distraction, people with sensory sensitivities hear everything at once. There is no mute button. And there is no making the noise stop, beyond earplugs and escape.

The other senses work the same. Textures irritate. Smells overwhelm and overtake. Sights hurt. And even the taste of air is unpleasant.

It appears there is something about the Asperger’s sensory and processing system that cause people to sense things in the environment in segmented over-exaggerated parts, instead of whole. Instead of looking upon a crowd and seeing a crowd, one looks upon a multitude of bombarding shapes and sizes, each movement as uncomfortable to view as the next.

People with sensory sensitivities are acutely aware of everything happening in their environment and everything seems to be occurring all at once. There isn’t release. What would be a soft unnoticeable hum to one becomes a piercing roar to the other. It is as if someone has turned up the volume of every single sensory organ.

There is no relaxation, only the constant stream of shards—parts of chatter, parts of the ticking clock, parts of the rattling and  hum. There are parts of smells, all sorted out and classified, not mingled, not forgotten. There are parts of tastes—the breath, the air, the fragrances, the poisons chemicals. Sights are in parts. Fragmented pieces that attempt to make a whole, but fail. A face not remembered except as shape of wrinkled wide nose and color of dark narrow eyes. Even the mind is in parts, continually breaking down wholes to subsections. Whole to parts is easy. Parts to whole is hard. Nothing is as it appears. Everything is in parts. It is the parts that bring agony, the endless parts that bring with them the impossibility of finding retreat in the whole.

With my sensory sensitivities, the six-hour ride in the airplane to Maui was torturous. No mind control, mantras, visualization, or distractions could stop the parts. And lacking the ability to help myself, sank me into self-blame. I sat in misery wishing to time travel into sweet oblivion. I became depleted, agitated, and depressed. Meltdown was avoided, but angry eyes prevailed.

The worst was the piercing babies’ cries. There were at least ten babies on the plane. There wasn’t a time when one wasn’t screaming.

I did find refuge. I had my words. I could write. I could escape through the process of creating images, feelings, and thoughts into story. Words were my parachute and freedom, a passport away from the screaming shards.

Cry from the Sky

Imploded

Without retreat

Saturated misery

Roots into ear

Vine out

Crumpling, tearing, crackling paper

The rhythmic off beat dance murdering peace

Stop!

Bring silence

Opening cans, clanging carts, annoying repetitive footsteps

Bumping in front, bumping in back

An uninvited rollercoaster

No escape

The babies scream and scream again

Piercing thorns

Constant chatter, whispers, sighs

Conversations bleed into a monster of noise

Roaring engine rattles fury

Even the yawns scream

Squishing and swishing misshapen bodies

Stench

Stale garbage

One hundred meals at once

Beyond window, the fresh and silence beckons

A tease of the unattainable

Aches, irritations, stiffness, icy cold

Suffocating soreness

More bumping, more banging

Nothing is calm

Nothing is motionless

Everything moving

Everything in parts

One broken into a thousand

Question after question

Comment after comment

Trapped in stinging air

Recycled germs everywhere

Breathing in danger

Stop. Shut up. Cease

Release me

Put a cork in the child’s mouth

Put a muzzle on the man

Put a mute light on

STOP MOVING!

Energy spikes, energy flows, energy feeds

Energy spirals, burrows, pangs

Into self

Close eyes

Close noise

Close people

Close the outside

Focus on inside

Focus on calm

And still the babe screams

“Help me!”

Day 160: Decreasing Photons

| Aspergers Girls

I have the hardest time writing when I am trying not to confront what is troubling my mind.

At those times, when angst is knocking on spirit’s door, I tend to write romantic and lust-filled poetry, or distract myself with stories from the past. I tend to grasp onto my muse, my anchor, a jolt that compels me into another state of reality.

Today I am insecure. I am insecure about my appearance, my personhood, my ability to shine, and my very spirit. I am looping in thought. And the taters are hitting the fan. I am worried that I am not enough, even though innately I know I am. I am worried that I am a facade, even though at my core I know I am authentic. I am worried about my health and a host of other items.

Insecurity is an emotion I’ve dealt with pretty much my entire life on earth, at least ever since my mother and father divorced. My insecurity quadrupled in size when my mother divorced my stepfather, and I was never able to see my step brothers and sisters again. My insecurity grew when my best friend was kidnapped, my pets died as I predicted, my homes constantly changed, and my mother became lost in her own world. The emotion mutated and divided when I mistook a teenager for the man I would marry someday and teenage girls for trusted confidants. And grownups as safety. The emotion enveloped the whole of me when I reached adulthood and realized I was very much still an infant.

I remember being so brave, so strong, and trying and trying to do the right thing. If I could only do the right thing, then life would be manageable. I remember with clarity the day my friends collected starfish on the ocean shore; I remember running up the sandy hill to the the truck, and hovering in the camper shell weeping, because no one would listen as I cried and shouted on the beach that the starfish were living creatures, and my friends were killing them. I remember lots of times crying in enclosed spaces…in tents, in closets, under covers, in bushes….anywhere I could escape the sadness surrounding me.

I figured if I tried hard enough, I could make a difference in my world and within myself. Take away the horrible pain. I thought if I tried enough, I too would get the promises, the opportunity, the good stuff.

I tried so hard that I succeeded in many ways, I gather. Only I don’t know what I succeeded in or for whom.

I like to pretend sometimes I have the answers.

I like to pretend I am carrying this grand light of wisdom and trust, of faith and hope, of all things precious and divine.

I like to pretend ego is in the backseat, Source at the wheel, and my present moment is the only one that matters.

I like to pretend.

I can’t tell imaginings from reality. I can’t find the line. I doubt the line even exists.

Sometimes I think I shine too much. Sometimes I think I lost the earthly cloak that stops the inner glow, that stops me from becoming depleted. I wonder what I’ve given up in order to shine. I wonder if the dark is perhaps a better place to go.

I thought writing would be my avenue, my escape, a way I could finally be me. But the pressure is building and the patterns are starting, and everything seems a repeat. Again I am soother,  lifter, giver, sweet Sam, adored,  gentle, kind…so kind. I’m still flawed. I get that. I’m not perfect. But I lean to the side of trying to be perfect, trying to be what I think others want to see. I make others my gods, my suitor, my love. I make people my exact reflection; their opinions my barometer. I see in my own mirror what I imagine others see. And then I tell myself not to. To stop. To trust. And then I wonder what and whom to trust, when my very existence seems a dream.

No matter how many times I tell myself I am enough, I still search. I think that if a certain person loves me then everything else will be erased. I dream of being rescued. I dream of escaping this life. A life that by most standards is wonderful. I have no idea where I would escape to. I have absolutely no idea. I just know I long to escape.

My mind is constant. Everything and everyone is questioned. Each comment I answer is weighted and analyzed. Each word I write a drop of blood, a hope that I spoke correctly, I answered honestly, I did my best. Each letter of the alphabet carries the weight of an elephant.

Typing is not typing. Typing is risking. Each word leads to thoughts. Each thought to more evaluation. Why do I care? Why can’t I let go? Why can I not accept me? Why does one person hold my world and my worth? Why can I not care only about the other and not about me? Why is my ego still here? Why do I have any motive at all except love? What is the right amount of drive? Am I too driven? Am I not driven enough? Am I too honest? Am I not honest enough? What is telling the whole truth, if not laying out my emotions? What is truth?

And yes, what of this light? This grand light? Is it anything beyond descending and decreasing photons………….

________

Day 157: The Demons at the Door

| Aspergers Girls

The Demons at the Door

The phone rang: one old pale orange phone with a curled orange cord that hung on the light blue wall.

A heavyset woman with a short-shaved haircut picked up.  She looked like my mother’s long ago roommate, the heavy-boned woman who taught me how to shower; the one I’d once tried to forget.  The one that reminded me of plums—how they can be split open with bare hands and the insides all sucked out.

“Stew, it’s for you!” The stranger hollered across the lobby.  Her eyes scanned the room like a mother surveying the clutter on a table. She hadn’t wanted to truly look, but she did nonetheless. “Anybody seen Stew?”  She scanned again while yawning, and then spoke.   “Can’t find him. Try again later.”

The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers

© Everyday Aspergers, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. https://aspergersgirls.wordpress.com

Song to go with found here.

Day 150: The Faded Sun

| Aspergers Girls

The Faded Sun

“Was it your voice or another voice that told you to kill yourself?” the stranger asked.

“My own voice,” I whispered from a mouth I could no longer feel.

I brought myself forward in a chair, a purposeful push, only to prove to myself I could move, that my brain synapses fired.  I nodded solemnly in the direction of a blank white space.  There was a stain in the high corner.  I was unable to focus, unable for the first time to pretend.  I had always been able to follow someone, to take the cue from the people around me.  Here I could not.  Here, though I was clothed, I was stripped naked, paralyzed with the thought that there were no answers…

 

The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers

 

Maui 2012

 

Day 148: Protector

| Aspergers Girls

Protector

misery

clanks like devil’s bells

burning muscles

closing eyes

through puffed out face

joints bent and scorched

monster in the mirror

tired

so tired

fatigue overwhelms

long to give up

to sleep life away

to escape

without burden

without tears

satisfied

don’t want to complain

to be here

in this space

where the future is absent

where pain draws his dark curtain of dismay

my innocent woe

a stage for fear’s echoed speech

rescuer where stand you

with fading voice I beckon

I beg

listen to your angel bright

and whisper your presence

trace the edges of my existence

with your dancing fingers

send feather-light kisses

through bleeding indigo sky

caress me in every thought

as eyes to tender sunrise

serve as prince’s cradle

my protector

lance turned syringe

siphoning fully

the chamber of ache

from the caverns

of my withered

and broken

weeping soul

by Sam Craft

June 17, 2012