autism

448: Quilted Thoughts…

| Aspergers Girls

Some days I see lots of things, in beautiful pictures, pieces of floating loveliness, and I like to piece together what I experience in visual into a collaboration of words that rings cohesive wholeness into my interior being. This is this day’s quilt:

* When I doubt my worth and question my way of being, when I think I am lacking or not acting or responding in the right manner, I remind myself I am judging self by some pre-established norms I have attached to, that I am indeed honoring someone else’s deemed truth to diminish my own light. I cannot be all things to all people. I cannot even be all things to my self. Yet, I slip, time and time again, trying to honor this place of perfection that I know exists but cannot materialize in such a world made by man. It is here, in my troubled state of doubting my worthiness, I often pull closer to my belief in a higher source, and hold fast to the truth that I am established and deemed worthy in my humanness brought to life through spirit. That I am enough in the exact recognition that I want to be more, that I want to be better. That I am everything in my suffering to strive to be that which I know resonates in my heart as truth and love. Here is where I must let myself slip further, back into the place of wholeness, before I was birthed into this world, a place filled with mystery that baffles and complicates the essence of self. Here I must remember, in the inside of my being, that I exist as purity, and without a doubt remember as well that my very questioning of adequacy demonstrates the depths of my passion to be good.

* The world has taught me to hide my dark side, to shine a façade of joyful-bliss and positive being. I have taught myself that no such existence of positive being is found, for I am not the parts of me divided: the good, the bad, the worthy, the unworthy. I am me in completion, in all my states; and no state is fluid in consistency, just as no state is stagnant or definable. There are no lines and boundaries inside of me. I cannot flag who I am as worthy of exposure or unworthy of veiling. For I am ever moving and ever changing, a wave that cannot be captured outside the oceans, outside the element of I am. I have taught myself to shine in all my travels. There is nothing about me I need to keep undercover. For to think something of self must be kept secret is to honor the practice of hiding. I do not exist to conform to the rigid guidelines created by the act of the masses’ ever-changing clutching of the illusion of normalcy. I exist to be the only way I know how: in the totality of self.

* Every time I meet another female with Aspergers, and peer into the depths of her genuine-loving spirit and grasp the miraculous complexities of her pondering mind, I fall in love with my self again and again.

* I go to a place so dark and dismal that no one can reach me there. And in this place, I cannot find my way out. In this place I cry, either inside or outside, more afraid of the whys and reasonings of the experience than the experience itself; for it seems there, in this place, my thoughts are a strange shovel, so that with every passing reasoning I dig myself deeper in, until I am lost. It is an extreme place of isolation and loneliness that no one, absolutely no one, can understand, unless they have been there. And it is a place that seems so far away when it disappears: as if it exists in a distant land I never belonged in to begin with. At moments it seems I will never return, but then it comes again without warning, like some ghost that steals my soul.

* Freedom arrived when I recognized that my heart is pure. Freedom entered when I dislodged the words flaw, imperfection, and normalcy from my reality. Freedom stayed when I embraced my self and silenced the haunting voices of strangers’ unfounded truths. Freedom grew when I accepted that to love myself in completion was the definition of beautiful.

sammy sammy

an afterthought…
You might be an aspie if you type something as simplistic as ‘xo’ and then wonder, in depth, if the person reading your markings will assume you really are hugging and kissing them in a non-platonic way; so to avoid confusion, you delete the ‘xo’ and replace it with ‘blessings;’ only to find yourself questioning if, in fact, the word blessings might be offensive to someone who does not believe in a higher power or the ability to bless. Thinking perhaps you might be perceived as a person that is placing her beliefs onto another, the word ‘blessing’ vanishes, and you choose a safe word that likely won’t offend anyone, or lead anyone to question your motives. Then, in the act of choosing this alternative way of expressing self, you question your seeming inability to be your true self, because you are so wrapped up in what others would deem ‘people pleasing.’ This all occurs together with the recognition that you aren’t ‘people pleasing’ at all, but indeed aiming to be as authentic and true to yourself while contemplating all the feasible ways your words will be misinterpreted because others have attached to preconceived norms of right and wrong….

(How can something be an afterthought? I don’t get that..you are still thinking…it doesn’t come after thought, it is still thought. lol)

428: Impermanence

| Aspergers Girls

Impermanence.

I understand the word. I feel the word. I live the word. I am hyper aware of impermanence. It is all around me. The constant changing elements of water, the river that is never the same once visited again. I understand all is in continuum. Nothing ever stops and nothing ever stays. I think I have understood this since I was a small child. I think that understanding such complex concepts at a young age added to my anxiety.

Perhaps this is when I began to cling to my imagination deeper and deeper, and began to learn how to survive. I was a fledgling set out to fly far too early. Someone unadjusted to the world at large made to be a part of something she did not understand and did not want to understand. I hid in my very own nightmares, determined to fight off demons in an arena I created, untouched by the outside.

I jumped fence after fence, leaping from robbers and ‘bad guys.’ I protected my mother from the giant waves coming at us as I clung to the ocean cliffs for life. I ward off monsters pulling me down the bed.

It was impossible to live in the present. Entirely impossible. To feel everything at once would have been liken to an internal combustion. I would have exploded, in one way or another. Instead I locked everything inside and I made promises. I promised to grow up to be a good person, to be a good mommy, and to make a difference in the world. I turned my terrible angst into hope. I set goals. I set conditions. And I made order out of the chaos.

Eventually my goals were reached. I’d done everything I’d ever wanted. My life was set. Every single one. And there I sat, not too long ago, lost. For what was I to do when everything I’d set to do had been reached?

I understood myself and the dynamics of my life. I understood the deepest of religious thoughts and philosophies. I understood my journey and all that had transpired. At least to the greatest degree possible for the person I was.

Had I been a different person years ago…oh so it seemed. Had I been made new week after week, waking up to a person I did not know or recognize? Indeed. I was transformed from the inside out. The dreams, prophetic and enriched with symbolism, came. The painting, the drawing, the poetry, the intense unbearable passion. I was wrapped up in this whirlwind I could not control. I was swept away by the beauty. I was floating. I was where I thought I would remain.

Only I was drowning. I was suffering in a rigidness and extremeness. I was stuck again. I lost myself in a way I didn’t know way possible. I flew up to the ceiling of my own life in a bubble of my own. Everything and everyone seemed a burden but my God. I was able to love, yes, unconditionally, but I wasn’t able to be. I wasn’t there. I was lost in yet another formed self.

I was reformed into something I was not. At least it seems that way through the eyes of retrospection. But what if that was who I am? What if at that moment that was me in completion: this lost heroine found to her own self. I do not know. I only know I was drifting. I was floating. I was no longer grounded. Nothing was that had been before, and all seemed lost and found at once.

It was my new escape. I know this in looking back. But I never would know it then. I’d transported into another place and into another state of being to survive. What was I surviving? This place.

I’d set new rules upon myself: to not fixate, to stay in the present, to be of service, to love unconditionally, to forgive everyone, to release anger. All beneficial rules. All effective measures. Except I wrapped myself in barbwire. I literally took the fencing that had always caged me in—the fence of rules, regulations, and must-do’s—and then made the fencing my very skin. I took my self and made myself the rigidness. I bleed for the world. Or so I thought.

But I was really bleeding for me. I was finally coming to the cuffing of self—to the last prison—the last restrictions of soul. I was making myself believe that through effort, sacrifice, and obeying I would at last be free. That through service, I would at last have found the answer.

I didn’t realize that I no longer need to suffer to be the light.
I didn’t realize that I no longer have to search to find who I already am.
I didn’t realize that the very impermanence that haunted me as a youth, was the same impermanence that would pull me through.

I went on my knees. I curled on the floor and I wept. For through everything, I believed I still hadn’t sacrificed enough. I believed I had to be tortured to heal the world. I believed if I wasn’t bled out I couldn’t survive. I thought, without reason, that to live was to die a thousand deaths.

I begged for reprieve, for change, for retreat. And it came.

The waves of trials. The turmoil of emotions. The constant moving of my foundation. Everything bubbled up and exploded as hot molten. Everything splattered and spilled and spat—hot liquid pain. And the landscape reformed burying me in the process. Momentarily, unable to breathe or float or be, I dug through the debris. I suffered then, but in a different way.

I suffered through finding where I’d last left myself. And I found me. Somewhat buried, too. But not as deep. Just set out as a shell beside the shadows where I moved; hidden beneath the very darkness I carried. An invisibleness that formed into shape with each of my worries and woes. I found me there then, or what remained of me, all withered and severed. And I remembered that I had this funny way of finding places to go while leaving the rest of me behind. I had to have been there, I supposed, in this place of no place, while the other slipped on my suit of being. I had to be there and rest, beyond the structure of the illusion of our world, so I could awaken to me again and behold the lands ruptured and renewed

425: What if I don’t have Aspergers?

| Aspergers Girls

What if I DON’T have Aspergers

But what if I don’t have Aspergers? What if this is just me clinging onto a thread in hopes of not being alone in this world?
What if we are just aliens, light-workers, empaths, sensitives or advanced spiritual beings?
What if I am a reincarnated sage?
What if I am a Buddhist paying for previous karmic waves?
What if I am truly crazy, self-inventing my own condition to feel more normal in claiming I am unique?
What if Aspergers doesn’t exist and this is just a human condition?
What if this whole Aspergers is a trend and being over diagnosed?
What if I am making this up in my head to fit in with a collective?
What if I find out from an expert I have something else and not Aspergers?
Am I smart enough to have Aspergers?
Am I odd enough?
Am I enough of anything?
Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee stop!
Who cares?
Really?
Get rid of the name. Call it a chicken-foot fungus dance. Call it the mushroom’s puke master. Call it genius. Call it gifted. Call it looney. I don’t really care!
WE found each other. And WE have more in common than not after years of feeling isolated and alone.

I don’t care what man-invented name, based on a collective documented list of traits based on the observation of some male behavior years ago, was the reason we met. WE met. And that’s what Aspergers means to me: Union.

We are together. We are no longer alone.
Perhaps we ARE from another planet.
Perhaps we are the only humans really here and the rest are reptilians.
Perhaps we are light-workers.
Perhaps we are entirely lost and confused.
Perhaps we are crazy nuts.
Perhaps we are the change the world needs.
Perhaps we are a trend, a wake, or a breaking.
Perhaps we are the new normal.
Perhaps we are just like everyone else.
I don’t care.
Stop trying to analyze what we are and who we are and why we are, and accept WE ARE.
There is no you verses them. There is no us verses them. There is no separation.
It is all just manmade games.
We just managed to survive.
To keep our heads above water.
To see through the madness.
To understand there are things, definite things that need changing in this world.
And if we want to start focusing on self-awareness, self-love, and self-acceptance, then YAY US.
I don’t care how you get there….to that point where life starts to make sense and you start to realize you aren’t alone and aren’t imperfect and have so much to give the world.
I just want you to know YOU matter and YOU make a difference and YOU are never alone.
Stop tromping over our parade, all of you doubters, critics, and people who feel the need to give your two cents about something that isn’t your journey.
I don’t care.
I really don’t.
Beyond the need I feel to tell the rest, who have struggled in pain so very long, that you are right where you need to be. Whatever you need to hold onto to build yourself up after this world has attempted to break you down, is what you need and is YOUR choice.
Shine, shine, shine.
It doesn’t matter if you have Aspergers or don’t, or if this word never exists again.
Let go of the word and reasons.
Just let go.
Breathe.
And be.
I love you.
Whatever you choose to call yourself.

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.