I want to please you. I want to be ‘normal.’ I want to come out of my shell and fit in. I want you to see me in all my glory and love me in my completion. I want to be all you ever wanted and needed.
I hear, from deep within myself.
I want to dance like no one is watching. Believe no one is watching, and spin and spin without a care in the world. I want to be free. Open to all without fear of over-exposure.
I cry, from deep within myself.
Why is it that my existence seems so different and locked up? A prisoner without a key? Why must I continue to pace, one corner to the next, chiseling away at invisible barriers?
I pound, from deep within myself.
I am tired of waking up to me. This sameness unaltered in every way—still tired. Still scared. Still this child who was dropped down into a misty nowhere.
I plead, from deep within myself.
I hate it here, inside this me. When the walls close in, and the voices of unreason come, the mind cycling through unwanted thoughts, over and over, some washing machine gone haywire, off-balance, loud, uncomfortable rocking.
I bang, from deep within myself.
I should know better by now, the world tells me so. The world dictates my wellness. How to be. What to say. Where to go. Whom to turn to. What to run away from. Bombarding me with their fragmented answers they hold as truths.
I watch, from deep within myself.
Back and forth the dreams go. One day full. The next moment empty. Unbridled towering emotions surging through me. An ocean, a river—the continual rapids of intake. Equilibrium broken. Eternally walking on the high wire above the crashing falls.
I breathe, from deep within myself.
Where am I today? Where did I go? I feel the eyes of judgment. Daunting glares they are. Again? Again? Again? Can she not learn? Can she not break her pattern? Hasn’t she had enough of this self she proclaims?
I wither, from deep within myself.
Tethered to the billion ideas lingering. A graveyard alive of circumstantial evidence. Dug up. Exposed to the rotted bone. And still empty solutions. A ghost alive, drifting away, as the shell collapses beneath the weight of the world.
I separate, from deep within myself.
Hold me, I proclaim. Touch me. I shout out. Not wanting to be moved in a human way. Not wanting the flesh. But what is beyond the flesh. The richness of soul to penetrate mine and make me into the woman less lost and lonely.
I shiver, from deep within myself.
Alone I am in this dance of mind. Brilliantly bright. Brilliantly kind. Tender. Deep. An open book turned asunder. The worn spine split upward into the heaven’s tears. Angel wings tarnished, bent, left for good.
I wait, from deep within myself.
Save me. Oh, someone, I do not know. Save me from my bitter-torn vision of life. This someone who was not made for this place of earth, this uproar of fanatical placating, this constant course of soothing gone wrong.
I stagger, from deep within myself.
Broken, I am, I speak. From the highest peak within. Standing on the ledge of tomorrow. Leaping into the unknown. Free fall. Tumbling into the newest unwanted.
I land, from deep within myself.
And here I am again. The same swollen woman filled with the forgotten pieces of beauty. Shattered and made whole in the misery of my making. Here I am again, swinging from the stars of my forgotten soul.
I have had a very stressful summer. Many of those items listed in publications as the top stressors in life happened to me, or almost happened, in the last four months. I have lost my equilibrium and suffered some serious health ‘flares.’ I also managed to lose sight of all I had gained in the last six months, in regards to my faith and ability to trust in all things working out.
I understand, even in these darker moments, all is unfolding for a higher purpose. This has been my belief since a small child, and whether or not I am accurate in my faith, makes no difference, as I must believe in something outside my realm of existence to continue onward. It has always been that way. I have always looked to the stars for reassurance and the acknowledgment that my pain, and my joy, serves a purpose. If I didn’t have purpose in living, I wouldn’t want to live.
Currently, and for a long time, my purpose has been in serving. With my physical limitations, I can now best serve through my words.
However, through this blogging journal, I have noticed that when I write I sometimes receive a jolt of what could best be described as glee. In producing a part of self into writing, I become wrapped up in ribbons of gold and a sense of celebration. The little girl I am shines and flies through the skies. But then, something else inevitably interrupts, in which I am pulled down, beyond the balancing point, and pressed deep within my soul. It is there I sit, in a dimly lit isolation, gathering the pieces of me I had released, and pulling in that string of joy.
It is an oddity and a familiarity that leaves me with a bitter-broken taste. In theory, I seem to have a naturally built in self-regulator for hubris and pride. I can only lift so far, until I find I am reeling myself back in—some flying fish, netted, hooked, and spun back down at full spinning-speed. I can feel it physically. I can witness it spiritually.
I used to believe this process, of exuberance turned sorrow, was a subconscious protective mechanism rigged in my early childhood in response to environmental influence. I see now, with much reflection, that I am indeed made with an internal thermostat, with a dial turned to the point where my self-based joy cannot rise too high without immediate departure to sub-zero levels. In moments, I feel leashed in, unable to charge outside of the confinements of my boundaries without the reminder of the chained-collar choking my neck. I do not think this is an affliction or a psychological response to my upbringing. I do not think this is biological. I do believe this is another part of how my brain functions. I believe in whatever way I was ‘programmed’ or ‘wired’ or put together, I was given an internal system that keeps my nature in check. I believe I have this same system in place for other parts of me as well.
I cannot stop it. I cannot choose to remain elated. Nor can I choose to remain sad. I am brought to the height, pulled back into the deep, and then set at balance, cleaned and reformed. Sometimes I wonder if I am not constantly shifting and readjusting, an entity truly in constant transition. And that perhaps I am keenly aware of this process. In remembering my childhood, I had the sensation of being just outside the realm of the reality of my peers, conceptualizing and processing at a faster and deeper rate than my playmates; in comparison, today, I can step back and see this existing outside of the arena of life, happening still, only the concepts and ponderings are substantially more complex.
As I continue to write, and share through my thoughts and words, I continue to observe myself and the transformations I make. Wherein I used to barely recognize myself in looking back in time, say some five or ten years ago, in the sense I seemed much changed and transformed. Now I can barely recognize the self I was just last month or last week. In some ways, I seem to be processing through more in a day than I had in previous years. And in other ways, I seem to slip out of one skin of being, into another. I do not know if this is because of my brain or because of my empathic abilities, or a combination of the two. What I do know is I find it harder and harder to hold on to who I am in this moment, knowing that what I think I am will be changing. I find it difficult to be stagnant and stern in my opinions, perception, and desires. Being I feel in a state of constant motion, I find safe harbor in the continual ability to connect and reach out, which ironically signifies the exact thing that brings me flying high and then flinging back down.
I have been depleted for two weeks, utterly exhausted, in pain, and unable to do much of anything, beyond a few simple errands. But that’s okay.
My life is a process. I am a process. And I firmly believe, despite my intense moments of pure panic and doomsday fear of my singular obliteration, that all is unfolding as it is meant to be.
I have had a lot of time to think, and over-think.
The thing is, with so much time to think, my mind tends to go into overdrive. I try to find all types of creative ways to preoccupy my brain, but it does its thing regardless. I sketched, I wrote poetry, I wrote a post or two (I think), I discovered how to make posters with my original photography and quotes, I watched a bunch of movies, or at least the first thirty-minutes of a lot of movies. I had a hard time focusing. My body wanted to move—to walk, to get out, to accomplish something, part of my body at least.
I got rather forlorn and lost in myself. Biologically this is caused, I gather, from the fluctuating hormones from PMDD. Physically, I hurt from what is most likely the result of my childish (as in spanking it) short term memory, in which I forget I have various muscle ‘conditions’ and quite frankly act like a dang super athletic hero, when I ought be seriously sitting on the sidelines.
I tend to forget I have limitations. Seems to be my area of expertise: overlooking limitations.
And… when it comes to my body, it’s not advantageous to overlook feasible limitations.
I have to learn to listen to this part of me, and I am finding I am a wee bit stubborn.
I keep thinking something will change. That if I just look hard enough, try hard enough, and just BE hard enough, (in that place of letting-go-zen-di-ness), that I will transform. That this physical pain will dismiss itself, and I can run and leap and charge forward like a little girl reborn, without repercussions.
The truth is: It’s time to let go of who I want to be and time to embrace who I am.
I am disabled.
I have had free parking (courtesy of the blue handicap plaque) for four years now. I have been unable to work more than part time for 12 years now. I have scoured literature on every disease, affliction, and illness known to man, and though I have developed practical theories on why I am the way I am, in regards to my pain ailments, I have not solved anything. Today, after thousands and thousands of research hours, and attempts at various regiments, restrictions, and so on, I am no closer to discovering an avenue of reprieve, than I was over a decade ago.
Deep breath.
I am coming to grips with this today. I am mourning. I am realizing that it is really time to throw in the towel. I can choose to spend my next decade focusing on a cure and an explanation, or I can choose to focus on the life I do have. I am not giving in. Not in the least. And I can’t promise I am giving the search up, but I do know that I am shedding attachment. And discarding of some lie I have enchanted my spirit with that preaches: I am not enough.
I am enough. I am not my pain. I am not my condition. I am not anything that has a name or label. I can’t be defined. And I am not inadequate, flawed, made wrong, or damaged. I just AM. I want to drill that into me. I want to tell myself again and again I just AM.
I have had enough. Enough tears. Enough struggles. Enough puzzle solving. In all my efforts, that I know aren’t wasted, but definitely over-drawn, I have collected more and more diagnosis, theories, and questions than a singular being ever needs in one life time. And all for what? To find out I am at square one, back on the couch, unable to proceed with a ‘normal’ life.
This is my normal.
I need to digest that like chocolate. I need to let it melt into my mouth—melt into me.
I need to hear it. I need to accept that I am okay with where I am at and to stop fighting. I have fought my entire life over one thing or another, trying to make better, to find the escape, to find the peace, to find the remedy.
My sickness, or ailment, of phantom quest, whatever I choose to call it, is a symbolic representation of my spiritual hunger, that need I have for answers and truth.
I thought I had let go enough to accept the flow of life, to be that stream. I know I have in many areas. But my health seems to have taken over my brain-processing like a singular-minded dictator. Getting better is pretty much all I can think about. It’s all I can do. I am over powered by this innate drive to fix and solve.
And I am rebelling. It is time.
This is as good as it gets. Right now, at this very moment, for you and for me. And if I can’t be happy exactly where I am sitting, whatever my circumstances be, then life will continue to be a rollercoaster.
Oh, how I want to blame the fixers of the world. Try this. Try that. Do this, it helped me. Have you done this?
Oh, how I want to blame the complainers of the world. Always me. Poor me. That’s me, too. It’s so terrible. I wish I was dead.
Oh, how I want to blame the proclaimers of the world. Just change your energetic vibration. Just visualize your reality. Create yourself in wholeness. Illness is illusion.
Oh, how I want to blame the coaches of the world. Just be strong. Life could be so much harder. You have so much to be thankful for. It’s not that bad. Toughen up, girly.
Oh, how I want to blame God. Why did you do this to me, Lord? Why me? Should I be better? Should I try harder? Is this punishment? Is this my fault?
Oh, how I want to blame the past me. Karma. It must be karma. Come to kick me in the butt. I must have done something right. I mean I have had a lot of accomplishments and love in life. But man, I must have really screwed up somewhere.
Oh, how I want to blame the concept of normal. Why can’t I be like her? Does she understand how hard this is? She takes her health for granted? She has no idea what suffering is?
Oh, how I want to blame the invisibility. No one can see this pain. No one can understand. I am so alone and isolated, forlorn, forgotten, un-important and lost.
Oh, how I want to blame everything and everyone, but me.
I have a choice today. I can join anyone I am blaming. I can blame them or become them (minus God) or I can start to be ME.
I can start relishing life for what I can do, and not blaming life for what I cannot do.
I can begin by pointing the finger at self, and then softly point the finger away to a space of emptiness. For no one and nothing is to blame. And just as there is no blame, there is no hidden promise of discovery to what ails me. What ails me cannot be relieved through attachment. Just as in my spiritual quest, I understand what ails me can only be relieved through letting go.
So today, I am letting go.
I am releasing this clinging-need to make myself whole and healed. I am accepting I already am whole and healed. I am accepting that the latest advice, tip, or cure isn’t for me. Nothing is out there. And if it is, this nothing, this something morphed from nothing, will find me when I am ready. I have to trust in the higher plan. In the course. In the miracle. I have to believe that this is as good as it gets, and be happy in this moment. For life is only this moment.
It’s hard to find the center of me. I tend to swing from one extreme to the next. Sometimes becoming my own captain and other times my own martyr. I can be undeniably strong and passionate in one moment, and the next, fallen, some lost child too ashamed to face the world.
I am hard on myself. I push myself. I know no other way of being. On the days I seem to blend in, another ghost in the world, not making my mark, or mistakes, or anything beyond normalcy, are the days I have drawn out of my reserves. I have taken out from somewhere the stockpile of self-esteem, self-worth, and self-love, bottled from the days of reprieve, and, in attempt to function, drenched myself in the overflow of me. I can walk in the world that way: as a form of former self, reclaimed and reopened.
If I do not, if I cannot find the reserves, I simply cannot be, and I must sink away into another world of creation, imagination, and slumber. I can sit aimlessly this way, repeating the same tasks, haunted by the same thoughts, and wondering where I am. In these moments, I am frightened into stillness, because the part of me I thought I was is no longer.
In some ways, every few hours, I seem to awaken to a new self, the other discarded and bottled, filed in the stream of somewhere else. And in many ways, I have to find the pieces I was to make sense of what I have become. I sit as a fisherman, hooked by my own hook, flaying about in search of something gone, something broken. It is me, I find, again and again, but no one I recognize. And I fail myself in this way, turning about trying to bring back myself from where I went and what I’ve done.
There are so many of me at times, it seems the universe is alive within, and I am but the essence of what has already happened. I am my past and barely my present. My future unattainable. I cannot explain the dynamics more than to say I am awake and aware of the process, but rendered entirely helpless. For some reason I have escaped again from something I know not what of, to become someone I do not recognize, and to sit in wonderment of where I am.
To exist in a state outside my own isolation requires the assembly of a massive team of onlookers. Not the people or the public, by the interior eyes on the walls inside of me. There is a team there of limitless resource; each expert a supporter of thought, and each thought an assembly line to the experts. I move and breathe in awareness of the inside of my own self. I question and conquer my surroundings and my very existence.
I am in a heightened state of being and, thusly so, in a physically exhausted state from the bombardment of awareness. I take in everything and everyone, beyond the surface, dividing and multiplying conclusions and theories. I take in even the process of the taking, analyzing the way in which my mind works, as it’s churning. Slipping beyond just being to being within the within.
The energy required to merely exist, outside the elements of rest and retreat, is the same energy required to fuel a giant battleship. I can float well enough, at the mercy of the elements, and definitely sink without assistance, but to move and continue to move, I must tap into the reservoir of self. I must find a section, a team, a group meandering about me, and rein them in, to teach them to teach me the ways. To remind me of how to move and what to contribute. To remind me of what not to say, and how to save myself, when what is spoken has gone too far.
I watch me, and I want to tell the others, outside of me, that this is not me. That on another day I will be entirely different. That each day I live I am renewed and born again. That what is seen is not me and what I see is not them.
Yet, I am made to believe all is real and all is as is, and that what I am, in my limited projection filtered through a limited perception, is me in totality. Nothing is further from the truth. I am not as the world makes me to be. And neither is the stranger before me.
And so I walk awake and exhausted, pretending to move through a game in which there is no end, with a limited fuel burning its way to empty. In this way I am made to bleed. Drip by drip, losing all I have collected in hopes of survival. Until the next day, when I find myself unable to move, unable to begin to navigate the ways, to begin to have the strength to even look for the start. It is then I retreat and fold into myself, wanting to stop all the signs that point in various directions to various phantom truths.
It is then I feel the loneliness, in my awaking, in the knowing of only belonging for a short while, without even being there fully, without even knowing how to be there. It is then I feel the loneliness of knowing the pendulum has moved again. The part of me once filled with eagerness and anticipation, with the desire to try and triumph, left at the sidelines forgotten. I can’t explain where I go or why I go. I only know I go. And in this way I am made. In this way I be.
1. I hate getting up in the morning. Why? It’s not that I don’t have the ability to like the day. I just don’t want to have to get up and do it all over again. I mean I just did the exact same thing the day before, e.g, shower, brush teeth, choose clothes, discard clothes, choose different clothes, stress about my food intake, wonder if coffee is good for me, stress over my next step—and man was it fricken exhausting! No one, well most people, has the slightest clue how much energy I exert just to be. I mean when I hear the words “be in the moment” and “stay present,” I am already thinking RUN! For me, being is like running up hill sideways with my eyes crisscrossed and my feet bound in piercing Velcro, while my arms are flapping to the beat of someone else’s heartbeat and I’m trying to recite the alphabet backwards. By the first hour of thinking and mundane activity, I am smashed. Surfer-punched smack off her surfboard and pounded into the rocks. Theme music in the background: WIPED OUT. And then, lucky me, if I conquer the day, at least a portion of the day, say 18.984 percent, then I get to retreat to the couch that has a permanent dent from my lounging hours, where I try to rest but end up, for the trillionth time, in some complex dialogue with a part of myself that really never learned to shut her mouth.
2. I like people but they bug me. Actually, I adore lots and lots of people, but I see way too much. I see past the nuances and suggestions and idioms and babble, and I grow so weary. I am thinking and pondering about approximately one hundred things and tangents compared to each singular concept another brings up in conversation. I am distracted by the webbing-style of my brain that largely resembles a graphic organizer big corporations use to plot out their schematics for the next decade. Trying to listen to a conversation in completion is an impossibility, unless I am in my Zen moment and steadily repeating each word said by my acquaintance back to myself and staring off with a peaceful tranquil demeanor. Even then, I am reviewing the rules of active listening and trying to recall at least a page of my Buddhist teachings. In the silence, I am baffled by all that my senses are taking in. I leap and run all over in my head, dissecting the molecular bits of a person. So much to chew off and digest that I am actually considering the act of investing in a pair of dark glasses—so dark I can’t see—so that at least one sense is blocked. Then I only have to deal with the distraction of the bombardment of various noises, odors, textures, and bodily sensations. At least with glasses I won’t be ice-skating about in thought regarding visual vomit, about to fall on my butt and shatter the ice, whilst distracted by the idiotic protruding mole on someone’s face reaching out and wanting to form a conversation with me. “Hi I am mole. I am big. I used to have a hair in me like a witch, but it was plucked out. Do you wonder why hairs grow faster on moles? Maybe you should Google it? What are the signs of irregular moles again? For a mole, I look healthy. Still ugly, though. I would have removed me. How much does it cost? I wonder if I have a soul, and where I would go if you burn me off. Hey, maybe you should listen to what the person who owns my face is saying.”
3. Forming thoughts hurts, but forming sentences is far worse. I connect rules to words. Yes, each word is alive and a willing or non-willing participant. Some words deserve center stage, depending on my mood, and some words…well they deserve the dank of a dark dungeon. I couldn’t say the word ‘vagina,’ until I was in my early-forties—which was another life time ago, because as you know I am effectually 39 forever. And words like fu** and other connotations that suggest what my boys were watching two spiders (likely) do on our window last night (interesting..couldn’t tell if they were eating each other or enjoying themselves) still makes me feel like I am in a library with my hair in a bun wearing a prudish ruffled blouse. Think Mary in the altered life of George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life. If you haven’t seen the movie, that really is the hugest mistake in your life. In constructing thoughts I run into constant roadblocks and detours. Case in point, my steering off the road to discuss a movie you should have watched twenty times by now, if you have an ounce of good taste in your bones. See how I judged you? That’s what I do with words. Is this one too provocative? Is this the best word choice? How does that word feel? He feels too fat, too heavy, too mundane, too cliché-like, too over-used, and so on. It’s not about perfection. The process is more akin to picking out the ground I want to walk on. The soles of my feet know that some foundations feel better than others. I mean I’d take clean laminate flooring over ten-year old carpet any day, and I’d much rather risk the residue on green grass then the debris on concrete, while shoeless. And I’ve gone off on tangent again, visualizing all the ways in which my feet can travel, and all the dangers flesh faces.
4. Life is fricken scary! Life doesn’t come with a guidebook or rulebook or anything, and all these grownups are trying to figure out what direction to go, what to say, how to be, what to do, and are pointing fingers this way and that, and sporadically jumping from one idea to the next, clinging to this hope, and then moments or decades later, another hope. And it confuses the heck out of me. Tears me open like an over-exposed vulnerable fish with her guts hanging out and seagulls hankering about for a ripe piece. I know enough to know I know nothing, and to watch all this chaos wobbling about like those weeble-wobble toys that don’t fall down, but get overwhelming annoying in their inability to go anywhere and do anything but remain stagnant, gets to the very bone of me. I feel nibbled upon and broken. I don’t want to be told what to do or how to be, but at the same time I want some almighty guru, higher-power, or at least Mother Nature’s henchman, to come down and point the real way. I am tired of people reinventing the right way and the wrong way, and proclaiming who is good and who is bad, and telling me what I can and cannot do, down to how I parent, who I spend time with, what I spend time doing, and worse what I spend time ingesting spiritually and mentally and physically. In truth, at times, I think humanity has reached an all-time low! I mean people have left the concrete physical examples of how to act and now are needling past the skin of others and dictating, preaching, and insinuating with sour-coated good intentions how people should form thoughts! I mean talk about instilling further fear. Seems like a diabolical plan to me: I know how to really inject terror. Teach people how their thoughts are bad. I mean, it’s not enough to teach them that they are bad, wrong, flawed, broken and in need of repair. Let’s indoctrinate them with how they are innately wired wrong in that their actual thoughts are imperfect! What a grand plan!”
5. I don’t know what I believe in. I just don’t anymore. I have read and processed way too much. As a child I used to pray every-night in an OCD manner: “Dear God, God bless my mom and dad, my cousins and aunts and uncles, my friends, and my enemies, and everyone I can think of. And please include everyone I can’t think of or am not remembering. I love them too, but I can’t remember them, but they are still important. Please include them. And if I am forgetting anyone else, please watch over them. And bless me too, and my animals and all the people I love and know and who love me and who don’t love me and who don’t know me…..” To cover all my bases, I asked Jesus into my heart when I was a young teenager, primarily because I was sleeping with a rosary around my neck with the lights on every night and warding of demons that were haunting me in my sleep. And primarily because life sucked so much in its confusion, unpredictability, and lack of security that I needed the Big Guy to come in and stand at the door to my heart. At least that way, when the aches of the world pounded on me, I had something/someone, imagined or not, to push back. Now, I have taken in so much clutter from the world that I am left confused and spinning. I have a natural instinctual desire to accept everyone and everything, to be open to forgiveness, to believe in others, and to love. So many religions don’t fit me; that is to say, if the religion was a substance it would feel, if ingested, as shards of glass, and, if worn, like an over-sized sixty-pound cloak of fur of which the shepherd of my flock had forgotten to shave. I just don’t know anymore, and strongly think we need an Aspie prophet to develop a new religion, that’s not called a religion, of course. Because religion is one of those words that munches at my eardrums.
6. Everything is alive. Geeze, I am so tired of caring about things. I mean things, literal things. Like when I go to discard of the peel of the potato. Crap, I am thinking, if I put this in the garbage he will likely end up in the landfill. He would much prefer to be in the compost pile where he is then able to turn into something else and nurture my future garden. I wouldn’t want to be in a landfill. You see, I have this natural tendency to apply my own emotions and experience to inanimate objects. And if you think that is bad, I also do this to most people and animals. I assume, from some part of my being (if I be) that others see and experience the world as me, even though I logically know they don’t. I still get caught up in the thoughts that my pain is another’s pain and that my agony is another’s. This adds some huge chains of ultra-super-charged responsibility onto moi! I mean, I hold the responsibility of the world. I am King Kong demolishing cities of insects, grass blades and potential habitats of living creatures when I partake on a stroll. I am a cruel demi-god slicing and dicing vegetables that I now know might have their own semblance of consciousness in the way they move and retreat from danger. I am this judge and controller of destiny: Off to the landfill for you onion skin! The truth is I know this is all nonsense. Until I read spiritual practices or ‘hippy’ life rules that actually reinforce my way of thinking, albeit at a much less complex and less mortifying degree. I know, I need a pill or a stiff drink, or something stiff, (yes, that’s sexual humor that makes me blush, but nonetheless a truism), to distract me from the cavernous rivers forging through my brain. I can see all the NTs out there (Neuro-typicals) shaking their heads and thinking, “Man, she thinks way too much. Just relax and chill.” If only! Like I choose to be this way. Like with my high intelligence I haven’t researched and entertained a thousand-plus techniques and manners in which to stop myself. I can’t help it. There is this black-and-white movie actor in my mind, with a hunchback and greasy black hair and spikey crooked teeth and pale, unattractive skin, (with a large distracting mole), screeching: It’s Alive!
7. I don’t like me, but I love me. Yes, this is a concept similar to when you have a relative you can’t stand to be around, and would never choose as a friend, and wish wasn’t born into your clan, or at the least you weren’t born into the clan, but you have this unfounded instinctual love that keeps pulling you in because she or he (why don’t we have a non-gender word yet?) is your blood. But it’s different, because I would choose me as a friend, and I do like to be around me, and I kind of think I am super cool at times. So that’s not a super good example. But I like it anyhow. A better example might be when you love your dog, but she does stuff that really messes up your sense of serenity; I don’t know, no names given; but let’s say she piddles when she is anxious, or brings in dead surprises through the doggy door, or digs up to find moles and comes in all muddy and tracks footprints through the house, or smells like last-week’s garbage left out in one-hundred degree weather, and you are way too tired and/or preoccupied to want to, yet, again, deal with the fluffy ball of love’s annoyances. That’s more like it—how it feels to live with me—like I am my own best friend who annoys me too no end at times, but at the end of the day is so warm and cuddly and loyal that I can’t help but overlook all the perceived failings and flaws and pain-in-the-butt doings. So really, let’s erase the first sentence of this paragraph, at least from our memories, kind of like our self-worth has been erased from our memories by big-business, and let’s pretend the first sentence reads: I love myself like I love my dog. I like to pretend.
8. I like my inner world more than my outer world. It’s safe in my head, for the most part. Well, not really, especially when I am looping, spinning, panicking, or feel like this time I am REALLY dying. Feel my heartbeat! But still, with all the slippery slopes, it still feels better than what’s outside of me. I don’t like all the judgment out in the world. I don’t like second-guessing; I don’t like first-guessing; or tenth-guessing. I just wish we all wore our hearts, integrity, and love on our sleeves. I wish that our individual attributes and way of being were accepted and that people were loved just for being. I wish that I lived in a forest with elves (nice ones) and fairies (nice ones) and that the whole world was peaceful. But at the same time, I understand the inner-workings of yin and yang and how opposites serve to accentuate the other, so that pleasure is pleasure, and happiness is happiness. I understand that in order to appreciate more of me and more of another, I am molded and chiseled. I understand to walk in this world in gratitude that I had to experience having less. I know these as truisms, at least truisms of this age. And I too know the concept of balance, acceptance, serenity, surrender, faith and trust. It’s just hard. Because so much of what I see is in contradiction to what is spoken and demonstrated in the world. At least in my mind I know what to expect, even if it’s chaos, even if it’s torture, it is predictable pain: not unexpected hurts inflicted on me by a society I have yet to understand. At least in my mind there are moments of intense fantasy that take me to another place, less filled with misfortune and misgivings. At least, inside of me, I can find the perfection, the love, the guidance, and the hope that the world keeps trying to dismiss and/or take away. I like it inside of me, curled up with the warm puppy, despite the smell, the responsibility, the duty. At least inside, the burden of the world isn’t leaning up against me, and I can hear the tender reassurance of a loving heart.
Everyday Asperger's 