It’s starting to stress me out that you can’t answer a blog prompt against, because I don’t really have a topic to start from each morning. Today wouldn’t have been a good one, anyway, because I don’t have any more morning/night rituals now than I did the first time around. The point still stands, though, that it was night to have a jumping off point and a tag everyone starts with every day, #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x, the number advancing every day. Well, since I have both tags for all of the prompts from last year, that’s why they already look like they’ve been answered this year. I’m sorry I’m on about this, it was just the main thing that kept me from being lazy and not posting something that day.
But yesterday wasn’t about laziness. I skipped yesterday because I was in burnout mode. I was more overstimulated than I’d been in a long time, because my schedule was all messed up. I needed time to recover and I took it. I slept, mostly. I am not as young as I continue to think I am.
If I have learned nothing from going to psychiatrists and psychologists over the years, it’s that medicine and therapy absolutely work and are valuable……… but so are sleep and sobriety. I don’t practice total abstinence from alcohol, because it’s okay to enjoy it once in a while. It’s just that if I am taking an antidepressant and drinking a depressant, I have not made any forward motion.
When I was in the restaurant business, I drank a lot more because that’s what we did after work. But, then after Dana got her DUI, we went to all these classes on medicine and alcohol (legally required for her, I just drove). It sent MY brain on fire. When I realized what was actually going on in my brain when I drank, I had a light bulb moment. It just didn’t feel like an every day sort of thing anymore.
Therefore, when I worked in a pub here in Silver Spring, I rarely drank. Occasionally I took them up on a beer, but they also had Maine Root Mexican Cola. That won nearly every night. It was a pub. None of the drinks we served had ice except for soda. With the choice of a room temperature beer or a cold soda with ice after a 12 hour shift on grill, it was a quick and easy decision. Give me the cold one.
I have shifted my focus into accommodating who I actually am instead of who everyone told me I was. Whoever I thought Leslie Lanagan was, I cannot say from before. I can only say that I saw the expectations in front of me and found all of them easy for a short period of time, and all of them untenable long term. I learned who my real friends were when I stopped social masking, and Doc was the first person who recognized it before I said it. “Do you think the authoritative part of yourself comes from you feeling more confident in confiding in me?” Yes, 100%. The more you allow me to be me without social masking, the more I want to talk to you. The more I want to open up to you.
I can only speak to the fact that the more I get to know myself, the more I learn how wrong I’ve been. Treating myself as perfectly mentally stable and perfectly physically able, just lazy and a drain on society has nearly killed me several times. I know that because I can only treat myself that way so long without realizing it’s not producing results.
Once I started being kind to myself, I could be softer, as well. That’s because I was living under everyone else’s expectations of what I should be able to do. I was not raised to be neurodivergent, and in some respects, not raised to even be fallible, either, because that is opening the kimono. The parish doesn’t get to live in the pastor’s house.
I didn’t “choose to air all of this out on my web site” re: Supergrover. I decided she wasn’t worthy of listening to my story anymore, because she’d told me she was tired of it. That did not mean there was no more story to tell. She just asked to stop listening to it. There’s so much context she’s missing, and what bothers me is that she told me that I’d aired some things she wanted to keep private, and in no way did I know any of that. When I started explaining, I went by the timeline of her e-mails, especially the ones where they said that her stories weren’t mine to carry anymore, that everyone already knew. She didn’t tell me any of it- no anger, no disappointment, no hurt, no anything. She just let it fester and wandered further from me. The thing I needed most was intimacy, but she didn’t want to give it to me. Not my call. It’s perfectly valid. But so is my hurt if that is her response. I am not saying that she did anything wrong. I am only saying that it is not her responsibility to have my reactions for me. If she wants distance, it’s just a different way of ending the game than I would have done it, but I get the same result and cannot be angry about that.
She says it’s a lot, that every letter is so dense. And at the same time, I don’t think she’d be as obsessed with reading my letters if they weren’t so deep and chewy. What brought us together has driven us apart.
Therefore, I went to my only other safe space in writing….. the part where it’s just me in my room, thinking to myself. I am writing these as letters to me in the future, which is why I cultivate this web site as what my friend Kristie called “my pensieve.” I am a really rare breed, I think….. someone who’s willing to let another person read their autistic mind in real time. I think it’s important, because generally, autistic people aren’t raised to be autistic. They know how their neurotypical adults handle the world, but they have no clue how an autistic person does it. And then add to that the large number of older women who are getting diagnosed now because it was entirely missed in their childhood due to having social masking beaten into them early. That social masking, those expectations, are what make an autistic person feel like an alien.
That’s because I am an aggressive taskmaster with myself, authoritative and stern without love because in addition to not giving myself empathy, I am a relentless perfectionist who doesn’t give a fuck about my feelings. I haven’t cared how bad I’ve made myself feel for not being perfect since I was born, because that’s how the outside world has treated me for years as well.
With autism/ADHD, you never “get it together.”
Stories That Are All True 