dailyprompt-1875 – Stories That Are All True

Daily writing prompt

Are you superstitious?

It feels a bit superstitious that I am dedicated to not breaking my WordPress streak. I’m at 132 days as of this entry, so it has become the thing to beat. I’m not competing with other bloggers, I’m competing against the clock. I cannot really compete with bloggers today because I’ve been around so long. They might be more popular, but they do not have writing days under their belts since 2001. This web site only goes back to 2013, but you can find my old stuff by going to The Wayback Machine and searching for “Clever Title Goes Here.”

I have not been on a continual “streak” since 2001. I’ve done other things and filled in with writing. It was only in 2013 that I really believed in myself enough to write, because someone else believed in me. It was then that it became an every day practice, because I finally had something to think about that was big enough. The relationship didn’t survive, but presumably we both did. I don’t know what happened to Aada and she doesn’t want me to know. That’s fine. It is the cost of my writing changing someone’s life without me doing a thing.

What I mean by that is that Aada got to know my writing, but she never got to know me. We coexisted in an Internet bubble in which she says that the narrative I’ve presented of her is disgusting and makes her feel bad. It certainly was not my intent; she looked away because she could not stand her reflection in the mirror. By the same token, I could not write her differently because, well, that’s how she behaved.

She reacted with defense when I wanted care and connection. The correct answer would have been to move on, but she made that impossible to navigate by activating my fear. She isolated me with her secrets, then gave me no support to handle them. Then shit on every way in which I tried to handle my problems on my own. There was no way to do the right thing, there was only learning to survive. It was bleak because she was so strict. It was a very “no crying in baseball” kind of love, and top-down. Essentially, “you will survive on the breadcrumbs of affection that I leave you so that you never know where you stand.”

Which is exactly how she read me…. “I note your breadcrumbs of affection, but they feel more like clues in a game.”

But that’s just the way she read me.

I am all in. Just ALL IN. I want her essence around me all the time. She lights me up from the inside because she’s so funny and clever. These are the lines she reads as “clues in a game” when they are the board. But she’s made a narrative about me that fits how she sees me- that the negative is the real story and the positive is just an elaborate hoax.

The beautiful thing is that she can continue to believe it about me for the rest of her life and it will never in a million years make it true.

It’ll just be a superstition.

Are you superstitious?

I am not superstitious because I can read a room. I don’t do rituals to try and keep things from happening, because nothing can stop the random dice from rolling. I do feel all the emotions in a room at once, though, which feels like ESP. A lot of the time, I can pick up the undercurrent of a couple’s relationship before they announce their breakup publicly. I didn’t know it, I felt it. Energy swirls around me and it comes in the form of being able to see relationship dynamics while being in a crowd. I take in most information by sight, and my body reacts. My nerves can sense when I’ve walked into a room with a couple who is in an argument, for instance.

Those moments are when my autism blossoms. It’s not my pain, but my pain signals are going to tell me to hurt, anyway. This is also not license for anyone to walk on eggshells around me. I actually take Tylenol to turn that sensory input down. Tylenol dulls both emotional and physical pain signals, in case that is a thing you needed to know. It’s my responsibility to manage me, and I’m sorry for every moment I haven’t been able. Processing disorders and mental illness are so hard. This is not to garner sympathy, as if any of it excuses my behavior when it is genuinely bizarre. I’m saying it as a patient. Mental illness is so hard. It’s relentless. Every feeling I have has to be thought, then analyzed to see if it’s real or not.

As in, “is this my real emotion, or is this my depression telling me a lie and I’m falling for it?” This is when I am talking to me about myself. I am generally good at picking out what is going on with everyone else. Generally bad at saying anything helpful or useful because I’m autistic. Likely, you’re not going to hear what I say due to the translation layer…… and whatever it is I think you need right now, it’s not an autistic amount of it. Other autistic people will probably laugh at that, because we all know what it means to think about something “an autistic amount,” and how that is so exhausting for other people. We learn to laugh about it, but it’s yet another thing that makes me too much for most people.

I don’t have communication issues in terms of receiving the emotions under what people say and I can predict group dynamics early. What I cannot do is then imitate it successfully so that I can convey to you that I understand (or don’t). I know what’s going on by the way it makes me feel, but fail in the execution at describing those feelings to other people.

People get so, so, so angry at me for things “everybody knows.” All of the feelings that I should have had in advance because of the social rules I should know. I am not a sociopath, who doesn’t have emotions and just imitates them, my blog a slam book because I don’t care about anyone else’s feelings. I’m autistic, which means that I feel every bit as deeply as you, I just process it differently….. and the way I process it is to write it out. I often don’t know how I feel about something until I’ve had a chance to take a step back from my emotions and craft the narrative that is going on in my head by squeezing out all the noise to find pure signal.

I create my own future by looking at my past. I don’t know how to predict other people’s behavior, but I’ve got 10 years of entries telling me everything that made them blow up previously. If someone won’t take the time to explain the rules, I will explain them to myself. I’m often wrong, but I’m not afraid to be wrong. I’m afraid to be unheard.

I sent Zac a message asking him for a scenario I could work from, like, “take a real conflict and make it fictional by changing around the countries or something. Just bare bones………” I haven’t gotten it yet because I said “everything goes to shit in a paragraph,” and he’s 1350 words in….. apparently I sparked his creativity when I asked him to spark mine. However, he could come up with eight of these scenarios before breakfast, so I don’t think it’s a competition. I think I just said something that stuck in his head, and I’m glad to be there. It honestly means more to me that I said something I said really resonated with him. If this turns out to be his magnum opus, I want you to know that I am entirely responsible. If it doesn’t? Totally his fault for not putting the material in more qualified hands…… laughing….. we’re not competitive, mostly because we can’t be. The kinds of writing we do are so different that there’s no comparison.

It’s just nice to have someone in my life who is also dedicated to the craft and understands that push/pull. Do I want to be with my friends or do I want to be with my characters? You pull yourself into your own world and at times struggle to resurface.

I notice more of the worlds inside me than I do my outside environment- I only understand the former, with no ladder to the latter.