ykw that was exactly the thing i was vaguing about earlier this morning btw (sorry). since saturday night the whole topic of [pausing here to transform into a hideous beast because of the word my phone was trying to suggest i put after ‘topic of.’ like could this get any more meta and/or disturbing] anyways the whole topic of.. me and how i am or am not situated like.. r*mantically. it’s been multiple times every day since saturday night that it’s come up in posts i see in irl convos in photo memory reminders in shows my family is watching etc. ajd im not like mad at anyone/thing for posting / talking about it it’s just i feel like exploding a little bit between me myself and i that’s all

Ok, secrets in return.. 6, 10, 15, 17...

ooh a lil secret exchange...... like little kids at a slumber party..... love this energy

6) how is your life different now from two years ago

hmm.... july 2018.... tbh not a whole lot has changed since, then, graduate school has a funny way of being all the same all the time. but i can think of a few... 

school/job-wise, i became a doctoral candidate in june 2018 which was just over 2 years ago and that was cool, and my research was finally published in december 2019 which kicked ass. actually the project that was published wasnt even finished until october 2018 so i guess that too. my mentor and i have developed a really great mentor/mentee relationship that i attribute a good amount of personal growth to, bc for like the first time in my life i have someone actively helping me quash a lot of self doubt.

personal life-wise, hmm... in october 2018 i had the plate in my knee removed bc it was severely impeding my recovery and making it hard to walk. i figured out how to sit down on the floor and get up from the floor and go up and down stairs one at a time with a railing, then without a railing, learned how to crouch about halfway to normal, built up my stamina to stay standing for about an hour with minimal discomfort whereas before i suffered if i stood for 10 minutes. the girl that almost killed me was finally arrested and convicted and put in jail which doesn’t fix or reverse anything but still felt like some kind of justice. 

and then personality wise i am just a little less afraid of getting things wrong. still terrified and still impacts my life, but i am able to give things a shot instead of dismissing them outright. led to me finding out i’m pretty good at some stuff i otherwise never would have tried. i’m also a little less afraid of asking for help or setting boundaries. therapy has that effect i guess. 

i’m also way more long-winded than before, i feel like, as presented here. oops. i also feel like i’m much more forgetful and scatterbrained than before. not sure if it’s from stress, or a natural progression of taking on more obligations and learning how to balance them, or a long term side effect of having who knows what pumped into me for a month straight three years ago. maybe all three?

10) do you believe in ghosts

nah. i don’t really have a wordy explanation as to why i don’t so you get a break from the wall of text from the previous question.

15) what is your favorite memory

questions like this are hard bc i have a pretty bad memory and favorite memories only come to me when i encounter something that reminds me of it? it’s really hard to call upon specific memories. but i’ll at least try to think of a nice one from recent memory, i’m sure it’ll be far from my favorite but that’s okay. 

hmm... oh actually my most recent birthday (abt 2.5 weeks ago) was really really nice? nothing super special happened; i got up, i went to work, i went home and bought myself an ice cream cake and video called my family. but throughout the day i had more people wishing me happy birthday than i ever had in my life. i’m a fairly active member of the rq official discord and i had no fewer than 2 dozen people immediately send happy birthday messages if they caught the implication from someone else (maybe more, that server is huge and it’s hard to keep track). and i’m in another, smaller server (you may be familiar uwu) where i’ve pretty fairly recently gotten to know a new group of people that seemed to pretty quickly welcome me into their friend group and i got some really nice birthday sentiments there too. and then at work i didn’t even really tell anyone it was my birthday, but i’m friends with one of my lab mates on facebook and he must have had birthday notifications on because he came by and wished me a happy birthday

obvs the last few months have been really isolating for just about everyone, but tbh it’s been especially hard for me bc i don’t really have many friends to begin with and definitely like no friends in my home town so my minimal social contact of like just small talk at the store and only having real conversations with coworkers being taken away has had me fairly down? but apparently over the past few months i have slowly been submitting myself to the mortifying ordeal of being known, even just a little bit, and reaping the rewards of being loved in return, no matter how small, felt really nice and made it a really special day uwuwuwuwu

17) what ‘small things’ things terrify you

i know i have some intangible existential fears that would definitely seem trivial to some people but see above point about having a really hard time calling upon specific memories, and also i’m in a good mood so i’m not gonna try too hard. but off the top of my head two silly weird fears i have are 1) heights and 2) having people around me start singing. 

1) i know heights are a very common fear/phobia but you don’t understand. i’m talking “i will literally freeze in place if i try to step onto this 4-inch stepstool, like seriously my conscious mind will not be able to lift my second foot onto the step, like it’s bolted to the ground” PETRIFIED of heights. i cannot stand on anything my brain perceives as not-solid-ground. this means i’m actually okay in airplanes and things like the st louis arch. i actually love that shit, i’ll look down at the ground and enjoy the view all day. but the second i have a single doubt about my ability to stay upright, fuck the fight/flight/freeze response. we are on 24/7 freeze/freeze/freeze response LOCKDOWN.

2) i’m talking flash mobs, i’m talking karaoke night, i’m talking people singing happy birthday to me. the idea of it puts me in “find an escape” mode, and being in it gives me the worst second-hand embarrassment ever, even if it’s all in good fun and there’s no reason for anyone involved to be embarrassed. this extends even to movie musical numbers (i actually skipped the scene in the tavern in disney’s tangled bc it gave me weird anxiety) and shit like hearing someone i know from another medium begin to sing (this is why it took me so long to check out the mechs and also why i cannot listen to recordings of friends singing as much as it would mean a lot to them for me to do so). idk if there’s a name for this phenomenon or if i’m the only person on the planet with this weird almost-or-maybe-complete phobia.

How was it like growing up as an autistic child? When were you diagnosed? C:

I was diagnosed later in life (mid-twenties) after seeking out the diagnosis on my own. I never really knew I was autistic as a child or as I was growing up, I just knew there was something “different” about me. It was hard to put two and two together for a number of reasons…

(adding a read more cut because this ended up being a long answer, sorry!)

I was home schooled by my mom with only my brother and sister as company until I reached the 7th grade. The only real social interaction I had was with a few family friends (most of whom trickled out of our life after a couple of yrs of knowing them, for various reasons) and kids I got to know at church. I went to church every Sunday and Wednesday until I was in jr high and had a few friendships that lasted a few yrs, but all of them ended over time (kind of badly in some cases, some of them bullied me in the end). I hung out with my cousin for several yrs until she also became too “cool” for me. Needless to say, everyone just thought I was weird because I was home schooled, isolated, and friendless through most of my little kid yrs.

Despite having a somewhat isolated childhood I was really happy I think. I didn’t really get why people didn’t want to be my friend back then. I was a pretty happy kid. I didn’t think it was all that weird to be as hyper-focused on small details of things as I was, to notice the things I did, or to have the special interests I had. Also I was really really shy and didn’t talk very much at all. I had fewer sensory issues back then because I was more in control of my environment (spent almost every minute at home!) but they tended to get worse on long trips in the car or in situations where I couldn’t get away.

I grew up in a very small town in Texas. There was no practical or helpful interventions in place for kids who didn’t “look” like they had a disability, but still did have one. None of my issues ever got singled out on an institutional level (like recognizing a learning disability or whatever, my issues were mostly intrapersonal and interpersonal, everyone thought my educational issues were bc of home school). My parents thought I had a behavioral attitude problem and threatened to send me to boot camp a lot (my dad is ex marine). I got in trouble at home a lot because I was argumentative. The one time i spoke up about having anxiety and depression I got a couple of months worth of Lexapo from my GP, and never got it refilled. I was a freshman in high school at the time I think. Mental health wasn’t talked about or taken seriously where I grew up. If you had real problems you were supposed to work them out in church (no offense to ppl who believe in that, but I don’t think it should take the place of practical interventions that can help improve ppl’s lives). I mostly just started “working them out” through self injury (bad coping mechanism), and later through art.

From jr high to high school I kind of found my niche. I had groups of friends eventually, really good friends. Mostly outcast types, but we didn’t care, we were the weirdos and we liked that. I also took on the role as the artsy eccentric one in the group who said weird stuff that people thought was funny or amusing. I actually really liked this part of me, but the other issues in my life at the time made this a less happy point in my life. It was a mixed bag.At this point (basically from 7th grade on) I was dealing with a lot of depression, anxiety, self injury, etc. I started looking into psychology as a way to describe what I was going through, why I had such intense emotions, meltdowns, sensory issues, depression, headaches, stress, etc. That time period was the birth of my lifelong interest in psychology. I bought every book I could, watched every movie. There was a lot of confusing info out there (movies probably didn’t help since they don’t portray mental illness very accurately usually, lol). But autism was never really brought to my attention because of the obvious reasons (stereotypically a young boy’s disorder, mute stereotype), but also because of the divide between the medical field and the psychological field. I was looking in the wrong places, apparently. I think this divide is a major issue that will eventually need to be addressed, by the way.

To answer your actual question… Growing up undiagnosed autistic was confusing as all hell. Often sad. Very very lonely. I didn’t really get what I was doing “wrong” most of the time? For a large portion of my life I had a lot of magical thinking. I thought I was “special” and could like, control certain things in my life (kind of like in a serendipitous way? idk it’s hard to describe). I used to think I had schizotypal pd but that might have just been a result of trying to make a confusing life make sense. Maybe I do though who knows really.

I might have had these issues with or without a diagnosis, but I definitely have always felt “broken” bc I didn’t have an explanation for why I was different.I have a lot of self-loathing, lack of confidence issues that I’m still working through as an adult. To be honest with you (and I don’t consider this tmi because this is my blog lol)… I was really at my wit’s end when I decided to seek out a diagnosis. I felt broken, like a burden, like garbage parts that would never do any good in the world or mean anything to anyone. I had a lot of suicidal thoughts all the time, I was in a really dark place for many years and the only thing keeping me going was my husband (then boyfriend) and my pets. When it got bad enough that I was scared for my safety I decided I needed to demand help from myself and my family and friends.

Things completely changed when I got my diagnosis. Something in me shifted, and I felt I understood the universe more clearly. Kind of like when you learn something new in school or whatever and everything takes on new meaning somehow. It was like that. Since then, I’ve had a lot more self acceptance. I still have a lot of issues sometimes when I’m having a really bad meltdown or depression (okay it happens way more than it should, I really need to go to therapy I know, lol), but things have improved so drastically by knowing I’m autistic, I can’t even tell you. It’s also improved my relationship with my husband, (side bonus).

It hasn’t been all good, I mean, my family and irl friends have barely acknowledged it which just makes me doubt myself all over again… But then I remember “oh yeah other people don’t have to deal with this kind of shit!!!! This isn’t typical!!! This isn’t the “normal” everyone else is experiencing!! Fuck you I’m autistic or whatever else you wanna call it, come at me!!!! I’m done feeling like I’m broken so just accept it already and start to know me as me and not as this bullshit image you’ve created in your mind to represent me!!” :D

Besides, acceptance or not, I’m always going to have the issues I have. I’ll always have a hard time understanding what people are saying when there’s too much going on, I’ll always get overwhelmed and burned out, I’ll always have meltdowns (something that is very hard to accept about myself), I’ll always make social blunders and misunderstand people, I’ll always be misunderstood, I’ll always struggle with things that come more easily for others. But I’ll also always see the world from a totally different perspective from everyone else, which I think really helps me in my art and ideas. And I have a lot of fun in life when things are going well, I’m really super passionate about so much and I think that’s because of my strong emotions and connectiveness to things. I have a fun childlike view of everything when I’m in a healthy place and I love that about myself. There’s a lot of really cool things about it, and some bad things too.

Sorry this is such a long answer. I’m clearly avoiding my school work…………. It’s been a long stressful weekend and venting a little felt good so thank you for this question that I have taken way far off track, heh heh.

I should probably be more “professional” in my answers to these types of questions since this is the field I want to specialize in eventually, but whatever. This is real life and real life is messy and sometimes you get mad about your baggage and curse a little. It helps to curse a little. ;)

Also I’m an oversharer, sorry! Autism is a big interest of mine and so is human behavior. So it’s hard to hold back…

2017

Hello.

Nice to meet ya 2017.

I hope you’re nice to me.

2016 was something. And here I am, per my usual, not posting on December 31st or whatever day is supposed to be set aside to recap the year.

It was an okay year, I guess. Our lawsuit got settled by a godsent pro-bono lawyer. We finally ridded ourselves of our rat infestation in May (though my rat anxiety is still pretty much like *woooosh*). I finally submitted my UC applications. I got my crippling anxiety under moderate control, and my neuroticism doesn’t shackle me as badly as it used to. I don’t even know if I can say that I’m depressed anymore (which is really saying something because I never knew that I couldn’t be sad lol). I’ve managed to go nearly 2 years off my antidepressants, which is FUCKING HUGE. I TOOK THOSE FOR 6 YEARS AND IT FEELS SO GOOD TO NOT HAVE TO BE ON THEM ANYMORE. GOD BLESS MARIJUANA, TBH. IT SAVED MY LIFE. Of course, I’m still mortified of taking pictures and still don’t know how it is that I want to present myself to the world, but i’M a work in progress. I got my GPA up, I became VP of my school’s Soc club, and I fell in love with Sociology even more...Hell. I even went to my first protest! *cough* FUCK DONALD TRUMP *cough*

I even fell in like. Pretty intense like, too, which is rare for me. Not in love though; not the way my two suitors did. One was an idiot; a full-fledged, ambitionless man-child who made me lash out for never being heard out. Granted, things were fine initially. I can even say that I liked him.The demisexual in me was decently intrigued, but the walls kept growing higher, and he figured leaving them would be easier than climbing them. The other, well...I don’t know what stopped me from pursuing her. Besides my own fear of the future, my neuroticism, my lack of aggression, my feelings that rooted too deeply to be a casual fling...Okay. Turns out a lot of things prevented me from going for it. Seeing as my emotions are hard to read about 200% of the time, I guess I didn’t realize the extent of my fancies with them both, even to myself. 

I think I got to really take a look at myself last year. I limited my toxic relationships. I kept up my routine of skating/exercising every day, and continuing my meatless regime. I also isolated myself from pretty much everyone. I have this sort of one foot in, one foot out approach to life, my relationships, and social media. On the one hand, I had time to be more exclusive, not opening myself up to people and situations that were not fruitful. On the other hand, I feel like my extreme introversion gutted my opportunities to cultivate my pre-existing relationships. Which, realistically, is hard to do for everyone. Truthfully, I also have rejection issues that I refuse to acknowledge. My fear of being told no often prohibits any opportunities I have to do anything with anyone. I don’t know if it’s because of implicit feelings of inadequacy instilled into me, or just perceived feelings of inferiority on my part for my lack. I also realize that I can’t do it alone, and that help is normal and healthy. Plus, if I’d give the last dollar I have away, is it so bad to expect a little kindness back in return? NO IT’S NOT JULES ACCEPT YOUR BLESSINGS FFS

I hope that in 2017, I continue my trajectory towards betterment. I hope that I become gainfully employed and help my family out way more. I hope that I can be more confident, because I have a lot to offer the world and I haven’t figured out how to make that known. I also hope that maybe, just maybe, I hit way fewer walls. In every regard. My education, my relationships, my finances, my health. Just like sensible Americans think, walls hinder opportunity, and they do not need to be in my way. I refuse to let anything hinder me anymore. I’ve been down for too long, and my time is now I can’t let life pass me by. I’m a single PYT, and the world is mine. The world doesn’t know it yet, but I do. Don’t sleep on me.