doing it your own way

It’s been a long time since I updated, but I felt it was important to post today. I missed Autistics Speak Day at the start of the month and just seemed to lose a lot of steam (pun intended).

November is a hard month. It contains Kitty’s birthday and the mixed feelings I have about that (glad she has a birthday, not glad I can’t be there with her for it). It is also often a time of year I find myself increasingly depressed; as much as I truly enjoy winter and late fall, I still have a biological reaction to it that is a lot less joyful and a lot more sobbing. I’m also having a weird sense of loss this year, because Greensboro doesn’t get snow. Last winter had a shitton of snow (that’s a precise measurement) and I will be lucky to get a flurry this year. I like snow–except digging my car out.

This November has been especially difficult: I still have a job which I do not like and feel is not ethical; I do not have a replacement job lined up; I have started to come out to coworkers about this autism stuff and that’s led to what feels like bullying, even though I strongly suspect it’s just meant to be friendly teasing (and then I feel crappy about feeling bullied, because I really did have a true bully at my previous job and this is pretty minor in comparison); I had to pass up a last-minute eval appointment with TEACCH because I couldn’t get off work; I’ve been sick twice this month, totalling about 14 of 20 days so far. I think I actually prefer the sporadic and scarily violent times I was hit or kicked at my previous job to my 10+ small kicks, hits, pinches, slobbers, and otherwise “affectionate” violent and upsetting touches every day.

I am sick of being assaulted, sick of being sick, sick of yelling at people to stop doing perfectly reasonable things like stimming because I’m supposed to, sick of feeling like a traitor to all my fellow autistic people because I get so damn frustrated that I understand the autistic line of thinking many of the people I work with follow, but due to a 4-5 standard deviation gap in our verbal and processing speeds I can’t figure out how to help them. How do I explain to someone that, actually, I totally get what it’s like to want to hit yourself or bite your hand and have a meltdown, and this is a good way to defuse that feeling rather than having the meltdown? I understand, but I can’t communicate that meaningfully, so all my insights into how to help are useless. I can see that the autistic man with overwhelming ADHD and difficulty with reading needs to have all information blocked out on the page so he can concentrate on the letters; I can’t figure out how to convince him to use the tool I made. Then we both get frustrated and he hits or kicks me and I have to go have the same meltdown I had to scold someone for an hour earlier.

I am sick of feeling utterly alone. Kitty is there, and lovely, but long distance hurts in a physical sort of way. I thought that I had plans for Thanksgiving, but they weren’t a priority.

So…whining wasn’t actually what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about how today is Transgender Day of Awareness and how I have come to identify as genderqueer over the past couple of years, and how I’ve never come out except to Kitty before. But now I’m crying instead, so I think this is done.

Oh, and my name has been changed.