The Alternate Lexicon
Currently viewing the tag: "kit"
I turn 26 tomorrow. It is also World Autism Day.
When I tell people I’m queer, it becomes a part of their idea of my identity. I mention my girlfriend, and a little light dings in their head to place me into the QUEER category of mental filing. They might be surprised or confused or alter how they interact with me (or not), and it might take a few further interactions for them to get that I mean queer in the broadest way and, yes, they can seriously still point out that cute boy and I’m not just humouring them when I agree.
Most people have a lexicon and background knowledge of what it means to be queer in some way. We broadly make up about 1 in 10, so there’s an awful lot of us out there being non cishet in some fashion. People recognize the concepts of bullying and gay-bashing, there are tv and movie characters who are out and proud, there are celebrities. I can say that I’m queer and it means something that we mutually understand, even if clarification might be needed on the details.
When I tell people I’m autistic, they don’t know quite how to react. Autism is kids in corners who headbang, boys who can’t speak or won’t speak, right? Autism isn’t adults who hold down steady jobs–including ones with customer service aspects!–and speak fluently (most of the time). The box in people’s heads is too small and ill-defined to fit me, and they are surprised, sometimes even angry.
Autism awareness isn’t inherently a bad idea, but the narrow scope of the spectrum that is promoted for awareness is very much dangerous and harmful for the rest of us. Autism, for me, means making enough of a single food to eat for a week, because making different food every day feels overwhelming. It means planning and rehearsing conversations, and then worrying when things don’t go as planned. It means auditory processing issues that leave me nodding at work and hoping I’ve timed it right, or not being able to hear over the sound of the tram. It means sensory issues that make it hard to hold my girlfriend’s hand sometimes. It means an encyclopedic knowledge of Kate Miller-Heidke lyrics. It means misunderstandings and hurt and bullying. And none of those are things you can see, if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
I want an autism awareness campaign that promotes actual awareness of the huge, wonderful spectrum that encompasses all of us. We each have our own strengths and weaknesses; what we share is an unusual way of experiencing the world. When I tell people I’m autistic, I want them to be able to easily fit me inside that mental box and understand that it means I might not be great at social cues and probably like routines, that I’m probably good with facts and rules, and that I probably have some sensory issues to work around.
Even more, I want people to understand that we–every single person–can inhabit more than one box. My mental filing system cross-indexes, fuckers, and yours can, too, with some practice. My being queer is not invalidated by autism, nor is autism invalidated by my being queer. It is often people who know that I’m queer who seem most surprised when I mention autism, because I am already in one minority group box in their heads.
Intersectionality is the concept of how different oppressions mix. Every person who belongs to multiple minority groups will experience it differently. For me, being queer, autistic, and genderqueer, it means erasure. I am allowed to be queer or autistic (gender doesn’t even cross most people’s minds, and since I’m not picky about pronouns it sometimes doesn’t come up).
I want to live in a world where it means acceptance. That starts with true awareness, not trite campaigns.
Tagged with: ableism • ali • asperger's • autism • disablism • gender • kit • neurodiversity • queer • utter pedantry
I miss Stina and Dylan.
I have a lot of other things I could, and probably should, say, too. Things about how I can’t forgive people who aren’t sorry, and how I still start to email or text to tell them little things before I remember we’re not speaking. Things about how I cry pretty much whenever I think about them. Things about how I didn’t volunteer to go to Harrisonburg for training at work because it felt too close. Fuck, I want to tell them how we’re going to Disney, because they (especially Stina) love Disney. I want to tell them the diagnosis is official, and doesn’t that make them feel shitty for the snide comments and scare quotes?
I want to tell them everything. But we aren’t speaking. And I can’t forgive people who aren’t sorry.
Tagged with: ableism • ali • asperger's • autism • depression • disablism • dissolution of a friendship • friends • frustrations • kit
Like Hez, I don’t believe in resolutions. I think you can set goals and have dreams, but timelines are invariably off and there are always surprises that change who you thought you were.
I’ve been thinking about how this blog has moved away from blogging my thoughts on autism and feminism and become more of a journal. Neither are really what I imagined when I started writing in this space, and I’m not sure either is what I want to be doing here.
So I don’t believe in resolutions, and I don’t know what I’m doing with this space.
I want to change my life so that it’s designed to make me happy, not to make me feel rotten. I’m starting a new job next week. I’m getting my new name in my passport soon. I’m getting Prosper’s import certs and making plans. I’m making plans. And I think I can learn how to be happy in a way that can be measured beyond moments.
It’s been an interesting week.
Yesterday I quit my job, the one I didn’t like and had to drive an hour each way to do. I have interviews scheduled and a lot of hope, and a lot of horrible anxiety, which is why I now have vanilla coke. It helps.
Thursday and Friday, I exchanged emails with Stina which curiously involved me apologizing an awful lot and her not at all, because I very strongly value having her as my friend even if she isn’t a nice person (1). I also learned from Kitty that generalizing lessons about emotional intimacy is probably a good move. Huh. Anyway, this led to an awful lot of sobbing and feeling pretty much like I must be broken in some way to not be able to sustain my friendships from college. And that led to…
Opening an email from Alice. It’s been sitting in my inbox, marked as read, for just over four months. I didn’t open it originally because it was two days before I started my new job (which turned out terribly anyway) and I might not make a personality disorder out of it, but I can certainly be avoidant. I didn’t open it later because it’d been a long time. Then I didn’t open it out of habit. So I opened it, and it was a very long, beautiful, heartbreaking apology letter (I habitually distrust email subject lines, so the fact that it said it was an apology didn’t convince me). It was everything I would love to get from Stina and Dylan and don’t really expect.
So then I cried some more. And then my job was over and I slept for ages. And then I went to the farmer’s market with my mom and we bonded (! I KNOW!) over apparently being unable to make our loved ones feel emotionally connected to us because we are demonstrative sort of people, not declarative, and apparently that makes people really annoyed. And then I wrote a blog post about it using really terrible grammar.
AND THEN I DECLARED THAT I AM A ROBOT MADE OUT OF MUSCLE.
And then it was over. Except for a footnote.
1. I would like to know why it’s okay to say that when we’re friends, but not when we’re fighting. I genuinely do not understand the difference. I’m expressing the exact same sentiment, but it was hilarious once and now apparently elicits tears.
Tagged with: ali • AND THEN BAD GRAMMAR HAPPENED • apologies • asperger's • autism • depression • disablism • dissolution of a friendship • family • friends • frustrations • kit • loneliness • meta • omg • utter pedantry • work
I stopped being friends with Alice when she blew me off.
Alice and I met within days of starting at Mary Baldwin. We auditioned for and joined the Madrigals together, and just hit it off immediately–similar senses of humour, both smart and curious about the world, and rather similar politics (though her Catholic homeschooled background made it hard for her to admit she was liberal, let alone progressive). She was one of my very best friends for the three years I was in college. There were regular rumours we were dating, we were so close.
I left and went to Australia and my girlfriend (much to Alice’s annoyance) and tried to keep up our friendship. I wrote in my then-blog, I wrote emails, I called a handful of times. The burden of maintenance was mine, but it was okay: I’d get back to the US and see her again and our friendship would properly pick up where we left off.
Except that it didn’t.
Alice and I made plans as soon as I knew I’d be back in town. Kitty was with me. We’d meet for coffee and catch up and everything would be great again. But Alice didn’t come for coffee; she blew off our date entirely to make an “emergency” trip for cold medicine for her (adult, able bodied, car-owning) roommate and then never rescheduled.
I put my foot down. Alice had blown off small things with me in college, and I’d always forgiven it. I knew that I liked more concrete plans than she did, and that she had many friends who were cooler than I was, so there was always a chance of being left for a better time. At the end of our second year, she decided unilaterally we shouldn’t be friends anymore since I was just going to leave anyway and she was bad at keeping up friendships; it was only after I pleaded to keep my best friend that we stayed close for the last year. Being ignored to baby the person she lived with was the last straw for me, and I cut Alice out of my life. We’ve exchanged emails once since then, which were unproductive, and she emailed me in September. I haven’t opened it. It’s been two and a half years since I lost my best friend.
Stina and Dylan were there when we fought: Kitty and I were staying at their house on that trip to Staunton, before I moved back to my college town. They were there when Alice and I fought over email–hell, Dylan was the one who opened the first email for me and read it, so he could warn me if I wanted to read it or not.
I’ve known Stina and Dylan since about a week into my first semester at Mary Baldwin. We met when I joined the queer/feminist group on campus, which Dylan and I would eventually co-run. They were my other best friends, complimentary matches for me and each other. It was a little easier to keep up with them when I moved, because calling one meant getting both, and they opened their house up without hesitation for us when Kitty and I arrived in the US. They invited me to live with them while I figured out what the hell I was going to DO with my life.
I don’t know how to write the collapse of our friendship. It’s raw and it hurts and none of the paragraphs I’ve started in this space are accurate.
I felt left out, ignored. I saw patterns in their treatment of me that made my heart ache with loneliness. I watched them each grow more unkind and reassure each other that it wasn’t so. I felt entirely unrespected. I couldn’t talk about it, too afraid to bring up small hurts but dwelling on them endlessly until they became big hurts and then I’d explode. But by then they’d forgotten the small hurts and I was making something out of nothing. For a psych major, Dylan is fucking terrible at introspection.
I was told, explicitly, that I was not autistic because i didn’t match his expectations of what an autistic person should be. I was told I was a lesbian, and any attempts to restate my actual identity were dismissed as trivial. I was told that genderqueer people don’t exist or are just indecisive. I was told I was petty, and rude, and embarassing to take out in public. I was told I was mean and hateful. I remember every fucking word that was said to me. They inform my self esteem and my sense of who I am and sow seeds of doubt deep into my heart.
We fought again and again. My therapist told me they were poisonous, no good for me.
I wish I’d listened to her. I wish I’d been able to listen to her. I defended them vigorously and angrily. How dare she say that about my only local friends?
I moved away in April. It was for the best; they hurt me again and again and while nothing seemed to change on their side, I felt broken and tired. I ended up here. I saw them in September for their wedding.
“Come for Thanksgiving. We miss you!”
So I asked off for Thanksgiving. I asked when they wanted me to come up. Two weeks ago they broke it to me: I’d be welcome to come, but they had no guest bed and were planning to spend black friday on a prolonged date.
Wait. So I’m welcome to come up, but I have to spend one of 3 days with them by myself because I am less important than them–married to each other, living together–having a date.
I didn’t go. They got their black friday together. I got time to myself without being touched and harassed and quiet. Lots of quiet.
“Dylan Grey had an awesome black fridate. All of my shopping is done. ALMOST. Lovely day with Christina Scott Sayer Grey, with delightful guest appearance by Megan Kolano. Tangled was GREAT. Bella is cuddly. Dylan out!”
They let a friend join them after all.
I think this is the point where I say I’m done.
Tagged with: ableism • ali • apologies • asperger's • autism • depression • disablism • dissolution of a friendship • friends • frustrations • kit • loneliness • meta • therapy
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.
I’m changing my name.
Not my website or any of the various aliases I use online, but my last name in real life. I have a couple reasons for wanting to do this:
1. I want the family I build with Kitty to share a name. We’ve talked about combining names, but she already has a hyphenated name and expressed some discomfort over having to pick which parent’s last name she kept. By taking on a wholly new name (whether or not we choose to keep our original surnames as well), we are creating a family unit. Because same-sex marriage isn’t available anywhere we plan to live, we won’t have the opportunity to change it when we get married.
2. I’m fairly certain that it will be easier to change it now, before I move permanently internationally. I’ll need to get a new liscence, social security card, passport, bank cards, credit cards issued (and I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff in that list–help!); I’ll need to change my name with my bank, my job(s?), all of my online information. Some of these things I doubt I can do at all once overseas: I don’t think the consulate would be able to handle my request for a new social security card, for instance, if they could grant a name change at all. North Carolina apparently has some of the most lax rules about legal name changes in the country, requiring a court fee, two affadavits that I am not a criminal, and a 10 day wait. The legal fees are about $80-90.
3. I am not very attached to my last name. It’s pretty common, which does give it the advantage of being easy to spell. In fact, the only part of my name I’m attached to at all is Alison. I’ve never really liked my middle name. My last name is my dad’s last name (and my mom’s, since she didn’t change it after they divorced), and I have no real connection to his family. Basically, I have no compelling reason to keep it.
So then the question becomes: if I’m paying to change my name, and I’m set on my first and surname, what the hell do I do with the middle?
I could keep my current middle name (1). Alison [bland middle] St. James. I could keep my current last name. Alison [bland surname] St. James. I could keep both. Alison [double bland, so intense] St. James. I could change it altogether. There have been a handful of names I’ve been interested in using for myself for years. I could go with my facebook first name, which sounds pretty good as a middle name in this construct.
Potential middle names, in no particular order:
Patience
Jane
Rosalind
Constance
Merit
Anna
Even
Laurel
Rose
Aster
[current surname]
Thoughts?
1. I’m a little reluctant to be posting my full name up on the internet–I use a pseud on facebook, for fuck’s sake. Those of you that know me personally can just insert the correct names where they belong.
I loathe person-centered language.
Part of my job at work is supervising residents in their work setting (if you want more information, feel free to scroll down to the locked post). They do a variety of jobs, and one of those is making the training binders for new employee orientation. This is a new task for my team, so it’s impossible for me to judge how independently they’ll be able to do it with time and practice, but this first lot of 15 needed to be done by yesterday and it ended up being mostly staff doing the work. Since I greatly enjoy doing this sort of menial paperwork–sorting, organizing, labelling, filing–I was very good and found it more enjoyable than most of my job.
The binders are a drastically better collection of information than I had at my previous job. There are sections about developmental disabilities, cultural diversity, and appropriate teaching strategies for adults. There are a few standout ideas in there, like an article about the differences in language use between the people who live in the group homes and staff, and how it is intensely othering.
There’s also a big section on using person-centered language, and having stared at it for days and days while doing these binders and then having a little nudge from the internet, I feel like I now have a simple explanation for why person-centered language unequivocally sucks.
Person-centered or people-first language is this idea that we should phrase things with the person placed before the disability:
Person with autism, not autistic person
Person with intellectual disability, not intellectually disabled person
Person with hearing loss, not D/deaf person
Person with vision loss, not blind person
Some disabilities lend themselves more to one construct or another–person with CP sounds pretty tolerable to my ears, while CP person or cerebral palsied person sounds weird (Kit, I welcome your thoughts on this specifically). I don’t like any of the adjective forms of Asperger’s that have been constructed (though it’s sort of moot since I think autistic is a better descriptor for the whole spectrum anyway).
At first glance, this idea doesn’t really bother me. I’ve felt pretty neutrally about it for a long time–I couldn’t see how it was harming anyone to use unnecessarily long constructs when the shorter ones were just fine and inoffensive, but whatever. If someone wanted to “put the person before the disabilty” and that led them to treating disabled people as equals, then fine.
But my work is inherently about how we (society-general we) can’t treat people with disabilities as equals. Every person I work with has a documented intellectual disability, and most of them have multiple disabilities. Because of this, they have been deemed unable to be their own guardians, their own caretakers, their own adult people. It’s not that I think needing assistance–any level, from mild to total–makes one less of an independent adult, but few have actively chosen of their own right to live with us. They are there because they have been “placed”–deemed too unable to learn, adapt, care for themselves that they must have caretakers whether they want it or not–rather than because they decided that they want help.
I think person-centered language actively harms them, and me, and all of the disability community.
Person-centered language claims to be about people first, but why would we need to make awkward linguistic constructs if disability was a neutral concept? Saying that we put people first means that you think disability is shameful, in need of being hidden or removed, that you are unable to think of people who are openly disabled as people. Saying I am a person with autism rather than an autistic person denies that autism is a value-neutral descriptor for the way I think and experience the world around me. It tries to make autism into something separate from the “real” me (and that leads to dangerous curbie mythologies and “treatments”), into something that is bad. Saying we are people with disabilities rather than disabled people shows that “disability” is a dirty word, something bad and to be avoided, rather than a word that describes our interactions with the community because of our atypical strengths and weaknesses. Saying we are people with disabilities rather than disabled people removes the burden from society to make adaptations and accomodations and places it upon us.
Using person-centered language ends up devaluing the person because it attempts to remove a central part of who they are and make it negative.
Unfortunately, I would probably be fired if I made some key edits to the binders, so they’ll remain as-is. For now.
Tagged with: ableism • ali • asperger's • autism • disablism • kit • neurodiversity • utter pedantry • work
I’ve been thinking about inertia and perseveration lately. I thought I’d been thinking about depression and my own early signs of a life-long sprint from black clouds, but apparently the part of my brain that ruminates without my knowledge was busy at work on something altogether separate.
I’ve talked about inertia before–I should probably start using a tag for it and the other things I mention regularly. And I’ve talked about perseveration, and how I think it’s a useful, adaptive process in working through executive function difficulties (see the link to rumination).
A quick recap: inertia is the tendency to keep doing what you’re doing rather than change paths (with a nod to Newtonian physics for the basic concept), and perseveration is going over something endlessly, either because it provides comfort, stimulation, or a solution to a problem or otherwise fills some need.
I think they are the same thing, or facets of a larger single thing. And I think that thing is at the heart of difficulties in choice making in autism spectrum disorders and at least partially to do with why concrete plans are necessary. I’m not sure if it is part of the larger executive function or a related but separate thing.
Inertia has negative connotations, at least for me. Inertia is continuing to do something that isn’t really great for me (like not eat or not sleep) because it is easier than the alternative (procuring food or getting ready for bed–which usually entails saying goodbye to Kitty, something I loathe). Inertia means staying in bad jobs because it is easier than finding new ones. Inertia means multiple degrees in a field which doesn’t hold a career or major interest to me, because considering a change took too much thought and spoons to be done at a pace that would have allowed me to change.
Perseveration has a mixed connotation. Perseveration is going over and over songs until I know them by heart and can sing them pitch, tone, and word perfectly. Perseveration is almost always thinking about one of the few topics I am especially interested in, like autism or MBT. Perseveration is the way my brain works to process complex information by letting it tumble around and then finding notable, interesting things in what that information sticks to inside my head. Perseveration is eating the same food for three, four, five days in a row all. the. time.
Both are the inability to change topics or actions without a strong desire to do so. That desire can be internally or externally motivated, emotionally or physically motivated.
This inability to move off a single track can make it difficult to impossible to make decisions and choices. I know that the DSM is too strictly categorized for this to ever happen, but perhaps autism should be considered partially an anxiety disorder.
I wanted to buy a computer–a laptop. I researched laptops for months, learning about screen types and the inner workings of a machine, learning about various OSes and interfaces. I learned what my price range would need to be to get something like what I wanted (a tablet with the ability to write directly on the screen). And then I didn’t do anything. I knew what I wanted, but I was absolutely paralyzed by the idea that as soon as I made a choice a better, cheaper, more awesome choice would appear and thus be unavailable to me. I finally bought my laptop only because it was on woot that day and the price was about half what I’d been prepared to pay previously. I needed that external limitation to make a decision: woot is only one item per day and there is no guarentee the item will ever turn up again, the price is drastically lower than anywhere else online, and there is a limited number of units available–but you can’t tell how many until it’s sold out. I’ve had this laptop for about two years now and I suspect I would still be dithering about getting the BEST LAPTOP EVAR had I not been constrained by this.
Having choices makes choosing extremely difficult when you tend towards this style of thinking. The more choices I have, the more likely I am to fall back into the holding pattern of inertia and just not choose. When I am hungry, I need to have explicit options rather than an open ended “what do you want?” because the latter will only lead to frustration and upset. (Kitty, in her wisdom, knew this years and years ago and tolerated my saying over and over that I hated planning meals and that it made food unappealing, and to her I apologize again for being a shit. She was completely right and knew me better than I knew myself at the time.) Having a schedule means I actually get things done. Without, I am likely to spend all day online, playing games or looking at tumblr.
Unfortunately, none of these things allows me to write coherent blog posts sometimes!
Tagged with: ali • asperger's • autism • frustrations • inertia • international relations • kit • meta • neurocognitive science • neurodiversity • perseveration • research • utter pedantry
My attention span is currently at a level I would describe as “kitten.”
I’ve known for a long time that my attention is directly correlated to the interestingness of the material–this isn’t unusual for kids identified as gifted (nor the adults they grow into), or anyone on the spectrum. In fact, it was this extreme hyperfocus that first had me questioning if I might be on the spectrum as I read tales of kids and their encyclopedic knowledge of topics and saw myself. This one time, I drew the same picture with only minor variations a couple hundred times; I was nine. I suspect I could still draw it.
I’ve also known for a long time that if I’m otherwise engaged, I can pay attention to topics of less interest with some reliability. In a school setting, for example, I’m usually really strongly into one class and then have varying levels of caring about the others–just like anyone else. Because of that high interest class, though, I have this sort of carry-over attention effect making it easier to pay attention to other material that is not as engaging for me. This has led me to the conclusion that I do well in moderate to high stress environments, but yesterday I started thinking (a rare thing these days when my mind lands on a topic and only stays for a few minutes at most), and this may not be the case.
There are different kinds of stress. Google thinks there are three–acute, episodic, and chronic–but that’s not what I mean. Those factors certainly play in, but I think stress can and should be divided by what part of you it engages, not just the length. Intellectual stress would be things like heavy schoolwork, complex reading material (fiction or no), non-rote professional work, puzzle solving. Emotional stress is identifying your own and other people’s feelings, social cues, working with other people. Physical stress could be identifying sensations (like needing to pee or being hungry), things that involve physical labour, or enduring discomfort (like working in a too-cold or too-hot place). Some combination of three things creates the stress, and that can then be chronic, episodic, or acute.
By this system, I really like things that are chronically intellectually stressful, with low levels of emotional or physical stress. I don’t like to move or worry about what my body language says. That is…not how I would currently describe my life. So even while I feel stressed, worrying about money and the cat and immigration, it isn’t the sort of stress that puts me in a position to spend a lot of time thinking. Those stressors are not comfortable for me, so they use up many more spoons than the stressors I like–and because I’ve wasted those spoons, I can’t do the things I enjoy (like reading scienceblogs) which could potentially refresh my spoons.
When I’m stressed–in the bad, not comfortable way–my memory and attention are spotty. I need to have a constant stream of intellectual information coming in–and going out, such as via blogging–to feed my own ruminative processes. Not only do I think they are a good thing, I now think they are essential to my well-being. When I am taking in enough information to have a viable ruminative background process going, my whole mind is working in concert, concious, unconcious, and memory. Being able to ruminate this way requires a precise memory, which is the first thing to go when I’m under stress (I often have no memory of meltdowns, for example–they’re just missing or I have a handful of photograph-like images).
I have been incredibly, risably forgetful lately–and lucky Kit doesn’t mind. Things we discussed multiple times have slipped my mind as if they never were. There is no sense of loss, of having forgotten something. My memory is not recording in the first place. Even when she reminds me, often with my own words, they feel new, unseen.
We talked about it yesterday, and I think it shifted my brain into the right gear to ruminate, because it hit me this morning, how all of this is connected for me: I need intellectual stress (and preferably as little of the other kinds as possible) to function well; I know alternate sources for this when I am not in uni; when I do not get this stress I become unable to seek it out because my will to live attention span grows shorter and shorter the longer I go without; this correlates with an unusually poor memory; these things are because with information coming in, I am able to ruminate properly (like any good ruminant and/or monster), because it is an adaptive and helpful process for me rather than being a destructive way to rehash bad memories or thoughts; therefore I have to just force myself to do something brainy, because it will sort of kickstart the whole process and I will stop feeling leaden. Which is…a helpful conclusion, and hopefully writing this will have done enough kickstarting I’ll no longer feel like my brain is dribbling out my ears slowly and painfully.
My name is Ali, though sometimes it's Eliot.
I have many tumblrs, which you are welcome to also visit:
The Polite Yeti - My personal tumblr, full of silliness.
Fuck Yeah, Kate Miller-Heidke - the only active Kate fan site, which is baffling.
The Branden Rose - the only active Monster Blood Tattoo fansite, which is less baffling.
I also have a semi-successful etsy shop, which you should visit, below.
Please buy things from me:
A brief history:
