I get so incredibly angry when I see injustice. It’s always been this way; this is why I had so many fights in school. I would dive in to protect strangers. Part of me probably loved the fights, but we can get into how I internalised audhd personal failings another day.
I just can’t stand it though. I get so genuinely angry about the injustice in the world; my body feels like it is facing down an assailant but there is nobody to destroy apart from the self. Shaking with rage, and always because of some scam or lie or duplicity, and the sheer inability to do anything about it on the internet. The pile-on culture of social justice warriors. It’s all revolting.
This sense of justice is one of the reasons my wife married me, but also one of the major causes of trouble throughout my life. I would walk up to teachers in school and say ‘this is not right and here is why’ in front of other kids. I made at least one cry, which I still feel bad for, but she was failing in her charge of providing an education and I guess that fell into the ‘injustice’ category for autistic James?
Thankfully my mother - and my father in a different way - gave me solid moral standpoints to fight from. I think it’s important to remember that if I didn’t have the fighter mask from my dad I wouldn’t have had the ‘stop when they go down’ rule and might well have killed someone. I hate the fighter and I wish he would sleep, but he won his fight and the program was effective. I guess the he might escape the loop of rebirth?
But looking at my social anxiety, probably not.
Rsd is gone, and that was the real killer. It’s back a little but I think this is more normal level not-wanting-to-be-hated than pathological love-me-mother-rat level. But I meet eyes and there’s the shoulder girdle tensing ready for violence. But again - is this learned? Or is this a biological thing? Both, but probably more biological than realised.
I maybe fed on this social anxiety before; this is why I was such an animated conversationalist, always with the dancing, gurning facial expressions. Maybe that’s why our family is so good at silly faces; because we have to practice our expressions in the mirror. I know I did, and then I relegated the memory to some half-remembered haze.
There’s been studies showing that autistic folks vs normal folks experience the comfort of eye contact in opposite manners. But honestly I don’t know how you can make a generalisation about autism since it seems to be ‘anything not generalised’.
Oh and fuck off with your pink and blue butterfly enablist shit. I know everyone has been told ‘this is a lifelong disorder and you have to accept it’ but that doesn’t mean Seligman’s learned helplessness it mean’s buddha’s road to enlightenment. It’s up to you which route you take. I’ll try to get this med to the world but I’m thinking more and more that it’s about the internal work too.
But the meds. I can’t overstate. I don’t think I would function like this without them. You can see my anger and how things changed with time in my art. Capitalism was pre-medication, trussed was post-guanfacine, and post-abilify I don’t want to look at that orange cunt and just want to be with my family instead.
Like a normal person. That’s what I feel like. In the juices at least. The wires will always be weird and that’s fine. But I didn’t eat my cannabis edible yesterday and I felt better than when I do usually. So this is exactly what I wanted in a med: sensory issues and cravings down, dopamine up to replace cannabis, once daily dosing and pharmacological ability. And adhd as a bonus.
Anyway fuck that ‘we are all broken so let’s pretend it’s a superpower’ shite. It’s not. But with abilify it sure felt that way for a while.
I do hope I can fix my relationships with my family. But I can’t focus on that yet. That’s the hardest can of worms. They have to meet me, then grieve the old me. Whoever he was, they loved him, and his death is going to hurt them. It will hurt them in proportion to how much they loved the dancer. But I still think that what they loved really was the stuff underneath. Maybe I should suggest they have a funeral of sorts. I had a burning ceremony for my old stuff last year, before everything imploded.
I guess I saw this coming a long way off and stacked the odds. ‘Get to the art James’ something said, with urgency. So I did. For a year. And it saved my life, I think. I cut wood, instead of my wrists. Somehow I tempered the relationship with my wife so she could (just about) survive the implosion. I got this website. I don’t know; it just feels like I knew this was coming and knew I had to prepare. When it all got bad and I just spent 3 weeks making pictures of my loved ones, before I had the serious breakdown. I wonder; if I’d paid just a little less attention to child #2’s hair, would I have killed myself?
All of this was an unconscious reminder of why I should stick around. What it was that J1 had built which could be a foundation for J2. Because J1 had done. He finished the program of being human. His fight was over, and he was terminating, and he needed to start the process for the next task or the system was going to shut down.
Now the next task is running. I think the first version is ready and it will need a rewrite to grow much from here so I’ll just add nuggets occasionally but focus on simple old blogging and living for now. Philosophical musings. I’ve always loved these and the adhd/asd lens is great to be honest; it means I can revisit the big problems and approach satisfactory solutions; agency and meaning for example just fell out the other day. This was the missing piece in my life, and it probably sounds a bit crazy to be here at 2:34 am writing this, but I was in bed at 0830 and this is a big change so… maybe this is how I was supposed to be. Maybe the ‘regular routine’ I tried to keep had become yet another personal failing and reason to beat myself up. Missing piece is not an understatement. Even better: this is the backing on which the puzzle is built.
Anyway - life is good. That’s what I’m saying. And I go to bed looking forward to waking up. Previously I would go to bed looking forward to getting up. The difference is huge.
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