Boxes

In the back of my mind there are a bunch of boxes. Beat up and dusty they sit in the corner out of the path of any direct light. Most of them hold nothing but air, the memories they once held now scattered to the winds in a million particles of dust fine glass. Corroded by the years and lack of attention they faded into nothingness without even a whisper to herald their passing. Some are full to the brim with the shining past, bits of happiness and comfort snatched here and there and filed away to peruse at a later date. Flickering lights of conversation long neglected that still hold out hope that one day I will open them up and see what they hold. A few, hidden at the very bottom of the pile, are dark and forbid careless tampering. Locked tight to the world they contain those things I have seen and lived and survived that lurk at the edges of my mind and make up the glue that holds this otherwise fragile and gossamer child together at the seams.

Rarely do I venture there, and bring forth one of those boxes. Rarely do I linger in the past where they live, wallowing in the mud of who I was, and who they were, and the choices we both made. I hardly even see them anymore hidden in the dusty mire where they have lain for so long, long ago cast from conscious thought to take up residence in nightmares and terror. These are the moments I would rather forget but cannot, jagged pieces of glass in my mind that could rend and tear if I spent too much time wallowing in their presence. Yet I know, in my heart, that these same bits of my past with such power to devastate me also fuel my strength and that to lock them away forever cheapens the horror and terror I felt when I was trapped in the moment. The tiny scrapes and cuts they cause allow the poison that could easily consume me to bleed from my veins.

I have a great deal of affection for those darker places in my mind, those corners lost deep in shadow where fear and hatred and misery lurk in patient silence, waiting for the opportunity to pounce. Most people shy away from the very edges of their humanity, never seeking to know what lies buried beneath that heap of lies we learn to tell ourselves in an effort to hide all that weakness from the prying eyes of others. In the pool of my own sweat and tears mingled with the blood of my pride and the dust at my feet I can see forever reflected back at me. These moments make me feel not less, but more and stronger each time I pull myself from the ashes of the fire to stand reborn and stretch my wings to the glory of their new span. It is only when held up in contrast to these moments of misery that I can witness the real value of the light and comfort that floods my life on a day to day basis. It’s only by carefully unlocking those boxes and rifling through their contents that I can achieve greater understanding. What I’ve done is such a huge part of who I am.

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“That one” she whispered, and he reached for one hidden back in the shadows of the already dim room. “No not that one, the one beside it” her voice got quieter as his hands neared the source of her anticipation. Wrapping it carefully in his hands he cradled it out of its place in the dusty past and lowered it carefully to the floor between them. She could barely look at it, knowing what it held, and tears started to creep down her cheeks, leaving tracks in the dust that had settled there in her search to unearth this long hidden piece of her past. With trembling hands she lifted the chain from around her neck and the key that dangled on the end danced in the small light offered by the one small lamp as she dropped it into his outstretched palm.

At the bottom

Every once in awhile I have to spend some time at the bottom of the well. Its like my body needs time to remember what its like to be sad so it can appreciate the good times and decides to stop producing those happy drugs altogether and I’m left in a rut I just don’t know how to get out of. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can’t communicate with any degree of effectiveness. All I can do is do my very best to live through it and hope that it will be over soon, that I can go to sleep one night and wake up the next day to a brighter world.

I think the hardest part of it is the effect it has on those I care most about. I don’t like being a burden but it’s hard to be anything else to those I can’t hide this from. The guilt I feel for having a negative impact on their lives at these times only compounds the way I feel. I feel like I should crawl into a hole somewhere and hide away from everyone until it passes but I can’t, and they see, and they worry, and the whole thing goes around in a big circle. I can accept what it does to me, I have a much harder time accepting what it does to them.

I feel like I should have better control, like if I could just look at this from the right angle I could make it do away, so I poke and I prod and I try to make it all make sense. Emotions rarely make sense, I don’t even know why I try. I know I should just ride it out, cry when I need to, sleep when I can, but that’s so much harder to do when there are other people to take into consideration. I’m stuck in a struggle between what I need to do to feel better, and what I need to do to keep them happy, and I really have no control over the outcome. I can try to smother it down but it will all build up in the long run and eventually overflow, eventually they will see, I can only keep it hidden so long and the longer I do the worse it is in the long run.

I know it will pass, I just wish it would pass faster so I can get back to living my life.

Masochism

Although this diagnosis of Asperger’s is new to my life, the self evaluation and discovery that has gone along with it is a story as old as I am. I’ve always been seeking the deeper meanings and hidden answers and this isn’t the first time that the things I have discovered about myself have raised eyebrows and had people thinking that there must be something wrong with me. When I tell people I’m a masochist I get the same reaction.

There is an epidemic in our world that for some reason no one seems to see. Its an epidemic of misinformation and it plays a deciding role in the amount of discrimination and ignorance that people are running up against every day of their lives. Google masochist and see what you find, a startling array of articles and definitions proclaiming masochism to be a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of self defeating behavior, and while I admit there are those out there like this, its these types of blanket diagnosis that contribute to the misunderstanding I suffer from. Things are rarely black and white in reality the way they are on paper.

No one stops to consider that maybe it’s a combination of mental and/or emotional disorders that contribute to some masochists behaving this way. I am a masochist without self defeating personality disorder.

Saying I like pain is a lousy way to describe it. While I have a high tolerance for it, pain is pain and it hurts. What I do like about it is the rush of endorphins and adrenaline my body produces in response to the physical and emotional trauma I am putting it through. When it comes down to it I’m nothing more than an adrenaline junkie who is too smart to jump out of an airplane and knows that its better to throw it into a cocktail with some yummy endorphins to kick start the effect. No one is out there insisting all snowboarders are in need of psychiatric evaluation, or that bungee jumpers are just trying to cover up emotional pain.

By now some of you are wondering, do I hurt myself? Do I let other people hurt me? The answer is once again not so black and white, it depends on the situation. I went from poking at scrapes as a kid to artistic cutting and wax as a teenager. I prefer, at this stage in my life, to have someone else do the hurting for me. Now, before you jump to conclusions, I am not out roaming the streets at night dressed like a slut hoping someone will attack me. Remember what I said up there about being too smart to jump out of an airplane? I take my personal safety very seriously, and this is no exception. I’m very careful about who I will let hurt me, but what a wonderful surprise to find out that there was another side to this coin. I have a wonderful sadist in my life.

You see, while the amount of pain I can cause myself takes the edge off the desire, satiation is hard to achieve. My bodies natural defence mechanisms kick into full gear way too soon and I have to remain present to continue. Take that power out of my hands and put it into the hands of another and suddenly I can ride the way it makes me feel. Ultimately I am safe, he isn’t going to do anything I can’t get up and function from in very short order, but the uncertainty of not knowing how far he will push this time or what he will do next plays tricks on my mind and floods my body with my drugs of choice. Knowing he gets off on hurting me just adds the emotional twist of lime that finishes it off perfectly.

There is a side of this no one sees, the mutual trust and respect that’s required to engage in these activities, or the communication that takes place about every aspect of this in our lives. This isn’t something that’s entered into lightly, it takes a vast amount of understanding about both yourself and the other person to take things to the level we do, and the risk is as much his as mine. People express their concerns for my safety and, while I understand that they are just worried, it’s insulting because it expresses a lack of confidence in my intelligence and strength.

Just as insulting, in fact, as considering my having Asperger’s a disability.

The proverbial light bulb

*takes a deep breath*

It starts here, or at least it feels like it does. I’m calling this the proverbial light bulb because that’s what happening in my life. Somehow it all makes a lot more sense, and yet I still can’t seem to come to terms with it all. There is a part of me that wants to scream, that feels that being defined in this way will somehow discredit all of the unique quirks and eccentricities that make me who I am. I’ve never felt the need for a cure, I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than who I am, and although I know that having Aspergers is a part of me, not the sum of my whole, it almost feels too comfortable to fit in a category that way. It’s never happened before.

I’m angry, I cant help but think that this was overlooked, that I was overlooked. I’m grieving for the years I have lost to trying to be normal when that was never going to happen. I’m elated to have found some of the answers that I have looked for for so long, but I’m confused by the volume of information that I have to work my way through, and where I fit into the spectrum. I can’t help but pick apart my life to find the pieces to the puzzle, but I find it overwhelming that so many of them fit. The “Neurotypical” box has very few pieces left.

All my life I’ve been different. Sure, everyone is different, but this is on a much deeper level. There have always been things I couldn’t do that most could accomplish with ease; I’ve always seen things differently. I just don’t feel things the same way as others do and without a point of comparison I have no way to describe the way I am feeling or how it differs.

I’ve never understood jealousy or grief as explained to me, my emotions at the time people tell me I should be experiencing them do not match the description provided by others feeling the same way. I have a difficult time in situations where I am expected to “feel for” someone, and although I can sympathize by rote it tends to come across as cold, it is after all scripted in my head based on the situation and what others around me are saying. Its hard to express feeling in a sentiment when you aren’t feeling anything at all.

Apart from the few people I form intense connections with I have difficulty socializing. I don’t understand the apparent enjoyment others get from this activity. Its not that I don’t want to feel this way, I simply don’t, and that makes the experience stressful. I spend the entire time worrying about what I can say, and can’t say, and how far away I should stand, and if I should shake hands, and how long its ok to talk. I’m confused easily by groups of people, especially those with an expectation that I will take part and contribute to the banter.

This doesn’t mean that I am disabled in any way it simply means that I do actually view the world differently, just as I have always suspected. I don’t experience things the same way as someone who is Neurotypical would, I simply don’t “feel” the same things.

There is a disappointing lack of information available to adults with Aspergers. It’s getting better, but the focus is still on diagnosing children with the syndrome, and less care is being taken to explain the way an adult would present the symptoms. The fact of the matter is that adults with Aspergers are highly overlooked in the medical community due to their high functionality and lack of extreme symptoms. After 30 years I was content to stand back and let the world affix the labels they wanted, knowing they would never understand and I would never be able to explain it to them. Despite the years of trying to be “normal”, I really had no desire to be that way. I was simply forcing myself into the mold, trying to make ends meet so that I would know how to relate to everyone else around me. As it dawned on me that no matter how hard I tried there was no way to change who I was, that I was definitely working at a disadvantage in social situations that no amount of study about psychology and social clues was going to fix, I retreated. I started resisting the urge to reach out and touch people because I knew that eventually I would let them down, they would see me as cold hearted no matter how much I wanted to connect, and my inability to make small talk or initiate any kind of social activity would drive them away thinking that I didn’t want a connection at all. I’m good at making friends, but I suck at keeping them.

That’s been the hardest part of my life I think, that people assume that because I cant I don’t want to. They take it personally when I don’t just drop in to say hi, or I can’t empathize when they need a shoulder to cry on. I can give advice, but I can’t empathize, and that’s a harsh reality for some people to face. I correct people when they are wrong and they assume I think they are stupid, when in fact I just sometimes get so fixated on the details that I cant see the bigger picture. I can’t do drop ins, people have to call before they come by. I often use the wrong tone of voice, facial expression, or body language when I am communicating giving the impression that I am upset or hostile and by the time I realize it I have no idea how to fix it. I tend to be so honest I can offend people without realizing it, I’m not the girl to ask if your ass looks fat in those jeans if you want platitudes. Most people expect more from their friends.

Even masochism is suspect in my eyes right now. I was never fully comfortable with the textbook definition of this word as it applies to me. It’s another example of standing back and letting the world choose how it wants to see me, it was a word that people understood and accepted. It saved me from having to explain the way I felt about it. This doesn’t change the way I see myself, but it may change the way the world sees me drastically. Pain at very mild levels gives me some element of sexual satisfaction, but leaves me totally unsatisfied. Pain at the level Cherry and I play gives me no sexual satisfaction at all, yet leaves me with a temporary satisfaction I can get no other way. See, here I am trying to explain it. I can’t. There is no point of reference. Needless to say, many people with Aspergers often enjoy pain and discomfort, both emotional and physical, because we seek those intense feelings what we don’t experience in thier natural setting.

This is by no means all the information I have, or all the clues that have come together. This is just me trying to get this all straight in my head. I’m working on making an appointment with a psychologist and by then I hope I will have this all in order to present to him on paper. This just fits, I feel like these people are in my head, right down to the fact that I walk on my tiptoes. I’m actually quite frightened.

This is just the beginning.