cybermule | The width of a circle (Reply)

I don't know how to structure this post. One thing I am enjoying about getting back to my writing is not knowing how to do the thing I want in a technical sense. Many things have become so routine that I hate them, and where there's change or challenge it's generally an uncontrollable crisis.

So this stuff? It's something I hold in my head like loosely spooled string for a kite. And I play it out until it either tangles or I reach the end. I'll do a tangle count.

I think the start of the thoughts was my friend telling me how well I'd parented my child through extremely difficult times. Which was lovely - H is going through similar with her kid, and it is excruciating to do. And she said that she admired that I never gave up, or went under, or seemed at a loss as to what to do. An aside to this is her being appalled at how much the last relationship took out of me, and broke me, because...well...that's just not very cybermule.

I do give myself all the credit I should for getting through those years. But I also have really good game face, and recompiling the scraps is what I do. That last one is probably pathological in extremis. I just get the bits, juggle them around, and try again. And that can kill you in certain circumstances. I think it was something I *had* to do with two alcoholic parents. There is no point having a plan, or an opinion, or needing something around an alcoholic because they will fuck it up for you. So just unravel, reknit, unravel, reknit.

Autistics are supposed to be inflexible. Women present "atypically" (i.e. not in the proper man way) anyway, but this is one of the two weird masking level-ups I think my parents inadvertently gave me. So this, the first, is the ability to recompile and keep moving. Because as a child in a dangerous situation, you will come to harm if you don't. The second also keeps you alive - be hypervigilant in reading the room. So being terrified probably raised me above normal intuition levels for an autist - I'm great right up until I'm not because after all, I learned from a faulty primer.

And there were times I absolutely despaired when I was raising her. Once to the point where I was having grave doubts about moving her to a new school, her dad used it to be nasty, and my partner slid me off for whatever reason. And I looked at the train track across the road and seriously considered making my life easier for B by lying down on it, because then she wouldn't be a "naughty child". She'd be that poor kid whose Mum had died, and I would stop being a corrupting influence on her.

Obviously stupid, but that's where your brain gets you sometimes. The only other similar point I have ever been in was February this year at the pit of my relationship. My ex basically just lied in my face and told me that it had always been so. And my brain broke. Clean snapped at the thought that my perception of reality was that incorrect, because why would someone who allegedly loved me lie, or even just refuse to concede any possibility of being wrong.

So against a vague background hum of preferring the idea of not being round quite a lot of days, those are the only two times I've really seriously considered not being here. My friend unknowingly pulled me out from the first one, and I crawled my way out of the second one by literally hanging on timed minute by timed minute until dawn came.

And I think that this is something I keep reeling into my life. Partners who can't consider the possibility that they might have misheard or misremembered - it always has to be me. Partners who are cold about my emotions and bullying with theirs. Partners who don't own their shit.

And I did actually manage to weave all that without a tangle :)