cybermule: (Default)
Today I write about space. I think I have just nipped a meltdown in the bud - I've not had quite enough processing time for some really important personal stuff. About 80-90% of enough. Parenting and running a house are both demanding tasks, and I'm working on streamlining the latter, but you can't skimp on the former. I had a possibly life changing interview today. And everyone wants a slice of my attention and is slack at getting back to me and closing the loops so those plates are still spinning. That's something that can be pruned too.

And I am still not getting around to all the things I want to do.

So today I've listened to my whizzy buzzy brain and its impending overwhelm and just stepped back. One of the things I identified needing was my space. Space to just be me and self soothe without yammering. It's surprisingly hard - I magnetise people with shitty boundaries. It's been interesting just sitting and holding myself and my reactions when people don't constantly push at my boundaries and demand my attention.

So there are all these things I want to do and don't get around to. Dressmaking, writing, making things. That's a thing. And it's a thing that has been warped a little by people pressuring me to do those things.

And there are a couple of things that give my brain some space to actually simmer down and uncoil and be its best self. Those first things are not going to happen until I get this defragging down to be a good and effective habit. Colouring. And playing computer games. Those two things put a healthy dissociative fence around my brain, let it heal, and recharge my batteries.

Computer games I have pondered for a bit. I've played those for 40 years, and often questioned whether it's a healthy thing. There's a lot of debate about whether it's a healthy thing, and I've read it all.

It isn't a major force in my life. I enjoy gaming, I'm evangelical about gaming, but I don't feel massively sucked towards it when I'm not doing it. I think I just do it to unwind, and nothing seems to suffer from me doing it except my kid occasionally gets cranky that I'm not making her enough snacks.

LOL.

And colouring is just a nice thing to do. It stretches my brain just beyond itself without hideous consequences. And actually, gaming does that. They both act as distress tolerance techniques, which I wish I'd worked out earlier in my life. And I love the exploration in gaming - I can get absorbed in a whole new world.

So yeah. If I can't be entirely on my own (which is a bit unreasonable most of the time) colouring and gaming give me space. They soothe and stretch me, but are secondary to anything better going on.

I am really really enojying the gaming. I get to explore new worlds that I would never ever see in my life. I've finished two new games and I'm redoing an old previously completed game now. There's art and cinematography and stories. And all the things that make me go OOOO.
cybermule: (Default)
Another of the "S"s. I desperately needed solitude last weekend. Asked for it and got it. Taking on extra work around the time I got Covid was unhelpful to anything other than my bank balance, and I have some occasional intense freelance work that pays well but crucifies my introversion.

I think I need a lot of solitude. More than I think, and more than I get. I had a massive solitude debt after home edding for 18 months in 2019 - 20, and trying to repay that and balance it with the needs of a relationship was hard work. It's a gender difference that annoys me. Men are more entitled to solitude in their hobbies or man sheds and women are supposed to be social. By default we always end up around people - men, kids, other women. Solitary women were burned as witches. And I've had several male partners that were very strenuous about their own solitude then quite pouty when I tried to take some. They would occasionally gift me some solitude, like that would even touch the sides of my big introversion hole. And it doesn't count if you've used the company during the day, eaten your dinner, and then slunk off to your hobbies to give your missus some alone time :P

Saying that, I have company at the moment. A last minute houseguest. But she is undemanding and kind to be around. I'm struggling with accepting that in all honesty - I'm used to the pull and drain of male energy nibbling away at my reserves and leaving me empty and cranky.

So finding quiet alone time is going to continue to be my mission. Just making the most of space and silence, and allowing my own self to come to the foreground.
cybermule: (Default)
I use that title line ever such a lot in the two decades I've been blogging. Nearly two decades. All these dates are starting to resonate. Anyway, it's from this:



My relationship with sleep has always been strange. You can blame the ubiquity of media. I can blame my parents making night time an unsafe place. But even before I had either of those things, I'd be watching the stream outside my house roll past at one in the morning before I even got to High School.

It could be a neurodivergent thing. Autism, anxiety, ADHD. They all fuck with your ability to switch off. And I am heavily introverted, so night time is definitely peaceful and quiet. And it's generally the time I can get stuff done. Self care shit. One of the ways I'm taming my perpetual insomnia is getting up and doing whatever scratches the itch. COVID has helped. I'm working at home and making my own schedule, and if it's nap o'clock then so be it.

It's easier now I have my room to myself. I think that just has to be a privilege in relationships now, rather than an expectation. I never really got that needing to glom to each other in your sleep thing. I've been OK with it in long term domestic relationships - with S and D it came and went. Other relationships too. I've learned that having my own duvet makes a massive difference. Simple things.

Sleep deprivation makes me absolutely batshit. That's an established thing, and given I have to parent, work, drive, and run a household...things can get ugly quite quickly. The two most chaotic and hurtful relationships were ones where I was massively sleep deprived. A and G had no real adult responsibility in their life, both really really wanted us to share a bed, and both snored like fucking hippos with no personal responsibility for that. Putting that aside, I can't keep doing things that make people like that happy, although to be fair A got their head around it. AS an interesting aside, both A and G used to lecture me on how awesome they were at Relationship Anarchy.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_anarchy)

Biznatch, I was always doing that.

Anyway, I need my sleep and if you don't like it then we are not going to work. I always sneakily thought that living next to my partner but not actually with them would be my ultimate plan.

And now I snooze to my heart's content. The enemy of sleep seems to be obligation. I crack my window open an inch. All my princess-y pure cotton bedlinen, my multiple texturally different pillows, my two thin lightweight duvets. Why shouldn't I have that? I used to joke that my daughter was the Princess and the Pea in reverse. Seems that we both need it to be just so so to let go and drop into Morpheus' realm.

An autism diagnosis is letting me let go of the things I tried to do for other people. I still have to hold myself accountable. I need to make sure I sleep. But how I do that is nobody else's business now. Except possibly B and Ziggy who are the only two mammals I can successfully share a bed with.

I read a book on sleep fairly recently. My friend said I absolutely shouldn't read it. She's known me for years, we were pregnancy pals, and she is familiar with my battle for the ZZZZs. But being who I am, I read it anyway, and I'm going to make some notes before I return it to the library.

(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep)

It's by-line is unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. COVID recovery is making me sleep like a pro to be fair, albeit on a strange schedule. I remember this when I was pregnant, the ability to just drop into sleepy satisfaction. And even though sleeping 14/24 hours is frustrating, the healing is amazing. I dream of my ex and my mother looking down on me with their chilly smug little faces. But I also dream of people looking at me with interest and desire and love.

Anyway, notes of interest:

- Code cracking and problem solving. Sleeping on it is better advice than you know - sleep defrags your brain and sorts your memories and experiences. I have the same relationship with my dreams that I do with tarot and astrology - they aren't magic, but if you leave your brain to rest it isfar cleverer than you give it credit for. Which is easier said than done. Rest will do it. There are many forms of rest. Don't force it.

- Get the nighttime chills.Oh yeah. I was right on it with the open windows and skimpy duvets. The book recommends 18 degrees C which is way warmer then the Free Miltonia household enjoy, but it's important to me. One of the issues I had with A was their need for everything to be locked up and insulated with huge duvets. They spent a lot of time sleeping rough, and I can understand their need for what they needed, but I can't deal with it. Nights need to be about security for me, but in a different way.

- Electric light. This is just a reality of our world. I've recently seen research that a little media before bed might be a good thing, despite popular folklore. I know my sprog likes to have the lights on and listen to music. My brother used to need this, and it did my head in. I chalked it up to my parents being a complete loose cannon once dark fell and they got drunk and shitty. But I don't think electronics are the definite terrible thing people make out. I like to subdue my lighting, sure. But I also need audio books to shut out the quiet that my brain fills with gibberish. I like whatever Monty Don wrote and recorded about gardens in the past year or so. And Jerusalem by Alan Moore. Long soothing tracts that hold no surprises for me. With a bit of luck I fall asleep before the 45 allocated minutes, but I have also left them gently chattering at me all night when things have been awful.

And that's it. I just need to keep listening to myself and not giving in to other people's needs. By the end of my last relationship I was heading to bed at 1, lying there while my ex looked at HotUKDeals, trying to sleep through their snoring for an hour or so, crashing on the sofa and getting 3 or 4 hours sleep before getting up at 7 to get B into school. Then putting up with my ex's bullshit when I tried to get them up a couple of hours later.

Utter bullshit.
cybermule: (Default)
I had a good therapy session today. She's not my previous therapist, A, who holds all my secrets. But I've finally bonded with her. Bonding with people, deshielding from my quiet reserve, that can take a bit of time. It is something I'm getting better at though. I've deshielded with a healthy number of people. I find it hard around others, and that's with good reason generally. I need to trust my instinct. She made a good point that my last relationship was built with an active addict, and I have a well worn psychic groove for managing addicts. Don't rock the boat. ALways make excuses for them. Always gently fold up and fawn and let them have their way. It's really not healthy, and what usually seems to happen is that I eventually break under the strain of treating them with kid gloves and chaos ensues.

I think, like I said, not treating them with care is something that I have been trained to avoid. I worked fucking hard with G to have opinions and boundaries and not to compromise myself, but addicts wouldn't be addicts if they weren't immensely good at getting the world to treat them as snowflakes. That was definitely a characteristic for him. To expect special treatment because he's sensitive and you don't know what might happen. I think it's just how he'd always been treated. And it takes an awful lot of balls to unpack that Sick Role privilege and be treated like everyone else. And there was no incentive for me to do that.

I already parent one person.

We talked about forgiveness and what it actually means. I think it's overrated, and possibly peddled by a patriarchal church. Why would I forgive someone for consistently being a shit to me for 6 months when everything was there to make things work? The secret is to not let that happen to me again.

There are things I cannot change about myself, however much I want to. If the twin peaks of autism and trauma coincide then it will end badly. I'm in meltdown mode, so best to just not let myself get there in the first place. I refuse to write myself a user manual for other people to look me up in, as the point of human relationships is to communicate, but I can build myself a checklist and work on that. Steer myself between Scylla and Charybdis as much as possible.

And just stop dating arseholes. Nobody can fix themselves in a broken system.

So, what do I need to stay in calm waters? (I may keep adding to this)

SLEEP
STRUCTURE
SOLITUDE
SPACE
CREATIVITY

That'll do as a start, although I obviously wish they all started with "S".
cybermule: (Default)
Earlier this week, I had an interesting experience through my new lens. I'd either spent time or chatted with two of my loved ones and with each I had the same familiar "oh shit - I've done something wrong" feeling. Not from anything particularly notable on either occasion, but it's something I was emotionally aware enough to stick a pin in. And it was a massive issue in my last relationship - one of the final list of Things That Should Be done was not thinking I've got things wrong all the time. And not needing as much reassurance generally. (**)

So if I've always been autistic, chances are I got dealt a shoddy hand of skills in picking up on cues from text and unspoken interactions. Plus, I had two alcoholics as my parental teachers, so there was no chance of playing catch up - addicts are in a perpetual state of lying their arses off to themselves and anyone else. It's how they do what they do.

I remember particularly with my first long term partner it was ok for me to ask "have I fucked up". He'd answer in the negative, I'd be "oh ok". He wasn't massively emotionally responsive, but he was clear and honest. Up until recently I've still relied on this method with partners to sanity check what I thought was madness, what I was often told was hideous ugly insecurity, but what was probably actually a good deal of inability to read a room.

Like I said, this exploded with my last partner, and to some extent a previous partner. They were both avoidant arseholes with angry man energy, in retrospect. But they both said I needed too much reassurance. Eww. Horrible ugly insecurity, amIrite? But things I learned from these partners (which may have been imprinted early with my parents) was that I could ask a question and get a really confusing answer:

Are you angry? NO! (crashing of crockery as they wash up)
Would you rather be gaming? NO! (spend the date slyly messaging a gaming chum)
Have I upset you? NO! (Flounces off on some pretext)
Am I delaying you? NO! (Repeatedly checks watch)

So I never got any kind of base of security with those people. It wasn't that they were processing or couldn't label or needed space to work stuff out. They just seemed to be flat out be lying but in a way I couldn't call them out on.

So I can work on my own abilities to read the room, and iron out some of my quirks. But it needs to be with people I can absolutely trust.

And FWIW in both cases I mentioned at the start, it just smoothed out and moved on effectively.In fact, just as I finished this my lovely weekend more than a friend said our date still made them smile <3



(**) actually, I should revisit THE LIST. As I think one of the items involved me reassuring people. I'll check. It was me that did all the work on it, and me that was the only one who stuck by it. So fuck The List. But anyway... back above ^
cybermule: (Default)
The last entry showed me so very very sad. And I still am. I got fucked over, badly. By somebody who was continually telling me how they weren't fucking me over, so I drowned the lack of trust they always pinned on me and carried on being vulnerable, humble and open to change until it was obvious, even to me, that it was pretty literally killing me.

Here is an interesting article on autism that is linked to this excessive drive to empathise and try to heal others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Nb2FDmQo4

I mean, yes. Not fucking over someone you love is something that shouldn't need saying, and I was right to be suspicious that it was being said. With the benefit of hindsight, there were a lot of things I was told about myself, like the lack of trust, that were basically set-ups so that I could be used as an emotional battery right up to the point I had no more charge, then discarded.

That's what hurts - I was watching the Arethra film last night, and her (admittedly shitty) husband says that he wants her to help him fight his demons. And I thought that was the deal with partners. Not holding a practical strangers hand and loving them when they're unlovable and scared, then being dropped as an inconvenience.

Because that's how you fuck someone over. You keep draining them right until they have nothing to give, or you find a better source. Then you walk away.

October 2023

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