Please read the Introduction first!

I don’t know about the NT folks, but reality can really suck for autistics. I think it’s primarily because we are just trying to fit in to the NT society. Social graces are not usually a strong aspect of our nature; square peg in the round hole kind of thing. So we are always trying to round off our corners so that we might find a way to fit into the NT round hole. Sometimes, I fail a bit less than gracefully… a bit like a diver executing a graceful swan dive but ending in a loud and obvious belly flop. The splash and waves haven’t quite disappeared from my dive yet; I’m just now coming up for air.

This time started like many times before:

I hate being interrupted! But, regrettably, my wife usually tells me that it’s the way that it’s just the way she and her sister and daughter communicate. Uh huh. They interrupt each other all the time, and nobody’s nose gets bent out of shape? Right. That sounds remarkably similar to what my ex mother-in-law once told me when I asked why everyone of her huge family (8 kids?) at the dinner table were all yelling at the same time: “If you wanna be heard around this table, you’re gonna have to holler.” At any rate, I’m supposed to just accept that I will never be able to complete a sentence, much less express a complete thought, without being interrupted. I would be able to accept this a little easier if she had even listened to what I was trying to say before she interrupted me. I know this because she never asks me what I was trying to say; it’s like she never heard me. It makes me feel like whatever I want to say isn’t even important enough to think about. It really makes me feel “less than”. Last week, while we’re in the car headed to my adult step child’s house to drop off a laptop I set up for a visitor to use, I tried talking to her about what the whole Trump thing was making me feel like. I was only half finished when she just blurted out “Look. You can see Mobile from here!” That was the end of me trying to talk to her. Once again, feeling like I’m not worth listening to. Jamie then gets a call from her daughter about the laptop. It seems her SO is home. The SO hates my guts and has stated that I am not to be within site. So Jamie says that we can just pull into the driveway, I can wait in the car while she brings the laptop into the SO. I said “No. I’m not doing that. She continues on in this train of thought until I said “No” again, but a little louder. Then… the SO is going out for a short while, and we can just bring it in now. But we need to hurry, because the SO won’t be gone long. As Jay is saying that we could pull this off, I’m saying “No.NO. NO!!!”. She finally acquiesced, and we me her daughter in a parking lot. I told her I am never going to that house again. She just quietly said “Ok.” We met her daughter in a store parking lot. I didn’t even feel as embarrassed as I thought I would.

The following days, I became very quiet. I kept telling myself that the whole problem was me; I just talked too much. And, whatever I did say was, simply, just not interesting enough to other people. I had to just keep my mouth shut, and that way I wouldn’t get hurt & frustrated. It’s a documented fact that unmitigated frustration always ends in anger. With me, the anger always ends in outburst, quiet, and quiet, painful & embarrassing sessions with the Shitty-Committee. Yes; I do embarrass myself. I don’t know if that’s universal, unique to autistics, or unique to me. But it sucks. 

When I fail this monumentally, I withdraw from everyone and everything. I need some quiet time to analyze what just happened, and how I can avoid it in the future. At times like this me, myself, & I get summoned  to come before the Shitty-Committee for an inquisition. This consists of explaining to the committee what I did, and the committee (whose members consist of every failure & embarrassment I’ve experienced in my life) passes judgement based upon their awareness of my past such inquiries. I try my damndest to avoid these sessions as they are long, quite painful, and self-embarrassing. I never know how long these sessions are going to last, and I’m pretty much unavailable to the world until it’s completed. I can imagine that everyone, even NTs, have a shitty-committee of one size or another.

That brings me to why I started this, the latest, bitch & moan post… autism. I guess what happened was a little more than just being cranky. I believe that what happened was, as I mention above, a mini meltdown. I say this because as I came out of this latest hissy-fit, I had changed somewhat. I am able to calm myself down like I used to do before my monumental crash of 2010. My voice lowered back to what it was prior to 2010 (I don’t know why my relatively deep voice had raised a half-octave or so after 2010) and is more “controlled”. I can sing again, although I now sing like a bullfrog instead of just a frog; not a pleasing sound for singing. I feel different. I stand a little taller; like I did before 2010.