can we stop the identity ride, I want to get off

I’m feeling tangled up in other peoples’ narratives right now.

I know someone who went through a period of time where she was expecting an asperger’s diagnosis, and she spent a lot of time gradually adjusting to it and talking about what it meant for her.  Then she actually got assessed, and they said she had some traits, but not a diagnosis’ worth. She didn’t talk about it again.

I think I would feel horribly embarrassed and guilty if I did that.  I’m not saying I think she should have, but it would feel like that for me.

And I think I was more ok when the narratives I had of autism spectrum disorders were different from my experience.

I moved at the start of July, away from a job that I took because it was portrayed as innovative and exciting, but that turned out to be a job where nobody did much work and no one would give “young” people work (I’m 30) and I was told that I needed to stop worrying about producing work and that my job was to “get to know people”. I did have a fantastic job description, on paper.  Which I kept thinking was my actual job description because it was written down.

So I moved away.  I’m actually on a temporary work assignment somewhere else and I’m supposed to go back there but I’m not going to.

Shortly before I moved, I got a medication raise.  I take a stimulant for ADHD, and the biggest thing it does in my life is reduce sensory overwhelm.  Forget the fact that it lets me follow meetings and stick with most conversations; it lets me spend time around other people without being unbearably exhausted at the end.

I moved here and I socialized a lot and I met a lot of people and I thought things were fixed.  Like, that my ongoing social skills issues were mostly a result of not being able to attend consistently enough to what was going on, and being too overwhelmed to tolerate much social interaction.

And things are still a lot better.  But they’re still broken.  I’m still getting too many channels when I interact with people – all the body language and facial expressions and tone of voice and word choice and prosody and everything, and I still can’t figure out what to do when I get mixed messages, and I can’t stop getting them.  None of my social perception turns off until I get so tired I start missing bits of conversation and not knowing what we’re talking about.

I still fall apart when someone does something completely unexpected.  I get lost, because up till that point it’s like I had a working map of how to tell what was going on, and then it just completely fails.  Like when Windows used to bluescreen – everything’s running fine, and then bang.

I have done lots of thinking and talking about identity with respect to sexuality (which I used to be clear on, and am now confused about), bipolar disorder (which I used to be clearer on, and am now uncomfortable with), ADHD (which I have always been extremely conflicted about), and religion (which I’m not even going to go into right now).  And I don’t want to do it any more.  I don’t want to spend lots and lots of time thinking about me and what it means to be whatever and how it affects my interaction with the world.  I don’t want to do this thing again.

I want to get up, and go to work, and do my work, and come home, and talk with my friends on the internet.  I want a while without surprises.  I want a regular schedule.  I don’t want to be understimulated or overstimulated and I don’t want to think about myself. I just don’t.  I’m too tired.

Advertisement

Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized