Yes. Not really. But, yes. Here's all the things I wrote before I chose this title:
Life is an endless development of rediscovering yourself. I've been having a lot of that lately. Lately, as in the last six months.
It's mainly been an internal process.
I'm about to turn 40 in less than a month. I've never held a job. I was diagnosed Asperger back in 2007 and by the time I turned 30 I'd started living on (what I suppose) is the equivalent to disability,
I don't really want to go into the in's and out's of the technical side of things. I live in Sweden, and I guess there are similarities and differences between countries regarding what you're eligible to get and what's expected from you by society and its institutions. And to be honest, I haven't got the best overview as I have a legal guardian-type person taking care of administrative stuff. I'm privileged to not spend energy sorting out those parts of life anymore.
I guess there's a lot more context that is relevant to fully grasp my situation and why my life has turned out the way it has. But then again, I'm not really here to provide a full picture. I can't help myself getting into that gear though.
I have this drive to explain things. An obsession with being understood and perceived in a well enough way. It's a constant battle in that the rational part of my brain knows that there's no such thing as being perfectly understood. There's no singular way of understanding another person.
That drive though comes from a life of being uncertain about when I'm seen and understood and when I'm not.
My dad is the kind of person that will vehemently insist he understands until he is proven otherwise. He is different to me in how he operates and interfaces with the world. And he is set in his ways. It's really only recently I've come to see how enormous an endeavor it would be for him to change. His barriers and self preserving mechanisms are there for a reason and were cemented long before I was even born.
He lacks self awareness and I feel that his defense mechanisms are so second nature that there are layer upon layer to battle through in order to communicate on a clear and precise wavelength.
I did not intend to write about him just now. But I've come to believe that his way of understanding me, and more importantly fail to understand me, have shaped me thoroughly. My insecurities surrounding communication and social dynamics have been molded there. In the ambivalence of being told we're on the same page when all signs point somewhere else.
Thankfully it's the opposite with my mom. We can talk things through and she has sensibilities that very much align with my inner workings.
My parents play a big role in all of this for the simple yet obviously regrettable reason that they are the people I most regularly interact with. I've become more and more socially isolated. By my own doing. Partly intentionally, partly as a byproduct of circumstance.
My teenage years were not like that. I was a punk rock kid finally finding my tribe in college. I went through the regular turbulent phases of discovering alcohol, falling in love and clumsily navigating the teenage range of emotions, losing my virginity, dreaming of starting a career within the music industry.
The exciting possibilities of my social life did not work well with the responsibilities of school. Paving way for an adult life could not compete with all the energy demanded by discovering life. At some point it all crashed down on me. I could not maintain. I had to drop out. I tried to find alternative ways forward. Community college, change of locale. When that didn't pan out either my mom found out about Asperger and I went to be evaluated.
It was an immense relief to get the diagnosis. I was entering my twenties and finally someone with societal authority could give me a break, say "you're right to feel overwhelmed, there's reasons why some things come harder for you."
I had to start over in trying to define who I was. Understand who I was. Who I am.
The clarity provided by the diagnosis also meant everything I thought I knew was scrambled and made uncertain. It's easy to become lost, confusing a diagnosis with identity. I'm still having a hard time with sorting that out and relating to autism in general. (I use Asperger and autism interchangeably. How all those things were defined back then probably differs from now and I'd might even get a different diagnosis altogether if I were to be evaluated now.)
Man..! What was I even aiming to write about in this post?
Right. Rediscovery.
Well, actually, I probably want to get into who I am today. Like, who I feel that I am. Away from the diagnosis side of things. I should not have mentioned it at all come to think of it. But it's hard to find a jumping off point where it all makes sense. Again - I tend to over-explain. If someone asks me how a specific thing came to be, I will have the urge to begin as far back as humanly possible. Book of Genesis, the Big Bang. It just feels as the best way to paint a picture that cannot be misinterpreted.
But of course I know that's silly. And it's impossible and ultimately pointless. I know that. Do not necessarily feel it.
I spent Christmas alone. I chose to. I had a really good time too, so it's not as depressing as it would seem. I needed a break from nostalgia that comes with immediate family assembling from being scattered around the country.
Something remarkable happened Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I was sat in front of my computer watching reaction-videos of Band of Brothers when I suddenly managed to relax my body in a way I did not know was possible.
Maybe I've relaxed that way back when I was young. If so, the sensation was forgotten.
It was something about how I sat back in my chair, legs resting on a stool.
It was mind-altering, a full body experience where I suddenly felt I accessed actually taking in the spectrum my senses picked up.
Scenes on the screen that I know really well felt different. More vivid. The actors choices, micro-expressions, pauses - they revealed themselves as if I'd missed out on so much. Almost as if I'd gone years having mini blackouts in every experience I was in and only taken in the broad strokes. Fragmented.
As sudden as this experience came, I guess it didn't come from nowhere. I've had epiphanies and developments that led up to this. A deeper understanding of my relationship with my dad was one of them. I had come to the realization that it needn't be that important to me whether he understands me. I can let him go. It's not a worthwhile endeavor to spend so much of my time shadowboxing, exhaustively pulling and tugging. I've developed bad habits from talking with him, where I cling to be the one speaking regardless of who the other person is because my dad will derail what I want to communicate if I let him get an edge in. It's not malicious on his part. He just wants to connect so badly, eagerly and it will often make him jump to conclusions and steer the conversation away to who knows where.
I know this is my first post. It becomes apparent as I write that I have needs that have led me to prosebox. Needs I'm having a hard time articulating for myself.
I don't even know if this is the place for me.
Prosebox is compelling to me because of the opportunity to express myself in English (because of the poor level my parents' English is). Not that there aren't many other places online where that's granted.
I kept a blog in Swedish for a long time. I've never been satisfied by keeping a private journal only I can see. There's something about just knowing there's the tiniest possibility a living, breathing person potentially reads that makes me feel less alone in my thoughts and my existence.
Hardly anyone read my blog. My parents stopped by once in a while. Still I kept it for many, many years and wrote post upon post. I did not direct people to it. I didn't hide it from the world, but I felt it was too personal to bring attention to. 'If you should read it, you will find it' was my reasoning. It was enough for me. At least to a degree, I think.
I overshare. A conversation with me can go on for a long time if you're not careful. I cannot easily stop when I get started. If I feel the least socially starved I find that I have an endless need for validation and get all the thoughts I've been carrying around out of me. I get self-obsessed, probably. But it's also that I process things better when I verbalize. I work through things in a way I can't just being in my own head.
At some point it always end up in tirades of streams of
consciousness. Dizzying myself. Afterwards I'm not sure what was being said. What was accomplished.
My mom is the one that indulges me more than anyone else. She's kind of the same. Saying the same thing over and over in a variation of ways. As if to refine, iterate upon and drill down on the subject matter until every avenue is exhausted. 'If I describe something in all the ways I can think of, there will be less risk of you missing the finer nuances that I feel are essential. Or the greater chance there'll be for me to genuinely be understood where I feel it matters.'
I can think of so many things I'd gladly go into right now. Directions to go if I were to write for another hour. It should be straightforward to just write what's on my mind. But I don't know how to write as if we're in the middle of a conversation and you'll catch up eventually. I wish I knew how though. I've written many posts like this one over the years. It ends up feeling like a long preamble that only ends because the feeling I started out with have faded enough to where I lose track. Or my mind runs so fast I can't maintain any semblance of coherence much longer. Sometimes I'm at least left feeling that an unclear but palpable weight has been lifted. And that's good. I can't map out how to get to that feeling, it's different every time, but still - it's good when I get there.
Well, that drained me! I didn't really get into what I've been thinking on today prior to the post. It centers on music. Music is super-duper-mega-important to me and my life.
Anyway. I don't know when or if I'll think of coming back and write again. And that naturally means there's no guaranty I'll see or respond if you try to reach out. But either way - I'm very grateful if you spent any time whatsoever reading my thoughts. My ego needed that.
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