http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&p=030C50D4F2056DD5&playnext=1&index=2
As you may have noticed, I haven't been writing much lately. So, I'll have to catch you all up. All hundreds of you, I am made to understand!! I just found out my little blog was being read by more than just two of my closest friends. I can't reveal how that information came to me or I would have to kill myself. I'll just say that I'm terribly honored! Thank you all for your readership!
Let's begin with where I started on this blog, widowed and desolate, and compare it to today, wherein I am totally blissed out.
It started with the discovery that grief and bliss are almost the same thing. Marie Ponsot, featured in the last 5 minutes of this News Hour for November 30, 2009, introduced herself this way. "I'm Marie Ponsot and I'm 88 years old which is very entertaining." She wrote this poem:
Bliss and Grief
No one
is here
right now.
Everybody (including a psychiatrist I saw for a minute, and including myself) assumed I was nuts because I was in grief/depression/anxiety, nothing new for me. I've been known to have "episodes." But just as almost everything always did my whole life, it felt like something "other" to me. David had been my buffer from the world for 35 years. I didn't know how to create buffers for myself. I didn't even know who I was by myself. I didn't know how to BE by myself. And that caused a lot of anxiety! Oh yeah, and by the way, I really missed him so I was inconsolable! But I had no choice but to find out who I am and grow. Which really blissed me out. And ever since roommate Ted's comment at the bottom of my July 8 entry that he thought I was autistic, I haven't been able to get it out of my mind.
I finally did an internet search. Holy crap. I got answers to questions I never even knew I had. For example, why boys rejected me in high school. But they didn't. I was basing the rejection of all boys on that guy staring at me for 3 years who tried to talk to me but I just couldn't speak. I wanted to kiss him but I couldn’t move out of my box. He finally got a girlfriend in our senior year. She bit him on his shoulder during curtain call of the senior play. Of course in my teenage angst I took this as a total rejection. But he just discovered a bit earlier than I did that what we both needed was someone aggressive enough to reach in and pull us out.
As I was telling this story to my friend, Ann, tonight, she stopped me here and asked if that's what David did? I told her yes, and charmed her with this story of how we met: I was sitting at a table surrounded on most sides by towers of books, and he bent down, found a hole in the books, put his face in my face and asked me, "Who are you and what are you doing?"
It explained why I hid so many of my strange behaviors even from those closest to me. My brother didn't know that I thrashed myself to sleep even though we shared a room until I was 6. (I thrashed into my 20s, and intensely rocked into my 40s, but still rock to this day.) If my mother didn't say things in the exact way that I could process and understand them I would go into a rage that mystified her, and would bang against the wall screaming. I did have normal tantrums as a toddler, but I remember thinking even at the time "what is wrong with me?? Why am I like this?" I hid from my husband that I was in an autistic episode for a decade. I hid it from everyone, including my employer.
At this point Ann looked at me thoughtfully and said she remembered working with me a long time ago and I rocked.
Here we are a long time ago (I'm guessing early 90s), before her dreads! All of us in this picture are still working in Doc Centers, but in all different places and cities now.
Here she is at our table, last Friday, while having a snack before a play, and we caught up for the year (she just got back from Bali!).
We were at this playhouse:
She wants me to write a book like this: explaining my life with flashbacks interspersed with how it is now. I just realized that's pretty much what my blog is. How convenient! I've already started my book.
I took this opportunity to confirm with Ann that I really am what Robby (more on him later) calls an "other" and that she is a "normie." She confirmed that she really always just felt normal, and that I probably really am an "other," and that blissed me out even more. I guess I had doubted it because my brother couldn't really confirm it. When Ann confirmed it, my doubt vanished. It was a moment.
It was like breathing for the first time. It made me whole. I was finally given the key to my life. It explained why it had always been easier for me to write rather than talk. It explained everything and gave me a connection to the world. It showed me that even I fit. Even I am a teacher. I teach by inspiration. I have inspired people my whole life. But the attention that brought me as a child was unbearable. I couldn't deal with it and shut myself in and people thought I was cold and aloof and quirky. Unless they "got" me. Guess who "got" me? Other autistics. The "others." Almost all my friends are autistic or disordered in some way or quirky or oddballs. But Ann wasn't. How come? Why was she my friend? I only knew her as a colleague of my industry, a member of girl bands with names like "Guitar Boy," a world traveler and a white girl that wears dreadlocks (as if that wouldn't be reason enough), but what I hadn't known was that her degree was in psychology, and she had worked with "others" in the past. And she could easily see what I was talking about. And confirmed that THIS IS BIG! (her words). She pointed out that she had never heard anybody else have a similar realization about their life before, and probably never will again. Thanks Ann! And, thanks Ted for pointing it out in the first place!
Now I see that rather than the pathetic life I had always thought I lead that I actually had lived a dream life. I mean that kind of literally. I lived my life in a dream, because I just wasn't connecting to "real" life. Ok, so I was a nervous, terrified wreck my whole life, starting in first grade when I was terrified that I would never learn to read. I was in a state of anxiety almost the whole year. I still recall the moment I finally processed it. The reason I recall that moment was because I was expecting to learn "A," then "B," and so on, the way I had been taught. But that wasn't what happened. I simply "got it" all at once. And I realized I would be alright and that I was able to process information. But truthfully, I put a Hollywood ending on this paragraph. That's what SHOULD have happened. What really happened was I was an anxious wreck my whole life, and hid a huge side of my life from those closest to me, which makes me understand why autism was confused with schizophrenia and anxiety disorders in its early days.
I am only now realizing that that had happened, that somehow deep inside me I always knew things would be alright, that it was ok for me to live inside my dream. That was what I was meant to teach the world. It's ok for EVERYBODY to do that. I wanted to have great adventures, and you can't have great adventures without creating struggles for yourself. And boy, did I struggle. I struggled so hard that I didn't see until now that as I dreamed, so it came to be. I have come home like a long lost traveler, expecting to find the place just trashed, but lo and behold, it's a dream! I've come home to a dream life! Yeah, I'm blissed out!
Why I'm blisssed out:
My beautiful Lu. We finally got rid of the fleas! I tossed her old scratchers, and her new scratcher is her favoritest one ever (I think the catnip that came with it is really fresh). Here she is falling asleep by it:
And asleep:
A friend's cat (he named this picture "SoftPillow"):
Daughter Nadia, whose life is an endless Arabian tales that she won't let me blog about.
Sakura, my lovely Chinese "granddaughter:"
Robby, my own personal chauffer, computer tech and Asperger's delight. He used to look like this:
But now he is growing his hair for http://www.locksoflove.org/. How cool is that?
Thalia did also. She came to visit me for the first time in 11 years last June. Here she is with her cousin (the beautician that cut her hair)…
and here she is after she cut it:
Thalia was my only friend in high school, and I was her only friend.
Here we are in the late 80s with our brothers.
Speaking of brothers, mine has always been my hero:
And, where the hell have I been? Well, visiting with Thalia (above) in June. And there was
roommate Ted's 61st birthday party...
(hence Sweet 16 (61 backwards, get it?) decorations.
And Jim's 70th:
And general frivolity with this whole autistic crew (Ted and his sistahs):
My firm celebrated their first 10 years in this location and had a gala event. Well, as gala as this economy would allow. Anyway, our party host made photo displays of the firm's first 10 years, and this picture of the Doc Center crew on Halloween was in the display (I'm the gypsy). It's from around 8 years ago:
Judy, found these lovely angels on her property:
And we just celebrated August Turkey Day at Georgann's house. That's the one day a year she cooks meat. I've known Geo since 3rd grade. Here we are in 1986 with "our" brother and the Golightlys, who I also really, really heart and are my forever family. I would have shown you an earlier picture of Geo, but she would have killed me.
Here she is with husband Miguel.
And we'll end this page with her beautiful back. The skirt is from Guatemala.
