(no subject)
Hello Old Friend.
I still exist. Sort of. I have been very unwell.
Lockdown was hard, as it was for everybody. Mine was made harder by the woman I loved, being stuck in the States, having what was probably a massive bipolar breakdown and going seriously manic for over a year during those dark and terrible times.
Trying to cope with somebody who had detached from reality... She received no treatment, so her condition was life-threatening and severe. Until eventually she did what people with bipolar mania do, succumbed to the hyper-sexuality, and she began to see other guys while gas-lighting me about it.
So that sucked. Took months before I got the proof. On top of everything else, it broke me. It was... the situations and the conversations I was trying to deal with, and I couldn't tell anybody because she didn't want me to tell anybody.
I disassociated.
A couple of times over the last few years I've been ready to die, had the means, had made plans to sensibly dispose of my belongings, felt incredibly at peace with it. Roz reminded me I wanted to see the Obi Wan show, and the Ahsoka show.
Little things, sometimes.
So I withdrew, from just about everybody. The crisis nurse told me to get off Facebook. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I still speak to regularly. (And I feel, deep down, quite guilty for still being a burden to that handful.) In my dissociated state, I was called fucking toxic, and I just seemed to be hurting everybody around me. So I just... went away. For a couple of years now.
Time flies when you're broken.
I'm, lonely, but at least I'm not hurting anybody anymore. I talk to the trees and the birds and the bugs and the rocks. Oh, apparently I have autism, which explains... everything about me really.
(Bart was funny, shortly before he died, I mentioned to him that one of my nurses thought I might be autistic and he said shit man, of course you are.)
Sorry, I don't offer this as an excuse for bad behavior. I just offer it as an explanation for why I am the way I am in the hope it helps people understand that sometimes my brain... functions very differently. It explains why I sometimes don't understand what people say to me, it explains why I think in black and white even when I know I shouldn't, it explains why I don't grok social situations. Everything, really. It's been revelatory. Suddenly everything in my life I've always struggled with makes sense to me.
I've been scared to tell people. There is stigma. I know it is also a very fashionable thing and the internet is full of people self-diagnosing with autism because they did a couple of online surveys, but please understand I have undergone about 12 hours of assessment with trained healthcare professionals before coming to this diagnosis. And I was resistant to it at first too.
I'm in a waiting list to get help for it, but it's at least a 3 year waiting list. The nurses at my community mental health team are doing their best to help though, and I think it provides me with many new tools and strategies to work on myself.
And now I have lost... much of my internal voice. There is a void at the center of my heart where my internal monologue used to be, and I struggle for ways to find words, to find any sense of the Simon I was. So I thought I might try writing something in my old livejournal again.
I need... to try and find some way to feel alive again. I've been mostly dead inside for years now.
I still exist. Sort of. I have been very unwell.
Lockdown was hard, as it was for everybody. Mine was made harder by the woman I loved, being stuck in the States, having what was probably a massive bipolar breakdown and going seriously manic for over a year during those dark and terrible times.
Trying to cope with somebody who had detached from reality... She received no treatment, so her condition was life-threatening and severe. Until eventually she did what people with bipolar mania do, succumbed to the hyper-sexuality, and she began to see other guys while gas-lighting me about it.
So that sucked. Took months before I got the proof. On top of everything else, it broke me. It was... the situations and the conversations I was trying to deal with, and I couldn't tell anybody because she didn't want me to tell anybody.
I disassociated.
A couple of times over the last few years I've been ready to die, had the means, had made plans to sensibly dispose of my belongings, felt incredibly at peace with it. Roz reminded me I wanted to see the Obi Wan show, and the Ahsoka show.
Little things, sometimes.
So I withdrew, from just about everybody. The crisis nurse told me to get off Facebook. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I still speak to regularly. (And I feel, deep down, quite guilty for still being a burden to that handful.) In my dissociated state, I was called fucking toxic, and I just seemed to be hurting everybody around me. So I just... went away. For a couple of years now.
Time flies when you're broken.
I'm, lonely, but at least I'm not hurting anybody anymore. I talk to the trees and the birds and the bugs and the rocks. Oh, apparently I have autism, which explains... everything about me really.
(Bart was funny, shortly before he died, I mentioned to him that one of my nurses thought I might be autistic and he said shit man, of course you are.)
Sorry, I don't offer this as an excuse for bad behavior. I just offer it as an explanation for why I am the way I am in the hope it helps people understand that sometimes my brain... functions very differently. It explains why I sometimes don't understand what people say to me, it explains why I think in black and white even when I know I shouldn't, it explains why I don't grok social situations. Everything, really. It's been revelatory. Suddenly everything in my life I've always struggled with makes sense to me.
I've been scared to tell people. There is stigma. I know it is also a very fashionable thing and the internet is full of people self-diagnosing with autism because they did a couple of online surveys, but please understand I have undergone about 12 hours of assessment with trained healthcare professionals before coming to this diagnosis. And I was resistant to it at first too.
I'm in a waiting list to get help for it, but it's at least a 3 year waiting list. The nurses at my community mental health team are doing their best to help though, and I think it provides me with many new tools and strategies to work on myself.
And now I have lost... much of my internal voice. There is a void at the center of my heart where my internal monologue used to be, and I struggle for ways to find words, to find any sense of the Simon I was. So I thought I might try writing something in my old livejournal again.
I need... to try and find some way to feel alive again. I've been mostly dead inside for years now.