how an autism spectrum disability affects my life now

[the video hasn't processed yet, if it doesn't make it onto youtube I'm going to plotz though.
FUCK YEAH SEAKING IT'S PROCESSING
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Hey um I tried to do this yesterday but the video was too long and it wouldn't post. Um, I made this video a year and a half ago which is called "How Asperger's Syndrome affects my life now." I, um, constantly want to delete this video because I don't identify as having Asperger's Syndrome anymore, and um the video also starts with me saying something like, "Well I guess I'm very high-functioning so you probably shouldn't judge Asperger's Syndrome from listening to me," and in retrospect I think that's a ridiculous thing to say. But I mean like everyone else I like when people talk to me on the Internet and I get a lot of comments on that video so I don't want to delete it. But I wanted to make a sequel.

Um, first of all, like, the whole Asperger's thing...kind of a stupid word, not going to be in the DSM anymore because it's not a concept that makes sense. Um, I mean it's not the only ASD diagnosis that I ever got, either, and I also um...the thing is that the reason I used that word about myself was not ever because I wanted to. Like, I used to use the word autistic when I was much younger. But um, from non-disabled people I would face you know criticism because I would be told, "You shouldn't be using that word about yourself because you're not severely disabled enough" or something like that. Um, I don't really think that this is a way of talking that makes sense, I mean there are lots of...pretty much every disability that I can think of, there are some people who are very severely affected and some people who are very mildly affected. I also don't think that people can just talk to me and decide that I am mildly affected when they don't live my life. Um, so, I guess, I'm no longer interested in feeling guilty about using the word Autistic about myself--I mean I consider myself part of Autistic culture, I consider people with severe disabilities to be people who I feel as much loyalty to as I do to people who have a disability experience very much like my own, I don't, um...I mean, I've known a lot of people with severe autism, and I mean it's more severe but it's not something else, and I don't...that doesn't really make sense to say it is.

Yeah, sorry, to actually talk about myself, um...I, like, I feel like, I mean before, I didn't know other people with autism so I was very um, my whole view of what stuff was was very much based in what I read in books by people who didn't have autism, so I was, I feel like I was always trying to fit myself into that kind of category and then when I didn't fit it I would just say, "oh well I must be so high-functioning that that's why I don't fit into that description." [note: but then there were other things I couldn't do that even people with "classic Asperger's" [i.e. worse than mine] were supposed to be able to do, so I didn't understand that.] But you know as I've gotten to meet other people with autism and other disabilities I've realized that you know I have stuff going on that's pretty classic sometimes but it hasn't been written about as much but it happens to most of the Autistic people that I know.

Um, okay, so, first of all, the whole social thing has been something that's really massively changed for me in the past year and a half since I made that video and since I became more involved in disability culture. I think the thing is that even though before I used to think of myself as being, like, "better" and "recovered" and "not really autistic anymore," like, because I was always judging by, because I was always judging myself by the standard of whether I looked like a normal person, I...it was very hard for me to relate to other people who didn't have disabilities because I always felt inferior to them.

Like, um, I guess um the way that I walk is kind of different from some people who don't have disabilities, so um, especially with other women--when I was friends with other girls, if we were both walking down the street I would become so conscious of the way that I walked and the way that it wasn't like the way the other person was walking that I would get like pretty upset, and um it really poisoned my relationships especially with other girls because I was very, I was always comparing myself to them and thinking how I couldn't move like them and stuff like that which is kind of stupid.

Um, another thing is that I was really really worried always that other people didn't really want to be around me and I was just like attaching myself to them, so it meant that it was hard for me to reach out to people and then when I did I felt really like upset about it and like they didn't really want me there and I mean...I think this has been a really...it was a really bad thing in a lot of my friendships because I couldn't help...I would always resent people as if they'd actually done something to me, when in fact like the only thing that was going on was that I thought that I was inferior to them so I just resented them. And um I guess all I can say is that since I've become more conscious of identifying as disabled and less upset about being disabled, it's pretty, like...you know if I'm walking along and I know that I'm walking differently from someone else it's like, surprise! I guess I'm disabled so I walk like I'm disabled. Shock! Not really a big deal. Um, I mean I figure that other people probably want to be around me just as much as they want to be around anyone else so I'm not afraid I guess of trying to reach out to people and talking to people and...

It's funny because people, um, professionals always talk about "social skills" and they frame social skills as being able to look like you're normal, but I mean, what I would call my social skills have vastly improved now that I don't care about that anymore because you know when you're not thinking about trying to make yourself look like you're normal, you really are much more interested in other people and you have a lot more energy to spare on just caring about other people and listening to what they have to say.

Um, other stuff, the brain stuff, which is actually, like, the real problem. Um I've been watching The Walking Dead recently which is a TV show about zombies and I figured out that I'm basically a zombie. For example if a zombie was following a person that it wanted to eat, and the person leaves, the zombie will just keep going in the same direction, and um that's pretty much what I'm like. It's hard for zombies to like make new decisions or um figure things out, like they just see objects that they used to use when they were alive and they just get triggered into using them the same way 'cause they don't really, you know, get it. Um, it's very hard for me to think about anything in a new way or to switch myself into any kind of new task, which can be a really huge problem. It's, um, and I mean there's also a lot of stuff which I guess is probably a bit like having dementia which is just you know constantly forgetting what you're doing a lot--and I mean, I know all this stuff is the kind of stuff where people can be like, "oh that happens to everyone," which is totally true, but I mean the way that it happens to me is very pervasive and makes it hard to do things.

I also have pretty severe anxiety problems and um a problem is that I get such severe anxiety about my um (laughs) cognitive problems, which I guess are what you would call poor um central coherence and executive dysfunction, and stuff like that, if you like big words, um I get so upset about those things that I like will intentionally like block off like the part of my brain that tries to remember what I have to do and um will intentionally get myself stuck on like new ideas--or, not new ideas, I will intentionally get myself stuck on old ideas so I can just kind of stim out on them and not have to um do the actual work--which I mean, it's very hard, the only way...I mean, the good way for things to happen is for someone else to just sit down with me and like calmly explain to me what I have to do and help me like stay like emotionally stable during that.

But that doesn't always happen because I don't get disability services at school because I haven't been recently diagnosed enough, etc., and even if I was people would probably be like, "well, autism is just a social disability so why do you think you need help with mental stuff?" Um, yeah, not a lot of fun, that stuff.

Something that's interesting, I don't know how many people it happens to, but I, um, when things are very bad for me I have like dissociative and derealization symptoms which are um...it basically means that everything kind of looks and feels the same. So like talking to my mom and talking to my best friend and talking to a stranger all feel exactly the same. It's like um I mean intellectually I remember who people are but it's kind of as if I had just been fed the information and I didn't actually have like the lived experience of having them in my life. So it's just like when you're with people you don't feel the same click of recognition when you're having that kind of episode (I guess it's, I guess you could call it an episode) and I um I don't know. It can be really scary. Especially because you feel like you don't know them so it's kind of like a sense of stage fright, because you know it's as if you're performing a relationship with someone that you don't really have in your life. So um that can be really hard and I think that's a lot of why I try to avoid all my cognitive stuff and just end up fucking myself over by trying to ignore like the brain stuff, just because um when I look at things head-on I get a lot of anxiety and the results can be so unpleasant that I feel like it's almost worse not to do it.

Okay, I ran out of time, I hope this video is short enough that it'll actually post. But I just wanted to make this because the other video I don't like so much and I really think this is better and more in line with what I actually think about and believe now. Okay.

Reality testing

Last spring, depersonalization was kind of a political act. I'll go more into detail another time. Stuff is a lot better now for various reasons. And I know disability-as-metaphor is dangerous, but it is my disability and my metaphor.

If I'm disabled, and I know I am, and people don't know that and people don't see that, then what I think I know is not real.

If people with disabilities are real and vibrant people, and I know them, and people think of us something other, something sad and tragic, then what I think I know is not real.

If writing here and meeting people through this is a really important, special thing that's changed my life, but no one can see it when they look at me and people think the Internet isn't real life, then what I think I know is not real.

If I need help but I don't look like I need help and I half the time think I'm lying and exaggerating about needing help, and I don't have current documentation to prove I need help, then what I think I know is not real.

If people who say they are my friends, family members who say they love me, can explain without feeling concerned why they wouldn't (or didn't) want a disabled child, why it's okay to talk about disabled people in negative sweeping terms, and these people love me, and I'm still me, then I'm not me, and what I think I know is not real.

So then why is it wrong to sometimes feel like there is no difference between me and characters on TV? Or like my friends are not really my friends, but just a bunch of fake memories imprinted on my brain, leaving me nervous to talk to them because I feel like it's the first time, the first real time, like I'm a clone that has slipped into Amanda's life and is trying to proceed as normal?

I mean, if all this is true, I could be a Cylon.

(I'm making a pun, reality testing remains intact--at least as far as I know.)

color and My Old Self

I'm visiting my friend at his house and experiencing periods of feeling Like My Old Self. By My Old Self I mean the person I was in my sophomore year of college, which ended more than a year ago. I was learning to do all these things, like travel by myself, and I guess my mind was full of color. It's sort of rare for me to experience that sense of excitement and competence and shivery sensitivity to sound and religion and ideas. I remember that I loved everything I was studying in school, and I kept writing songs about the books I was reading and the things I was learning. I remember crying over things I learned in class.

I was also sort of enraged all the time because I thought that things were screwed up for same-sex-attracted and trans people but I felt like the community was focused on completely stupid things that didn't relate to what most people actually needed. And that kind of feeling, along with any general sense of lack of purpose, is pretty much gone because I now heavily identify as disabled and I guess I feel much more hopeful and proud and excited about what disabled people do. And to the extent that I have social justice energy it is about disability which is an area where I think I can actually do things people appreciate.

But this has also made me feel really different because there's no acknowledgement of disability rights at my school. So I think the past year's lack of color was probably first the result of my failure at studying abroad, which caused me to have impairments and emotional problems I hadn't had since high school or earlier, and then the result of coming back to school and starting to hang out with my friends again while completely boiling over with disability and feeling like it wasn't something I could express. My blog started to feel like it was being written by another person, or vice versa, and I think that's why I was having so many disassociative experiences (which often took the form of feeling like the previous year wasn't real).

So why I feel Like My Old Self right now, I don't know. Maybe because going on a trip to visit a friend is something I associate with MOS who was very social and could do a lot of things, but my friend is also someone I wouldn't know if I didn't have the identity and interests that I've developed since MOS went away. I would like to think that color and purpose could come back together for me but time will tell.

privilege scrounging

I think this has a lot of potential--not really to be posted or published anywhere else, but just to be a really complicated and decent post on this blog--but I kept putting off the first draft because it seemed so daunting, and at this point I’ve been writing it for weeks and I’m leaving for Vermont in three hours and going to have basically no Internet until I get home at the beginning of August. So I’m just posting the first draft, which is a bunch of pieces of things jammed together. Please, say anything you can think of to say.

This is not really a piece with ideas or arguments, it’s just a really long confession. Bear with me.
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On a related note, I can't help thinking of my tendency for gleefully tearing apart anyone I perceive as thinking that mild ASD is not a disability, or is especially interesting or cool. I mean I do think those views are fucked-up and fallacious, but they are not held by millionaires who pass without effort and have all the friends they could want. The situation is not a person who feels powerful wanting to push people with severe and/or visible disabilities even farther down on the food chain than they already are. That is what they're doing in practice, but it's my sickness too.

Before I go far, I should probably say that I don't think of ASD and intellectual disability as being two completely separate things, at least in practice. In addition to the facts that of course some people have both, and that people who really only have ASD are often misdiagnosed with comorbid ID, I just feel there's a lot of overlap in terms of what people with ID and ASD are like, and also what our oppression is like. I hope it's obvious that this doesn't mean I would refer to myself as ID, or try to be in spaces/organizations that are just for people with ID--but it is the reason that I don't think of this as an ASD blog or really think of my disability-related trains of thought as ASD trains of thought. Also people with ASD, ID, and both all make me feel safe, and feeling safe is the focus of what I’m trying to say.
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A bit of my history as staff or pseudo-staff, because I’m not really staff yet (actually at nine tonight I will be arriving at my first real staff job, at a summer camp). It is sort of a big identity thing, it’s in the sidebar, and I guess it gives me a somewhat different relationship to DD than someone who only has DD. Better and worse.

I once, like many people, was “interested in autism” (I can’t imagine being less interested in anything now). In my freshman year of college, when I was realizing that I wasn’t cut out for my previous aspirations, I took a psych practicum where we went into a special ed school and observed/helped out in a class of nonverbal ASD kids. I won’t pretend this was some kind of life-changing experience. I found it interesting and relaxing, and was fond of one girl who would somberly take hold of my hands and run her fingers over the collars of my shirts. Her aide was really shitty to her, and one of my psych classmates explained that it was hard to find people to work with disabled kids. So that’s how I started aiming in that direction--I figured it would be easy and I couldn’t possibly be as bad as the people who were already doing it.

That summer, when I was nineteen, I got my first job. I worked in Cape Cod at a complex that contained a golf course, a drive-in theater, a regular movie theater, and a flea market (which was located in the same place as the drive-in). Mostly I cashiered at the flea market snack bar during the day, which I really liked. Some days were incredibly slow and I could just read and write. I didn’t mind days that were fast either. I liked dealing with big crowds from a safe vantage point behind my register, seeing lots of different kinds of people, and endearing myself to the flea market vendors who would then give me discounts when I wandered out of the snack bar on my break. The other people who worked during the day were two middle-aged women who were easy to be with. We would joke around together.

Every week, I would have to work about a day and two nights at the regular movie theater, where most of the employees were my age. This was a lot harder because they all knew each other and some of them seemed slightly contemptuous of me. (I should have expected this after what happened the first night I worked there, when they reacted with barely-concealed disgust after a teenage boy with a DD was unwise enough to start a conversation with them.) I also had more trouble working there because I wasn’t just a cashier, and I didn’t work fast when I was being asked to do lots of different things at once. So they were always at least slightly annoyed at me.

Then later my boss started assigning me to work at the drive-in snack bar at night. This was sort of okay because I got to use the register I was used to, and watch the movie out the windows. But I didn’t get along as well with the people who worked there. I was going through some issues about being queer, and two of the people who worked there were a middle-aged lesbian couple. I always wanted to talk to them and have them like me, but they liked everyone else better. I especially wanted to talk to one who was a special ed teacher, but she was always rolling her eyes when I had trouble understanding the words she was saying or overfocused on how to do something. At both the drive-in and the movie theater, I spent some nights getting more and more depressed, feeling really cold and nervous as my mind went over the same circles (especially when I was sweeping or mopping floors). I didn’t know anyone in Cape Cod so my social interactions consisted of joking around at the flea market, and phone conversations and letters with my friends from school. I got more and more lonely and depressed.

The last night I worked at the complex, I worked at the drive-in. As I got to work and was punching in, getting ice for the soda fountain, and putting my hair up, I started to think about how I would soon be back in college with my friends. But when I thought of my friends, I thought that they weren’t real. I knew they were, but they didn’t feel real. They felt like people I had made up.

All night I felt like I was slipping away from myself. It was really hard for me to remember any errands I was being sent on (I had to make up little songs to remind myself which novelty ice creams to get out of the freezer which was about two yards away from where I was standing). I kept wishing they’d put me on the register, which I was good at, but when they finally put me on the register, I was fucked. Every time a new customer appeared, I couldn’t recognize the food they were holding. I looked at it really carefully and slowly figured it out: pizza, chocolate bar, Hoodwich. Then I had to look at the register and find the key to press (I normally knew the register like the back of my hand). During the rush between the first and second feature, the special ed teacher snapped at me for getting in her way and accidentally signing in to the wrong register. As soon as the movie was over, I did my share of the cleaning as fast as I could, pulled on my flannel shirt and my bag of books, and slipped out the back of the building while the other employees were hugging each other goodbye.
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That summer, and during the fall, I had occasional positive encounters with other DD adults. I was part of a school club that visited and arranged activities for the residents of local group homes. I also met a few people who came to the flea market and movie theater.

Once I remember being at the theater all day with a really intimidating girl named Julie--in the morning and early afternoon, almost no one came in. A guy with Down Syndrome came in with his mom, who went to the bathroom and bought gift certificates from Julie. As was usually the case when it was slow, one person was at the counter and another person sat down in the theater lobby. The guy came in and sat across from me in the lobby, and soon he was telling me about the upcoming Star Trek movie, which he obviously spent a lot of time reading about online. I am not into Star Trek (except the girl version, which I don’t think the movie was based on), but I could occasionally interject, “Oh, I love Simon Pegg,” and I was relieved enough by the non-stressful interaction that I enjoyed everything he had to say.

I remember wondering what Julie thought. It was probably obvious that I had no job-related reason to talk to this guy. Did she think I was being nice? Did she think, wow, Amanda’s so weird that she can only talk to a person with Down Syndrome? (Number two is of course the true assessment, although it’s interesting that I assume the agency is mine. “That guy has such a calming presence that even a giant freak like Amanda doesn’t mind talking to him” is an equally accurate way of putting it.)

These brief encounters were pleasant, but the real game-changer occurred in the spring term of my sophomore year. My friend suggested that we volunteer twice a week at the MRC sheltered workshop for DD adults. Ostensibly we taught a class about countries--we would discuss facts about a particular country, look through books about the country, and do a related craft. Talking and looking at books didn’t take very long, and coloring gets boring after the first thirty years, so we often spent a lot of time talking about whatever we wanted. After class, my friend and I would walk around the workshop saying hello to people we had met when visiting the group homes. Every time we were there, our beloved Mike Ward would come and find us at least twice (barging into the conference room to show us his fliers, running up to us before we left and giving us a drawing he’d stolen from someone else in his group home).

Over time, three things happened.

1. There were some people I became more close with, and would usually sit and talk with during class. I learned a lot about what was important to them and what they were happy and unhappy about. It was cool because it was the first time I really saw “that kind of people” on a regular basis and knew them well enough to consider them friends.
2. A lot of things I hated about myself were things I subconsciously associated with “that kind of people.” Once I actually met a lot of t.k.o.p., I was able to recognize the nature of my self-hatred; and once I got to know some of them, I was able to see that I should be unashamed of any resemblance between us.
3. I loved going to the workshop because a lot of the people were so loud and effusive in how they expressed themselves, and many people were really happy to see my friend and me. I felt that here, people liked me, I knew where I stood with them, and there was enough diversity of behavior that I didn’t have to worry about doing things right. I once said that I hoped the afterlife was in the MRC workshop.
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Most feelings can be accurately summed up by quotes from the movie Serenity. This feeling's quote is the thing the Operative says to Mal about how there would be no place for him in a better world. It sums up the guilty resentment I experienced as I became more advanced in how I thought about developmental disabilities--saying "ID" instead of MR or retarded (the words that the nondisabled people around me used), and becoming more aware that sheltered workshops and group homes weren't something I should simply accept as the places where MRC consumers would naturally work and live. The people at MRC were some of the only people in the world I felt uncomplicatedly safe with; although I recognized it as fair that I should feel scared of offending them the way I felt scared of offending everyone else, I felt that I’d lost something when I realized there was an appropriate word to use and I hadn't been using it.

I liked the workshop and the group homes, because they were environments where people without disabilities were in the minority. I hoped to work at the MRC school after college because it had the kind of low-key setting I felt comfortable in, and the building was full of kids who looked and acted different. I wasn't interested in being an aide for an ID or ASD kid at a mainstream school, where I imagined the halls would be noisy and chaotic, my student and I would sit in a neat row of desks, and the non-disabled students would bully us both. (If my student was socially successful, of course, that would also suck; my student would be my only person to talk to, since I knew I wouldn’t fit in with the teachers and other aides.)

I'm using the past tense even though not all these feelings were in the past.
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I've only been to the workshop twice this year. But I have cashiered at my school's dining hall during the period of the day when several people from the workshop also work there, and in light of becoming more guilty, this has been a tense experience.

First there is Laurie, who is someone I knew at the workshop last year. We weren't close because she was always with her boyfriend, but when she saw me at the dining hall she would say hello in the energetic way she did most things. Sometimes, in the first few weeks of my job, she would come up to the register and we would each ask how the other person was doing. This petered out, and I'm wondering if it was because I felt self-conscious around Laurie and talked to her in the shy restrained way I would talk to an acquaintance who wasn't disabled. After a month, she just said hello to me in a bored way, and this made me sad.

Second there are other people, who I liked to watch when I was at work because it's a relief to see people moving jerkily, swinging their arms, or concentrating on things you're not supposed to concentrate on. Some of them I wanted to talk to--a guy with a beard, a guy who warned me not to touch a stack of hot dishes. I would always walk by the MRC people to punch in and out, to get detergent, to throw rags away--it started to make me feel cold like I felt cold during nights at the theater complex, this feeling of not being able to talk to them because I wasn't good for them or was drawn to them for the wrong reasons.
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I think of myself as very normal-acting. And I am very normal. Acting. I have spent a lot of time buckling down to get through things without being immediately identified as extremely different. When you ignore feelings for long enough, they go away, and this means that in addition to my occasional dissociative symptoms, the fact that I for example have anxiety problems is something that I have to prove to myself logically by making a list of things I’ve done that could have no other motive. I tend not to feel angry when I hear people say things like, “Retarded people depress me because there’s no point to their lives,” because I do not feel anger on a regular basis. I figure that professionals who try to stomp stimming out stimming people are just coming from a place of not really examining their privilege or putting themselves in stimming people’s shoes. Actually a lot of the writing on this blog, I think, is a result of my numbness and subsequent willingness to engage with arguments that are quite irrational and hateful.

Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think of myself as disabled. Or I do but I don’t. In terms of working with developmentally disabled kids and adults, I don’t think of myself as a DD person who feels understandably relaxed when I get to stop packaging myself for non-disabled consumption. Instead I just think of myself the way I imagine non-disabled people see me: this weird girl who is really drawn to DD people, beyond professionalism, beyond allyship...just, kind of creepy.

As I don’t experience anger and anxiety on an obvious level, I forget what it means for me that I am normal-acting. But I can try to construct the facts like a detective. I have some very good friends and they are different. But the truth is that most moments (airport, library, classroom) I never stop working, I feel incredibly inadequate anyway, and that’s painful in a way I don’t think about because it’s always there. Except with certain people at the MRC.

Passing is not some sort of miserable burden--the group homes I think of so nostalgically are not places I’d want to live myself. I like being in college and thinking about where I want to move after I graduate. I like blundering around alone more than I would like having people ask if someone like me should be left unattended. I like privilege, do I ever--but I would like to avoid having to earn it with the constant, barely successful work of passing. If I was staff in a segregated environment, that would be possible--I’d retain the social status of a normal person without having to actually be around n.p.s.

So I mean--I’m not saying I’m not a piece of shit.
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What I try to do is--and I mean, I don’t want to feel it all, but the other week I told my best friend that I could remember facts about him, I could remember how we started talking, but I felt emotionally like I’d never met him before. I was even kind of nervous, like I was talking to a celebrity for the first time, but trying to pass for someone who knew him well. I didn’t realize until my friend got upset that this wasn’t something that happened to lots of people. I conclude that this level of dislocation, while practical, is a little unbearable if I’m going to continue being alive.

What I’m trying to explain to myself is that I also count. Because of course I know that I’m a piece of shit--I understand that it is horrible to feel attached to segregated environments because those are generally environments where people have less control. I got very afraid of these feelings in myself, they were a piece of my sin I couldn’t even look at--and this was infuriating because I had felt like the person I was with MRC people was the only really pure part of me. I began to sort of resent progress, or at least hope it would happen slowly so I could still have the kinds of jobs I wanted to have.

I am trying to remember that I am in fact disabled and that I’m actually stressed out by real things, and that a better world for disabled people is not a world where Disabled People (whoever they are) get better and I am still stuck where I am. In a better world I would not have had to hit on a solution to avoid the wearing down of my ability to feel or sense things; I wouldn’t have to think about my life like Fantastic Mr. Fox, trying to locate the exact tunnel I can use to feed myself without coming in contact with Boggis Bunce and Bean. I’m trying to remember that if I wasn’t disabled I wouldn’t feel like I’m getting away with something when I get a job or have a conversation with a stranger. When people asked me out I wouldn’t avoid answering rather than wonder when they would realize what was wrong. If the MRC workshop is a refuge then it’s actually a refuge from something, right?

I think I’m trying to remember that while I can and do oppress MRC consumers if I accept everything the MRC does as The Way Things Should Be, instead of hating myself it is better to untangle it and try to remember that I can also be helped by that nebulous Progress.

I wanted to tell you this

I am going to counseling on Friday but I've basically thought that there's something wrong with me because I'm experiencing constant derealization and frequently I have to concentrate to keep from screaming/crying about something that ordinarily wouldn't be a big deal (waiting for a sandwich, waiting in line, waiting for a class to end). This started a week ago. Well, maybe it happened before, but I noticed the day I shaved my eyebrows. For periods I have thought "oh, it's getting better" but they're only periods. It's not permanent. I can hardly understand what people are saying sometimes, it just looks like a bunch of colors.

I got scared that I was going to be a person who loses skills.

Fortunately I saw Noah who is going to be a psychologist and is basically a joy, and I told him and showed him how much I have to press on my hands with my fingers all the time in an attempt to keep myself inside, and how I feel like I'm constantly in a state of yammering "I can't believe I'm alive, I can't believe I'm alive right here, right now" (this sounds nice but it's not, not all the time--derealization starts out seeming really fucking spiritual or something, but then you're like, shit--I can't do anything when my brain won't stop telling me I'm alive, I can't even feel God because I'm stuck in a creepy spaced-out box of my distinct moment and place).

Anyway, I was talking about how scary and weird it is to find out that something's been wrong with me ever since I came back from the UK--I mean, that must be it, because I'm taking like no classes, two of the four only meet once a week, and Noah was like, "what about your workload?" and I told Noah my workload and Noah was like, "That's a ton of work."

And I was kind of shocked. But like, I think it might just be a ton of work. Maybe I can't get anything done because there's so much to do.

In other news: I think everyone thinks that they like sex too much. Well, I mean, obviously some people are asexual. But I think you can even be asexual and think that you like sex too much. Or think that you want a girlfriend or boyfriend too much. Or that no one eats as much junk food as you do or does as little homework as you do or is as ugly as you or smells as bad as you're afraid you smell. And I think this is especially true for ASD people because we are trained to think of ourselves as deviant and overly intense--but it probably is the case for a lot of other people, too. I just wanted to tell you this because I thought of it later.