I am autistic. In many ways that entails a tension between needing consistency and resisting it. I would be more comfortable in a clean world where my language can be parsed and translated for others automatically. I wish I were a robot. Because I hate emotions. I hate them because I cannot process them. I lose my autonomy to them and become a slave to my anxiety.
I started this blog to help mitigate the harms of daily life. It's a space for me to speak my truth with no interruption and no judgment. To not feel like I burden people. A one-way conversation, so to speak. People can read my posts and think I'm a brat, or an emo, or an annoying human being, but here I am safe from that. I know my flaws. I understand with excruciating detail how I have been hurt, and how I have hurt. I know when my reaction came from trauma, autism, or simply a shitty week. I don't know what I feel always, and I certainly can't always pinpoint why. But I ruminate and obsess so much that I get there eventually. I don't think there's been a situation in my adult life where I was so wronged that I could view it as a simple thing. I always contribute. I always overwhelm others with my sudden emotions. So I cannot blame not one goodbye. I take that back. One boyfriend was verbally abusive to me in my 20s. I was raped when I was 22. But those were the only times when I was abused as an adult. My family did some things that were wrong when my mother died, but even then I cannot fully blame them, as I reacted by running away and estranging myself from them. They deserved a non-autistic family member. They didn't deserve the meltdown and fallout.
So I have obsessive thought loops and I ruminate a lot. Humans can't sustain me when I get like this. I write here. A human here and there reads it and that's it. Sometimes I have, in my worst episodes of anxiety, turned to AI. Not as a therapist. I mean it gives solid conservative advice about mental health, but I am not so naive as to consider it a therapist. Do you know what it is though? A machine that talks fairly human-like. It tolerates my thought loops with aplomb. It repeats advice patiently. Objectively validates me and in turn warns me of a behavior being a red flag. I'm not researching facts so I don't need to worry about inaccuracies. It's just a space to vent and explore my feelings. Another way to unmask. I want to one day unmask fully. But I have too many trigger reactions to do so in a way that wouldn't impact my mental health and deplete me. I feel that interacting with people is very important, but sometimes the safety of a machine that might not care, but doesn't judge to be an important tool for me. I mean I can't even unmask with therapists. So I need these things to get to a point where I can get to the next step.
I believe this is heaven to no one else but me
And I'll defend it long as I can be
Left here to linger in silence
if I choose to
Would you try to understand?
– Sarah McLachlan (Elsewhere)