I am a person who takes things very personally. I am a very sensitive person.
This is how i have been my whole life.
When things happen in my life that are huge and monumental, especially when they involve huge hurts, it takes time for my brain, body, and soul to process and fully get over it. It takes Alot of time.
Sometimes years.
I have good days when i think i am okay, but then i have those bad days, where the memories of a certain hurt will flood me, and i am brought to my knees, grieving all over again.
I am also autistic, and i have grown to be very proud of my autism. I consider my autism to be a blessing, a different operating system of sorts.....i do not consider myself to be a research project or a blue puzzle piece or a disease, nor am i an epidemic, or a burden or a tsunami. Nor do i consider myself someone who is in need of a fix or cure. I did not always feel this way. Before Facebook, and especially when i was growing up, i wanted to be normal. I grew up thinking that if i was just normal, i would be accepted by others, i would "belong"----i would fit in. I was even into Autism Speaks for awhile---because i had the mistaken idea that they were for me. But something happened to me after coming onto Facebook and posting my feelings on, of all things, an Autism Speaks comment thread. It was through that comment thread, that i immediately began to meet a huge community of awesome friends, many of whom are also who are also on the autism spectrum. Quickly, my mindset changed. Because i allowed myself to be educated...rather, re-educated.
For it is real human beings who i have met,
people who have real personalities,
people who have a heart,
people who have a sense of humor,
people who are married,
some who go to college,
many who have children,
some who have jobs,
some who also go to Washington to speak to Congress about the real issues we who are autistic face.
The people i have met, are people from all ends of the autism spectrum, who do not fit the stereotypical view of what an autistic person "should" be like. I have been educated as to the very real issues we still face today.....one of the biggest issues being the stigma that still runs rampant among the mindsets of even those who are autism parents and advocates, about us. There are even a very small number of autistics who feel this way.
We are NOT blue puzzle pieces. We are human beings with dreams and goals just like all of you in the neurotypical world.
There are still those who want to come in and get mad and get right in our faces and yell at us and scold us when we have bad days, and have meltdowns....they want to come in and try to fix us when we are right smack dab in the middle of a meltdown, treating our meltdowns just as if we are a spoiled kid throwing a temper tantrum.
NO.
THIS IS THE WRONG WAY TO APPROACH US WHEN WE ARE HAVING A MELTDOWN. A MELTDOWN IS NOT A TEMPER TANTRUM.
A MELTDOWN IS AS DIFFERENT AS DAY IS TO NIGHT FROM A TEMPER TANTRUM.
A temper tantrum happens when a kid wants a toy or candy, and the parent says no, and the kid starts screaming and crying, as a way to manipulate the parent into relenting and saying yes.
A temper tantrum happens when a kid wants a toy or candy, and the parent says no, and the kid starts screaming and crying, as a way to manipulate the parent into relenting and saying yes.
A meltdown happens when an autistic person's senses become overloaded. The whole room starts to spin and it is as if there is a bombardment of wild colors, and different noises clashing, all coming at me in haphazard fashion.....it is as if i am being poked hard all over, as i am being spun all around too fast, and i can actually feel the hot breath of you, the neurotypical, yelling at me in the middle of it all, and then i spiral down and shut down even further.
Please don't yell at me and scold me when i am having a meltdown. It will make it even worse. I promise you.
It will make my meltdown worse.
One of the ways i cope with anything that is troubling me, is to vent by posting and writing about it. I do this to better understand and process through it. I do it because it is the only way i know of how to cope with it. I cannot cope any other way. And i know my friends will get what i am feeling, and not scold and chastise me for it.
God has given me the gift of being able to write.
Please don't shut me up when i want to talk and need to talk. Please don't stop me from writing about how i feel. I do it also to educate...to make others understand. To make the NT world understand.
The note that i wrote last night, was in NO way meant to convey anything other than where i am mentally and emotionally at right now...it wasn't meant to say that i have turned my back on God, for i have NOT turned my back on God....but guess what? I am still not over what that ex-friend did to me last year. And right now, certain Scriptures, certain Christian rock songs, etc, all bring back to me the painful memories of what that ex friend did to me. That whole experience of how he turned on me, still haunts me and impacts my life so greatly one year later, that i am still sometimes brought right to my very knees by it. I still have very profound and painful nightmares about that ex-friend.
I still very much need to vent and talk about it.
It helps me to be able to have that freedom to come here to Facebook and talk and vent about the things that traumatize me...the thing with (Roger---not his real name) shook me to my very core. He may as well of blasted me with a cannon. Because what he did, was like a rape of my very self essteem, safety, security, and who i am as a person......
I had another dream about him just this morning. He will not leave me alone in my dreams. You can talk to me and lecture me till i am blue in the face, but i am not yet over what he did to me.....no amount of you teling me to get over this, will make it happen.....yes, it will happen in time.....but you cannot force it to happen by your lectures and self help strategies and self help books.
Just as you cannot go to a rosebush and force open the buds to force them to bloom now....
I am still in the grieving process over what was done to me last year,
And then on top of my ex-friend turning on me, i had to endure more emotional agony from the caregiver i had from May through October of last year, when she too began to take her bad moods out on me, yell at me, belittle me, and tell me i was stupid, and that i needed to just take my autism off and be normal.....
My family did all of this to me growing up, and this still keeps happening, and brings my childhod right back up to me....
It seems that the only real support i get, is through all of my Facebook friends who DO get this...and ME!!
I am also very head shy, and when you yell at me....i feel like i am being slapped and hit right on my head!!!!!!!
I cannot stand it when people yell at me, so please stop....please....or one of these days i will make good on my threat to hop a bus to Rhode Island, and then i will be in a safe place where i am surrounded by people who actually get and accept autism!!!!!
My autism is not going to go away!!!!!!! Neither is the voice i have to express what this is like to be continually yelled at, shut down, shut up, squelched, thrown away, and muzzled by you, the NT world, who still make it so hard to be Autistically Me. To just be Me. Period.
Please don't raise and shake your index finger and talk down to me anymore.
I am not a child.
Please don't preface your statements with "You need to do this"
"There's no need to be upset"
"There's no need to feel like this", anymore.
Please don't tell me no, and give me no options to work with.
Please don't hand me ultimatums. I cannot work with ultimatums.
Instead, ask me how i want things to be done...ask me how before you jump in and assume i want things a certain way. I have rituals, and want and have to have my things to be a certain way.
Please respect that. Please respect the world, the bubble that i am in. It is my world. I am inviting you in because i trust you. If that trust is broken, my world is broken.
I want to be validated, not dismissed, and you are dismissing me when you talk at me and talk over me in that manner.
I want to die because of how i keep getting treated by all of you, in the NT world....
Please stop.....
Please stop shunning me
Please include me in your conversations....in your fun events.
Please don't talk over and interrupt me when i am talking anymore
Please don't tell me how i should and should not feel anymore--i process things differently and in my own way...and at my own pace.
I just want to know it is okay to Be Me.....
And please don;t chastise me and be angry that i wrote this note.....
I love you all, my friends. God bless you.
