Big Changes, and how my mind overdoes it

 I am sitting here this morning in my corner of our bedroom, just finished breakfast, drinking some Irish breakfast tea, and trying to figure out what to write about. Every time I sit down I have ten or more ideas in my head of what subject to talk about, but as soon as my fingers touch the keyboard my brain blanks. I want to talk about my childhood, the things I’ve seen, what I’ve gone through, what it’s taught me, and how it shaped me. Thinking about that makes me realize that a lot of how I was shaped as a kid was reshaped as a teen, then reshaped again in my twenties, then again in my thirties, and now is being reshaped as I am typing this in my forties. It feels like every ten years my life goes through some giant and dramatic changes, and here I am at 40, and I’m just waiting for the next bunch of big giant changes to happen. I am waiting, and nervous, and freaking right the fuck out.

I have no idea what those changes will be, but I can feel them coming on. It’s like my own Spider Sense, but instead of for immanent danger, it warns me of big changes coming. Unlike a Spider Sense where he is able to figure out what is coming and dodge it, my sense tells me something is coming, just not what or when or why or how. It tells me to be aware that something big is about to happen, that something is going to change, that I need to be prepared. It’s just hard to be aware and prepared when I have no idea what the change will be, how it will affect me, or even when it will come about. How do you prepare for the unknown when there is so much in life that could change in an instant without warning. How do I know what change is the big change that the sense is trying to warn me about?

This is my life. This is my mind every day. It spends all it’s time fretting over the future and what’s coming up and trying to be prepared for every possible outcome. It’s impossible to be prepared for every possible outcome but that doesn’t stop my mind from trying. I don’t mean that I try to just have a plan prepared for the major possible outcomes, oh no, that would be way to simple and easy to handle. No, my brain tries to look at every single possible outcome, every single possible way that something could go, and tries to figure out how to deal with every single one of them. Not just how I should react to them, but also tries to guess how everyone else around me is going to react to them as well. I’m sure you have had full on conversations in your head where you are practicing for a real conversation coming up, or how you should have responded to a previous conversation. Now imagine doing that, for every possible outcome of a situation, all day, every day, without fail. Imagine spending your life always trying to be one step ahead of EVERYTHING all the time. 

Imagine you are on your way home, and you know that you are about to have a difficult situation with someone when you get there. So on the way you start preparing yourself for the conversation to come. You go over everything that you want to say, everything you think they might say, and how you would handle the emotions that are bound to come up. That’s normal right? Most everyone does that. Now, take that same idea, but expound upon it. Not only does my brain do that, but it figures out conversations for if the person is happy, or sad, or angry, or depressed. It figures out how I am going to talk about it to anyone else afterward, and how they might respond to the situation. It tries to figure out how to handle it if I say something wrong that could come back to bite me later. It tries to figure out how to react to the other person, not just with words, but also with tones of voice and facial expression and body language. It tries to figure out every single possible outcome, and then, when the moment arrives, it’s so overwhelmed with it’s own attempts to figure the situation out ahead of time, that if the other person doesn’t act in one of the many ways I tried to prepare for, I panic and freeze. If they say anything that goes outside of what I was ready for, I have no idea how to react. At least, not until afterward, when I’m by myself, and then all the possible responses coming pouring out into my thoughts as if by some miracle just thinking of them will fix all of it. It goes over every possible thing I could have said instead of what I did say, and then just sits there while I beat myself up for not having thought of those things in the moment.

So here I am, at the ten year mark, waiting for big changes that my sense is telling me is on the way, freaking out over every possible option and circumstance that could arise. Constantly stuck in my own head to the point that the rest of the world just fades away. So worried about what’s coming next that I am missing all of what’s happening now. So desperate to cling on to what I have now, that I miss any chance of what comes next being a good thing. So wrapped up in my own misery and depression and self loathing that I can’t see that life is always changing around me. Everything always changes, that is just the nature of how life works. Life never stops, never quits, never gives up. It is we as humans who stop and quit and give up. It is me and my neurodivergent brain that always thinks up all the worst possible outcomes to focus on rather than enjoying the ride.

I have never known how to just enjoy the ride of life. That aspect of life has always eluded me. I have always been this person who must always be mentally prepared for everything. I have always been the person that tries to plan every single possible thing as far in advance as I can so as not to be surprised by anything. I want to make it stop, I want to learn to just enjoy life. I want to be able to just wake up in the morning and not instantly start fretting over what is going on, and what may be going on, and what could possibly maybe happen with what is going on. I don’t want to be that person anymore, I just am not sure where that switch is to turn that part of me off. I don’t know what magic words will make it go away, or if there is even some way to train my Spider Sense to work with me and get me more info than just, “hey, change is coming, time to panic”. I desperately want to do better, and I am actively trying to do better, it just often feels like an incredibly hopeless endeavor. But I am not giving up.

Podcast Version

Time waits for no one, so how can I take time for myself?

 I wrote today in the Neurospicy R Us blog today, and it was about how even though we struggle with things, and don't know how to have people help us, we are NOT so alone. Wrote a nice long post about it, posted it, shared it to all the social medias, etc. Then I sat down to look at my life and how things are going and realized that I really suck at following my own advice with things. I really suck at not feeling alone and lost and so on. I really struggle to beleive that anyone understands what I am going through, because way too often, when I do try explain my feelings or thoughts or what I am going through, all I get in response from people is, "I'm sorry you are going through that". That's it, that's all I get. I get people feeling sorry for me. I get people telling me they don't know how they could survive with their brain attacking them like that, or how they could even begin to handle half of what I have been through.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad they are listening to me. I am glad that they are there for me. I am glad that I know there are people who want to help me out. I really am. I just never know what kind of help I would even need, and I am getting tired of all the responces being about just how bad off I am. I know they mean well, and that they are actually trying to show that they are proud of me for continuing on in life despite of or in spite of what's happened or is happening. I get that, I really do. I am not trying to make light of them at all. I am just tired of not being able to move past that point.

Now yes, there are counselers and therapists and specialists and medication that can help with most of the issues that I am dealing with and/or going through. That's not the point though. See all those things cost money in one way or another. All of those things are just there to assist in dealing with the things. None of them can actually take all the issues away. None of them can fix all the issues for me. None of them can even give me the exact answers on how to start fixing the issues. At least, not in my experiance. They try, they really do, but there are limitations to what they can do, and the rest falls on me. I have a proven track record however of giving up when working on myself gets too difficult to deal with. I have a track record of just pushing the issues aside and just moving on without dealing with them completely like I should.

Why do I do this? It's because my trauma filled brain took a quote from my father, and has made that it's mantra on why I can't seem to ever spend the right amount of time needed to get things fixed.

"Time waits for no one. There is no pause button, there is no undo button, time does not stop. It will not just wait for you to be ready for what comes next, so you need to keep moving forward."

Now, was my father trying to tell me to keep going on with things and not finish fixing myself, no, however that seemed to be what he did for himself and I can't seem to not follow in his footsteps with that one. The man pushed off so many things cuz there just wasn't enough time, until the day that it all caught up with him. Been almost two years now since he passed, and I still struggle with it often. I still hear his voice in my head telling me, "Time waits for no man." I still see him pushing himself harder and harder to keep up appearences and make the money needed and just keep pushing through the pain and the tired and the fatigue and the sickness and the...........

He wasn't wrong though, time doesn't stop. Time keeps marching forward wether we want it to or not. What I am trying to learn however is how to make the most of the time that I do have. How to take time every day to set aside for my own mental and physical health. How to accept that there are days that nothing is going to get done around the house, but that they are needed to recharge myself. How to accept the bits of help that people do give me and make the most of them while I can. Most importantly, how to be willing to put myself first more often so I stop burning myself out.

That will be another post soon, how it's not selfish to put yourself first more often life, but it fits here too.

If I am ever to get past this feeling of being all alone. If I am ever to be able to hear people say they are sorry I had to go through what I have, and accept it as it is meant. If I am ever to move forward in my life and my self work and become the better me that I want to be. Then I need to learn to accept the fact that even though time doesn't wait for anyone, I am allowed to take time to wait for myself.

Podcast Version

Dark Voice and the world I was raised in

I sit down here to write, and I have all these ideas of the things I want to write about, and then my brain jumps in and tells me that no one cares. It is self sabatage on a level like none other. Everytime I want to make something worth while, my brain tells me that it's pointless. It tells me that I will fail, or no one will care, or it's not worth doing, or whatever other thing it can come up with to get me to stop. So why do I keep going? What is the point in continuing to push myself to do anything when all the things I try to do I beat myself up over? 

Because that voice isn't allowed to win.

I used to call it my "Dark Unwanted Passenger", which is still true to a point. It is dark, it is unwanted, and it's always there right next to me trying to get me to drive my life how it wants. However I really think it goes a lot deeper than that. It's not that it's a passenger in this car I call my life, it is me. When I look at the passenger seat I am not looking at something else, I am just looking at myself. I am looking at a part of myself that I can not seem to control. I am looking at a part of myself that has always been, and will most likely always be, there. It's not another person, or another personality, or anything like that. It is all the dark parts of me that I have been trying to hide and pretend they don't exist, all coming back up to fight me for control.

See, I went about it all wrong growing up. The world I was raised in taught me from birth that I was never going to fit in being myself, and that fitting in was the most important part. Standing out was only for those who had their lives together and weren't mentally broken like I was. Standing out was only for the important people, not for me, not for mister clutz. Standing out was for people who were smarter than me, and more attractive than me, and more popular than me. Standing out was not for me, and I needed to sit down and learn to just fit in.

There are so many examples of this in my past. So many examples of times where the world I was raised in made it very clear that if I didn't change, I was never going to be actually accepted for who I was, or who I am.

I wanted to be a singer, then in high school on a church missions trip, while I was trying to hone in on who I was as a singer, someone I trusted and respected looked me dead in the eyes and told me, "can you please stop singing, it's just aweful when you sing like that." Then a few years later when I got up the courage to try to be a singer again, the person I was dating and planning to marry looked at me and told me, "yeah, I don't know what happened but your voice is just aweful, please stop."

I wanted to be a youth pastor for years, wanted to work with kids and help them understand that they didn't need to feel alone, that God had a place for everyone. So I tried to be mentored by my churches youth pastor, and was ignored, put down, and told that I wouldn't be able to follow in their footsteps until I learned to get what ever was wrong with my brain under control. The youth pastor, senior pastor, and multiple church leaders all on different occasions told me that my ADHD, and what I learned later in life was Autism spectrum, were too much and too problematic to ever be in a leadership role and I needed to just step back and assist, not lead.

I have wanted to be a writer, a story teller, my entire life, and out of all the writing and english teachers I've had, only 2 have ever seen any promise in me and pushed me to do better. 6th and 10th grade were the only years I really felt like I could become a great writer, story teller, and even a poet. Now a days I can't get anyone to even help proofread any of my writing to let me know if they enjoy it or if I am just rubbish, which leads that dark voice in my head to tell me that I need to just give up.

I wanted to be an artist for a very long time. I love abstract art and patterns and art that speaks to you. I would draw all the time, doodles and large peices and patterns and anything that came to mind. Even have gone so far as to make my own coloring book. I have sold a total of 10 copies, 80% of which have been bought by my mother as gifts for other people. I am grateful for her support, but it really charges up those voices to tell me that I am not as good as I think I am or want to be.

My dark voice, and the world I was raised in, taught me to doubt myself at every turn. Raised me to feel guilty for ever wanting to speak up and stand out and be unique. Built walls around the parts of me that made me feel whole, so that way I would be able to fit in just that much better with the world around me. I am trying to escape it, trying to run away from it, trying to destroy these walls as I find them.

Only thing I can't seem to do is get that dark voice to go away. Can't seem to get the dark thoughts to leave me alone. I have learned to ignore them, and not let them win, just not how to get them to go away and leave me alone. I don't want them there anymore, but there is almost 40 years of trauma and repression to be dealt with first, and I am not sure where to even start. I'm not giving up though. Never giving up.

Podcast Version