You Don't Meet a Girl Like Me Every Dynasty

For being only twenty-two, I feel like I've lived a lot of life. Or, rather, have had a lot of life experiences, largely negative, happen within a time frame that is atypical from the average white, middle-class lady experience. At the same time, though, it feels like I haven't lived at all--most of the cultural markers of adulthood have not happened to me yet. And I guess to some extent, that list is subjective; it's true that I did go to college, did purchase my own first car (or got a loan for it, at lease, lolpun), went abroad, have road tripped independently, et cetera.

The life experiences I'm referencing the lack thereof, however, are more in regards to relationships. Now that I've got my AS diagnosis, this really makes sense, because even if someone were all, "ohey, sexual," it would probably go right over my head. Conceptually, I understand flirting and its function in male-to-female relations (lolheterosexism, but in this case, it's applicable), but as I can neither understand nor reciprocate these subtle and confusing cues, I feel #foreveralone.

Rudy Simone touches upon this subject (re:sexypantsness & dating) in Aspergirls, and the entire chapter is marked to hell with OMGWTFBBQs and exclamation points because finally, finally, FINALLY someone GETS it and explains it in a way that makes it seem like I'm not a pouty, whiny thirteen-year-old who thinks it's the end of the world because a boy did not ask her to the middle school dance. It runs deeper than that. WAY deep, like in the way that my brain is wired. Here is the thing she said (one of them, anyway) that makes SO MUCH SENSE to me: "Informed thought-out choices are the best ones as opposed to 'love at first sight' for an Aspergirl, simply because we don't read others' intentions all that well at first, and we may take longer to get to know someone. Ideally we must try and take our time."

The extent to which this profoundly touched me cannot adequately be put into words. As I've said before, a lot of my friends are procreating, living together, getting engaged, married, real life employment, and I feel like I'm absolutely drowning in all the not adult things I'm doing with my life. Simone helped me to understand that not only is this a typical thing for a lass with AS, but it is actually a GOOD thing--I mean, statistics about marriages being more successful when entered upon later in life aside, I realize that at this point in my life, I don't actually want these things. What I'm feeling is partly cultural pressure, but mostly (and more acutely) the fact that I will always be behind developmentally, and it's statistically likely that everything my friends do, I'll be doing five to ten years later.

And that's okay. Good, even.

I am where I am because I need to be. What's meant to be will always find a way. Other various cultural cliches.

Also, since my brain mostly processes things on the level of Disney, these quotes from Mulan are super applicable:

Fa Zhou: My, what beautiful blossoms we have this year. But look, this one's late. But I'll bet that when it blooms, it will be the most beautiful of all.

The Emperor of China: The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.
Shang: Sir?
The Emperor of China: You don't meet a girl like that every dynasty.

Boom.

Ass Burger

holy christ the layout has changed on this thing DAAAAAAAAAAYUMMMM

so anyway, last week I met with the local superstar of Asperger's
and she was all
um
yep
you just spent the better part of the hour alternately staring at me without blinking slash looking at the ceiling
you, sir, are an ass burger

and so I'm kinda like
(well, more like REALLY like)
pissed off that no one was like
OHEY
you CLEARLY exhibit signs of this disorder
buuuuuuuuuuut
howbout we diagnose it as seven different other things
and drug the fuck out of you
MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRFFFFFFFFFFFF

so I was chatting up the superstar
tellin her bout all the childhood traumas and whatnot
and then tellin her bout all the social failures
middle school
and about boy-who-I-thought-was-my-friend and all the advantage he took
because here's the thing
I'm jaded as all living fuck
but like
I'm also really naive
and I don't know how that works
well actually mostly it doesn't
but it is what it is
I am who I am
and I like me, mostly, I just want to be able to reach out to people more

cause therapist and I (not the superstar) were like
oh right
insight
YOU HAS IT
but also
YOU HAVE NO COMMON SENSE
like it literally dawned on me just two weeks ago that people view me as a sexual being

...

I have taken ALL THE WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASSES
been subject to ALL THE STREET HARASSMENT
had ALL THE PERIODS
but I guess it just never occurred to me that people view me in that way

THAT INSIGHT WOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH MORE HELPFUL A YEAR AGO
but it's not even really insight
it's just a thing
other people seem to understand it
perceive things like that
and I'm just in my own little la la land
which is fine most of the time
but like
I'd really like to not be taken advantage of
and I'd like to know if Boy at Work is really flirting with me or not
because he says yoink and shazam
and apparently that is the key to my heart

but real talk, I have NO IDEA how to fucking navigate human social relations
especially sexypants ones
I can't tell if he is equally as oblivious of social cues as I am
or if he's like...#giggity but we work together so is sneakypants about it
pretty much until someone is like
look
I want to stick my penis inside of you
I am like
LUUUUUUUUUURRRRRDERPA NOT UNDERSTAND

I feel really helpless about this
and logic-me knows I have agency
and that this is something I can work on
and that in all honesty, I am probably much more endearing and funny because of it
but I just don't want to be all heartbroken again
cause that shit is the WORST

and sometimes I feel like everything is a giant lie
because so much of communication isn't even words, it's body language
and if reading facial minutia was a class
I would do the opposite of pass it
like
WHY CAN'T PEOPLE JUST FUCKING SAY WHAT THEY MEAN
within reason

but you know
one thing Superstar said about people with Asperger's really stuck with me
and I wish I could remember what she said exactly
but it was something to the effect of
she knows a woman with it
who lives so honest a life
so earnestly
that Superstar is almost jello that she doesn't get to experience the world the way that Woman with Asperger's does

so I'm like
cool
I'm special
CA$HMONEY

and I think I'm ramblin on meow but really I guess I'm just super thankful for all the people that I love
who love me for me
Ass burger and all

Shit's Real Whack

I haven't updated in forever
Mostly because nothing ever happens to me
Scratch that
Aggressively bad things keep happening
But like
They're #firstworldproblems bad things
And sometimes I'm just like
Self
Shut up.
Just shut THE FUCK UP
Because okay, yeah, it sucks that YET ANOTHER DENTIST has fucked up THE SAME GODDAMN TOOTH
And YES YOU WILL HAVE TO PAY A FUCKTON TO REPAIR IT BECAUSE EVERY DENTIST IS AN INCOMPETENT SADIST AND INSURANCE COMPANIES LIKE TO DO THE OPPOSITE OF INSURE YOU
But like
There are fucking people
IN THE UNITED STATES
Living in GODDAMN SHANTY TOWNS.
TOWNS COMPRISED OF TIN
WHERE THEY WORK IN MINES
WHICH IS PROBABLY SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE THAN WHERE I WORK NOW

The other day I calculated my total debt, finally
And I was like...$75,000? that doesn't even seem like a real number
I actually have more private loans than I do federal
A DERPA DERR
Because I had zero conceptualization of money as a senior in high school
Because those dumb fucks who ran the school were all
"Oh, college prep, you should probably take Trig 3 and calc, because those are certainly real things that you will encounter in your everyday life"
as opposed to
"ORIGHT, you're seventeen and you know shit about shit, how bout we setcha up with a nice consumer math?"
Well that would be RIDICULOUS
Because everyone know that consumer math is for POOR PEOPLE who can't afford to hire accounts or whatever the fuck people who deal with money are called

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE

So then I just get in this super unhealthy spiral
Of feeling SUPER GUILTY that I'm privileged enough to have even GOTTEN loans to go to a place like Allegheny
But then also realizing that I graduated with a bunch of fucks who are all
WHY YES WE SUMMER IN THE CAYMAN ISLANDS. BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS LIKE A DEFINITELY NOT MADE UP PLACE AND WE LIKE TO USE SEASONS AS VERBS AND WEAR FUCKING NORTHFACE AND GO ON SO MANY ADVENTURES.

The point of me staying at home was to get mentally well enough to move. And really, it's not happening. One, because these fucks NEVER CALL ME BACK. Like. Maybe if you deal with psychically damaged people, you maybe inform them if you're just going to up and leave for weeks at a time, so they don't irrationally convince themselves that you hate them and then they stop seeking psychological services altogether and then get WAY WORSE than they were before?

I just
UGH
I really want out of Erie
It's just a bad situation all around
But I BARELY make even working 40+ hours a week at my current job
And all my savings were wiped out the one year I didn't take out a private loan

I get so stuck
And I feel so helpless
And really, I'm not even depressed
At least on a neurochemical level
I just need new people, new experiences
Non-northwestern Pennsylvania type things

I wanna fall in love
I wanna set the world on fire
I wanna vigilante the shit out of some shady-ass dentists

But I feel like that's gonna keep not happening because A) I am terrified of losing the safety net I have when I'm at home, minimal as it is; B) I am brokeasfuuuuuuuuck; C) I have zero ability in relating to other human beings.

There's a quote from Dollhouse, something to the effect of "sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the least capable of it."

True. As. Shit. I am too afraid to reach out to people because of a shit ton of conditioned rejection and pride and fear.

Excuses, excuses, right?

I just wish I knew how to make it stop.

How I Got So Far in Life is Beyond Me

Soooo...today I learned that I have been using tampons incorrectly for the past ten years.

Incorrectly, you say? How does one use them "incorrectly?"

Well.

An important thing to note before I get into this hilariously improbable story is that I was raised in a school district with abstinence-only education. You know, the kind that tells you that women are 90% emotional, 10% sexual, and men are 90% sexual, 10% emotional, and that married couples (who have the best sex, fyi) complete each other 100% (because 100% plus 100% equals...100%?), and that women who have sex before marriage are like used lollipops (or toothbrushes, depending on which teacher you had), and EW, who would want to use something that's already been all mucked up by someone else's germs!

But, I digress.

For the past three weeks, I have been taking antibiotics for a sinus infection. The first week, I was on regular amoxicillin, but when that failed to take away sinus pressure, my doctor put me on fancypants amoxicillin, which seemed, for the most part, to take the headaches away. At least the worst of them. Unbeknownst to me, antibiotics can kill not only the bacteria or whatever in your face, but in your vagina as well--good bacteria that keeps the yeast at bay. Or something. Long story short, I woke up one day with vag fire. Don't think that's a thing? Try being on antibiotics for three weeks and then ignoring the initial symptoms of a yeast infection because you weren't really aware that was a thing and then realize that your hoo-ha is on FUCKING DEATH FIRE. It is unpleasant as shit.

After using the necessary and awkward medication suppository-thingmajig, I felt pretty icky, and also the vag fire wasn't completely put out, so I had to call off work. I told my boss that I had a negative reaction to a medication (which is totes true) and that I was pretty sure I'd need to go to the ER (which I THOUGHT was true because I was convinced that I was going to die). Luckily, I realized that I would rather die than pay $100 to sit in an ER for three hours, so I opted to drug the shit out of myself and sleep on the couch all day. Yaaaaaay Valium.

That morning, I asked my mother, a nurse, when it would be okay for me to pee. To which she was all, o.O face? And then proceeded to tell me that I knew that your pee hole and vag hole are two separate things, right?

To which I was all, O_O ?!?!?!

And then she was like lollollollollolsrsly? wtf are they teaching you in school?

And then I was like...lollipop, grumble, going back to bed. But not before I pee out of a hole I was previously unaware that existed.

So I sleep all day, as previously stated, and then texted my friend Sarah about the magical pee hole discovery. I'm not sure how we got on the topic, but I mentioned that with this anti fungal stuff, you can't use a tampon, which I thought was kinda weird since the medicine gets put all the way UP there.

And that's when I started to wonder: why, if you could use pads to make sure the medicine doesn't fuck up your cute and expensive underwear, why couldn't you use a tampon? It's not like a tampon goes UP, it just kinda hangs out in between your lips, so to speak.

God. Damn. It.

So I asked Sarah: have I been using tampons wrong for the past like, ten years?

Sarah: *Confused on how you would use something like tampons incorrectly*

Me: They don't go, like, ALL THE WAY up, do they?

Sarah: *facepalm*

Sarah was like, WTF, dude, they come with directions! And I was like, no stupid, I just checked my box and they do NOT.

Then I checked a different box. One that I apparently had NOT thrown the directions away.

Turns out, she was right. They DO go all the way up. And you CAN pee with tampons in.

I'd always kind of wondered why some women I knew bitched about cardboard applicators. Now I know.

ruh-roh

some bad news:

I am pretty sure I have a brain tumor, and probably also face cancer.

Don't think that's a thing?

Look it up.

**EDIT: DO NOT LOOK UP FACE CANCER, SOME THINGS CANNOT BE UNGOOGLED

Okay so anyway, furreal, I have had a chronic eyebrow headache for about a month. Sinus headache, you say?

No.

That is not a thing.

...shut up.

Anyway.

I have never been particularly good at accurately gauging time lapses, but I'm fairly certain that these headaches coincide with the death of my grandmother. My gram and I were very close--she and my grandfather helped to raise me in my formative years, and I made a habit of calling her at least once every other week to see how she was doing. As of late (and by late, I mean like ten years--see, timesense is not a thing I possess), she's not been doing well--had not been doing well, rather--and pretty much everyone was like, okay, she's probs gonna die soonish, guess we'll make the most of our time and whatnot. But since my life was a giant sadface for the past three months or so (and by three months I mean chronic depression-y since fetushood), I had avoided contact for the most part because I didn't want her to know how sad I was.

Apparently that's a thing I've been doing since I was little. My childhood psychologist told me that I had told him I didn't want to talk about my dad with my mother because I didn't want to hurt her. The FUCK a six-year-old thinks that kind of shit.


**EDIT: The problem with taking a brief hiatus to eat a popsicle and snuggle your cat is that you COMPLETELY lose your trail of thought. Orrrr it kinda makes you realize you didn't really have one in the first place and maybe you should just GTFOff the computer and watch Arnold Schwarzenegger be pregnant in a movie (seriously, I don't understand why Junior was never Oscar-nominated). But I digress...

So I guess what I was trying to say back there is that for the past weekish or so, I have been having dizzy spells, headaches, nausea, the shakes (is there a real-life word for that? I'd use trembling but that sounds kinda...inappropriate-y), forgetfulness and weird limb sensations which means I am PROBABLY dying. Except that I'm probably NOT dying, I'm just sad and overdramatic and fifty-milligrams of Adderall paranoid when I haven't even been TAKING my Adderall BECAUSE it makes me so goddamn paranoid.

Grumble grumble.

I feel very stuck, and I'm not quite sure how to get unstuck. Empirically, I know I am intellectually gifted, creative, amusing and hard-working, but I have so much of the anxieties that usually I just sit on the couch being sad for extended periods of time.

Mas electroshock, por favor.

It's Not Your Lungs This Time, It's Your Heart That Holds Your Fate

Sometimes I stop and wonder how I get to these low, low points in my life and then realize they happen like they've always happened: gradually, then suddenly.

It's not that I don't realize I have so much to live for.

My life is filled with laughter, love, family, friends, fluffy kittens and My Drunk Kitchen. At the same time, though, it's filled with psychological turmoil, lonliness, anxiety, helplessness, lack of affordable healthcare and grapefruit.

I have a four year degree from a prestigious college, and after two months of unemployment, I now stand and scrub parts in a shop for eight hours a day. (Though on the bright side, I did just get a kind-of promotion, so I get to sit down and draw faces in epoxy glue all day--woo!)

It's not that I don't mind paying my dues--having a college degree isn't the same as it was twenty years ago, and most people don't land their dream jobs straightaway. Especially in this economy, and especially in Erie, where the unemployment rate is thirty percent.

I knew I wanted to take a year off before school because I wanted to be more psychologically well for graduate school, and I wasn't ready to be away from home so permanently yet. But being here feels like I'm drowning, like my brain slowly atrophies with every passing smiley or frowny face I draw in epoxy. I've told people that the reason I'm not taking a job with some non-profit in D.C. was because of healthcare reasons (read: lose healthcare benefits and DIE), but the truth is, I am just so overwhelmingly terrified of change that I can't ever see myself being successful in life.

And part (even most) of that is because of the PTSD.

But you know what? The real world doesn't give a fuck if I had a traumatic upbringing. My private loan companies don't give two shits that my anxiety gets so out of control sometimes that I down twenty milligrams of Valium just to make it through the day. When all is said and done, my past doesn't make any difference to anyone else but me--just my current actions matter.

Growing up is fucking hard and also stupid, but I've finally, FINALLY contacted a therapist that was recommended to me by my childhood psychologist, and I'm looking into treatment facilities for PTSD and hoping against all the hopes that my insurance will cover something like that.

I've come to realize that I can't hide behind the past, that I have to move on and become the person I'm going to be, because I think she's going to be pretty great. I just need some help to get by, and I need to learn how to ask for it when I need it.

I need to start being me again. Or finally.

She is Perfect in That Fucked-Up Way

That title's been derived from Everclear's "Amphetamine," a song I listen to roughly seven times a day.

It's about a girl. (Which, incidentally, is the title of my Women's Studies comp!)
She tried to escape her former life; she "came out West to break away clean from her family and her friends and her little girl's dreams."

"She is, according to Everclear's singer/songwriter, "the saddest girl that I have ever known."

She came out west to escape the pressures of her current life, to explore a different mode of being, to break away from all the horrible that caused her to turn to substances like amphetamine.

Results: unstable. Even moreso than before.

See, I've tried running away. I've tried removing myself from undesirable situations both literally and figuratively--I went three thousand miles across the ocean, for Chrissakes.

It.
Don't.
Work.

There's an annoying self-help book gatheing dust on a bookshelf upstairs entitled "Wherever You Go, There You Are."

Girl, you can go to California.
You can go to Bumfucknowhere, England.
You can go to Boston.
Illinois.
Florida.
Georgia.
Any place not in the tri-state area.

Wherever you go, there you are. Sure, maybe you have less environmental, social or economic stressors (or perhaps even more, if you are hella unlucky). When it comes down to it, you are you.

See that?
It's important.

You.
Are.
You.

Whatever circumstances brought you to this moment, whatever violence or pain or misery or disaster brought you here, to this place you can escape from, are going to be carried within yourself so long as you keep them buried there.

I guess what I'm trying to say in my Ambien-induced nostalgia/wisdomfest is that the past will always be with you no matter where you go.

Should you choose to ignore it?
Accept it?
Embrace it?

I am caught in a liminal space between acceptance and embrace[ment?].

On the one hand, I feel my crazypants makes me an incredibly unique individual.
My sense of humor is off-beat and quirky, sometimes a bit macabre, but it helps me to deal on some level with painful memories that my brain has declared off-limits.

I want to run.
I want to go to DC and be successful.
I want to rabble-rouse and set shit on fire.
I want to be a thorn in the ass of patriarchy.

...if only I could convince myself that it's worth waking up in the morning.

I'm perfect, I've decided.
Perfect in that fucked-up way.
Maybe it isn't the healthiest thing in the world.
Maybe I should buckle down and get long-term PTSD treatment in a facility.
Maybe I could go under hypnosis and find out what REALLY happened to me.
But you know what?
Fucked up as I am, I LIKE me.
Of course, me being the way I am does not make it easy to attract a potential mate.
I need someone who is the opposite of me stability-wise so that we don't implode on ourselves when shit hits the fan.
This post ended up in a really different place than it started.