Spilt Milk

"Nothing can prepare you for motherhood." That's probably the truest statement I've ever heard. I was so beyond unprepared on so many levels that nearly seven years in, I still find myself reeling. I love my children, but I am still in mourning for so many things wiped away by their entrance to this world, my body and mind not least among these. Here's a little Twitterpation (my new label for verses set down first on social media) on these laments.

Oh, baby

You’ve hurt me so

Most people will never know

The hidden scars

That run so deep

The years of nights

Without sleep

You slumber and play

Ignorant bliss

I hold back tears

Your brow to kiss

The middle soft

The endings hard

My restless soul

This mind you charred

A wicked tear

The loss of hair

Unburdened mind

You never care

What you wreaked

On this poor vessel

Resentful thoughts

I fight to wrestle

To the ground

It’s not your fault

You never sought

To be born 

Saying I'm Sorry: Part I (Master T)

Beautiful watercolour by kiwitachan

I've written previously about how my ASD diagnosis opened a whole new world of self understanding floating in the alphabet soup of personal experiences I never previously recognised as "things". In the year that has passed since the possibility I could be neurodivergent was first floated, I've had the eye-opening experience of connecting with Autistics and other ND folks from around the world. This has provided ample opportunity to discuss commonalities and differences in how we experience the world. While we are all individuals ("I'm not!" one for the Life of Brian fans…), there are some shared experiences that resonate strongly with nearly all Autistics I've had the pleasure of interacting with. One of these is the overwhelming need for closure that tends to trigger endlessly looping thoughts, clinically described as perseveration.

I imagine that all people have niggling thoughts they simply cannot lay to rest from time to time, but many Autistics report having multitudes of thoughts that continue to echo through the vast hallways of their brains endlessly. It is not uncommon for such thoughts to rip us out of a dead sleep and keep us awake for days, interrupt normal daily activities, or sap the joy from our lives. It can be something as simple as a conversation 25 years ago that didn't go the way we expected, or an entire relationship left in shambles that we would give anything to at least understand, if not repair. In an earlier post, I touched on my own desperate desire to rectify past bungled relationships and felt it was time to move on and let those go, but alas, my brain is like a rusted vice grip, so I will endeavour to write my side of the stories in an attempt to lay my ghosts to rest.

Jewish Headstone by Nikodem Nijaki (wikimedia commons)

There is a picture of me horsing around with my first real boyfriend, snapped by my mom one happy afternoon, that clearly depicts my whole-hearted adoration of him. We're on the couch in my living room, playfully punching each other, I'm wearing a ridiculous hat, and we're both laughing through our pretend acts of aggression. I do not need to look at this photo to remember all the details because it is so clearly emblazoned on my brain as one of the few times in four years of high school I was truly happy.

Master T was a year younger than me and at least a foot taller. Even before he got sick, he was a dangerously skinny kid with the proudest Roman nose and a razor sharp sense of humour, which he could instantly turn against any unwitting adversary at the slightest provocation. To me he was a god.

We met through a high school theatre production, he working back stage while I lapped up the limelight. In the years to come, his prowess on the stage would far surpass mine, but that first season, he seemed content to control the curtains and make cutting remarks at the expense of all the actors. I wanted nothing more than for him to like me, but that desire just made me spout the most insipid utterances when I could think of anything to say at all. Somehow, more by sheer will than any degree of finesse, I got him alone and professed my overpowering attraction to him. This led to a delightful make-out session and us 'going out together', which mostly amounted to him occasionally coming to my house for more kissing.

He never invited me to his house and quickly thwarted any suggestion that we go there. He never included me in anything to do with his friends and would nearly always leave me hanging to meet up with them. I wanted him so badly, but as the weeks went on, he became increasingly distracted and intent on drinking with his friends any time alcohol presented itself. My mind raced through these discrete and incomplete pieces of evidence to conclude that 1) I really didn't mean much to him at all, and 2) he was developing a substance abuse problem at the ripe old age of 15. The first conclusion broke my heart, the second was simply terrifying. I'd grown up on a steady diet of stories about a family friend a few years my senior who was a brilliant and beautiful girl being dragged down by her dead-beat, drug addicted boyfriend. These stories fuelled my rapidly spiralling fears that this was the path I had unwittingly stumbled upon and if I didn't change course quickly, I would be "ruined" as she was (N.B. she ended up becoming a doctor).

I resolutely did not want to break up with Master T, the thought of it crushed me. I wanted to talk to him about his drinking, but I lacked the skills to broach such a delicate topic with anyone, especially someone who left me tongue tied and capable of slicing me to ribbons with an unparalleled caustic tongue. I was also of the mind that no one, especially not him, could actually care about me. I honestly believed it would not bother him one scrap if I simply vaporised and let him be. So, I just stopped talking to him and couldn't even bring myself to look at him in passing because it hurt so much. Twenty five years have passed, and the simple act of writing this brings tears to my eyes and an unbearable tightness in my chest. I can still see him coming toward me from the Senior wing as I approached it and just walking right past.

No one knew it at the time, but Master T was incredibly sick. He knew he was in excruciating pain, but he didn't tell anyone, choosing instead to self medicate with whatever alcohol his friends could get their hands on. My inability to deal with confusing and conflicting signals meant I walked away from someone who made my heart sing when he needed more support than ever. This thought still gnaws away at the corners of my brain far more often than I appreciate. Not long after I left him in a lurch, he was admitted to a distinguished hospital with the most advanced case of his disease they'd ever witnessed in someone his age. He required intensive treatment and was partly disabled from the extensive damage. While I know the disease and its effects are in no way my fault, I have never been able to forgive myself for walking away at that critical time in his life, for my inability to sit with someone else's pain rather than run away from the overwhelming effect it has on me.

A year later, another stage production underway, we were foisted together again. Tensions were high, but my feelings for Master T had only intensified. Now it was his turn to drive and as we sat in a darkened parking lot he wanted answers. Answers I didn't have. Answers for something it would take me decades to completely decipher. I was nearly 30 before I discovered my inability to perceive love and affection from others and on the brink of 40 before I understood the interplay between my neurology and environment that generated that devastating flaw.

We got back together during the production run and I was over the moon at this second chance. I wanted to do it better. I wanted so badly to right the wrongs, but he was only in it for retribution. With cold calculation, he threw back the dish I'd unintentionally served and had his revenge. I can still feel my breath wrenched from my body as he delivered the blow, he didn't want to see me anymore. I can see the grass around me wavering as I made my way unsteadily back across the open field where the new high school now stands. The ache was so palpable and pervasive; it would have hurt less if he'd physically beat me.

The only benefit to holding on so clearly to these painful details is using them as raw materials to weave into something new and beautiful. I'm nearly finished writing a novel in which my main character shares many of my challenges, but is more self aware and better supported. Still, she is not immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the scene in which her boyfriend breaks up with her is based directly on this moment of acute agony in my own anthology of pain.

I thought that writing a friendly post-script to our story could stop the perseverating on my grievous error, but I was wrong. While it did bring me great joy to reconnect with Master T online in recent years, and even more so to talk in person, it did not resolve the final chord still hanging in my mind. Our interactions and conversation steered clear of the past, navigating only the safe waters of the present. I thought this would be enough, to feel absolved in a smile and a snarky joke, but without the chance to ever say "I'm sorry I hurt you, and I forgive you for hurting me" the thoughts play on endless repeat, wearing holes in the carpet of my mind.

It's a complicated thing, the past. It's made even more complicated by the way my brain holds so fiercely to things others can lay to rest. I assume Master T never looses a wink of sleep over this briefest moment of our shared ancient history, but for me it's an interminable wobbly tooth that I cannot excise.

Battles In My Mind (Part III): PTSD, PND, ASD, GAD Alphabet Soup and Black Dog Dancing

In Part II of this series, I started my battle story in the middle with the arrival of my second child. As brutal, protracted, and dehumanising as that series of events was, it paled in comparison with the acute trauma of my first birth. When we think about having a baby, it's all teddy bears and nappies, smiling exhausted parents, bottles and boobies, not near-death experiences. I'd heard of PTSD prior to my first pregnancy, but it was something I mistakenly only associated with soldiers returning from the battle fields or perhaps police officers or firefighters, never ever "the happiest day of your life".

I was physically and mentally prepared to give birth. I knew instinctively what my body needed to do, I was not afraid of the pain; my highly experienced midwife had more faith in my ability to birth my baby than any of her previous clients. But things didn't exactly go to plan. We'll never know exactly why my body didn't quite do what it was supposed to, but it's quite likely that a bike accident a decade earlier disrupted the communication along my spine just enough that part of my cervix simply didn't get the message to let go and my big-brained baby got stuck.

I had zero desire to go to hospital, ever. I have a massive phobia of them. The noise, the lights, the intrusive people, the lack of privacy, the GERMS; it's a fucking nightmare. My homebirth was going beautifully until I exhaustedly agreed to have my waters broken after eight hours of full labour. 

There's meconium. I no longer have any option but to go to hospital. More than six years later, I still feel the edges of the floorboards that I clung to, pleading not to be taken into the waiting ambulance, under my fingernails and bare body. I summon every ounce of resolve in my bull-headed self to keep my contractions going during the 25-minute ambulance ride to avoid an emergency Cesarian upon arrival in hell.

Four hours of battle later, with the aid of untold scores of midwives fighting along side me, I let out a tremendous roar (after being nearly silent for the preceding 12 hours) as the doctor unsheathes the scalpel and eject my daughter into the world unaided. The midwives are shocked to see a baby fly out that fast. It is over. She is placed on my belly and crawls to my breast. We lie there united at last. But the nightmare is just about to start…

After a few lovely moments, a couple of photos, a general reprieve, she is taken from me to be weighed and measured. I am stitched and stitched and stitched as well as the surgeon can muster before he mutters something about the rest he can't get to that will have to heal on its own… The happy congratulatory voices become hushed. Doctors sound concerned and new messages start zipping around the room. Something about her respiration, I can't understand, I'm cold, I know she is cold. "She'll be OK, we just need to monitor her resps… Do you want to get up and take a shower?" "Yeah, OK, that would be great…"

I get up, the room swims, there's a lot more blood under me than anyone anticipated. I reach out for the bed, a midwife catches me before I crash to the floor. Someone presses an alarm. The room seethes with strange faces. No one can find a pulse, a vein to pump fluids into, I'm poked full of holes in a futile exercise to find one that is not collapsed, "20 over 80" someone proclaims. My daughter is also slipping, she is plopped into an oxygen cot and my husband rushes manically back and forth between us but I tell him to stay with her because the terror in his eyes scares me too much. He goes to NICU and a steadfast midwife stares deeply into my pupils willing me to stay with her as I start to slip down a very easy slope. I am so incredibly cold. Nothing warms me. I am left completely alone.

I am supposed to be elated, but I am empty. My most precious little person is no longer inside of me and I can't even touch her anymore. I spend an hour listening to other women scream their heads off having short and highly medicated labours whilst I'm trapped alone not knowing where anyone is or how my baby is doing. I can't sleep.

When I can finally go to her, I can only just put my hand on her tiny relaxed body for a few moments. It's absolutely heartbreaking. I've been waiting to hold her in my arms and nuzzle that little neck for nine months and now I'm not even sure she knows I'm here. She has no needs now as the tubes have replaced me. I'm told to go get some sleep. But sleep doesn't come. I feel like I'm going crazy. After a few days they hesitantly discharge us because the doctor can see I'm too anxious in this place, but the midwife comes every day to check both of us. Less than 24 hours later we're re-admitted to emergency because my little one is fighting a lung infection. All focus is on her and no one worries about me.

Another week in hospital. I rage and scream when my roommate's visitors think it's cool to have a smoke prior to entering the maternity ward where I stew with my IV-antibiotic-fed newborn fighting for her life. I've earned massive cred with the midwives on this ward for what I fought through, so they quickly pull strings to get me a private room. I'm in pain, but trying to maintain a brave face. I'm still not sleeping, but neither is my baby, so it appears normal.

But the sleepless weeks turn into months. Even when someone else looks after her and tells me to sleep, I can't. I'm 100% on edge all the time. I cry nearly as much as she does. We travel a lot because it's so much easier to just keep moving.

One night, several months later, when she has finally started sleeping for at least a few hours at a time, my husband and I decide to watch a movie. It's a light-hearted comedy about four couples having babies. It's silly and ridiculous and we laugh a lot. Until suddenly, it's not. One of the mothers has a problem in labour and the doctors hit the Code Blue alarm. The same one I had. My smile instantly dissolves, my head spins, and I feel like I'm going to vomit. I try to get out of the room but collapse on the floor and feel like I'm dying. My whole body seizes up. I have no idea what's happening. I'm terrified. I'm heaving and sobbing. I can't make it stop. My husband holds me, lets me cry, is completely baffled with me; I have to get up to feed the baby.

Shortly thereafter I read an article in a breastfeeding magazine about the 1% of births that lead to PTSD. The description and explanation make everything click. I start to get some help and counselling. The regular counsellor is at a loss of what to do to help me so she sends me to someone who teaches me a tapping and eye tracking technique to use whenever I have a trigger. It works a treat, but doesn't stop the insomnia. I'm also severely depressed, but ardently refuse to fill the prescription for SSRIs the doctor implores me to take.

Looking back on my life, I know I've suffered multiple severe depressive episodes. I have contemplated suicide more times than I like to admit. Now, understanding myself through the lens of Autism, I see the patterns of sensory overload, people overload, new environments/experiences, anxiety, and insufficient time for my special interests that built up to each. Had I known then what I know now, I would have advocated for my own needs, removed the forks and conserved the spoons. I wouldn't have felt so ridiculous about my need for quieter spaces, fewer smells, a particular piece of fabric to rub.

Arriving on the scene wholly unprepared for parenthood unravels a lot of people. It is a triggering event for many ND women that suddenly sets them on a path toward self-awareness and/or diagnosis. But I crash landed into it with the triple threat of zero experience around children under 10, undiagnosed ASD, and PTSD. It has taken a long time, but I'm learning to forgive myself for being so completely fucked up those first two years of my daughter's life.

Learning to see depression and anxiety through a kinder, softer lens finds its corollary in the Black Dog Project. I came across this beautiful endeavour to break the stigma around adopting black dogs, who are perceived as more aggressive, as I was searching for images for this post. I love what they're doing and it reminds me to be kinder and more compassionate to myself when I'm fighting poor mental health.

Depression in all its forms is crushing. There is so much stigma, so many misconceptions, so little compassion that it takes a lot to even write anonymously about it. My mother once told my older brother I was being treated for depression, to which he scoffed, "what does she have to be unhappy about?" Depression is NOT about just being unhappy or dissatisfied (although those are some of the symptoms). For me, it comes from being out of my depth, pushing myself too hard, insomnia, isolation, sensory/people overwhelm, and the anxiety that ensues. I genuinely NEED time to self regulate, let my mind wander, control my environment, move, move, and move. When these needs are not met for whatever unfortunate combination of reasons, my mind goes into hyperdrive, it WILL NOT STOP. Yes, there are drugs that help, but they have unpleasant side effects and we still don't have any controlled long-term human studies to know if they're safe for continued use. I prefer to at least attempt to manage this brutal condition via non-chemical means because I do not want to be a living lab experiment.

There are so many people out there suffering in silence about their depression and anxiety. You can show you support them by brandishing a Black Dog logo or posting a sign in your office/shop/classroom. Dancing With the Black Dog is a registered charity.

You can't always get what you need, but sometimes you get what you said you wanted…

Recently someone said all he ever wanted was to be loved back by a girl in the same way he loved her. On the face of it, it's a sadly sweet sentiment, but examining it more closely it's perplexing.

First, there exists the premise that two people's feelings for each other can be perfectly mirrored by the other. Perhaps it is possible for the complex sine waves of their emotions to intersect or overlap periodically, but to stay in perfect harmony indefinitely defies logic or human capacity. So, maybe this isn't exactly what he meant. Maybe he just wanted to know that her feelings for him were as intense and overwhelming and utterly confusing for her as his feelings for her were for him. Fair enough.

But here's the thing, hers were. She told him so repeatedly and in no uncertain terms. But he wanted so much more than just to be loved back. Nothing she gave him was ever enough. Her time, her affection, her trust, her sanity, and nearly her life, but somehow he was still left lamenting that she didn't love him enough. She nearly sacrificed everything for him, but then he had the audacity to throw it back in her face, accuse her of terrible unkindness, and claim he never actually loved her anyway.

This behaviour seems rather psychotic, or at the very least completely and utterly irrational. But what is love if not irrationality manifest? Like a swarm of bees no longer content within the overly crowded confines of the hive, it buzzes about directionless, homeless, awaiting its queen. If she fails to appear, it dies.

The agony we experience when we wish to share another's experience but are unable is visceral. Thinking we are alone, feeling utterly isolated and unable to connect becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as our tiny tendrils of attachment whither and recoil back into the dark recesses of our delicate souls. We feel forlorn and forget that others continue to hold us in their minds and hearts even when they are not with us or actively engaged. Strength comes from the constant inner mantras of self-love that does not hang on external stanchions.

Caught Between a Rock & a Hard Place :: Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't…

As a self-IDed, not formally diagnosed female Aspie on the brink of 40, I'm facing some interesting criticisms on two fronts. Those closest to me have accepted this lens shift without much fuss and life is flowing far more smoothly as my stress levels drop along with my mask and others accept some of my idiosyncrasies rather than railing against them. The next circles out, the family members with whom I have less frequent interactions or more strained relations, are not accepting this new paradigm quite as gracefully.

On one hand I get the common refrains, "but you don't look autistic", "but you're not a math savant", "but you're not emotionless". I am just making this all up and seeking attention/trying to be special because clearly my life isn't complicated enough. Right. Everyone wants to be labelled with a disorder/disability because that's just sooooo awesome…

On the other hand I get, "but how could you NOT know you're autistic??!!" Well, let's see… Prior to starting this journey of self discovery a few months ago my knowledge of autism/Asperger's was limited to its portrayal in popular culture (e.g. Rainman, the curious incident of the dog in the night, Big Bang Theory) and what a few friends of mine were struggling with in their sons. These expressions of autism in no way reflect my life experiences, so why would I identify in this way. I studied physical science, not human psychology. I've spent my life ensconced in academia where autistic traits are both commonplace and generally advantageous, therefore pretty "normal". Plus, the diagnostic criteria for women changed significantly long after I left school or any environment wherein someone might suggest I seek diagnosis. Yes, apparently many people "in the know" tagged me as an Aspie long before I had a clue, but no one ever mentioned it to me.

But now I await the formal tick in the box. I've opened the professional Pandora's box to see if there are other confounding issues. Maybe I'm "subcritical" and only just express some Autistic traits, but below the diagnostic threshold. It's a weird and uncomfortable place to be. Some days I wonder who I actually am.

This comes at a time when I don't seem to be able to satisfy anyone, making it all the more exhausting and exasperating. Too many people wanting completely conflicting things from me all the time. The constant tug-of-war for my attention, affection, energies, time, and ideas is pulling me apart at the seams. When I need more time for self care than ever before in my life, there is no allowance for this from anyone else. The second I carve out space for myself, I'm failing someone else.

I feel crushed by expectation and demand; emptied from filling others. My batteries are drained and I just want a nap. Perhaps for a month. Or more… If I'm deemed "on the spectrum" then maybe this is Autistic burnout. Otherwise, I guess I'm just a lazy whinger who needs to pull up her socks.

Echoes of love left behind through blurred boundaries

I'm not particularly good at boundaries. I struggle with the nuance between 'acquaintance' and 'friend'; even using the German Bekannte never really helped me define these shades of grey. Hence, I've been badly burned many times by opening myself up completely and unreservedly to people I thought were Friends, who didn't have quite the same affinity for me. Wearing my heart on my sleeve has won me some true blue friends, but it has also left me open to derision and stabs in the back. I now realise this challenge is strongly tied to my inability to correctly read people and social situations.

I've been contemplating this issue in the context of Dunbar's number, which quantifies the number of meaningful relationship a person can maintain. (See: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-greatest-number-of-friends-a-person-can-have ) Listening to Dr. Dunbar explain his theory and the evidence to support it, I found myself both baffled and intrigued. The first time I heard an interview with him, it was prior to identifying myself as an Aspien and I thought it was simply outrageous to claim this to be a universal limiting truth as it felt so far removed from my own experience. Re-listening to the interview post Aspie-awakening, I had a completely different take on his ideas through the Autistic lens.

Dunbar posits (with a good deal of historical and social data to back him up) that humans have always been limited to about 150 people in their social network. This requires more specific defining in today's world of vast online social networks: these are people with whom one can maintain "stable interpersonal relationships" and is limited by the size of the neocortex. Now, I'm not a cognitive scientist, but it seems logical to draw the conclusion that if the neocortex is directly involved in one's ability to maintain stable interpersonal relationships, then this is somewhere we might look to find significant differences between NT and ND individuals.

In his interview with Dr Dunbar on the NPR Podcast, TED Radio Hour, Guy Raz describes this network of ~150 people as a series of widening circles with ever diminishing intensity. Each wider circle contains more people with whom we (ostensibly) are able to maintain a certain level of friendship. At the outer reaches of this circle, we reach a thinning edge where we pass from people we truly know and can trust in the present to all the others who are known to us in a lesser capacity or too far in the past to still be worthwhile. Dunbar explains that this limit exists because of the space those in the inner-most circles occupy in our brains.

I contemplated this "brain space" paradigm in light of my own experience. My first reaction was that I most certainly have more than 150 people within what I would consider to be a "stable interpersonal relationship", with whom I could pick up wherever we left off however many months/years/decades ago. I placed that number far closer to 400 and wondered why this might be so. Then it slowly dawned on me that maybe this is where my Autistic brain starts to get things "wrong" socially.

I believe that I most likely have a very skewed notion of what constitutes a close relationship and I must admit that I find it nearly impossible to contemplate that people I have not seen in many years may have moved on and changed. I started to recognise that the somewhat shocked/maybe irked, "um, hi, what do you want?" response of "close friends" I hadn't seen or been in contact with for many years might well be a function of the lack of reciprocity in holding others in my head and heart. I have never really been able to understand how someone I felt so close to in the past could just move on when there had been no falling out of any sort.

I discussed this all with my husband and his take was that I indeed have very few people within those first few realms of "close friends". He suggested that what I interpret as a strong friendship really just boils down to people putting up with my quirks and allowing me to bounce back into their life whenever I have a mind to do so. So, perhaps I simply spread out my neocortex space very thinly to an enormous network of people because I have absolutely no idea how to actually form strong, resilient friendships. This is both sad and kind of a special skill (in a weird, slightly antisocial way) because I often think of myself as a "node" connecting many different people I know only tangentially with other people they deeply connect with.

Another blurry boundary for me is the surface between other's emotional bubbles and my own. If people's emotions were objects in a painting, my world would look like Monet's Water Lilies. I tend to experience other's emotions as my own, which is odd at best and horribly confusing and upsetting at worst. The notion that Aspies don't have feelings or lack empathy is patently false. If anything, we may have unbuffered receptors of the emotional world around us, which can be completely overwhelming if not kept in check or blocked out completely. Walking around like the emotional equivalent of an open gaping wound often leads to an involuntary emotional system shut-down (hello, appearing emotionless!) or a meltdown (cue looking mentally unstable!) when it's all just too much.

This unfortunate combination of poor boundary conditions is the basis for the most painful series of human interactions in my life, the ramifications of which continually reverberate through both my conscious and unconscious mind. It creates a situation that makes it almost impossible for me to maintain my Self when I feel genuinely close to someone. I slide rapidly into the character they need/want me to be. I dissociate like salt in water, my atoms forgetting the crucial bonds within my whole.

My pattern is to lurch along in this disassociated state for a while before some crisis alerts me that I'm at risk of irrevocable loss. In a panicked act of self-preservation, I dump the baby out with the bath water and flee. I shut down all feelings of love, friendship, kinship, closeness, togetherness, etc. that were shared between us and steel myself with the hardened belief that it was a one-way farce all along and that the other person will be better off/happier without me. Some time later, I discover that I caused the other person immense pain and I feel confused and ashamed. I want to mend the friendship and apologise deeply and sincerely, but I'm convinced that all trust is obliterated, that there is no redemption for me in their eyes.

My dreams are haunted by endless echos of apologies to those I've hurt with my perceived callousness. I chase old loves and friends through abandoned hallways, across oceans, down ski slopes and unfathomable other worlds calling out pleas for forgiveness, assuring them I still love them, always will, because loss of love isn't why I left. I left because I felt too much. I couldn't handle so much feeling. I didn't know what to do with it all. It stole my tongue and left me deaf and dumb. My dreams are the only place the words will ever come out because my rational mind knows that by now time has pushed me beyond the edge of their neocortex into a footnote of friendships past.

Some might say I just want closure or to apologise to make myself feel better, but I truly wish I could go back and wipe away the hurt I inflicted, explain that none of it was intentional, put that little piece of my heart in a box and give it back to the person to whom it belongs and ask that they carry me as I do them. As I come into accepting my authentic autistic self, there's an overwhelming urge to go back to those old lost loves and friends and offer up my "disability" as an explanation for the pain I caused, but I think that would just do more damage than good. The only way is forward.

Finding Balance in the Land of Extremes

   There is nothing balanced about life in Alaska.  It is a land of extremes: long, dark, cold winters, insomniac summers, monstrous mountains, and vast empty spaces.  A landscape and environment so out of balance that it forces its inhabitants to either reach deep within themselves to create balance or risk going mad.  Deep equanimity is the only antidote to the myriad mental assailants inherent in the North.
   "Pack your Sorel's®" was the message that came from my mother while I was stumbling onto my path in the Phillipines.  I was accepted into the graduate program in geology/geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a new chapter of my life was about to unfold.  A quick visit in the spring left me feeling heady and invigorated; I knew it was the place for me, but I really wasn't prepared for what it would do to me.
   To say that life in Alaska is intense is an understatement.  It's not just the weather and living at the end of the road, but a jumble of little things that you wouldn't imagine unless you lived there.  For three years I lived in cabins sans running water.  Every teaspoon of water for drinking, cooking, washing up, etc. had to be pumped at the Water Wagon (like a gas station, but for water), frequently at sub-zero temperatures, into containers and then hauled into the cabin.  On campus there were warnings about bears and irate moose.  In the summers forest fires choked the valley and exceeded all EPA hazard levels.  And the people who gathered in this place of extremes were typically cut from an unnaturally tough cloth, often leaving me feeling like a mere mortal trying to compete on Olympus with the gods and demigods.  It was simultaneously electrifying and exhausting.
   Alaska is a fundamentally fantastic place to live if you have come into balance before you touch down.  Unfortunately for me, my heart and head were all over the place when I arrived.  I was in transition in so many ways that I didn't know who I was or where I wanted to go.  I didn't even particularly want to go to Alaska and I will forever reply to the question, "why did you choose Alaska?!" with my standard and honest response that "I didn't, it chose me."  It's true, I really didn't see any other option and so, without so much as a decent winter coat, I bundled up my few trappings and all of my personal baggage to see just what Alaska could throw at me.
   We duked it out for neigh on eight years, Alaska and I.  It was a brutal love-hate relationship.  I've never wanted anything so badly as to be a 'real Alaskan'; to get out there and touch those mountain peaks, traverse the uncharted landscape, feed myself off of her back.  But I couldn't do it.  Something always held me back, curbed my enthusiasm and left me with a cloying unfulfilled desire.  I look back and I still don't completely understand what happened.  I watched my peers head out and embrace the wilderness while I stumbled into the role of city girl.  Somehow Alaska had the opposite effect than what was expected; instead of tom-boy-cum-mountain man, I started reading Glamour magazine and fell in love with Sex and the City!?  For the first time in my life I cared deeply about my wardrobe and fantasized about long luxurious baths in some weird backlash to the extreme disheveledness around me.
    For better or for worse, Alaska forced me to dig deep and really find myself.  The process was neither straightforward nor painless.  I continued to struggle with friends and relationships, but I got better.  Sometimes it was one or two steps backwards for every two or three forward, but I made progress all the same.  Near the end of my life in the North I started receiving the best complements I could ever have asked for: I was a much more likable person than when I arrived and people were actually going to miss me.
   For years up there I teetered on the edge of madness, but I'm too damn stubborn to just give in and completely loose my marbles.  The control freak in me just won't hear of it.  It took a lot of counseling, some amazing friends and the most incredible yoga teachers ever, but by the time I left I could feel that I was just starting to come into balance.

Path to Somewhere

Some travelers know where their path leads, although they may not know when they got on the road. Others, like me, know exactly when they got on the road but never had a clue where it might go. My path began in the Philippines.

In 2001 I extracted myself from a horribly unhealthy relationship and lost my head over my 'rebound'. My misguided affections coupled with the intense self-imposed pressure to ace the GREs spun me into an emotional whirlpool. I was drowning and there was no lifeguard on duty. I didn't leave my apartment for a week. I stopped eating. I missed class regularly for the first time in my life, striking fear into the hearts of well-meaning professors. No one, least of all my parents, knew where I was or what was going on.

One day I stepped out of the bath and examined the foreign creature in the mirror like the surface of a distant planet. The body that had always been healthy or occasionally a wee bit plump was now jagged and angular. I could count every rib. My hip bones jutted out at unfamiliar angles. I looked gaunt and drawn with dark circles framed by limp lifeless hair. It slowly dawned on me as I stood there that I was starving to death and didn't really give a damn.

Somehow I found the strength to make a phone call. The only number that made any sense from that shadowy pit was that of my recently-exed boyfriend. He had been my best friend for two and a half years and we had completely isolated ourselves from the rest of the world. I had attempted to swim away from our island but found I needed a lifeboat. Although he was incredibly pissed at me, and a piece of him likely wanted me to rot in hell, he sensed the urgency of the situation and came to nurse me back to life. That, and get in a few digs as soon as I found my feet…

Somewhere in the chaos of this period I signed on for a three-month stint in the Philippines. While I was lying on the floor of my apartment wondering what in the hell I was going to do with myself, my classmates were arranging for three geology units normally taught winter quarter to be offered in the field on the other side of the Pacific by professors from our department. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and ultimately the lifeline that pulled me through the darkness. In December I crawled out of my pit, out of my depression, out of my apartment and relationship for good, and dove into the unknown.

The Philippines is a challenging little archipelago for a westerner. There are inklings of the familiar, "culture" handed down from the Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Christian missionaries, Mormon missionaries, and finally American GIs; yet it is undeniably foreign. The Filipino spirit is indefatigable. They somehow take all they've been given, all that's been thrown at and foisted upon them and embrace it to make it uniquely their own. They are like bamboo: extraordinarily flexible, strong and resilient. I was completely humbled by all they withstood on a daily basis and in a lifetime as I could barely make it through my grad school applications without a complete breakdown.

We were there predominantly to study the geology in and around Mt. Pinatubo 10 years after its cataclysmic eruption that completely decimated central Luzon, shut down a major US Air Force base and cooled the planet by several degrees for a few years. I was ready for strenuous days in the field. I was mentally prepared for culture shock and homesickness. But nothing could have prepared me for the watershed experience of a lifetime.

There's something about being confronted with abject poverty on a daily basis that really puts one's own pitiful ethos into perspective. For two months there was no way to avoid the harsh reality of what the one-two punch of environmental and economic destruction could do to people. Their homes, villages, families, businesses, farms, schools, churches and streets had been obliterated. Parents had had their children swept from their arms by lahars. Everything that had been was undone. Yet you wouldn't know it to see the beaming faces smiling up to you from a pile of burning garbage or down from an overcrowded jeepney. These were deeply happy people; happy on a level I'd never even conceived. To be honest, it made me extremely uncomfortable.

So first there was this whole new paradigm staring at me from every direction; then there was the 'team'. Our motley little crew consisted of eight undergraduate geology students from three universities, one or two grad students and a professor or two, depending on the month, crowded into every nook and cranny of a tiny little pick-up truck or a purple VW Bug (affectionately named Violet) everywhere we went. We were together 24-7 for three months - meals, classes, field work, play, showers, brushing teeth, relaxing, and for many weeks even sleeping - there was no respite. This was neither a familiar nor a comfortable lifestyle for someone who just jumped off an island of two to become one. I thought I was going to die.

I'm the kind of person who seems to do the best on my own, like a saguaro cactus in the middle of a desert, I can be perfectly self content with no one around. Conversely, I never feel more alone than when I'm in a crowd. Except, of course, when that crowd has quite blatantly left me out on my own.

This happened one night. I could hear them outside having a grand ol' time. I could tell that everyone was there from their voices and I could hear them talking about me. I'm not sure if there's any sharper stab to the heart than hearing your name spoken followed by a series of hushed conspiratorial exchanges. I felt completely alienated. I didn't know what I had done. I didn't know what I could do. I wanted to go home, but then I remembered there wasn't anything for me there either. And then I got angry. I wanted to lash out, hurt them physically and emotionally, but instead I turned my anger inward and beat myself up for being unlovable and endlessly unloved.

Thank God for Joey. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I don't know where I'd be today without that woman. Probably a lot less happy and a lot less loved. In many ways I feel I owe her my life, if not physically then at least emotionally.

One night, after the I-wasn't-invited-but-everyone-else-was night, I slunk into Joey's room under the auspices of needing a book to borrow. We chatted idly for a bit as I fingered the Harry Potter book she'd proffered and mostly stared at my feet or the walls. Finally, carefully and very awkwardly, Joey said there was something difficult she really wanted to talk about with me. I was taken aback but encouraged her to go on. It took her a long time to spit it out because she sincerely didn't want to hurt me, but knew it was going to be rough no matter how she laid it out. Basically it all boiled down to my odd aversion to asking people about themselves; my unusual brand of shyness in an otherwise extroverted shell. Everyone found me to be a conceited, self-centered show-off and had ultimately decided that I wasn't worth the time of day.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. With tears streaming down my face I trembled in the middle of the room and whispered for help: what could I possibly do to turn this tide? I tried to explain that honestly I am interested in other people's stories, but I'm terrified of asking the wrong question, prying, or calling up some unhappy memory. I always felt that by telling my own stories I would provide people with opportunities to tell their own as the conversation flowed along. I never felt that I was superior to others nor more deserving of attention. If anything, I felt exactly the opposite.

Perhaps this weird paranoia of mine grew out of a childhood populated primarily by adults. Sure, I had to deal with the other kids at school (not that I handled that well either), but I spent an inordinate amount of my formative years attending very grown-up functions with my parents. We went to the theater, dinner parties, music recitals and church functions; frequently I was the only minor in attendance or at least the only one who elected to chat with the adults. I learned the gift of the gab in an environment where I was an anomaly, a little trained monkey who would dance and sing for her dinner while all the adults watched on in adoration and commended my parents on my 'grown up' behavior. The problem was, they never expected me to actually carry on an 'adult' conversation. They asked me questions. I answered adroitly, eloquently, humorously. They were charmed and continued asking questions until something more interesting came along. Hence, I spent a lifetime at bat and never learned how to pitch.

Things got a little better after I talked with Joey. In part they improved because I worked so hard and watched myself constantly, but mostly it was because Joey saw the real me and genuinely wanted to be my friend. She helped me limp along, giving me sidelong glances when I got carried away and a little wink when I 'did good'. I believe she may also have tried to explain where I was coming from to some of the others to help break the cycle of estrangement, but I'll probably never know for sure. Regardless, she saved me; she was the ultimate life raft because she actually taught me how to swim the distance.

For the first time in my life I actually felt empowered to change for the better. I saw that people could legitimately like me. I learned to appreciate other people and all that they had to offer. I learned a little self restraint and I saw how happy it was possible to be. I still didn't know if I had the capacity for so much joy, but I decided it was worth looking into. So, with a little nudge from a true friend in a strange place at a difficult time, I found a path and vowed to stay on it until I found joy.

In the Beginning…

Three years ago I was about as unbalanced as any certifiably sane person could be. I was out of balance emotionally, physically, personally, socially and spiritually. Life was spiraling out of control at an ever increasing pace and I lived in constant fear that it would all come crashing down around my ears at any moment.

This was about a year and a half after I found myself, knife in hand, seriously contemplating suicide in the cold dark kitchen of my cabin in the North. Life no longer seemed viable. It was a no-win situation no matter how I looked at it and there just didn't seem to be any good reason to continue. The story from here differs depending on who you ask, and I was probably too numb to really remember, but it was then I realized something needed to change. Unfortunately, I didn't really know what or how so I just started changing things, which does not typically result in a well-balanced approach.

About two months later I was skimming along just fine despite incredible odds against it. My boyfriend of more than four years was out of the country and I chalked up my renewed strength and vitality to his absence and decided to call the whole thing off. Yep, just like that. Forget years of friendship and love, to hell with the shared house and our mutual friends, I was taking the Band-aid® route: get it over with as quickly as possible. I ended four and a half years of incredible intimacy before we got home from the airport Valentine's eve. I moved out, got a cat (he was terribly allergic) and jumped into rebound mode before the stores sold out of roses and chocolates.

In retrospect this may have been a bit rash. It did, however, feel completely logical, reasonable and justifiable at the time. My jump took me out of the proverbial frying pan barreling into the fire.

The intervening months between the afore mentioned events and the place I started this post, three years ago, reads like a bad cross between Danielle Steele, Nancy Drew and Little House in the Big Woods (not that a good cross could likely be produced out of those). Hunks and heartbreak, intrigue and intestinal disorders, harsh winters and insane northern summers, plus way too much time spent working on the infinitesimally small details of volcanic eruption dynamics provided a very long and bumpy roller-coaster ride. Each of the major events along the way deserves its own space to be deconstructed and reconciled, but that will have to wait for another post. Months of insomnia made me feel like a raving loony. Short intense relationships with guys who were just no good turned me inside out and upside down. Through all of it I was very lucky to have a small cast and crew of close friends who stood by me, otherwise I may not have made it to a most important turn in the road.

Three years ago, I decided to go cycle around New Zealand. Solo. Not all of it, just bits and pieces. I didn't head off with much of a plan, but I did one little piece of research that completely changed my life and got me acquainted with what was so dearly missing in my life: balance. I've never been someone who looks at the email-content-driven online advertisements that pop up all the time. I'm generally pretty good at mentally filtering them out, but a pop-up for WWOOF came up in response to my email exchange about the upcoming trip with my mother and seemed to beckon to me. I few clicks later I found my way to a yoga center in Golden Bay and knew I had to go there.

I had never really 'done' yoga. I learned a few poses and was given a few private classes from certified yoga instructor friends, but that was the extent of it. I knew very little about yoga and, as many uninitiated Westerners are want to do, just viewed it as a glorified method of stretching. I imagined I would spend my week on the hill blissfully contorting my body for hours a day, living it up with other blissed-out souls and sleeping like a log each night. The reality couldn't have been much further from the truth.

Satyananda yoga isn't for the 'holiday yogi'. Asanas (the graceful, stretchy poses commonly associated with yoga) make up only a single component of the many branches of yoga and are not strongly emphasized by those who follow the teachings of Swami Satyananda Saraswati. At this particular retreat, karma yoga, meditation, yoga nidra and kirtan were the primary daily yogic practices, and as I previously mentioned I wasn't mentally, physically, emotionally or spiritually prepped for the catharsis that these practices would induce.

I think I broke down at least once a day for the entire week. Sometimes I sobbed so hard I nearly flooded my yoga mat in the middle of a chanting session. I didn't know why I was crying and I couldn't stop. It was draining. It was exhausting. I cried until there simply were no more tears to cry. My body seized up and I could hardly move.

Most people, upon finding themselves in such a state, might entertain the notion of stopping, or at least really slowing down, for a while to take stock of their lives and really contemplate what the hell was so f'ing out of whack. I, however, am not most people. I jumped back on my bike the day after I left the retreat and rode 100 km in the driving South Island rain just to ride to the end of the road and back. And I didn't just cruise along either, I pushed and I pushed hard.

The next day I got a wake-up call. I went to see a highly recommended body worker in Takaka. She spent an hour going over my beaten body loosening things I didn't even know were tight. She was far more tuned into imbalances in my body than I and pointed out that I was treading thin ice, something was about to give. I thanked her for her input and the fantastic massage and tucked her advice away somewhere in the back of my brain. She did have a small immediate influence and I decided against riding over the legendary Takaka Hill (which has thwarted many a fine cyclist) in the fog and got a lift instead, which may quite possibly have saved my life.

But I'm a bit like Teflon® when it comes to advice because I'm stubborn as hell. I wanted to keep riding and so I did. I even shrugged off a ride to the ferry terminal and into Wellington (no more than 10 kms) just because I'm so damn stubborn. This last act of pig-headedness nearly did cost my life and left me with physical and emotional scars that are still healing.

I found the signage for the bike route away from the ferry terminal in Wellington confusing and decided to take the main route I felt would lead me into town. This was a very bad idea. Many a cyclist has come undone on this road as it provides a nasty combination of zero shoulder (read: concrete barrier) and railroad tracks at an acute angle to the road. I saw the tracks a'commin', I was riding 30+kms to stay with traffic, I head checked to see if I could move out to cross the tracks at a safer angle and was on them before I could blink.

It took me two days to fully reconstruct what happened by mapping out the bruises on my body and the damage to my bike. All I knew at the time was that my saddle bags went flying out into the road, a semi-truck blocked traffic behind me and that a small group of people was at my side 'immediately'. I put 'immediately' in quotes because I realized much later that four people who were either at work or walking down the foot path could not instantly materialize at the side of a crumpled cyclist and I had, therefore, blacked out for a while.

But still I wouldn't admit that I needed to slow down. I got on a train to National Park the next day and spent the afternoon wondering why I was having so much trouble rock climbing. The day after I took the bus to Auckland and spent the night unable to sleep. Following that I rode my smooshed bike around the city wearing a borrowed helmet because I broke mine in the crash. And later that evening I boarded a plane for the U.S.

It was my mom who finally intervened and insisted on taking me to her chiropractor's office. The woman there realized I had dislocated all of the ribs on the right side of my sternum. The muscles of my abdomen were twisted and matting down in odd directions. My neck was fucked, the inside of my hip joint was bruised and I had a golfball sized lump on the back of my head. She couldn't believe I had walked away from the accident let alone gone rock climbing, cycling!!, and flown half way around the world.

Let's just say I was a wreck for the next few months. The pain, the post-concussive issues, the insomnia, etc. were more than enough. Yet I was dealing with it all on top of the demands of my Ph.D., teaching and a new massive heart ache. Thankfully, I had brought something else back from NZ to help me deal with it all: yoga. I was practicing every day, just little things, but they were so grounding. I felt that the universe had simultaneously smacked me upside the head (literally) and provided me with a tool to get my shit together. It was time to come into balance.

Square Peg - Round Hole

I'm a person who struggles. No big struggle between good and evil nor for the betterment of mankind, just within and without myself. I struggle with my thoughts. I struggle with others and their thoughts about me. I struggle with the world as it is, as it has been and as I perceive it will be. I doubt I'm unique in my propensity to struggle, my problem is simply that my perpetual struggles for thirty-odd years made me terribly unbalanced, out of whack and off kilter. I am coming into balance slowly and attempting to let my struggles abate.

This blog is my dedication to myself and my need to process where I've been, what I've gone through and determine where I'm going. It's a space and an opportunity for me to process many thoughts, feelings and experiences that tend to bang around in my head leading to further struggles. It's a hope that some day I will find balance, even if just for a moment, and a way of achieving that. In other words, it's not for you, it's for me.

After a lifetime of being a square peg trying to jam myself through a round hole, followed by years of trying unsuccessfully to become a round peg to fit through that same round hole, I am now in search of a square hole. My edges have certainly softened from the years of whittling, but I'm not going to bemoan the changes nor claim I've lost anything of myself. I'm just different, a little rounder and aware of how important balance is to being whole and finding the right hole.