Name the feeling

1. I'm in a particular mood today, I don't think I know the word for it in English? It's a shade of sadness. I know several shades of sadness in my own language, but my command of English stops about there, when I need the exact right word for something. Right word at the right time.

It's a type of gloominess, I know that much. And it has to do with loneliness and longing, it's the feeling that makes it seem as if I’m never able to relax with someone, with the possible exception of my mother and sister (drawing lines to what I wrote last year on self-disgust, as if relaxing my personality is like relaxing my bladder, I actually have the anxious image that if I let my guard down I’ll wet myself). It's the feeling of what a kiss would be like on my lips, what the back of my finger would feel like against someone’s cheek, or in their hair. It's a nice kind of sadness in a way, because those things are nice.

If someone were to stick a pole into this sadness and stir around a little, I’m sure my eyes would flow over for a while, though there would be no sobs, and crying like that would feel like hugging a large happy dog, or a stuffed animal, something that’s nothing but soft and warm. Except for its tug on my consciousness, unsettling me a little, except for the questions about my life that intrude on me in this mood, it's mostly a pleasant sadness.

I know a word or two I’d use for it in Norwegian, but still can't come up with in in English, but maybe I can capture more with a description than with the exact right word anyway. So yeah, that's how I'm feeling today. 

2. Today it's Wednesday. The above was written last Saturday, 4 days ago, with the intent to post that day, but it got delayed. Feelings have changed since then... tiny epihanies come and gone, found and lost and revisited, as is the way of feelings and epiphanies, which really makes them into the opposite of epiphanies, I suppose?

Just read through my previous entry as well, from June, and it deals with the lot of the same, the same longing-hope-sadness as in this one. One feeling relieving the other, revisiting the next... if ther anything to say of larger scale development, it might be that I'm getting a sense of this. That feelings are always there, always confusing, the define my subjective experience, that is to say the entirety of my experience, so life will always have little bits of confusion floating around in it. It's the way of humanity really.

It's the realization that I'll have to spend effort, there's no way around it. Action or passivity, they all require effort. Laying in bed, frustrated from passivity, takes effort. I've talked about relaxation, calm... but that has to be something other than not expanding effort, right?

Understanding my feelings, too, sharing them with others... there will always be a measure of confusion. There will always be a measure of subjectivity, stuff that has to be mine alone.

I think moving out has done a lot to spur this recent blooming of feelings and confusion. Being alone with everyday tasks that I used to have help with before. Being responsible for every one of them... is teaching me how lonely responsibilities can be, and if I leave them to someone else, that's just a transferral of loneliness. Even doing things together... muscular action, raising an arm or a foot, I'm all alone in sending the mental command for that.

It's daunting, but not as discouraging as one might believe. Parts of it I'm looking forward to.

Snapshot of thoughts about intimacy and sex

There are many thoughts that compete for space in my head when I'm reminded of sex, touch, more-than-platonic affection... When I see couples in the park, or they could be friends for all I know, like a young woman on her stomach, another above her giving a massage. An even younger man, with more than a touch of boy in his face and a sigarette, and a tough haircut, a woman or girl his own age inching closer. When I see someone in a really nice dress, covering what seems to be a nice body, waiting for someone else. Or to the other end of the scale, the grand stuff  – a TV show where someone acts out of love, sacrifices and is renewed for love. Where lovers have each other's back.

There's the thought that my life, both internal and external, has changed so much that in not too long, I could be able to take part in things like that again. Hanging in parks-things, if not the grand gestures. Or kissing. Then the other thought that maybe I won't, because behind each thing I've fixed so far, there has been new obstacles, and new ones behind those, on and on. And I think how for a while, I did go around doing those things. In so unhealthful ways, ways that couldn't go on. But there were flirtations... some of those nice thrills... moments of more-than-platonic affection... But it's so very long ago. And even I do meet someone tomorrow, who's to say it won't be the only time for yet another eight-year period?

Unlikely. The final thought to enter is that having a kiss, or a touch, or an orgasm with someone is not a very well defined goal, the goal must be to live a life where such things crop up once in a while. The goal is the have abilities (internal), habits (external) where I come into contact with people, where I can be good to the people I know

... the thought of "it's been so long, and who knows how much longer" intrudes, and is explicitly about sex now, and maybe it's not so bad after all? It's not that they are foreign to me, all those thoughts, they are me. Sexual frustration is a common feeling, sadness and longing are common feelings, they belong to me too.  As does hope, and looking forward, and meticulously working to change. Maybe the life I want is really a life where all those things belong, where they don't have to compete for space.

And maybe people to share them with, occasionally.

Excessive rehersal of opinions

I am always, and I mean constantly, rehersing my opinions, going over the arguments, over and over again. It takes the shape of imagined conversations with people I’ve discussed them with before. Those of the discussions that have been heated in real life are heated in my imagination too, and the emotions that I call up are real. They are emotions like fear, anger, abandonment, and communicative frustration.

Rehershal of heated discussions usually takes precedence over fun or neutral ones. Which means, when I have a heated discussion in recent memory, or know I’m about to enter one, they’re the ones my brain picks to reherse. I reherse them more obsessively than the others too.

I can sometimes push them away though by thinking of things I’m going to write instead. (Including posts like these.)

Argument rehershals take up a lot of mental space, take attention away from aesthetic experience, and sometimes from necessary tasks. They provide a lot of mental noise, and a lot of emotional strain. And in the end, they don't work.

You see... when I’m under strain or stress, my communicative abilities become... less than they normally are. I’m... not sure if this is similar or not to when other autistic people say they lose language, and if it's not, I'm sorry for touching on an experience that I haven't actually shared. In my case I still have language, it's just harder to think trough what I’m actually saying, and it's hard bordering on painful to take in what [i]other people[/i] are saying and adjust my next response. It's painful in the way looking at sharp lights is painful. My emotional response to this is anger, which, of course, strains both me and the conversation further.

My cognitive response is to go into auto-pilot. (Or should I say auto-cue, like news readers are using?) Cling to the few scraps of thought I can find.

And I think the purpose of my rehershals is to feed my auto-pilot-auto-cue with lines for those moments. Only it doesn't work. Or rarely works. Because... ehm... people out in the real world tend to have other things to say than my mental models of them do when I reherse. And in my mind, they tend to nod and get it, when I finally manage to find the right wording. In real life people don’t do that, because they have, you know, their own points of view, not mine. And then most of the time, I don't really remember what I’ve rehersed anyway.

So I go over it in my head, try to cover every base, try to remember everything, everyhing, every expletive eventuality, every line I might know, all the time knowing that I won't, I’ll remember little and make use of even less. Much like... much like... when I have an exam and try to memorize the entire contents (if not the wording) of the textbook but know that I can't, but hopefully enough will stick that I’ll be able to reconstruct the rest, because I don't know how to take notes or plan study session in advance, and I have this number of pages still to read and this many hours left to study, and THANKS SWEARWORD I don't have to deal with exams anymore.

They're both exhausting, for many of the same reasons.

So, uhm, does anyone know any practical ways to train my brain out of this habit – teach it not to spend all this effort rehersing arguments it won't have any use for anyway? Or as a temporary solution, ways to get out of heated discussions before they end up on the schedule for rehersal? Perhaps an easier way to bring across the things I've just said in this post?

I sometimes wish I didn't have to have opinions at all.

Moving out, learning life

It's the first night in my new apartment. I've brought an inflatable matress, a sleeping bag, and some pillows, and that's pretty much all that's in here now. That and some toilet paper I bought earlier today. I brought a toothbrush, but forgot to take tooth paste. I have also brought some dental floss, but I have nowhere to dispose of it after use. So I'm skipping dental care this evening.

It's been a long time since I posted anything here, and I'm not sure I've even mentioned that I was planning to move out from my mother's... well, I've been planning to move out from my mother's even since before I moved in. Because for eight years I had a student apartment, but I never really lived there. Except the first couple of years. After that, visits to my mother's began to last for weeks, even months. Among many reasons for this was that the collection of stuff I had laying around there grew for each month I stayed, so it became more and my base of operations; at the student apartment, I shared kitchen and bath with up to four other people, which was more of a challenge than I was aware of at the time; and after a while, the habit of heading towards my mother's rather than home became so entrenched, it was mentally hard for me even to try anything else.

When I wanted to convince myself to go to my own place, it felt to me like a kind of anxiety. Thinknig about it now, it can also have been a kind of confusion I think might have something to do with autism... the confusion of making a decision, when you call up mental representations of every possible pathway and have to bring one to the foreground, and the effort of doing that is so high that you'd so much rather fall back on routine, turn on the auto-pilot.

That sensation feels very much like anxiety to me, and when I think of it, I don't believe it's restricted only to autism. Like with most other things I associate with autism, really. It's the degree and pervasiveness and extra effort of it that makes me different enough to benefit from a diagnosis.

Anyway, eight years is the maximum limit on student apartments, and seeing as I hardly lived there anyway, it was for the best that I eventually had to move out. (Apologies to other student that might have needed that apartment more.) And since then, I have been living with my mother for real. Which is a bit different, because then I can't just go somewhere else if one of us should need some time alone. And it's worked out well enough, we get along great, but, yeah, I've missed having the opportunity of privacy. Particularly over the last few years, when things have been coming together for me mentally, I've missed having a place to build a life in.

Or I should say grow a life, because that's how I'm trying to do it... that's why I left my mother's at around midnight, carrying a sleeping bag and a couple of pillows, even though I'm not actually moving out for some weeks yet. Because I want to start quite literally from the ground, learn how the place works, fantasize on where I will put all the furniture. (Same furniture I had in my student's apartment, only there is more than twice the space now to put it in.)

Same thing with tooth paste and waste bin – I'm thinking that because I don't have those things now, I'll remember to go out and buy them tomorrow, and that way, I'll learn from experience what things that ought to be present in a day to day life. Maybe I won't drift back to my mother's place this time around. (It also helps that I've learned a very big lot about myself since my last try at living on my own.)

Now, the apartment: I have been so very lucky. For one thing, it's only a five minute walk from where I lived before. That's why it was easy to go over just around midnight, with my sleeping bag and my couple of pillows. And it means I don't have to leave my neighborhood, which has been one of the reasons I've been reluctant to move until now – I've lived here as good as all my life, am familiar with all the streets (though for some reason not with street names), have my favorite coffee shop here, am even starting go get a favorite pub here. I feel at home here.

And for another thing, there's a convenience store in the block next to mine, a hardware store less than a block away (for when I need things like a waste bin. Or frying pan.) A bookstore and a movie theatre as well. That favorite coffee shop? If I lean out the window, I can see it from here. And for a third thing, it has a fairly comfortable size, and a fairly comfortable prize. I had really not believed I'd be able to afford something like this. And my landlord, well, I've a feeling he's a really good guy. If nothing else because the friend-of-a-friend I got it through says so, and that person has been living here for a long time.

That's what I'm planning to do. Live here for a long time. Figure out what's what, and how to keep up with change. Grow myself a life.