Boundaries

Wow. It's been a really long time since I've posted. I couldn't think of anything interesting to say.

One thing I have noticed, hanging out lately with more autistics, is that autistics tend to suck at boundaries.

It makes sense. Filters are internal boundaries and we are rather lacking in those. So how do you learn to apply boundaries outside yourself? We lack in a sense of where we end and others begin even physically. So the thoughts of putting up imaginary dividers emotionally and behaviorally is difficult.

Hell, it's difficult for NTs.

What are some basic boundaries?

* My emotions are mine to feel. You don't have to feel them just because I do. Your emotions are yours to feel. I don't feel yours just because you do. (This is a very common lack-of-boundary everywhere. I am sad because you are sad, and now I am angry that I am sad and you didn't feel sad.)

* My choices are mine to make and my consequences resulting are mine to accept. And vice versa: your choices are yours and you can live with the consequences without me trying to rescue you or fix or change it. (Another huge lack-of in general, especially in parenting!)

* Things that bother me don't have to bother you. (Another very common lack-of. You see it mostly in rules and laws where people want their pet peeves to be law so no one is allowed to do them!)

* My beliefs are mine and no one else has to believe them. (You see this lack-of in religion and politics, mostly. My belief is the only one and everyone should believe it.)

Why don't most people have boundaries? They are afraid to be alone. Boundaries seem like they would isolate you, fence you in. People would rather be blended, not quite real, a part of something else. To have boundaries is to declare who and what you are, and few people are that brave.

Boundaries do not isolate, though. They make you a real person, strong in yourself, grounded in who you are. They make you able to find others who are also strong and be friends and partners. Once you are all more real, you are also happier and more stable.

Book Rec

I highly recommend this book to everyone!

The Unwritten Social Rules of Social Behavior.
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It's an interesting insight to how autism works and by explaining how they see the world differently, you can get insight into how NTs seem to function. Personally, I'm still confused that they can carry on a conversation and have coherent thoughts with all their weird emotional ties to everything, but I guess they get used to it so young, they hardly notice.

My Stress Free Christmas

Apparently the trick to having a stress free Christmas is to remove all the stress. Who ever would have thought?!? *laughing*

So, I took my Imooto and Boy to and Irish Christmas concert. It was wonderful fun. Relaxed. We all dressed up and just enjoyed the music and one another's company. I don't think any of us are Christian. Not really sure. So that helped too. No weird lectures on god while trying to enjoy Irish tunes.

Then I had Imooto over to do baking. All her gifts got made and I got to enjoy her company again. No stress there, beyond going to stores to get ingredients. And that is a stress every week so I can roll with it. While we were out, we checked to see if Christmas meant sewing machines on sale. It did not. Epic fail. But I bought one anyway for my nieces, since we were there.

So then all her presents were done with low stress and much fun. So win for her.

Finally, I had friends stop by on three different days to just get coffee and catch up. They swung by while going to other holiday events, I think. Anyway, low key and just chatted. No presents or obligations. Just relaxed fun.

Finally, my mom wanted to get me a present so I told her I needed dance shoes. Mission accomplished in one trip. And I got to spend a day with her. Since we're getting along pretty well, that was good.

I also spent a couple days hanging out with my step dad and we did a trip to buy presents for his grandson. And he kept that totally low key and not stressful, too. There was no "what did you buy for whom?" or reminders that I should be more *fill in the blank*.

So, presents were accomplished (sewing machine, concert, and I fed Imooto when she was here cooking). Enjoyment of friends happened. Nothing else need be done.

I got last minute invites to both parents for dinner (Mom tonight and dad tomorrow) and I'm so lacking in stress, I agreed (with time limits). I'm not stressed about either. Dad's will be harder, as there will be a lot more people, including children. But I'll bring a good book and hand sewing and hide away. They think I'm weird and avoid me anyway :)

Plus, the dad dinner is lacking dessert. Don't ask ME how that happens. So I have the joy today of making truffles. Bwahahaha. And mom asked me to make my cranberry sauce. Cooking is always happiness.

So there you have it. Remove stress. Have an enjoyable holiday.

How to Create Charisma

How to Create Charisma in four easy steps!!!

1. Create ego. Before you can gain real confidence, you have to fake it. But that is what a ginormous ego is for!! Start listing every tiny thing about you that you can stand and put it on the "AWESOME THINGS ABOUT ME" list. Eventually, you will realize the scope of your awesomeness and your ego will grow.

2. Create positiveness. You have to be able to keep going if your evil plots are foiled; learn to give a laugh (preferably an evil chortle) and know that you are more awesome than any lame ass hero and will live to conquer them at some undetermined point in the future.

Remember to compliment others. Your people will rise up for you against an enemy more out of love than fear! Your underlings need encouragement and they need to bask in the glow of your awesomeness. The worse thing to happen to your plans is for one of your minions to leave and tell your secrets. Make them want to stay with you. If you really can't muster good feelings in others, shock collars are an option as well.

And finally, enjoy yourself. It shows if you are just going through the motions. If you are no longer enjoying yourself, find a new way of doing things. It might just be that you need a different perspective. Most of the joy in life is expressing yourself. Have fun creating your signature behaviors!

3. Create self esteem to bolster your ego. By this point you should actually be starting to like yourself. You know you are awesome, that you will foil your enemies, and those around you admire you. This bolsters your huge ego by holding it up with more than just hot air.

People are really drawn to those who like themselves. Most people want to be told what to do and if you like yourself, they will like you, entirely because you do. Liking yourself creates a trend that, like gravity, draws people in to you. Also, like gravity, it makes it harder for them to escape. If they try, don't hesitate to use shock collars.

Remember, anyone who fails to admire you is obviously an idiot or so neurotic that they fear how bad you make them look.

4. Take joy in life. If you have the first three points down, joy just happens. Everything you do is great fun if you are positive and full of ego and self esteem. People cannot help liking you and this is fun too. Joy is taking delight in yourself and the world around you.

Don't listen to anyone that says if you are positive and happy you have to do "good works". You can kill and destroy from a place of love. In fact, I cannot imagine a better place from which TO kill and destroy.

Congratulations! With these four attributes, people will flock to you. They will beg to be your minions and will enjoy doing your bidding!

Dance Class!

I haven't written in forever. Work exploded and got on a new project (a BETTER project) and had to get through training and then I got a cold and blah blah blah.

So as soon as I got my raise on my new project, I signed up for ballroom classes!!!

My mom got me dance shoes for Christmas, and I'm working on leotards and knee length skirts! WOOT!

I loves to dance :) I'm not sure if I am any good at it, but I adore it so I don't care. Like singing. Only I know my singing isn't great. But with years of voice lessons I bet I could carry a tune in a bucket.

I'll think of something spiffy to blog about soon! I'm thinking of practicing a Christmas letter here...

financial aid GAH

So I'm in the pointless running in circles point of school. They changed my schedule at work so I'll miss too much of class for a Pell Grant. So I have an email in to my instructor to get more details (ie: can I pass with only half the class taken, and can she count me as there even if I leave halfway through?) and, if all goes well, I'll use the Pell Grant next term (in ten weeks). In the meantime, I'm still fighting with work about my schedule.

So it'll be... interesting.

I really really wanna learn how to sew well. I want to be able to make Vickie fashions and cosplay. Is that so much to ask?? At the moment, that DOES give me this term to finish the niece's winter skirts, my winter skirts, and more jammie pants for work as I outgrew all the ones I had.

I'm also trying to figure out a more or less polite way to back off certain relatives without alienating the couple I can stand. My auntie gave me the best method so going to work on that. I'm very proud. I was pretty sure that gushing over something you previously hated probably meant you were lying about no longer hating it and I was indeed correct. I'm getting pretty good at this social shit! *beams proudly* Lookie me with Social Skillz. Not mad social skillz... but like... one. >.>

I also went to this site for scholarships and while it states they have scholarships for trade schools, it doesn't list any or link to any. So while it's very nice to know they exist, I'm not closer to getting applications out. I need someone to stop by and hold my hand and make it work because financial aid is financial aid. They don't actually want to help you in any way. I suppose it's rather comforting because I do so hate change!!!

On another note: I didn't get any bug bites sleeping on my mat on the other side of the room, reinforcing my idea that these are newly hatched baby wolf spiders and I was in the hunting zone between the cat food and the cat litter. So I think I'll set my newly washing sleeping mat across the room and stay out of there way. I loves my little wolf spiders. Other than gnawing on me, they also keep all the other bugs cleaned up. Nom, little spiders. Nom nom nom. ^_^

I now work an extra 90 minutes per shift. (Hence the eating into school time...) So no more having to scrounge for enough overtime to hit forty hours. Yes, it took 90 minutes per shift for me to hit 40. Life will be MUCH easier with these hours if I can just get school to work around it for me...

I'll come up with something much "deeper" and more significant later. At the moment I just realized I hadn't blogged in a while. Of course, when I opened this I realized it hadn't been that long but I hadn't remembered writing it but it did sound awful familiar when I read it so good on my crazy brain and all the people in it working together to write a blog! Go team awesome.

Schrödinger's Nutshell

It's sometimes quite a funny thing to be able to hold every single memory as equally true and untrue. Logic might dictate one more probable, but there is no proof to swing things one way or another. It all exists equally because nothing can be certain.

Perhaps the more amusing thing is that this gives me stability. I'm more stable saying "this is me in a nutshell, and the nutshell is Schrödinger's", than I ever have been before. So much stress removed, not having to fit thoughts into one reality or another. It's quite liberating.

Science is not about proving or disproving. It is about gathering evidence. It is about finding facts. It is about truth. You can jump off the roof 100 times wearing a superman cape and hit the ground each time. This makes it very unlikely that next time you'll fly, but it doesn't prove you cannot fly.

When you recognize that no one actually knows more about their past than I do but that, for their sanity, they simply accept that certain things must be real, you can see how flimsy reality therefore must be. No one cares whether or not things are, one is simply relieved to have something certain in which to believe. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is, and I think far more people would suicide or refuse to go on if they didn't have a past upon which to cling. I can see why this is so since I give up all the time and wish to not have to exist and I can see that this might perhaps be less so if I had something solid upon which to stand. But since that isn't so and here I am, I find it quite difficult to actually quit, despite how thoroughly I've given up.

I appear to have a rather well developed sense of survival.

This all comes up because it turns out my father hadn't actually meant that he wouldn't pay for school when I was 19. As he didn't bring up the damning conversation, I suppose he didn't remember it. He was simply surprised to learn that I hadn't quit school because I'd given up on school, but had quit school because I couldn't figure out how to pay for it. He was probably just annoyed at me and said something that I, being me, took utterly seriously. And I, being me, simply accepted it as fact and carried on, realized I had no way to gather funds, and figured I'd wait til I was old enough to qualify for more grants. He, meanwhile, assumed I'd given up on school because I'd always hated school.

This is, perhaps, why I've had to learn to not make assumptions: none of our realities are the same reality. They merely overlap from time to time when our perceptions line up just right.

I still do, however, simply accept what one says as what is. Knowing and understanding aren't always the same thing. I know that people lie and I know that people just talk out their asses. But I still don't understand that people do not say what is.

While I was at work today, I lost all sense of mouth noise being words. So I typed the random syllables the mouths spouted. Then I read what I wrote to see if I could spot words. Luckily, I more or less could, and so I carried on. It occured to me much later that perhaps this was a good tip for autistics: don't worry about making sense of words. If you can hear syllables, just type them out as the person talks because reading phonetically is far easier than turning mouth noise into comprehendable words.

It's funny, some days I can type out all the words as proper words, but I cannot make sense of the meaning of those words until I read what I typed.

It's a VERY good thing I type as fast as I do. I really ought to practice moving much faster so that I can fully keep up with conversations. It would be rather amusing to spend a day typing everything I hear so that people can read it back and see the nonsense I come up with.

Not only do I say "cow" instead of "milk"... I'm just as likely to hear "cow" instead of "milk". But since I didn't have the right word in my head and just said it wrong (although often I hear my own word that is wrong and it starts its own domino effect of associations), I hear it wrong and then cannot get caught back up to the conversation again. So long as I am not being timed (as on calls at work), this is often amusing and I have an entirely other conversation than anyone else with whom I converse.

I think I shall go pass out now. Pre-seizure week is always odd.