I used to schedule two week trips and decide at the ten day mark that I was ready to go home. This time I scheduled a nine day trip and after six days… I’m ready to go home. Deep sigh.

I want to snuggle my family. I want to not feel wrong. No one is doing anything bad… this just isn’t an environment set up for me. From almost everything in the house being breakable to the fact that they are both very quiet and when I can’t hear people I tend to talk louder. Then I hurt their heads. Then I feel ashamed of myself for being too gross and loud and too much and…

I want to go home to my fucktastically loud family where I’m not bad for the volume of my voice.

Everyone is COMPLETELY ENTITLED to have their own preferences for sound volume. I just… can’t hear very well. I’m still passing hearing tests. I think partially because fucking hearing tests are always “can you hear this isolated sound in an otherwise silent environment” and my problem is that if there is any background noise at all I have trouble picking out the morphemes of language. It all becomes a blur. And if you mumble at the same time? Well… let’s just say it probably isn’t a fucking mystery why my children E.N.U.N.C.I.A.T.E. They really want me to hear them.

My house is set up to be safe for me. Not other people. And the thing is… it isn’t about the physical building. It’s about the home and the people. Home is different than a space. Home is the feeling that you are allowed to be somewhere; that you are where you are supposed to be.

I wonder if my home is as safe for the other people who live there. I should probably do some checking on that.

Noah and my kids shine with love for me. They are basically incandescent. And sometimes I get too loud for them, too. Just like they get too loud for me sometimes. And we signal each other in a way that doesn’t trigger this shame spiral.

At home I can feel sheepish and not ashamed. Yeah. I get too excited.

My friend pointed it out in a super polite way. I’m not complaining about his method of asserting that his physical boundaries were being crossed. I’m struggling with my internal set of feelings about being almost 36 fucking years old and I still don’t have that great of control over the volume of my voice.

Noah asked: “Which behavioral/emotional modification are you currently thinking of and trying for?”

I don’t know for sure what I had in mind the exact day I typed the original post. My memory isn’t that good.

But I’m always trying to work on more constructive expressions of anger. Anger is not wrong and anger is not bad but acting inappropriately while angry is a serious problem. By the time my children are adults I hope that they will be proud of how I manage my anger. I have already come a long way in their lifetimes. I hope that I keep getting better. I don’t know if my children will be proud of me. I can’t ask them to be. Not ever. I have to just try and earn it and hope for the best.

I’m still trying to swim through the grief I feel about my mother. I would like that to feel less like dropping a plugged in hair dryer in the bath tub. I would like to get to the point where I am not crying about missing her so often. If I stop and feel sad for a few minutes once or twice a year I think that’ll be reasonable. It’s still way way way way way more often than that. It interferes with time I’d rather be spending in other ways.

I am trying to figure out what I need to do to get my shit together and stop taking so much out on you (Noah).  You are my “safe” person and that’s mixed and complicated. I don’t need to dump so much on you just because you won’t abandon me the way anyone else would.

I was doing great on sleep regulation till this damn trip. Now… my sleep is shit. It’s almost 1 in the fucking morning here. It’s almost god damn 2 in my time zone. They haven’t gone to bed yet. So I’m up like a hypervigilant freak.

awake awake awake awake

I need my children because I regulate off of them. I regulate myself by force of will for them. When they are not with me… I spend too much time in my head. I spend too much time feeling like everything I’m doing is wrong.

I’m too sensitive. I’m too needy. I’m too particular.

Let me god damn tell you: it’s fun reading stuff about autistic folks at this moment in my life. Something I hadn’t really expected… I’m finding the diagnosis funny. Like, it makes me feel more amused with myself. But only in certain ways and that doesn’t mean I want anyone else to laugh at me. There are an awful lot of behaviors that I’ve spent years in therapy trying to eradicate and I suspect I would have been better served by being taught how to cope with who I am instead of being told to change who I am.

The fact that I taught myself facial expressions in the mirror… there are so many funny little things like that. I have done a lot of self therapy and I use a lot of techniques that overlap with recommended autistic therapies.

I’ve been doing them for a long time. I practice in the mirror. I make up scripts for how to have conversations. I have spent years documenting my attempt to train myself through writing to be able to see ambiguities in life and not treat everything as a black/white. I mean shit, I’m fucking doing it now. Keeping it on topic. That’s one I really fucking struggle with. It’s complicated.

Another thing I’m trying to figure out is what having self worth means. I can rattle off a list of accomplishments, sure whatever. But I don’t value most of what I can list off much. Whoopdie fucking shit. I mostly walked a marathon.

I’m way more impressed that someone I loved was willing to come help me get through that experience with grace and humor and compassion.

I don’t take pride in my writing, not really. I don’t… see much to take pride in? Ok, so I have the typing equivalent of verbal diarrhea. I don’t write “seriously” or about a real “topic”. I just fucking blather because it helps me not be physically violent in the rest of my life. I organize my feelings. This is my meditation.

Now I lay my thoughts to rest

Each and every day puts them to the test;

If I should die before I wake

My thoughts are here for you to take.

They went in their room. I should probably try to sleep now. Maybe I’ll tell you later about the Anchorage bdsm play space I went to. I only have comments on the building because… uhh… only one person was there and she was kinda busy.