Abscissa – Autism and Techno Blog

Greetings time for another blog. A quick summary of what I’ve been up to.

Busy at work as usual. This week has seen me falling asleep straight after work, a mid-sized nap before waking up and staying awake for a few hours before falling asleep again.

I’ve been thinking about how I like my job but it’s not quite fulfilling enough. Doing calcs is most enjoyable when I can master the maths behind the values we calculate. Then I can engage in a little creativity and develop my spreadsheets with a little artistic flourish, treating each calc like a project.

I was working on a rare policy type whose last calc wasn’t saved. A brief investigation followed where I found the calc specs and an old calc for a similar policy that had all the rates I needed.

I understand it enough that I feel confident creating my own template for a tool capable of calculating for any of these policies. When I say they are rare though, we’ve only seen 5 policies in 5 years, so it may never be needed.

I’d be happy to create it in my own time without asking for overtime pay. It got me thinking that tool development is not part of my remit as a calcer. Even coming up with a template is more the sort of thing that the analysts do. I would need to have it signed off by a senior analyst to make it official.

But then I can use it unofficially anyway. We basically don’t have a tool for these policies so they’re done like that anyway.

My job usually involves using tools to calculate values while sometimes we do manual spreadsheet rewrites. As the usual pressure is on us to work quickly and efficiently, I find I’m not fully using my abilities and the innate calculator is a passenger.

Of course I’m not fully expert level and some calculations are too complex for me to get my head round. I am frequently puzzled by why policy values behave the way they do. Not how but why.

It’s something to look into for the future. A change in the role may be forced upon me anyway next year.

To the music. Now that I’ve finished the HFW game and an hesitant to replay it, time to get back into making music. Revisiting the track I’m working on and have made real progress. It’s very nearly there now.

Listening to the best of my old tracks, if only for a bit of inspiration. Had to dig out my spare ear buds which actually fit better so I’m hearing it better now.

Annoyingly I’m hearing a rough crackling which just smacks of amateur sound production. Several attempts to isolate it and get rid of it have resulted in the tune losing a lot of it’s magic. And I saved it so I can’t reset it back to how it was.

The YT vid is still up in it’s original state but the source material is changed. But it’s time for new tracks anyway. And new artwork is wanted. Will finish the music and start the art this weekend hopefully.

What of my social issues? I’m still having the same dreams. Still got feelings to deal with.

First off, it’s a part of my nature and always has been, that I’m ruled by my beliefs about other people. Beliefs often held in lieu of knowing the truth. And those beliefs end up becoming absolute in lieu of experience.

I cling to the belief that my old friends don’t see me the same way they used to and consequently see something they don’t want to be a part of. It would challenge this belief only if they were to actually think of me and get in touch to see how I’m doing and show they care about me and value me as a friend.

For how much I miss them and want to get in touch, everything changed and everyone became distant.

So I’m reiterating the advice to give to myself. If they don’t feel comfortable around me, it’s doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me. They can feel how they feel. I can do what I can to rebuild friendships if I want to. If they truly are better off without me, then it’s just better to move on.

There’s no shame in trying. In actual fact, it would be better for me to try and to learn how things stand. Because I’ve lived with the poisonous beliefs for too long.

Something I’m slowly beginning to understand about myself is how deeply I rely on knowing and how beliefs will always take precedence when truth fails.

How uncomfortable is it to take action without knowing or believing? How uncomfortable to find myself feeling something without knowing what to do?

Ditching any goals or plans to take the pressure off and give myself time to slowly absorb things. Can actually think about what is good for me without getting anxious or demanding.

Taking life one day at a time, doing what i can. Procrastinating the big stuff but then again, the big stuff needs the most care and precision.

A colossal source of doubt and fear in my mind still takes hold. Is it all too late? Has too much damage been done? Am I too traumatised to be helped and healthy? Am I too old and stubborn to change?

The entropic arrow of times tells us that broken things stay broken because the rules of probability dictate chaos is infinitely more likely than order. If a physically shattered glass can’t be reversed can a metaphorically shattered relationship be reversed?

In an artistic sense, the concept of shattering feels deeply personal to me. How the events of life feel shattering. How I feel my own mind and conscious existence is a shattered glass, shards stabbing and tearing, cutting and painful. To be handled with care or very thick gloves.

Broken mirrors are quite common psychological concepts in storytelling. A strong metaphor of mental fragility perhaps.

And yet how paradoxical that I feel safer with the familiarity of mental illness and decay. What truly terrifies me? Being and doing things that are mentally healthy.

It seems funny now to think that I don’t avoid dealing with things to out of fear but to make sure there is always something with sharp edges to justify the belief that I am a broken mirror.

This is where I feel I belong. A living statement of shattered humanity. To communicate that which most people would find unpalatable. I am a state of existence in this universe that most would struggle to see let alone understand.

A statement on suffering that is universally deplored and yet I live it anyway, not that there’s much choice in that regard.

So actually embracing and living life as my true self means owning and stating this shattered existence.

Amongst my autistic friends, particularly my autistic crush, I did everything I could to hide and bury my mental health issues. But they are so much a part of who I am and I wish I had just embraced it and expressed it.

I’ve spent my entire life stubbornly living it my way to prove a point. That I can and that it is valid. It sucks a lot sometimes. But why change when to do so would be to declare it invalid?

Misery Loves Company. It seemed unfair for me to saddle the bad when others avoid it. I wanted someone somewhere to share my struggles but I could never ask anyone to do that. Nor did I ever want anyone I cared about to struggle.

But I needed someone somewhere to walk through hell with me. No one did so I vowed to walk through it alone, no matter how it turned out.

The hell that was my own mind, was mine alone and I fucking owned it. Why? Because it means something and it matters. Matters to me if no one else and that is why I am still alive.

Oh, how I wish people cared about these things as much as I do. But people exist in their own state with their own cares and interests.

I hope people understand that I do care about them but I haven’t yet accepted and become myself and I need to do this first. Everything about me is still fake because I haven’t mastered the art of owning myself.

Caring about others leaves me extraordinarily vulnerable to getting hurt because I’m not very good at caring for myself alongside. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Owning yourself makes it so much harder for anyone to hurt you.

One more time for clarity, my biggest weakness is massive self-consciousness around others. Paralyzing it is. How people see and judge me is the fucking king.

But why?

Because I need people to like me. But why?

Autistic over-sensitivity. Inability to deal with conflict and criticism. But, but, but, fucking why?

There’s no stress or conflict in living alone but neither is there any joy or meaning.

Time to wrap this blog up now because, well realisations are coming thick and fast and I’m losing the ability to type coherently.

Sufficed it is to say thank you for reading as always xx