Abscissa – Autism and Techno Blog

Well greetings again. It’s that time. Time for what exactly, you may ask. I dunno, just got some stuff to say.

Loneliness is hitting again, severely. It’s almost like everything I’ve said and done over the last 4 years has been bullshit. Not outright lies but delusions. Things I just so wishes to be true, that I had to believe it for a short time.

It’s official. I’m back seeking mental help from NHS Talking Therapies. Everything has been pointing me to it. No time for any actual physical illness, all just mental.

The truth is I am still very anxious and very depressed. It took 4 years to open the door again, and I’m still unable to walk through it.

A prison within a prison. Is that my lot? Do I need to be on something, an officially prescribed medical drug, just to be able to live in some form of comfort?

And I’ll reiterate it here, seeking help might just be for the sake of having someone new to talk to. Might end up as no help at all. Past experience says I’ll feel better for having talked to someone and will just abandon any specific practise they may have suggested.

Endless circles, it seems. I feel almost the same now as I did 4 years ago. Does this mean I’m going to go through the next 4 years exactly the same way? Well I hope not. Some things are different now. The door is somewhat open, still.

I’m out tonight with the idea of getting trollied, drinking to ease the pain. To stop feeling the way I do. Haven’t got properly drunk in ages. I am actually more open to invitations now, but they seem to be thin on the ground.

Sod’s Law isn’t it. 4 years ago, I had a number of people in the pub, happily offering me to join them, taking pity on me for being on my own on a friday night. I wasn’t ready then.

It remains up to me, to take control, take charge, and go out to meet new people and make new friends. It hasn’t really gotten much easier.  I think I understand just how more deeply comfortable I felt in the presence of fellow autistics compared to normal people.

Why I still truly feel like my old friends are still the only people I want as friends. I wanted nothing more than to turn back the clock and go back to how things were. Yet things had changed irrevocably, and I could never overcome that.

Well I managed to turn my brain back, it seems. But the world moved on without me.

Anyway, it seems like what I’m going through now is the war between anxiety and depression. If I’m not depressed, I’m too anxious. And coping with anxiety has meant calling back the depression.

Among many things, Im still angry and hurt over how I was left alone when I needed company the most. Everyone else just getting on with their lives and their own problems, nery a thought for poor old me. Left to solve my own issues or to just seek professional help.

I’ve perhaps proven to a large extent how impossible that is, to do it all alone. Now is the time to ask for help. Or, more pertinently, to ask people to be friends, to ask for company.

I’d be lying if I said I was shame-free, trauma-free. Indeed, I have lied about that. It feels like I still need to lie in the hope that people will feel comfortable around me.

If I’ve become uncomfortable around others, it’s become a problematic loss of trust. One of the many double-binds I give myself. Need people to invest in me before I can invest in myself.

Yet I need to invest in myself before I can trust others again. The same fundamental issues have been there for so long now. If you asked me a week or two ago, I would have cried out. “I just want to be healthy again”.

The cry of seriously troubled souls. A morbid dread at the thought of needing to be locked away so I can be forcefully treated.

And so, the eternal quest continues. To become totally self-secure and to be myself with all the confidence in the world. Just to say and do what I will. To be able to be completely honest and authentic and to believe in myself absolutely.

And to be patient in getting there because it’s basically a lifelong quest. Being amongst people in the pub, despite not yet talking to anyone, it does help to put me back in the game, so to speak. Reminds me what the aim of the game is. I have my escapes as always.

I’ve been relentlessly modelling psychology. My own specifically. It has driven me mad at times, going round in circles again, perpetually switching from one model to another. It’s probably not going to get results. Probably not what I’m actually good at.

Yes, I can’t stop with the MBTI obsession. But it gets me thinking and it calms me down somewhat. Not that I’ll ever settle for a solution but I think I might be INTP-T at the moment. The problem is that it feels like a modern-day con trick, the type where anything can feel true.

I think I’ve managed to type myself as everyone of the 16 types. I mean it doesn’t really mean much to categorise when everyone is so unique. But I suppose the application is to help understand who I am.

And potentially, to plot a course forward. In terms of personal development, I’ve been obsessed with becoming mentally healthy enough to grow, strive and flourish. Because I am a massive perfectionist in everything I do.

You see, I don’t just go out to the pub to get wasted but to open myself up to some form of enlightenment. I probably should have become that guy who experiments with mind-altering drugs. Would have done if I wasn’t so anxious.

Well, alcohol usually does the job anyway.

I’m reminded of how I tried to make this blog a voice for Autism awareness and was trying to be helpful by sharing my thoughts and feelings. It should be clear by now that I don’t really consider my words all that useful or trustworthy anymore.

But I’ll keep saying them here anyway. It’s here for me first and foremost, always has been.

One update to share actually, that I have finally got back into making music. Something  a little it different this time but the track I’m working on is a slower tempo. Just the 120 bpm. And the real reason for that is that I forgot I could adjust the tempo and increasing the bpm after the fact doesn’t sound right.

It is a new start of sorts, second album syndrome maybe, not that I had huge success or anything.  Nah, just going full experimental with this second album of sorts. Always searching for that audio heaven.

Also, perhaps, an aim of getting tracks done a  it quicker. Getting a fuller body of work done without spending ridiculous amounts of time on them.

Embracing a new concept of the spirit animal. If anyone is wandering, I’ve not been very keen on this memefied concept but if I have a spirit animal, I think it is the humble spider. Something I’ve had a mild phobia of previously. But I’ve been feeling more like embracing it as a spirit animal.

That is to say I’ve been growing a sense of attachment to feeling like one of the more creepy-crawly creatures of nature. And perhaps one of the more feared and misunderstood.

With that said, I feel like my path to follow should be that which seeks to make people around me happy. I’d like to be happy within myself again. I really would. I guess embracing weird ideas will always be part of that.

Plus, I can’t deny, to express myself now means sharing in the esoteric, artful, thoughtful. meaningful stuff. Sometimes I just have to push myself to a place where I can express myself.

Just a few days ago, I was preparing to write a blog declaring how proud of myself I am, that I keep fighting and overcoming difficulties. That might remain true, but I don’t wish to keep on fighting. It would be nice to score some victory over the misery.

At some point, I will want to stop fighting and just be. No matter what or who I actuay am, no matter what horrors persist in my heart, I just want to stop hiding and repressing everything.

It does feel at times like these that if I put my mind to something, no one can defeat me. No one can stop me. The real pain has been seeing everything I love become tainted with hurt in some way, leaving me with nothing left to love. Nothing to put my mind to other than my own warped sense of self.

This is the art of depression, I think. Expressing myself now means not telling the world how sad I am but talking about sadness in a coded way, fishing for that special someone who will decode the language and understand that I just want someone to talk to about stuff in a deep and meaningful way.

There remains much work to do, but it helps to reinforce what I truly want and how I truly feel. Life continues to be a struggle but, honestly, how the hell am I supposed to keep going without being true to myself?

There are hidden depths that continue to reign in terror. Still fears to confront.

There’s a special place in my heart for sadness because it’s an emotion I know so well. Almost to the point of reverance. This is a time for confronting and admitting. Processing and actually feeling. Allowing myself to feel sadness and understand that it just needs to be felt.

Though it’s a fearsome beast to face up to. God knows how I do everything to push it away. And it’s not normally possible to allow it without outside help.

But it is inside me and it is a big part of me. Im truth, I simply haven’t allowed myself to feel sadness for a long time. But it is time. Perhaps that’s what I meant when I keep saying it’s time. Still so much work to do.

It’s probably not grief anymore, not insatiable unfulfilled longing, just the lack of ability to feel ok being sad. Not the sort of thing I’d ever talk about publically. So in the spirit of making changes, I am going to share this blog with everyone I know.

Let them all know how deeply sad I am at the moment. That’s probably the difference between sadness and depression. When the black dog comes calling, it’s probably because the sadness has become sacred, to the point of reverance. Something so big as to tremble before it.

I should make it clear at this point that I need people around me to be ok with me being sad without trying to fix me. Allow me the confidence to be able to be sad, angry, hurt, etc. Allow me to express myself without judgement or worry.

In fact, encourage me to feel sadness, because I won’t do it without help.

Thanks as always for reading xx