Abscissa – Autism and Techno Blog

Well hello again. It’s been a long time. Time for suffering and time for reflection.

Words and time. Everything comes down to it.

I’m struggling to find the words as usual. It’s been on my mind for some time now. Actually some small prompting in this direction.

I’ve been reading the Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons who I just heard has passed away recently. Among the concepts espoused is that which states that words crudely reduce what we all actually experience in life.

Borrowing a mathematical metaphor using 0-determinant matrices that transform vectors from higher to lower dimensions. Trying to communicate my experience and ideas feels like depicting 5-dimensional objects in a 2-dimensional space.

I never did like talking that much. I always wished to be a writer but held out little hope that it would be a success.

Have you ever tried to map out a 3d space in 2d? Segmented levels that quickly lose their coherence.

And yet there is stuff I need to write about. One thing I don’t want to write about is my long ongoing health issues. In fact, slowly it goes, I’m beginning to shut out the anxiety around it and just accept things as they are. Managing the worst of it day by day, week by week.

Shutting out all the health fad ads on social media, just ignoring the calls to fix my ills.

More than anything else, this seems to be helping. Circling back to the old ideas of acceptance. At the same time, there is circling back to the stuff I used to love, good old fashioned escapist time-travel stories and philosophical longing.

Anything to get my mind away from my body again.

I had so much to say, so many ideas swirling around that I can’t keep hold of for long.

Perhaps, among other things, I’ve been thinking about saying goodbye. To what? To the things that still tie me down. To the wounded inner child still screams to be saved. To whatever I will lose as the cost of moving on.

Indeed, it may be the blog writing and it’s readers. Or just to the same old voice that writes it in this form.

Accepting who I really am and who I should become that best fits that, it would an abnormal life and the outside world might have no use for me.

In the spirit of acceptance and forgiveness. I wanted to say that I was hurt by the outside world so much, but it was never anything malicious. I have forgiven much in my own way and I wish to be forgiven for my own discretions.

There’s one principle running through my mind that I really do believe in. It is that we are driven to confront our faults and failures, we actively look for them to try to learn from them. It goes without saying at this point that I have been running away from them, unable to overcome them and learn from them.

And I will continue to look for them. If the lesson to be learned is really just to see them and accept them and even embrace them, well that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Getting the feeling, day after day, that everything I ever do just doesn’t work for me anymore. I have been lowering my hopes and expectations consistently.

In fact. you might say, that my current ills all stem from a loss of hope, a loss of the safe place, a loss of my most baseline cognitive shields.

The loss of my protected mind.

Everything is so raw these days. Unfiltered. Nerve-shredding.

I’m planning on saying goodbye to the cigarettes, have been for a long time. I realised how deeply embedded this habit is in feeling calm. to the point of saying it is the only one thing left that does, for such a long time now. Decades.

Only now does it no longer make me feel safe.   It is an addiction and I wonder how much the act of smoking actually soothes the toxic poison feeling of years of smoking.

Just how deeply terrified I am of having to go without. How I’m only calm when I have smoked and when I can delude myself into thinking I will quit it soon and it will be easy.

I’m preparing myself for the intolerable pain of it getting worse before it gets better. The cruel pain of detoxing with no mental safety net.

How am I supposed to live without it? How can I socialise and have fun and be a human being? How can I get drunk and go dancing in the dark on my own without the safety net?

And how can I get healthy again if don’t quit, don’t suffer the withdrawals? Ultimately, I’ll have to choose to say goodbye to the addict. Goodbye to everything that feeds the addiction.

I’ll need help, love and support. I’ll need friends and family. I’ll need a will of iron. I’ll need unshakeable belief in myself. A turbodose of all of that.

And I think I’d need to make a loud and public statement of commitment.

It might all be growing pains, you know. Decades of immaturity and refusal until I finally start to grow up, only to find it just that little bit too hard, like I left it too late.

I’m here writing tonight on the off chance that it might be the day I finally click with something such that I don’t need to do it anymore. And if not, I’ll probably just carry on until I can’t do it anymore.

It’s been nearly 5 years now since I’ve been writing about my struggles and they never really changed. So many words written and they meant nothing! Just talking to myself.

And I’m scared to let go of it, scared to let go of so, so much. And so there remains some poison deep within me that I keep searching for and running away from.

As if there’s one little obscure, esoteric switch that will solve everything.

There is one important point to summarise here and it’s this.

That I don’t want to see myself as broken anymore. I don’t want to think of myself as ill or unhealthy either. My state of experience is not a problem that needs to be fixed.

But I do want to be more healthy and in less pain and discomfort. There are things I can do and I want to do them without the pressure of anxiety and fear.

There is a victory to be won, an obstacle to be overcome, in getting myself healthy. I just don’t want to feel like it has to be done to prove myself worthy of living. Worthy of friendship and happiness.

I don’t expect the outside world of other people would make accomodations needed for me to feel free to be myself. I have difficulties and frailties that make other people uncomfortable. The reason why I have hidden and denied those aspects of myself for my own sake.

And so for tonight, it’s one more fix. One more drunken night of excess, one more drunk dance up the town park in the dark, one more expression of love for the moonlight in the heat of the night.

Until the next time anyway. For I actually love the possibility that never materialises. The hope that never comes to fruition.

But there is more to life than that.

There is the time of work and survival and struggle and existence in the real world.

Anyway, it’s fair to say that I’m trying to achieve something with this blog post, but I don’t know where this is going and I don’t really even know what I’m trying to say.

I think that I’m trying to let go and overcome something to try to change myself, but what I have to overcome would only lead to accepting things I can’t change. Deceptively simple, it would seem.

What changes I want to make require work. Work I’m too afraid to do, too burned out, too tired, too hesitant, too unmotivated to do.

I’ve survived these last 5 years because all my suffering has been tolerable. More tolerable than the thought of actual change.

And I should say that the biggest change I did make only resulted in the loss of my psychological safety blanket because my emotional suffering did reach a point of intolerability.

Aha, it’s the journey I’ve been on, clearly a new and different form of suffering was required to change direction. And a new, unthinkable level of pain seems to be the answer to the next step.

The funny thing is that the last couple of days have seen some easing of my health issues. I’ve actually allowed myself to switch off, put the stimulation away for the night and gone to bed for an early night and slept as long as I could.

It’s actually a good sign that I have fallen asleep without too much trouble. This world that does demand so much, that needs me to work beyond my compromised capability.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get the time and space to be able to quit that which I take to get through the day. To actually allow myself to be ill enough to quit.

It’s uncomfortable for me to admit certain things. Like how badly I desire to be free of the addictive poisons that control me. While I can only think, let alone say, these things while being under the influence of said poisons.

This is how deep the trap goes. It is the only real battle worth fighting. If I can somehow do this, what can’t I do?

Here’s one reason why I’m doing this one more time. One more fix deep enough to go without for at least one day where I’m too hungover to smoke.

And the realisation that these brave pronouncements will be gone in the morning when the alcohol leaves my system.

Time is the enemy when it slows to a crawl through suffering and flies away at light speed during the good times.

Time is the currency that can never be saved, only spent. Where did all go? Why am I so old now when I suffered so much. Where did my youth go? Why did thou forsake me, etc?

Why is life such a struggle to tolerate the passage of time only to pay the price of lost time? And if time is so precious, why do I continue to waste so much of it? Actually destroy so much time in a big bonfire of despair?

Because I demand so much of it, to repair and make amends for every act of wasted time.

Well, I’m going to enjoy this drunken time as much as I can and pay dearly for the rest.

Thanks as always for reading. If this is my last blog, I’ll say my fondest and most reverential goodbyes.

I expect I’ll be back at some point xxx