hyper vigilance

As I sat here stoned, ruminating about why I chose to do nothing instead of going to the gym, as I often do, I had an imaginary conversation with Kyle. I get the impression he's stoned sometimes. Maybe occasionally, maybe all the time, I'm not sure. He gets stoned and go does stuff. I wanted to ask him how that works.

In my head though, I did most of the talking. Yep, apparently, I daydream about explaining myself to people a lot. It can be productive though, as my questions and explanations sometimes coalesce around a better way of looking at things, aided by imagining what someone else might be thinking in response.

In this instance, I realized that I can't go out and do stuff when I'm stoned, because I have to be vigilant about masking. Getting drunk or stoned around other people runs a high risk that I'll be uninhibited and express myself honestly, and that could be catastrophic.

I'd love to be a more genuine person. It would make me so much more likable, if not for having the personality that I do. Some people might like me more, but for the most part, I do believe that it would be unbearably alienating. I'm trying to learn social skills here, like asking people questions about themselves, instead of monologuing at them about communism or AI, awkwardly fumbling through as if I have no idea what I'm talking about, because my brain doesn't work well when I'm trying to interact with people. I literally struggle to talk and think at the same time #autism

So, one example product of my vigilance being how I avoid talking about anything that involves too much thinking. It's like I have to carefully measure and limit my brain usage, and it's for entirely rational reasons, learned from years of experience being me. Another example might be how it's best that women half my age don't know how I feel about them. My mask is practically asexual. Even when attractive women are my own age, it's never felt appropriate for me to have those sorts of feelings. Maybe I'll just confess to hating everyone. That never goes over well. Who knows what I might blurt out if I'm stoned (oh right, I do. That's the problem)

I was thinking about how cannabis is medicinal in some ways, but how that's arguably outweighed by how impairing it can be. It might help me feel good enough to get to the gym if not for my fear of being stoned at the gym. Makes me wonder if it's largely impairing because of fears around how it messes with all my carefully constructed and still very much under construction inhibitions.

conventional

One of the more defining elements of autism is a disregard for conventional values and norms. At its root, this is not ideological, although ideological nonconformity often develops as a consequence. When this inability to connect with others is severe enough, autistic children have trouble even learning to speak. This is because they aren't mirroring caregivers. They don't learn the basics the way others instinctively learn. 

Even for the most brilliant of us, this can be a profound learning disability. It creates a cascade of consequences as the autistic individual progresses through life, learning how to cope, learning how to act normal, but never actually being normal, and coping never becomes easy. Neurotypical behaviors are called mainstream precisely because that's where the flow is the strongest and most common. It's not a choice to be outside the mainstream, so much as the absence of learned behavior that typically draws people into going with the flow.

Autism is a spectrum, not because it varies in severity, but because without conformist instincts to guide us, we learn to get by in our own ways. Every individual's life experiences are different. These experiences then guide development in a wide range of different ways. We don't follow any sort of standard autistic path, but are forced to forge our own paths, and we go in all different directions.

This often makes it very difficult to relate to others and form healthy relationships. Even other autistic people can be so different from one another as to make connection feel impossible between them, never mind connection with neurotypicals. When people don't share similar values, and have lived our whole lives accordingly, it can result in a devaluation that goes both ways.

A basic example might be materialism. This is simplistic and people are more complicated, but to illustrate the point, someone who doesn't value wealth or owning stuff will probably go through life with very little. Work is not only more difficult for such an individual, but their incentive to work is also greatly diminished. The importance they place on this basic measure of social value might not only be diminished, but negative- it's not something we're going to value in others, either.

Another example might be vanity. This one applies less to myself, but I know it's also common. A person who is indifferent to appearances will not put effort into their own appearance, nor value anyone else's. They might go through life being judged for how they look while judging others for caring about something perceived to be meaningless.

Autism is strongly correlated with social deficits, such as difficulty making small talk and other related conventions. So, even our personalities can be seen as lacking, while we might find those same social behaviors to be irritating, and worse than worthless. We may try to mask these differences, because this whole dynamic can make life so alienating and difficult, while on a deeper level, hating the prospect of being more like everyone else.

When such differences are framed as disability, that is a devaluation. This is why there's often controversy around framing autism as a disability. We do not bring to the table what others are looking for, and that they place importance on things we deem worthless can make them seem like idiots. We go through our lives struggling to find our way in a society clearly built by idiots. If we fail to connect with others who share our values, it can be a very lonely journey.

reeling

I'm not feeling super optimistic about the trajectory this recovery is taking. I was not at all aware of just how much of my psyche was being held together by this. I could always see everything that's wrong with it, and yet, feel I made the best possible choices given the reality I'm dealing with. I'm desperately trying to figure out how to make my life work; how to make my brain work.

What was the alternative, to be less ambitious, to lose interest in training all together and go back to doing nothing? Motivating myself has not been easy. I've had to develop so many strategies and hacks to overcome a rather profound deficit in my ability to do much of anything. Nothing is more motivating to me than an attractive woman.

The whole reason I left my apartment eight years ago was to embark on this quest for human connection, and this is how it plays out.

reciprocation

I used to hate people for not liking me. In driving myself to go out into the world to be around people all the time, I decided this was wrong. I look at myself from their perspective, taking all the reasons for their perspective into account. I understand, and can't hate them, because how they feel only makes sense, given their own lived experience, what they've been exposed to, and what they're entirely reasonable for caring about.

We're not supposed to like people who don't reciprocate. That isn't connection. It's a normative and natural defense of our egos to reciprocate negativity. If we don't do that, if we like people who think very little of us, we can start thinking very little of ourselves. Especially if we like them way too much. This is what I've been struggling with for the last eight years.

Why can't I be someone better appreciated by my peers? That most of my peers are half my age really compounds this problem, although I don't relate to people my own age any better. I don't know of any good ways to meet people my own age, so I don't know how much of a difference that would have made.

In order to become a more functional successful person, I allowed myself to lean into fantasy. I knew it was irrational, delusional even, but I let it carry me. I let myself be motivated by it. I let myself believe on a level I tried not to think too much about, that if I trained hard enough, I could become worthy. I could defy both aging and neurodivergence to find my way to a place in life where I might stand a chance of winning over a heart like hers.

Deep grooves form in the monotropic mind, as I allowed this fantasy to dominate my thinking for years. This winter has been really difficult. I wasn't consciously aware of why. The news itself was merely the confirmation of what I've feared since November. Something has been missing at the gym. Training hasn't been rewarding. I've been pushing myself to keep going, only to go home feeling sad, after every class. Now I know why and these painful thoughts flood the old obsessive grooves that riddle my mind.

I have nothing but the same old loneliness laid bare again, the protective layers of fantasy stripped away. I hate myself for being this way. I hate the world for making me like this. I hate everyone else for not understanding any of it.

what am i

When we think of who we are, what defines us, implicit in that is the concept of objectivity. Who are we really, undistorted, free of subjective bias, delusion, and deception.

But what is objectivity in relation to identity? The natural universe doesn't have all these values we attribute to everything. Are we pretty, or smart, or interesting? Those concepts don't exist objectively. Everything that constitutes identity is subjective. Who do I think I am, who do you think I am, who do they think we are. 

When we are concerned with objectively defining ourselves, I suspect that underlying that is the concern for what others think of us. Other viewpoints, consensus, these can make the subjective seem more objective, but identity is still a lot of arbitrary and relative nonsense that only exists in the human mind, ours or theirs. Do I really care if I'm interesting or do I just want someone pretty to think I'm interesting?

cerebral

I have a fraught relationship with reality. I have never looked forward to going anywhere or doing anything. Except as a child, maybe. I looked forward to going to video arcades, gaming shops and comic book stores. A theme of escapism developing early. "Reality is boring," I'd say.

It's a common mistake to take the things we think too seriously. We don't know what's going on, especially as kids. Our brains have evolved to compensate by taking stupid guesses and moving on. Why did I feel that reality was boring? This probably had less to do with me thinking about it wrong, and more to do with my lived experiences feeling that way. I wasn't connecting with the world.

What I've been through not only being external, but also internal. Not just what's happening to me, but how I experienced it due to the particulars of how my brain works, followed by an array of consequences. I was unhappy a lot. I was sensitive and often overwhelmed. Lonely, alienated and isolated. I was very imaginative with an extensive inner life; the most fundamental sort of escapism.

This naturally leads to failures when it comes to actually dealing with the reality I'd spend all my time avoiding. It would be a bad plan, if it were simply a matter of thinking about it all wrong. To say that I never look forward to going anywhere is pretty extreme though. What I do feel is a barrage of anxiety to fight my way through, when I have to go anywhere or do anything, leaving the peace and safety of my apartment. Reality is hard for me.

I've had to learn all sorts of coping strategies and ways of getting myself out and doing things anyhow. They don't always work, but it's been a massive improvement. I'm usually happier for getting myself out and around people, but I feel like I dissociate my way through a lot of it. It's stressful. I try my best and fail a lot. My ego has been pulverized into oblivion. I'm constantly recovering from burnout, and I don't even do that much. The longing to just stay home all the time never seems to go away, because this is just how my brain works. These are logical consequences.

It's been hard facing that I really am disabled. That's why my life is like this. I've always been like this. I don't handle reality very well. I'm struggling to function as best I can in spite of this demonstrably crippling disability that can be traced back throughout my entire life.

I've spent most of my life inside my own head, where I had a much more flattering take on the whole situation. I've come to realize that people do not have much faith in me, because they can discern some of this, and they don't trust me to handle reality. It has been terribly unflattering to realize how others perceive me and that they're not entirely wrong.

I desperately want a pretty girl to tell me they are wrong. It's a nice fantasy, right? I think about what I want a lot. Actually do anything though? Reality is a lot less nice for me, for all these converging reasons, internal, external, and consequential.

I never look forward to going literally anywhere. Can you even imagine that? What does that alone do to a person's ability to be a functional motivated human being?

nuff said

Realizing that I'm autistic has been traumatizing. It's just a word, in terms of its capacity to communicate information. It represents different things to different people. 

In specific terms of where I am on the spectrum, it represents all sorts of things I thought were hurdles that I inexplicably couldn't get over. In my head, I'd overcome eventually. One day I'd be a functional grown up, who could hold a job, afford a place to live and a car. I'd have a social life and a girlfriend.

I hate when people doubt why these things matter. It makes me defensive. How absurd to be miserable about things that don't actually matter, but these are just the basic underpinnings of good mental health in modern society. It is not delusion to understand the need for material security and independence, emotional bonds and experiences with other human beings we enjoy being around. 

It is not delusion to understand how and why our capacities for these things matter to other people. Nor is it delusion to see how other people's opinions of us can have substantial consequences. 

Being autistic is more like cerebral palsy or downs syndrome than depression or anxiety. Less overt or outwardly obvious, but we are not seen as peers, especially if we don't work or drive. Even more so if we don't do much of anything because shifting gears is so hard and we can't focus on anything outside the scope of whatever it is we're focused on. 

I'm not bad at social interaction because I have anxiety. I have anxiety because I am fundamentally and inherently bad at social interaction. In those times when I seem to be doing ok at it, just understand that it's taking a lot of effort. I've gotten better at it over the years, but it rarely comes naturally. 

To a greater extent than I'd realized, this is just the way I am. Autism is not a mental illness. It is not something people are afflicted with, overcome or even get treated. You can treat symptoms like depression and anxiety, as with anyone else, but you don't really treat autism, let alone cure it. 

It explains a whole lot about my life, while making me realize, I am never going to be a normal society navigating functional adult. I've made some progress, I've grown, I've learned tactics to manage, but I'm no less autistic and never will be.

This was the crisis I was going through, before having my life taken from me. When I needed support and stability to navigate this in a positive way, I was cast out like trash, my whole life upended. I'm grateful for the support I received in Philly. The problem was that it was in Philly.

I completely fell apart in Philly. I didn't know what I was going to do or where I'd be able to live. I am doing better now, but I am seriously damaged. My entire trajectory nosedived, and even as I recover some of it, it can't ever be what it was. I can't be who I was. I can't go where he was going. I'm doing what I can. I have ambitions again, my life has some direction, even if not what it was before.

Stumbling through roadblock after roadblock, and well, I'm 50 now. My trajectory is what it was. I'm pretty much done.

attachments

The monotropic mind tends to dig deep grooves fixating on what it can. We don't handle change or adapt well, because we become so attached to the way things are, or if we get too lost in our own heads, the way things should be. It isn't just difficult in some nebulous sense of sweating and struggling, but wounding and extraordinarily painful, losing everything I've been fighting to get used to.

Some in the autistic community will say that we are not disabled, just different, trying to function in a world designed by and for neurotypicals. I think what they're missing is that neurotypicals are all kinds of different from one another but they're also much better at adapting to whatever life demands. The inability to adapt is the problem. It's not a matter of being different. It's disabling.

As I struggle to get from one day to the next, I cling to what I can. I become attached. Then life goes and rips it all apart, and it hurts like hell. I've been through so much here in Philly. It wasn't what I'd wanted or chosen, and pushed me well beyond my comfort zone, but now that it's all being swept away, I can't help but mourn. 

I lived almost a year of my life here, with my kind landlady who referred to herself as more of a roommate. I saw my aunt all the time, who I hadn't prior seen in years. I met people at these different gyms and at vegan food swaps. I earned honest money pet sitting, house sitting, and even some chicken sitting. I got to know lots of people and their pets. I wandered all over Germantown and Mt Airy, with the occasional trip to center city. I'm going to miss H-Mart. I'm going to miss all of it, all gone in a moment. Again and a-fucking-gain.

I have an apartment in Burlington now. I'm leaving Philly tomorrow. I get to try to reconnect with my old life. I don't know how that will go. I don't know how much ground I've lost or gained, physically and mentally. I feel very damaged. In addition to grieving for everyone and everything I'm saying goodbye to, I'm full of fears about what traumas my new life will bring, as once more, I'm thrust into the unknown.

People ask me if I'm excited to be going back to Vermont. I've been here a long time. I don't know what I'm going back to anymore. Maybe things will go well. It's theoretically possible. I can't stop crying, but I'm no longer suicidal, and that's no small thing.

transitions

Among so many fears, I was concerned that even under much better circumstances, this plan of moving and then moving again was going to be rough. As much as I've wanted to get back to Vermont, I've now lived almost a year of my life here.  I've had all these strange and new experiences and interactions. There is a lot here I might have appreciated more, had it not been under such duress. There is a lot I will miss. 

This sounds like simple sentimentalism. Bittersweet, but hardly the end of the world. More like the end of one world and the beginning of yet another. I struggle with transitions, and moving like this is a massive one. My whole life is about the be completely different again. I have all kinds of work to do, getting it back together. I will be in a very different neighborhood than I was before, let alone where I am now. I will have to learn to adapt to everything, including adapting to the reality of things I'll fail to adapt to. I don't know how it's all going to go, but I'm hopeful.

My room here is already rented out to another needy soul as of the day after tomorrow. The day after that, I'll be meeting my new landlord in Burlington.

refugee

Housesitting for another person. There is a dog and a cat involved, and a whole new house for me to hang around in, trying not to make too much of a mess of. It's a nice change of scenery from someone else's house I normally spend my days trying not to make too much of a mess of. This isn't my life. I'm just living it for a while.

I can't relate to people, so I found this hack where I keep going to the same place a few times a week, year after year, doing the same activities with the same people, and it felt almost like having friends. I knew it was lacking in some key ways, but it sure beat sitting around by myself blogging in the vague direction of imaginary readers.

I never formed any real relationships with any of them. I was still working on that, engaging with a few of them a little more here and there, experimenting with being a little more prosocial. In the meantime, training together was everything to me. Now I'm just alone and aimless again. All those years of work scattered to the wind.

Nothing is getting better. My life has been destroyed. What little I'd managed to hold onto through these last few miserable years, all gone. The life I'd worked so hard to establish for myself was what kept my mental health under control. I can't function without it.

I can't blog anymore without just doing this over and over. It's the truth and none of my philosophies about anything ever mattered. I can't even figure out how to find housing for myself. I'm not a wandering philosopher, just another abject failure of a human being in a world full of suffering.

anchored

I can't heal, recover or move forward with my life, as long as my heart is still in Vermont. Everything I do here is just passing time until I can go back to having a life. I don't know why I'm like this, but I've long known being forced to move is terrible for me. 

This is even worse, because I can't move. It's an indefinite extended visit. I don't want to fully move here, and it isn't viable anyhow. Rents are even higher here in Philly than in Vermont, and I fucking liked Vermont!

I chose to anchor myself there for lots of reasons, much as I chose to train MMA for lots of reasons. I don't know what it's like to be anyone else, but I can't just chose to do things for which there aren't enough reasons, much of which has to do with what I need to manage and overcome my mental health issues, whatever we want to call that.

I'm clinging to the pain of what I've lost because it's all I have, all that's worked for me. Do you have any idea how hard it's been to find anything that's worked for me?

Maybe I need a therapist here. Maybe I should try meds. Except I've tried all that and so much more. I've moved from state to state nine goddamn times.

no one survives

Somewhere along the line in the last ten years or so, I changed my mind. I used to think survival itself was to be lauded. Life is scary, dangerous, and traumatic. Just getting through it was supposed to mean something. Especially if you could enjoy yourself along the way, the good cup of coffee, the beautiful weather, enjoying a good book, movie, or video game.

What has any of that accomplished? The pleasure of eating a donut falls behind me immediately, while the consequences can be far more lasting. I used to think in terms of the moment but have come to think more in terms of the broader picture of my life and what I've done with it. Who have I become, because of how I've lived?

I have a range of theories as to what caused this. It could just be the evolution of my thoughts and experiences over 49 years, but it could also have been spurred by the endocrine shift that began almost a decade ago. Another possibility is that it's the product of being more social, being around people, coming to appreciate them and care what they think. Seeing myself from their point of view and realizing something has gone terribly wrong.

I've shed the notion of meeting someone "like me" as I've realized that was all a defense, a fantasy of meeting someone who would see me the way I saw myself. I've realized that I can like people who are all sorts of different and we are judged on what we have to offer each other, not our autobiographies. I've realized that this is as it should be, because of course we want our connections to be positive.

Who I am doesn't matter. How I live is what matters, and defines who I really am, no matter what I may think about it. I can say it's not my fault, because life keeps being mean to me, but the fact of the matter is that my life has been an abject failure. I have very little to offer. I can't find the motivation to do much of anything, anymore.

Yay, I'm hanging on, getting through it? What are we getting through? This is life. When you get through it, it's over.

rationale

So much is a matter of perspective that it's very easy to present who we are as a product of our own entirely reasonable interests, worldview, and ethics. To some extent, almost everyone should be able to relate at least a little to the old adage, I'm not crazy, it's the rest of the world that's crazy.

From our perspective, on a very basic level, yeah, that's why we are the way we are. I refer to my difficulties relating to people in neutral terms, but for the longest time, I let myself believe it's because I don't like them. What is the difference really? They are different interpretations of the same experience. 

It's easy to point to things that are wrong with people, by our standards of course, framing our feelings of alienation as only reasonable. Easier still, if you then avoid them all your life so as to make people into abstract concepts, easier to manipulate in our heads. This is basic othering behavior, extended to everyone other than ourselves.

Instead of calling myself disabled for not working, I could focus on how fucked up the whole system is. I'm capable of work, in the most direct sense, but what I'm not capable of is all the bullshit involved in getting and holding a job, aside from doing the work itself. I'm also disgusted by the whole proposition that we have to sell half our waking lives to make some pig rich, just to survive. Cut the bullshit, give me a job, and maybe I could work part time. I'm not disabled, I just hate capitalism, right?

In this country, a part time minimum wage job isn't enough to live on and in so doing, I'd make myself ineligible for disability, including healthcare and everything. It's a fucked up system, but the reality of it is that other people do it and seem to have much fuller lives due to being functional adults with value to society. Framing the problem as a dysfunctional system might be better for not only my self-esteem, but how I present my situation to others. Framing it as a disability wrecks my self-esteem. That's to say, I can't live like they do. I can't be a part of what they do.  

I've been feeling painfully left out my whole life, and getting close to people has made it worse, but training has allowed me to play with them. The longer I've been at it, the more I feel accepted and a part of what they're doing. Maybe with enough perseverance, all the way up to competing myself. Then doing some teaching. This would go a long way towards counterbalancing my deficiencies, and it seemed to be a challenge but within reach.

I was moving in that direction, but now I'm feeling more left out than ever. I've tumbled back into the lonely darkness where the best I can do is go stand around awkwardly in a gym full of strangers. Too much of what was working for me was predicated on all the people I'd spent years building rapport with. It takes me a long time because I am different.

They don't have a concept of how these things can change. They have no motivation to help me change. It's just who I am, so they have no interest in helping, aside from being condescending.

It's so easy to conclude that people are just assholes, but from their perspective, their behavior only makes sense, too. Let myself get too close to them and realize they're not really assholes at all. I realize that I want to be able to live as they do, striving to achieve things in the world. I realize that I don't do these things because I can't. I'm disabled. I'm not good enough. When I finally stand up, ready to show that I am good enough, they tend to smack me down. And now, really compounding it all, I'm getting too old. 

I realize that I want them to like me, but they can't, because they perceive the deficit. Especially once I've been cornered into explaining that I'm disabled. Nobody calls them disabled for not being able to live the way I do. That makes just as much sense, but of course society is going to be built around norms and not what fringe weirdos think.

That's just the reality of it. Apparently, it's neurodivergent of me to care more about material reality than appearances and feelings. To be more delusional would be less disabling.

i had a life

I don't know what it means to have a life. We all have a life, right? What kind of value judgment is this? Right? I'm not sure, over the past few years, I've come to feel that I have one. For all the years prior, I felt that I did not. In Vermont, I finally had goals and ambitions, in such a way that was socially connected. I felt socially connected.

It's not a value judgment, but an important component of good mental health. Introverts are no exception. Rather they just need to be more careful and measured about it. During the pandemic, studies showed that it was actually introverts who suffered the most from the social regulations. Our careful measured connections can be more fragile, more easily thwarted, and far more difficult to replace.

Throw a wrecking ball through that, and it's introverts who start hanging themselves. Extroverts don't have a greater need, they're just far better at meeting it. When you're so much of an introvert that you're on the spectrum, it's all the more severe.

I complicate everything trying to understand it, hoping that understanding empowers me, but it's not always so complicated. I had a life. I don't have a life here. To go from having a life back to not having one is massively depressing. Of course I'm having trouble getting to the gym and everything else. Nothing I can do is going to help, so I'm just trapped in a downward spiral of drifting further and further away from what it felt like to be alive.

Depression is like acid. We're forced to watch everything we are slowly burned away. I was beating it, but now I'm back to drowning in it. That life that I left behind was all about beating depression.

abject misery

This whole situation has been catastrophically horrible for me, and I don't know why it's so difficult to explain why. It's so easy to lose sight of the details and in turn how they conspire to destroy my mental health. It's so easy to not think about it, so as to conclude I should be ok and just need to keep going.

I'm not ok. I will never be ok here. I will never get over this. What I was accomplishing in Vermont has been my life's work. Everything I was doing was about repairing a lifetime of damage. It was a long slow arduous process, obliterated by being forced to leave. Everyone who thought making me leave Vermont wasn't a brutal miserable thing to do can fuck off forever. Literally. Not to mention forcing me to throw out everything I owned. My family in Vermont is dead to me.

I keep trying to pick up the pieces and stay focused, but the only thing that motivates me being what I can accomplish that will serve me when I'm back in Vermont. Any progress I make at the gym is all about how it might help me perform at my old gym. I have no interest in accomplishing anything here. My only motivation is what I can bring back with me, when I get my life back. 

I don't know when that will be, if ever. This is a feeble immiserating sort of motivation. I'm torn between clinging to it, because it's all I have, and letting go. I can't do this anymore. I can't function in spite of how much pain I'm in. I want to collapse into survival mode where I have no ambitions but easing the pain, knowing damn well that only brings worse pain in the long run.

I miss having ambition. I miss having goals. I miss everything I was trying to do. I miss all the people I was trying to do it with, everyone I was trying to do it for. I have nothing left but this vague hope for a future where I can get it back. I can't live like this. 

I hate myself for not being stronger, more resilient, more independent. I hate that all I can do is suffer, desperately hoping someone will save me, because I have nothing else to hope for. I hate that I never formed enough of a connection with anyone to stay in touch or turn to for help. All the people I left behind just carrying on with their lives, neither knowing nor caring how much they mattered to me.

so much pain

Corrosion of Conformity was a band that caught my eye as a teenager, exploring the fringes of the punk/hardcore scenes. Before they became generic alternative metal band, they were a lousy hardcore band. I wasn't a fan in any case, but I liked the name and their nuclear skull logo. The point of the reference being that this "on the spectrum" bit is a different way of framing what has been a lifelong theme for me. My distaste for the band making it all the more apt.

What we have in common, in this grouping, is a negative. Not a value judgement, but the absence of a function neurotypical people have. As such, it says nothing for what we might have in common with each other. It says very little about who we are or who we might relate to.

I can't get to the gym here. It's one problem after another and then I get sick and my immune system is crap because I'm so depressed, so I can't get to the gym some more. I worked out on my own today. I keep trying, but I keep failing. Life just goes wrong and then more wrong. I'm drowning and no one can do anything but watch.

It took me years to get where I was in Vermont. I don't adapt to moving, because I'm alone and fragile, desperately trying to form roots such that I make progress against both of those problems. Only to be uprooted and tossed elsewhere, again and again. Now I'm stranded here. Failed and broken, crying when people from my old gym post to Instagram.

That was more progress towards feeling connected to people than I've made ever, but now it's just more pain. I hate myself for being helpless to do anything but suffer at the mercy of such a clearly uncaring world.

corrosion of conformity

The problem with looking for like-minded non-conformists is that they're all over the place. Conformity goes a long way towards keeping everyone on the same page. Conformists naturally find each other. That is arguably the central point of the conformist impulse. We don't want to impede social functionality by having a whole other viewpoint. This is bad for both survival and the likelihood of reproducing, such that evolution has made most of us conformists.

I've always been opposed to the fundamental notion of conformity. It's by definition constraining. Why shouldn't everyone be different, of course. Should this, shouldn't that. This is just how evolution works, and how socializing works. The reality of it is that socializing is of critical importance to most of us, such that evolution selects for conformists.

I didn't like it, because my viewpoint was different. I was different. I don't have the impulse to conform. I adapted to this fact by adopting a worldview deeming conformity a bad thing. It's something that has its pros and cons, but what is good or bad, should and shouldn't? It was something that would have benefited me, were my brain not wired differently.

Some people are calling this autism now. If you aren't trying to imitate the behaviors of others from an early age, this can cause a wide array of development problems. It is essentially this dysfunction of our instinctual impulse to stick together. To be gregarious, to form a herd, to find a sense of social connectivity. It is a way of thinking differently. 

A way of thinking differently, how? Just differently. In all sorts of ways. I question the utility of calling it autism, but we should be calling it something.

gaza

Karma is when we contribute to the environment, and thus have to live in that environment. Israel has used their disproportionate position of power to enforce their will, without compromise. They use their power to then aggressively punish any resistance.

Without regard to ethics or fairness, backed by the American empire, Israel embraces the nihilistic doctrine, might makes right. Israel shows no respect for their opposition as equals, or as human beings, but dangerous pests to be crushed.

Power dynamics in the world are always changing. Those on top never get to stay there. When they find their adversaries one day strong enough to stand against them, they will do so in the cold brutal world they've created.

I used to stand with Israel. I used to believe all the west's drivel vilifying Palestinians and their leadership. Israel was brutal and oppressive because they had to be.

 

For me, the turning point was the Great March of Return, where Israeli snipers gunned down thousands of unarmed protesters in Gaza, including medics and journalists, that I realized, Israel is a monstrous evil waging perpetual war. A tool of western imperialism, our military foothold in the middle east. All the bombs, the bulldozers, the apartheid and blockade - none of it is about necessity, but domination and oppression of the indigenous population and their neighbors.

Israel has no right to defend itself, because Israel is the aggressor. A bully does not have the right to murder someone for standing up to the bullying. It is the Palestinian people who have a right to defend themselves. Even against impossible odds and certain death, I stand with those who fight back.

sparring on the spectrum

When people talk about someone who is more unambiguously on the spectrum, like OG autism, I start thinking, yeah, this is silly. Of course I'm not autistic. The word doesn't have a solid enough meaning to end these arguments in my head.

When someone has depression or anxiety, we look at the symptoms and that defines the condition. It doesn't matter if you're depressed and anxious due to trauma or genetics. The symptoms are straight forward and if you have enough of them, that's depression. With autism, it's just like, problems socializing. limited and repetitive interests, and being hypersensitive to sensory input.

Do I start screaming and crying when the smoke alarm goes off? Not always. How severe are we talking? 

A student coach comes up to me after class today, going on about how if people are going too hard on me, it's ok to tell them to lighten up. Some people think they have to be macho and take it, but that's nonsense, he says to me. He was just being nice. He was just concerned about me. I know.

happy birthday to me

Accepting my fate here in this strange new city, I might as well start devoting myself to this new gym. I decided this weeks ago, but it's taken some time to implement the decision by going more often. I finally got to the advanced sparring class today, all full of anxiety because I had no idea what to expect, and it was underwhelming. Advanced, like Han Dynasty's 10/10 on their spicy scale is all that spicy.

I had Chinese food with my aunt. It's a decent restaurant, but nothing is all that spicy anymore, except my own cooking. Northstar MMA is a decent gym, but their advanced sparring class seemed kinda basic to me. I got some good sparring in. It's more regimented than the open sparring system I'm used to. We all just spar for round after round for about an hour. It was fine, but my jaw doesn't even hurt.

The BJJ, OTOH, has been frustrating. I'm getting my ass kicked by almost everyone. Some of them tap me out over and over like I'm a complete newbie again. I don't know if I'm rusty or not trying, due to being in unfamiliar territory, or if a lot of them are simply a lot better than most of the people at my old gym.

The instruction does seem a lot better. The gym itself is lacking in a lot of ways, but both the BJJ and Muay Thai instruction has been more technical and difficult. In theory, I could go back to Vermont in a few years, having greatly improved and impress everyone, but I never seem to get the upshot of anything. Somehow it won't work out that way.