USF Botanic Gardens and a prayer to bees…masking versus translation
I mostly just need to clear out my brain. Stuff built up.
I woke up this morning to another house dream.–One of the reasons I like haunted house stories is that I’ve been having house dreams for a while now. Decades?
About the time that my “OMG, showed up naked at the play rehearsal WITHOUT LEARNING MY LINES” dreams stopped (it was always the not having learned lines thing that freaked me out), I started having house dreams, dreams where I was in some kind of weird house and struggling to navigate whatever the fuck was going on inside it.
Often, people were moving out of/into the house, and I was expected to pack/unpack their stuff.
I eventually figured out that the dreams were associated with disruptions in my circles of friends and acquaintances, or rather more particularly with things that I was uncomfortable with.
When one of the people in a friend circle decided to harass me for my politics during the 2016 election cycle and ZERO people stepped up to intervene, for example, I had a LOT of these nightmares. I eventually left that friend circle almost completely.
And the dreams stopped again.
The houses almost always have secret passages in them, ones that led in unexpected ways from room to room, from floor to floor, or to entire sections of the house that weren’t public.
There were several houses that repeated, based on real houses: the uncle’s house with the “good bathroom” with the jacuzzi tub long enough to stretch out in; the grandfather’s house that had increasingly awful, small, moldy (I can smell in dreams) sub-basements, leading to a tunnel so small I can’t back out of (it was really only one cellar!); the friends’ house with the balcony. Each had its own pattern of dream.
Last night I dreamt of a new house: broken down, full of nonsense rooms (there was a full-sized child’s kitchen full of broken unpainted toy furniture, including a plywood deep freezer that I was shocked to discover wasn’t cold), holes in the walls you could see through, water running from the ceiling as it rained. A roof deck covered in rain-soaked books that I had to rescue, with rotting boards holding me up, springing underfoot.
I’m not sure where my brain cobbled this house together; it sorta reminds me of some of the barns and outbuildings of the farm where I grew up.–I went to sleep trying to think of story ideas for another short story I need to write, and I suppose this is it.
The closest house I can think of is actually in another story, one of my Fairy’s Tale books, not yet finished, an abandoned house that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. A sorcerer’s house, as it were, although I don’t think of it like that. It’s a portal to another dimension.
In the dream, though, my mom was there in the new house. I was trying to make a list of the big stuff that we all needed to work together to handle first (like the water pouring in through the hole in the roof!) and she kept handing me stacks of pads of paper, all of it already written on, and getting angry when I kept tearing off the pages that were already written on to try to get to blank pieces of paper.
At one point I said, “I’m gonna wait until you fall asleep, and then I’m going to take all these scraps of paper you’ve already written on, and throw them all away.”
She freaked out. She rarely freaks out; she usually just gets pissed. “Why? Why would you do such a thing?”
“So you can be free.”
…
I took a mini-Day Where the Gods Can’t See Me the other day and went to the USF Botanic Garden. I’ve been there before; it’s small but I like it and I needed to discuss some life stuff with the bees. I recently put together a book that I’d been not-indie-publishing for over a decade, but that was still pretty good. I fought the publishing process every step of the way, trying to sabotage myself; a bunch of my publishing routines had to change so I didn’t exactly need any help with the sabotage. It was frustrating.
When it came to announcing the book I froze up. It took going to talk to the bees to work up the courage to get it done.
I walked through the gardens, took a bunch of pictures I still haven’t posted, and ended up at the bees. There was a sign that said I should NOT get any closer, which I ignored. I stayed out of the main flight paths, but really there was just a silly amount of distance they wanted me to keep. Nobody came to kick me out, at any rate.
I ended up asking for help, not in finding the bravery to get the book out, but in just…accepting other people’s help. What I was dreading was both ends of an all-or-nothing spectrum:
–Nobody would buy the book, while simultaneously hating it.
–People would buy the book, and help promote it, and [insert nervous twitching] like it and subsequently say so.
UGHHHHHH.
Anyway I prayed. I’m not religious, but I’m a strong agnostic (meaning that I believe we’ll never really know the “truth” of the universe for sure, which means all tools should be tested on practical effectiveness, not theory) and will absolutely pray if I think it’ll help.
I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it went something like this:
Dear bees,
I’ve been living with failure for a long time now,
I’m used to nothing going the way I hope it will.
I know how to bear it, if no one notices what I’m doing.
I can carry forward again. I know it. I know it
and know it and know it, how to trod along helplessly,
blindly, simply because I’m too fucking stubborn to stop.
I don’t need help with that part. What I need now is help
accepting help. Accepting kindness. Accepting support.
Accepting compliments. Accepting hope.
Help me walk lightly. Help me rest so I can find strength,
enough to let people know I am weak.
Help me not try to defend myself from good things,
because I always feel that worse things always follow.
Help me submit to care, and support, and help.
Help me listen.
–There’s an adorable fairy garden that I missed the first time I went. There were tiny dinosaurs; in case you were wondering where the dinosaurs went, they’re hanging out with the fae now.
The initial announcements for the book release went fine, and I handled everyone’s help (that I was able to track down so far!) with hearts and thanks. I need to keep doing promo posts, but I found a reasonable way to do them, so it feels more like a pain in the ass task to do, rather than something that actively terrifies me.
Just how hard I’m fighting myself on this feels surprising to me. Both because I keep going, “Aren’t good things supposed to be good? Why fight so hard?” and because I’m actually letting myself see how hard this is hitting me, rather than numbing it down and tuning it out.
…
Ray’s working on anatomy (independently) and her art just took a big leap forward. She’s also trying to learn how to code old-style HTML websites with nothing more than CSS and HTML markup. She’s having WAY more trouble with the website. She keeps complaining to me about stuff not working, even as she is stealing some incredibly twisted code from other websites–not copying the code so much as going, “Imma figure out how to do that BUT BETTER.” I sympathize with her but say NOTHING about tables, because I love her and she’ll encounter tables in her own time. Yesterday’s adventure: AUGH WHY WON’T THIS PATTERN TILE RIGHT. HOW DID THIS , TEXT, WHICH I TYPED IN MYSELF, BECOME AN IMAGE?!?!
No advice, please. It’s too funny watching her chew through the skillset in record time, while invoking +1 to willpower by yelling at the screen.
…
Slightly more TMI than usual, here.
It was bound to happen sooner or later; I’ve started doing situps again, using the chin-up bar (on the floor; it’s a multipurpose bar). I got to a point where I need more core strength there in order to get smoother bellydancing-type moves.
I used to be great at situps. Then I had a kid and all kinds of stuff got torn up, moved out of whack, and nobody gave a fuck, because “that’s just the price of having babies.” As long as the vessel keeps popping the damn things out, then the vessel’s internal experience and integrity is immaterial. You can literally go insane having babies and people go, “Lol. But babies.”
Dancing a lot over this past year has taught me that, well, stuff can be strengthened and put back in place, even if each small increment of improvement may come with, hm, accidents and misadventures. I’ve learned to prepare.
Maybe someday I’ll even learn how to sneeze without dread again!
I feel like I’m preparing for old age. I want to stave off getting hauled around like a sack of potatoes and wearing a diaper for as long as possible. I spent too much time working with older folks to have the illusion that it won’t happen to me. If I can also have fun and manage my ADHD a little better at the same time, well, good stuff all round.
…
I’ve been continuing to play around with the idea of ADHD as nonlinear autism. I’m trying not to be disrespectful; one of the things I’ve been finding out is that people who got diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s (although the dude from whence that name comes was a flying douche canoe so that term’s out) have been through, and continue to go through, tons of abuse over that diagnosis.
I don’t think an ADHD diagnosis (or suspicion of diagnosis?) carries the same stigma. “They” just want to drug us ADHDers into compliance or at least sitting still; “they” don’t want to erase our brains and replace us with someone else, retroactively. What gets done to autistic kids and adults is some straight-up creepy-ass shit. So if I get nothing else out of exploring this line of thought, I got more context and empathy.
If you grew up with your entire society wanting to erase your brain and just start over with the person you “should” have been, you have my sympathies.
I still don’t fully get why anyone would think that such brains needed to be replaced. I grew up in an extended family where my type of brain was *mostly* tolerated. I have family on both sides who are clearly ADHD and family who I’m pretty sure are on the autism spectrum, with greater or lesser ADHD on the side. There are also members who are probably psychopaths; relatively speaking (ahem) a possible autism diagnosis is small beer where I come from.
Of course my mother could not accept anything out of the ordinary in her eldest daughter–because I was the trash bin for everything she hated about herself, and she lives in terror of being found out that she’s not acceptable on some level. But that was pretty much just her. Mostly when I butt heads with extended family it’s because I’m not a conservative and/or a religious nut, not because I’m some flavor of nerd. A few of them still seem mad that I was never a basketball player or a rodeo diva.
Side note, I’m running into a bunch of lines of thinking about women and enbies with ADHD/autism and how it presents differently, mainly because of the requirements to mask one’s personality heavily, regardless of whether you’re neurodivergent or not.
So I don’t know. I’m finding a lot of areas about autism where I keep going, “If I answer this literally, no, but if I translate the concepts to something nonlinear or extremely sensitive to surrounding/starting conditions, yes.”
Do I have a narrow range of foods I’ll tolerate? No. I’ll fucking try anything, as long as I know that it’s not just being sprung on me as a joke, and that it was made by someone who knows what they’re doing.
But I eat the same things for breakfast and lunch every day, barring something more interesting to eat, and I don’t even care, now that I’ve found the “right” things. I’ve been eating the same breakfast and lunch for…a year now. High protein, high fiber, a reasonable amount of tasty cheese, a mix of sweet and sour flavors (my top two flavors). Good.
I try not to eat junk food or anything sugary until after I’ve eaten my regular stuff, which means I by default eat better overall without having to exert much willpower. I also now don’t have to worry about eating a bag of chips for breakfast, or a block of cheese for lunch, and never pooping again.
Does that type of thinking make me autistic? Not the way it’s currently defined, which was mainly for male-type persons who disrupted school classrooms.
I needed to slow down and pay more attention, and to stop switching my digits around and maybe learn how to spell better…
But I also grew up around people who knew my extended family, and who knew people like me.
I’ve been messing around with some of the conceptual tools that people with autism talk about: not the clinical stuff, which often seems disgustingly biased toward erasing people’s personalities, but the stuff people talk about on social media. Which has its own problems but at least is somewhat relatable.
Today I want to talk about masking:
I almost always have a mask on. It’s not something I even think about. Often, I don’t think, “Oh, I don’t dare show my authentic self” but “Oh, I need to slow things down so people can understand me.” I’ll make intuitive leaps in the middle of a sentence and expect people to follow me, or remember context that I only mentioned aloud to them once, or translate from my inner shorthand, or–a hundred other things. I often wish I could go, “Let me just explain this in interpretive dance” and just have people understand me. Words, despite being my playground, suck.
When I meet (or rediscover) people I can drop some of that constant translation with, it is SUCH a relief that I’ll drop more of the translation than I should. Doesn’t matter who you are; you can’t read my mind and shouldn’t have to try to, if I’m trying to communicate.
And yet. Some people clearly respond badly to being asked to take on any of the responsibility for translating my experience to theirs or vice versa.
I was walking around the botanic gardens going, “I am…just going to think about not trying to act normal today. I am going to try not to perform ‘normal’ while I’m here, and see what happens.”
One woman treated me like I was a freak, like I wasn’t speaking clearly, when all I wanted to do was buy a fucking ticket. When really it was just that she’d turned her brain off and was mad at being interrupted from her zone-out.
Another decided that she “knew” me–and she did! Came right up to me and asked if I wanted my picture taken while I was crawling around underneath a cow statue (there was a hole underneath and I wanted to take pictures from the inside of the statue). I did! She took my picture, then started bitching about the botanic gardens and how they weren’t what she expected, she’d been to *other* botanic gardens, *real* ones, and they weren’t like this.
We didn’t click the way I’ll do with people who turn out to be neurodivergent on some level. It was definitely a situation involving a LOT of translation on both sides–but she was working hard and making good guesses. Me too.
I ended up pulling up the part of my brain that can answer those questions quickly, sort of a Cassandra thing that’s good for making reasonable predictions out of thin air. Bullshit, but useful.
Through that lens, I could tell that the woman really just wanted to know that she was seeing what she was seeing, that the USF Botanic Garden wasn’t on the same level as, say, the Sunken Gardens or the Denver Botanic Gardens.
It isn’t! But I also didn’t want to leave her feeling like she’d been cheated of the experience she could be having if she wasn’t mad about it, so I said, “I mean, they probably went, ‘What can we maintain with a bunch of college kids’ and planned accordingly. Their whole staff basically turns over once a semester.” She nodded and laughed; I saw her later elsewhere in the garden, smiling.
I affirmed her view of things, then recontextualized it so she could be there in the moment. I might not be *right* about the way the USF gardens are the way they are, but I’m not *wrong,* either.
In other words, I translated. It’s the same skillset I use in putting people at ease around me, just more intense. It was tiring but satisfying.
At any rate, I’m starting to think less in terms of “dropping the mask” as more of “asking the people around me to meet me halfway.”
I’ve been practicing this for a while, mainly through these adventures du jour posts and things like them. Opening up, practicing being able to respond to comments in a way that is open but preserves boundaries, deciding who can see these posts and who can’t, deciding what I will share and what I won’t, talking about things that are meaningful to me in ways that preserve other people’s secrets and privacy in the ways they value. (An absolute dropping of all my “masks” would involve betraying a lot of trust, I suspect.)
I don’t always get it right.
I have to learn, painfully, who isn’t going to meet me halfway AND demand that I do all of the work to preserve the relationship or even just to be heard.
I have to learn that those people don’t get to see me, not really, and that I don’t need to be “out” to those people, on any level.
I don’t owe them “authenticity.”
I’m a chaotic good rogue. Some people like to be 100% out in the open about everything, all the time. Some people like to sneak around a bit. Deal with it.
And I’ve also had to learn that some types of secrets and privacy absolutely should *not* be respected. Trying to be my own self and still follow the wishes of people like my ex or my mom doesn’t work: they did all kinds of shit specifically in order to make me not be myself, to fear being myself, to feel like being myself was a failure, to not be able to identify myself, even to myself. So that shit gets talked about.
I don’t need to think in terms of black and white, either/or. I can protect most people’s privacy and still be open about my relationship with my daughter and my pride in her (for example). I can talk about my mom and my ex, to the limit that it respects my other boundaries.
The black and white thinking was theirs. The either/or thinking that society tries to shove down my throat–either I’m autistic or I’m not; either I’m ADHD or I’m not; either I’m normal or I’m not–is there to control me, not to help.
The boxes we get put into are pigeonholes; sometimes those pigeonholes contain some awesome toolsets, free for the stealing.
The rules that I am building for myself: I can explore them flexibly without betraying myself or the people around me, or necessarily becoming someone I hate.
I can use the talents I was forced to acquire for my own purposes.
I *don’t* have to be 100% anything.
One of the odd little fairy houses at the USF Botanic Gardens.
Midjourney’s idea of what my dream house looked like. Not right…but not wrong, either.
I think I’m ready for Halloween already.