I slept last night. Like, I went to sleep at 8:30 and slept through the entire night. That might not sound like a big thing, but it is. Normally I can’t get to sleep until 11, midnight, 1am… which isn’t good considering I have to be up at 5:10am at the latest in order to get myself ready for work.
I must have really needed the sleep. I get like that. I stay up late and later and later every night, then I get overtired which makes me more likely to have a massive and at least semi-public meltdown – and we are talking yell at Hoppy for breathing too aggressively, freak out because I can’t find that pen I wanted to use more than the one I’m holding, get highly confused because I’m doing one thing and I’ve been asked to do another and everybody knows you can’t do two things at once and I can’t possibly figure out that I could complete task one before dealing with task two {and on that particular occasion, I learnt that it’s better to try and reign in the anger of confusion, because I severed the tendon in my little finger by accident}.
Those examples are all of the extreme variety. As in, I’m not only deprived of sleep but I’ve also been doing things that are deceptively physical. Diving, for example, has never felt like it is hard physical work to me, but it is – the bruises and exhaustion that kick in two days later are signs of that. But there are other things too, that I don’t class as “hard work” or “hard exercise” or whatever, because I don’t see them that way – either because they’re fun or I’m too distracted while doing them to notice I’m getting a work out.
But anyway – when I sleep like I did last night I have to assume it is because I am reaching my limit. Because I honestly do not know my own limits, my own breaking points. I will go and go (I learned to try and set limits when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 22, because I now knew that I wasn’t weak, that I actually had something causing the pain and that maybe it was a good time to stop, but generally I push myself anyway) until I literally can’t go anymore, and then I will try and take two or three more steps before I give up. Because I do not want to be weak.
A lot of me is like that. I don’t want to see myself (let alone have other people see me) as weak, either physically or emotionally. I act bat-sugar crazy (thank you to The Strawberry Kiwi – my first friend in primary school who now lives in America, whom I do not believe I have yet introduced {also my one follower. Yay, follower!} – for that delicious phrase) kind of on purpose and kind of because I reached a certain age and decided that if people couldn’t accept me for my eccentricities then why should they have the awesomeness that is me in their lives? So I’m guessing that I don’t care if people see me as “weak” mentally.
This is why I push myself beyond the point that I think “maybe that’s enough”. And this is why for something like seven years I didn’t cry in public. This is why I lie about some things, even though people with Aspergers supposedly don’t lie – although 99.99% of the time I get caught out in my lies anyway, so I really should give up on the lying.
Let’s just put it this way: I do a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t do, just so I can “keep up” with the NT crowd. And I can’t stop myself from being like this, not easily anyway, because I have had 29 years (28 years and 51 weeks?) of thinking that I was NT too, of thinking “okay, I may be different, but I’m still one of them so I need to keep up”, of thinking… well anything and everything along those lines.
I have only had one month of knowing, knowing 100 percent without a doubt, that I am not one of them. Only six months before that of thinking “maybe I am… but I’m probably just being a hypochondriac.” You know, that’s the time where you start looking at things, but not terribly seriously, you start thinking about ways you could change things or ways you can learn to accept yourself, but not seriously enough at all.
And in this one month of actual knowing, what have I done? Re-read the first two chapters of Aspergirls by Rudy Simone, and written 27 blog posts (two of which are incomplete and in draft form, and that’s not counting this one). I’ve “come out” as aspergian to exactly: one person at work, my mum and grandmother, my current best friend, best friend in primary school and best friend from uni (not best friend from high school or best friend from intermediate/some of primary and high school, because I’m not in touch with those two and one of them is completely invisible as far as online presence goes, so no-one I know from those days knows how to get in touch with her!), my flatmate (and she’s probably “outed” me to her boyfriend/I haven’t kept it a secret around him), and a girl from school last year who I thought was possibly aspergian too.
What I should have been doing: making plans and ways for me to accept my limits. This one is an important one. I need to not only accept, but learn my limits, so I know “this is five steps before my breaking point, I should stop here because I do not want to break.” I need to read up more on this sort of thing, because reading is the way I learn things.
Blogging is good for me, I’ve been able to get all these thoughts out there and make them tangible, making them more real and being able to make sense of the things that I am thinking. Take this blog post for example. When it started out, I was just writing about how I’d gone to sleep early and how that must have been a sign that I was getting overtired. But the organic flow that my mind takes – rambling and wandering, and fully irritating or confusing in my verbal communication – has lead me down this path to this eventual brilliant revelation. So writing down my thoughts is good.
Um… yeah, that’s all I can think of. Learning more about the actual me, so I know when to say when, and how to stop myself from doing things I really shouldn’t be doing, and keep on blogging. Any ideas or suggestions on good places to start looking? J
