Learning

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These outbursts are painfully pathetic and embarrassing, but seem to be the only form of release from it all that actually helps. There's also so much more that I've managed to hold myself back from saying or doing, so I guess that's something.

It's been a whoooole lot trying to cope with this while also trying to figure out who the fuck I am and what I'm capable of.

I would like to invite you to attempt to comprehend how infinitely distressing this has been. To feel like every decision you make is being analysed by some unknown entity for some unknown reason that may or may not lead to negative consequences at some point in your life. To cope with this, I started to analyse e v e r y t h i n g I did before I did it, to make sure it was 'acceptable'. But it went deeper than just my decisions, I don't know how far this kind of surveillance goes (and I didn't want to know, which is a whole other tangent), so I started to assume that absolutely every moment of my life was being monitored. Every breath, every step, every fall, every bathroom break, every disposable vape, every coffee, every phone call, every time I had sex, every friendship I abandoned, every stupid song on my playlist, every thing I threw away etc etc... It's violating.

Two of my ex-boyfriends treated me in a similar way, always assuming I was hiding something, or Mark always liked to say that he thought I had some 'evil plan'. He really rolled with that idea when we discovered I had the same Myers Briggs personality type as Hitler (while conveniently ignoring that Jesus was in that group too lol). Speaking of the Mark situation, I've barely been able to process any of it because my mind has been so full of this drama. I'm only just starting to realise how much shit I put up with and how much of myself I allowed him to shame me for.

But I guess they were right in the sense that I was hiding something, but even I didn't know it at the time. Learning that I'm almost definitely autistic and what that means for me, while also having an omnipresent audience with unknown intentions, has been tricky to say the least. I've been trying to let myself unmask, but never feeling truly safe enough to do so, even in my own home. Trying to discover what helps me and what hurts me, and adapting my life to something that suits me. A black hoody and sunglasses goes a long way to block out excess stimulation and to scare off people who may have bad intentions, but I'm also painfully aware of how suspicious that can look from a surveillance perspective.

(continues in next post)