My Lack Of Social Skills Screws Me Over Yet Again

I'm stuck on Kyrie again, so I'm writing about it here because somehow writing stuff on my blog helps me process things (even more than writing them in my literal journal sometimes).

To recap: in February/March, I redid the entire timeline for Act I. I added subplots, I moved stuff around, I added quite a few scenes. (I am largely happy with Act II as-is, but Act I was... awful. I had trouble slogging through it during re-reading, and I wrote it.)

This weekend I finally made some real progress on the thing for the first time in ages. I wrote three whole scenes, which amounted to just over five thousand words of (hopefully) new and improved storytelling.

But now we are in a scene where multiple characters (as in more than three) have to socialise, and I am freezing up.

Before I was diagnosed with ADHD, this wouldn't have been a problem. I would probably have just made something up and assumed that was exactly how people socialise. But now -- after years of merely feeling vaguely out of place in social situations while trying to convince myself it was probably nothing -- I know that my brain is broken and that I am Not Like Other People.

This means I Do Not Know how Other People actually socialise.

At this moment, this scene feels like the literal scariest thing I will ever write. It's still early in the book, so readers might not be invested and willing to forgive mistakes yet. But here is where any semblance of normalcy will end, where my inability to be a Normal Person will be revealed in all its cringy starkness. This feels like no matter what I do, all the neurotypicals (you know, the people who can focus on reading books for any length of time) will feel all the awkwardness and feel immediately that this is not a 'normal' situation, and it's off-putting, and that I am not Like Them and am no longer worth their time, energy, or attention. Just like in real life.

Can I tell myself I will revise it later? Sure, but I won't believe myself. This is the second rewrite, and I know if I suck at writing this social situation now, odds are good that I'm still going to suck at it in a years' time.

I don't know to get through this. Even if I go work on something else first, at some point I am GOING to have to write this scene.

Vulnerability

In years past, I was known for my bluntness and honesty, in all situations, 'socially acceptable' or not. This kept the weird neurotypicals at arms' length and brought the neurodiverse people who actually tell you exactly what they're thinking into my circle.

Then I went to college.

A common theme among my directors and professors was vulnerability. "You need to be more vulnerable." "You need to be more open." I couldn't understand what they were on about. I asked them so many times to define, to explain, to give an example of what they meant, but none of them could. The main one would smile sardonically and say, "I think you already know." But I didn't. How could I be vulnerable? In all my brutal honesty, what had I missed? What was I hiding that they didn't already know?

And the other day while doing the dishes it hit me.

They wanted me to be honest.

But there was a fatal flaw in their logic -- they assumed I was not already being honest. This was why I could not understand what they wanted -- I was already doing it, but they wouldn't recognise that and instead kept telling me I was wrong. The fact that they could never once explain to me over the course of five years what I was missing/doing wrong should have tipped me off that I was not actually doing anything wrong. But I knew I was inexperienced and I was trying to trust their 'experience.'

I went through an obscene amount of emotional pain in college. The death count alone from those years of my life exceeds the death toll of friends of people twice my age. I drew on that heavily for my first character -- Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. The child loses both parents and the only home she's ever known to cholera. Surely she's haunted and grieving when she first arrives in England. I think this is what made my performance of that show so great. I could relate to the emotions of the character. And yet, I remember the director telling me that the character (at the beginning) needed to be 'happier.' He gave no reason for this. I ignored him, of course... even then, my acting instincts kicked in to save the show from his incompetence. While that's not the way I should have gone about it, he was also at fault for not being willing to acknowledge the emotional states of all the characters at all points of the show. He used this incident as proof that I was 'too stubborn' and 'refusing to be vulnerable' and ultimately used it to justify actively preventing me from getting my diploma.

To him, 'vulnerable' meant 'happy.' To me, 'vulnerable' means 'honest -- no matter what.'

To be happy at the exclusion of all other emotions -- no matter how valid -- is to skip over at minimum half of the human experience. To be vulnerable is to be honest about every emotion, not just happiness.

I maintain that I am more vulnerable every single day of my life than he perhaps has ever been at any point of his.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-Up

Never did do a wrap up post, and now that I'm wildly late, here we go.

I achieved my goals: 1. I passed 50k, and 2. I enjoyed doing it.

That's it. Those were my goals.

I hadn't enjoyed writing at all since M died, so 'fun' was just as important to me this year as the standard 50k mark. I used to love writing and wanted to recapture that wonder of seeing the story come together. I would say I did that. Enough to make it to the 50,000-word mark by Day 24, and to finish out with 52,086 words.

The story turned out rather good. I think it came out differently than I expected, but I'm happy with the result. It's definitely good enough to revise and publish, but that day is a long, long way off. First Kyrie, and honestly IF that ever happens the next one in line is probably my 2016 novel Father's Delight. Then probably this one.

I was honestly scared I would never enjoy writing again. Having realised now that I still can brings both joy and sadness. Joy because my ability to escape into my art is not lost forever, but sadness because I'm not doing it with someone, and because it's different now. My autistic brain has yet to accept that 'different' doesn't mean 'bad' (it has the double whammy of having to process this concept in relation to Christmas too, and that's going about as well as this is).

I would still like to do NaNoWriMo next year. I don't think this is the last hurrah. But now I need to convince my brain to come up with more plots (this year's plot was inspired by a post on the NaNoWriMo 'plot bunnies' forum ages ago, and yes, I will try to credit the person should this actually ever get published.)

I Jumped On The Bandwagon

Originally written on 26 September 2021, 4.08pm.

I've recently started a 'bullet journal' (I use the quotation marks because it looks NOTHING like a 'typical' bullet journal). All it is is a dollar store notebook. I made an index at the front, a basic habit-tracker, lists with goals for September and October as well as the rest of 2021 as a whole, a page for tracking all bank account activity this month, and I'm doing a daily two-page spread for to-do lists, play-by-play of everything I did and said, and general infodumping. I'm also using it to track the crochet legwarmer pattern I'm currently developing. I haven't drawn in a calendar because it's too much work and honestly, I don't have much of anything to put in it until we've finally gotten the upper hand on COVID-19 and can actually revive the performing arts again.

I had five coloured InkJoy pens lying around that someone had given us. I'm not usually one for coloured pens (my weapon of choice is usually the PaperMate FlexGrip Ultra in black, with a cap, not a clicker, although a somehow picked up a black InkJoy 100 from somewhere and it has been making a very strong case for itself), but I use them to fill in the habit tracker and I've given colours to certain things like mental health status and choreography. I have to admit, the extra bit of colour is nice. This 'journal' is also MUCH lighter than the previous notebook I'd been carting around in my purse and I'm actually using this one as opposed to the last one.

One of my (possibly autistic) obsessions is notebooks. I literally have an entire apple box of UNUSED notebooks and journals at my parents' house, and probably at least a dozen at our place. I also suspect the act of handwriting is a stim for me. I've always felt a sense of security and comfort holding a pen, or even just having one nearby. I have a dozen pens in my purse at any given time, in case one dies or gets lost -- even though I am meticulous about where they are at all times. If someone borrows a pen from me, I will literally hunt them down for it the second they're done writing. If I lend you a pen, that means I trust you a LOT, and just know that my heart is in my throat from the second that pen leaves my hand until it returns to my hand.

All this to say that the rush of adrenaline that comes from having a brand new notebook in my purse that I can (and should!) write in all the time with pretty colours to boot is absolute euphoria for the very understimulated ADHD brain and the familiarity of notebooks and writing is soothing for the autism brain. Is the journal itself actually helping my ADHD symptoms? That remains to be seen -- I haven't been doing it long enough to find out yet.

That being said, reinstating a basic habit tracker into my life (I was doing one in my last year of college to prove to my profs I was actually practicing/trying to improve my skills -- it didn't convince them, of course, but it did help me stay on track and kind of feel better about myself... and Lord knows with those clowns as my profs, I needed all the mini-mood-boosters I could get) is helping a lot with getting back into choreography, specifically. There are other things I'm tracking, but that's the one seeing the most dramatic improvement so far. I've set the bar low (two sets of eight per day) so as to not scare myself off of any seemingly-impossible goals.  If I have ideas for more than two sets of eight, then I choreograph more than two sets of eight. But if not, then I will be happy with only two sets of eight, and I will count that as progress. I need to get my brain back into choreographic shape, the way it was in the summer of 2013. I went to college to improve my choreography, not kill it. Time to bring those five years of knowledge and experience (mostly experience) to bear.

(For example, just now I've been writing this entire post to put off my two sets of eight for today. I literally had my headphones on and my iPod and page of in-progress choreography in front of me, but I didn't have any ideas and was trying desperately to procrastinate. I've done the two sets of eight now and it literally didn't even take me ten minutes -- and this was a section I was struggling with. It's so easy once I just do it... I just had to persuade myself to make this one tiny goal. And if I hadn't made this one tiny goal for myself, this page would have sat there for literally months, if not years.)

I digress. I didn't really have a point to this post, I just wanted to write something (for once) and I felt like telling all the ghosts of people who used to use Blogger that I started a bullet journal experiment. I'll try to make progress updates, but we all know how good I am at those...

ADHD

Originally written 13 September 2021, 11.40pm.

Two days before our first anniversary, I was diagnosed with ADHD and officially told I am on the autism spectrum. This is not a self-diagnosis for attention; this information came from a licensed neuropsychiatrist following an hour-and-a-half assessment and screening.

I was fully prepared for an autism diagnosis. I was not prepared, however, for ADHD.

This has rocked my world -- it explains SO MUCH. I’ve been reading through the NaNoWriMo Adult ADHD thread all day (13 September) and literally crying because all of it is me. Time blindness/underestimating how much time things will take, inability to switch tasks, hyperfocus, inability to focus on anything boring (including sleeping, which is why I will 100% stay up till 4am if no-one actively stops me), inability to just sit still, constantly being busy, brain constantly going a million miles an hour (turns out this is why my brain always feels like it's being eaten by acid), self-teaching myself everything under the sun, millions of brilliant and unfinished creative projects in my wake, constantly interrupting people, executive dysfunction…

I’ve been a dancer for 22 years, I routinely overloaded myself in college and mostly managed to get almost every assignment done hours before it was due (a famous example is when I wrote four papers and two final exams in 36 hours), all while still dancing 12-20 hours a week and keeping up a theatre career on the side (I’m also usually in three shows concurrently, and the only reason I still get away with this is because I’m always on top of things – if I miss a rehearsal for another rehearsal for a different show, I study my butt off and show up next rehearsal looking like I didn’t miss a thing). Twice I wrote two 50k novels in a month for NaNoWriMo because doing only one was too easy and I had enough plot ideas to sustain it. My mother was CONSTANTLY on my case for forgetting my chores and knew that if I was reading or engrossed in a project that nothing short of an atomic bomb under my seat could get my attention (and even then, it would take me a minute to realise where I was and that something was happening). I once choreographed an entire 4.5-minute dance piece for seventeen dancers start-to-finish in one single eight-hour sitting (during which I did not eat, drink, or go to the bathroom), and also recently finished a far less complicated five-minute dance for four people that took me seven years. There’s really no in between. I notoriously learn entire dance pieces three days before I perform them and then perform them better than everyone else in the piece (none of my teachers have ever known what to do with me).

I would never have known I had ADHD until the pandemic took all of my coping mechanisms away – theatre and dance had been giving me enough controlled chaos to keep me sane, and then when it was all taken away, my symptoms (both ADHD and autism) finally presented, big-time. At first I thought it was just depression, brought on by the stress of the pandemic and my first real romantic relationship/marriage, but luckily I follow a few autistic performers on Instagram who regularly post autism/ADHD memes, and I began to see myself in a few too many of these posts. I took my autism suspicions to my therapist, who told me how to go about getting assessed. The process happened very quickly, and it was at my autism assessment that I was screened for and diagnosed with ADHD.

I am not medicated yet, pending a more detailed autism assessment, and also because they want to put me on Wellbutrin and I've shied away because I am TERRIFIED of Wellbutrin. I have not met a single person who has had a positive experience with Wellbutrin. Everyone I know who has been on it has had severe side effects that were ten times worse than the issue that they were trying to treat. Plus, it only comes in pill form, and I can't swallow pills (thanks, autism-related/hereditary texture issues).

As difficult as life is with ADHD, I'm glad to have a diagnosis. Not only does it explain things that I honestly thought meant I was just a no-good failure and a waste of skin/God's punching bag, it also saved our marriage. My husband was constantly on my case for forgetting to do things and he would get extremely frustrated and accuse me of doing it on purpose and I would get angry because I was angry at myself for forgetting (again) and angry at him for not believing me whenever I tried to explain that I didn’t mean to forget things (that's literally what 'forgetting' means...?). Since my diagnosis, we went from screaming matches every other day to I think maybe one or two in the past month. It’s helped me understand myself and make a conscious effort to be more attentive to the things I forget that annoy him the most and it’s helped him understand me and be more patient with me.

There is still a lot to learn and a very, very long way to go. I've borrowed some books from the library to try to understand myself and how to function as an adult human in a world that I never did feel I belonged in. It's a lot to catch up on, and right now I'm feeling rather overwhelmed by it all... but I'll keep trying.

Stay tuned...

I May Have Found An Answer...

Originally written in March 2021.

Lately I've started to wonder if I am autistic.

It would explain SO much... my lifelong texture issues with nearly every 'normal' food on the planet, my inability to get over stuff quickly, why everyone complains that I'm too honest and wants nothing to do with me, why I literally cannot even feign interest in something I just don't care about, why I can't tell apart characters in films (which also explains why I hate watching them)... so much.

This is something that's been brewing for a while. I happen to follow a few autistic performers on Instagram, and the more autism-life memes they posted, the more I found myself relating to them. I started to research a little. At first I thought, 'oh, most of these don't apply to me,' but then I began to remember/notice things. Like how I have legitimately bought clothing purely because I liked the texture. Like how I NEED to either bounce my leg or move my feet at all times. Like how I made a massive scene (meltdown?) in front of my in-laws in my late twenties because there was too much conflict and I just couldn't hold it together anymore. Like the fact that my sister has taken over my old bedroom at my parents' house has left me completely, entirely lost. Like how I know almost literally everything there is to know about Christian music up till the year 1995, but could not tell you one single fact about Michael Jackson or Madonna, even though they were huge artists in the same era. Like how my one and only dream has only ever been choreography, and I literally get suicidal at the mere thought that it might not happen. Like how I struggle SO MUCH to understand the vague phrases my profs and teachers would use.  Like how I shut down at the tiniest provocation. Like how, if someone says, 'just be yourself,' I have literally no idea what to do because I do not, and have never, known who I 'truly' am -- my entire life I have quite consciously taken on the characters of people around me (for better or for worse). Like the fact that I am so cold I am in physical pain 90% of the time. Like the fact that I overexplain literally EVERYTHING. Or the fact that I often will get so engrossed in something (usually reading, writing, or choreographing) that I get 'stuck' in it and literally can't get out -- not even to eat or use the washroom -- until either the task is done or some extremely strong outside force absolutely demands I shift my attention. Or the fact that almost everyone I've ever met is quick to say how smart and quick I am, yet refuses to associate with me because I'm rude/negative/mean/annoying (*cough* HONEST and willing to call out people's crap). Or the fact that I absolutely LOATHE talking to people out loud, but have no problem writing them 800-word texts.

There is autism in the family. It was a cousin who was quite a bit younger than me who I rarely interacted with. My first real experience with autism was when I befriended two fellow theatre performers on the spectrum. I got on extremely (in my case, abnormally) well with both, and it wasn't until MUCH later that I began to wonder if this was because we were more alike than I thought.

I don't know where to go from here. I don't know how to get assessed, especially since the people I've shared my concerns with have outright dismissed them.

I'm not afraid of being diagnosed autistic -- in fact, I'm excited about the possibility. For nearly 25 years I have wondered what was wrong with me, why nobody wanted me and (it seemed) nobody loved me, and maybe now I've found it. Maybe it wasn't my fault like I thought all those years. Maybe all my failings weren't because I wasn't trying hard enough. Maybe my entire lack of a social life has all been based on misunderstanding rather than hate. And because I lacked the concept, the vocabulary, to explain why I couldn't connect with anybody, I thought it was all my fault and I was a failure. I spent YEARS of my life being suicidal for this reason... and maybe I didn't have to be. I'm more worried about NOT being autistic, because if I'm not, I have to start from square one all over again.

I am afraid, however, of posting this.

I have said some pretty bold things on this blog and didn't flinch when posting them, but this one scares me. I am in my late twenties... 'too late' for an autism diagnosis in a lot of people's minds. I know it's common for people (especially women) to go undiagnosed into adulthood, but that doesn't mean the stigma isn't there. I have only shared this suspicion with a handful of people, but every. single. one of them dismissed me immediately. I think they were trying to make me feel better, but it really only made me feel more alone. I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried that the few friends I've managed to make will treat me differently if the term 'autistic' is attached to me. I'm still the same Kate -- I always was. If I'm autistic now, that means I've been autistic from the start -- we just finally have a name for it now; a reason why I have struggled so much with so many things that 'should have' come easily to me. All my life, I wondered why -- why can they make friends so easily and I can't? why do I make the exact same jokes they do and get told off for being 'rude,' when you laughed at the same joke when someone else made it? why do I still carry SO MUCH pain and such a sickening feeling of un-resolution from all those deaths going on six years ago now? why do I feel so different and so unwanted and so 'weird'? why do people get SO angry with me for not understanding the vague new age positive phrases they keep giving me when I ask for genuine, detailed help? why do people call me smart but treat me like I'm stupid? why do I feel like such a failure? why can't I understand what people are saying when they're literally speaking the same language as me and yelling to be heard?

I just don't know where to start.