autism

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I’m back, despite my back holding me back

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go in to the office, because the pain I was having on Monday just continued and worsened, and by yesterday morning I was just exhausted.  I’m frankly not feeling a whole lot better today, to be honest (and to be redundant, since I already said “frankly” which means essentially the same thing as “to be honest”).

In case any of you don’t already know, I have a thing called “failed back surgery syndrome”, which seems a bit unfair to the surgeon, who was a colleague of mine.  He did as good a job as science and technology allowed.  I just had a fairly bad lower back injury:  specifically, a ruptured L5-S1 intervertebral disk.

That’s not a bulging disk, that’s a rupture‒it was torn all the way down into the nucleus pulposus of the disk, which is the delicious jelly center from which the bouncability arises.  I had all sorts of investigations after the pain began, because it didn’t first present as back pain but with pain in my legs.  And then once the disk issue was confirmed, I tried a lot of less invasive interventions to treat my pain, none of which did anything much.

Even after the surgery, I tried and was on various medications, of various classes‒including opioids‒which helped some but which caused their own issues over time.  But the pain has never gone away since its onset, over twenty years ago, and which has contributed greatly to things like the failure of my marriage and the ruination of my career.  Still, the surgery did reduce the pain at least to some degree.

But of course, these last several days have been worse than usual, probably partly because I was exercising (low impact) to try to improve my condition and help my pain.  Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, can’t it?

Anyway, I have to go to work today because it’s payroll day.  That was the same reason I kind of pushed to be let out of the hospital early with my recent kidney stone:  I had to do the payroll the next day.  That was unpleasant, I can tell you.

Such is my life now, it seems:  Chronic pain with varying intensity, insomnia, tension/anxiety and depression‒both at least partly (probably) related to ASD‒and work, then going back to the house to lie down to try to recover for the next day.  The only real bright spots are seeing my youngest child now and then (this was started by the kidney stone, curiously enough, so that at least paid for itself) and talking to my sister on the phone once every week or so.

In case anyone wonders why I have suicidal ideation, well, all the above should explain at least some of it.  Of course, I’ve had such thoughts since I was a teenager, long before my chronic pain developed, but I did have chronic depression (AKA dysthymia) starting at that time.  Looking back, this was probably at least partly because of my long-undiagnosed ASD (level 2).

I also had the other kind of ASD‒an atrial septal defect‒until I was 18 and had heart surgery for it.  Interestingly enough, there is a higher incidence of the heart-based ASD in people with the other kind of ASD, according to some studies I have read.  There’s also some increased prevalence of spina bifida occulta, which often has its effects very low down the spine.  I sometimes wonder if I might have had a very slight version of this that made me prone to have the back injury I had, but I may be going through “second year medical student syndrome” again with respect to that possibility.

Okay, well, sorry about annoying you with my medical history and medical/psychiatric complaints.  For the most part, it’s all I have to talk about anymore.  I don’t do anything interesting; I don’t do anything much at all other than work and trying to rest and distract myself.  It’s really quite pathetic and pointless.

I keep hoping that all the aspirin I take (among the other strictly OTC meds I now use) will lead me to have some form of hemorrhage and take this all away from me, but I have had no luck so far.  I guess it’s true what they say, that if you want something done “right” you need to do it yourself.

I don’t know if that’s always true, though.  I think what really happens is that people want to do something in a particular way for personal, often aesthetic, reasons, and want to be able to have some control over something, so they do it themselves.  Then, no matter how badly they fuck it up or how much better someone else might have done the job, they convince themselves that what they did was best, since confirmation bias is one of the easiest fallacies of reasoning into which people can fall.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you feel better than I do, since that would at least be some comfort for me.  I’ll probably be back to write a post tomorrow, Batman knows why.  But he’s not telling.

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Lost then found thoughts about lost connections

While I was getting ready to go this morning, I thought about writing this blog post.  I thought about my usual starting point of saying something like, “Well, it’s Wednesday morning again,” or some other such inanity.  But then, as I was thinking about that, another, more interesting beginning and an actual, rather interesting, topic occurred to me.

Then, by the time I got ready to start writing—i.e., now—I had completely forgotten what I meant to write.

That’s terribly frustrating, but it is par for the course.

Oh, wait!  Maybe what I was going to write was about my realization regarding the effects of having a very uncomfortable crisis, but one that is inherently finite*.  It’s probably pretty obvious to you that what made me think of this was my recent adventure with a kidney stone.

Of course, while it was happening, it drowned out everything else, especially in the acute stages.  If that had been something without an endpoint, and if there were not sufficient medication to control the pain, then death would have been the only feasible alternative.  Even later, with the stent in place and the literal, constant, burning feeling that I needed to urinate for two weeks, things were pretty harsh.  But though it did not truly drown out my depression, and it was thoroughly exhausting, it did rather overshadow much of my chronic pain.

The day the stent was taken out I felt a fair amount of relief, of course.  But before long my usual existence asserted itself, with all its emptiness, and of course, with all its chronic pain.  And I remembered that, really, I have nothing going on in my life at all, nothing to which I look forward in any kind of long-term sense, and I have no further clue about or hope for my future.

It’s a bit reminiscent, on a shorter time scale, of what happened when I was a “guest” of the Florida Department of Corrections.  Though I was/am innocent of the charges that were created against me, I took a plea bargain for three years (toward which time served applied) because it was tolerably short and I didn’t want to risk the possibility of the much longer sentence with which the prosecution threatened to try to get, risking the outcome on the potential of a jury of my peers to see past my (apparently) not terribly endearing personality and the simple fact that I was a doctor and thus, to those who might be in a typical jury, a generally hated “elite”**.

I think it was the best available choice at the time.  And while I was “up the road” I was able to console myself with looking forward to seeing my children again once I got out—and to see them before they were adults, which would not have been the case otherwise—and that gave me the optimism to write first Mark Red and then The Chasm and the Collision and then Paradox City while I was at FSP West.

But then, of course, once I got out, it turned out that my kids didn’t really want the discombobulation of me having visitation or anything of that sort.  While I was heartbroken, I didn’t feel that I had a right forcibly to disrupt their lives when I had already fucked everything up, first with my personal health problems, then with my misguided attempts to help other people with chronic pain that led me to be arrested.

So, I bit the bullet and kept on writing at least, on my own, though I think my stories grew steadily bleaker and darker over time.  And I learned to play guitar and wrote and recorded a few songs, and did some covers and everything.  But I still didn’t see my kids, and haven’t even communicated with my son other than to receive his email stating that he didn’t really want to have a relationship with me (“right now”).

At least I got to see my youngest when I was visited in the hospital with my kidney stone.  That was a gift that was well worth even that much pain.  But now I’m back to my nosferatu existence, and like Vermithrax***, though I don’t feel pain as severe as the kidney stone, I still feel constant pain.

There may be people who can have chronic pain without getting depressed about it, and indeed, without losing their zest for life, but I fear I’m only left with the squeezed dry pulp of mine.  It seems to be just the way I’m built neurologically.

I suspect that most people who keep their spirits up despite chronic pain and disability do so because they are surrounded by a local support system of some sort****, and they probably do better at connecting with and getting along with other people than I do.

I’ve only ever really been close to specific, core groups of people, and with ones nearby, that I saw nearly every day.  I’ve never been good at connecting over long distances, and I have a hard time even picturing people when they’re far away.  I mean, I can “picture” them in the sense that I know what they look like, and I will be able to interact with them if and when I see them, but I cannot in any intuitive sense “model” their existence elsewhere.  I cannot really get a feel for what they might be doing and certainly not for what they might be thinking.

When even the people I love are far away from me, they really exist more as concepts than as people whose reality I can feel.  They are missing in a bleak and rather horrible way.  I feel terrible about that fact, and I hope it doesn’t come across as insulting—though it has probably hurt the feelings of people about whom I care on more than one occasion—but it seems to be just the way my brain works.  It’s also probably related to the fact that I never have for an instant imagined wanting to be someone other than myself, even though I hate myself; I just cannot even conceive of what that would mean, let alone wish for it.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.  I’m back on the train, yeah, and here I go again, on my own…alone again, naturally.

(I do like to quote things, don’t I?)

I hope you have a good day.

*Of course, as far as we can tell, pretty much everything is inherently finite, but some things are much more constrained and contained in time than others.

**This is based on what my attorney, and my attorney’s supervisor, said to me.  I don’t think they were trying to be unkind, and though their judgement was and is fallible, it was likely better than mine would have been.

***I know, I’m mixing fantasy metaphors and similes.  That’s okay; I like them.

****And most of them are probably not “ex-cons”.

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Missing AC units and one man’s lack of mental health

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and that’s better than it still being Monday evening, which wasn’t so fun.  I got the notice that my AC unit had been delivered yesterday afternoon, but when I got back to the house, it was nowhere to be seen, and my housemates had not seen it let alone brought it in out of the rain.

It was raining, in case I hadn’t told you.  It still is.

Anyway, I looked around the nearby houses and then I checked with Amazon, and I called FedEx, who said that their info was that it was delivered.  I went to the website with them and saw the delivery picture‒which was not of the house where I live.

I got pretty frustrated, because it was raining a fair amount, but I looked at the picture and thought it might be the neighbor’s house.  But it had not been there when I’d looked around.

I was already wet, so I went to their house and knocked on the door, so irritated by the whole process that I was willing to interact with other people.  It turned out they had brought it inside because of the rain.  They graciously (and with some difficulty, since it was both heavy and awkward) brought it out for me.

Then I had to lug this 50 pound box, with no real handles, back to the house.  I’m feeling the effects of that in my back quite a bit, and I hold FedEx responsible.

In the end, at least I got it set up and started using it last night.  I won’t say it was miraculous, but I was able to use a blanket part of the night last night for the first time in a long while.

I guess it can’t expect it to make a life-changing difference, but it’s better to be at least a little cooler than I was.  It can’t be a bad thing‒or, well, it’s always possible in principle for it to be a bad thing, but I would give that quite a low likelihood.

As for everything else, well…I’m still at a loss.  I don’t know what to do, and I feel no why to do anything.  I guess it’s appropriate that June is (among other things) Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, though it might better be called Men’s Mental Lack of Health Awareness Month.

Apparently, according to the statistics I have recently seen (this was on social media, so the precision and accuracy must be considered at least potentially lacking) men die from suicide three times as often as women.  And, of course, people with autism spectrum disorder die from suicide a similar multiple compared with those who do not have it (and the proportion may be as high as 25 times that in non-autistic people, but I’ll stick with 3 times for the moment).

So, if those variables are independent, which they probably are not completely, then I would be nine times as likely to die from suicide as a neurotypical woman.

That sounds alarming, doesn’t it?  Nine times the risk?  Like corduroy pillows, that’s the sort of thing that makes headlines.  But if you think about it, those statistics and probability ratios give you almost no information.  Before you can decide to act on that risk multiplier, you need to understand the baseline risk/rate of occurrence.

If 10% of neurotypical women die from suicide (an absurdly large and entirely imaginary percentage) then with my relative risk of 9 x the baseline, it would seem that I would have a 90% risk of suicide.  If the women’s rate were a bit higher, my risk might even seem to be more than 100%, which is a mathematical absurdity.

On the other hand, if neurotypical women committed suicide at a rate of .000001, or one in a million, then my risk would seem to be .000009, or just shy of one in a hundred thousand*.  That wouldn’t be too terrible.

This is why you should not get alarmed if you hear some statistic such as “people with red hair have a hundred times the chance to spontaneously combust as non redheads”.  You need to know what the baseline chance is to know if there’s anything worth worrying about**.

As for my personal risk of suicide, well, that’s not vanishingly small.  I have numerous risk factors, including the single biggest predictive risk factor.  As a rough estimate, I would say that, despite the fact that I’m a 55 year old white male with some pertinent family history, I think my risk of death by suicide is significantly higher than my risk of death due to heart attack; it’s probably bigger than my chance of having a heart attack, even a relatively minor one.  That’s not a fixed number, of course.  Many things can change all these relative risks.

Unfortunately, I don’t honestly expect my own risk of suicide to go down significantly, or even at all, as time goes on.  My internal life seems to be steadily growing slightly bleaker, and even blanker, every day, and none of the things that used to bring me comfort or at least engage me seem to be of any interest.  If anything, I feel my likelihood is increasing over time, though maybe it’s staying the same but each day is a new roll of the dice, so over time, the likelihood increases.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  I don’t have the wherewithal to change the situation myself; if I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation.  I’ve already tried a great many things.

Anyway, I hope the weather is more pleasant wherever you are, and that you have a very good day.

*The actual rates, while apparently difficult to tease out with great precision, are quite a bit more alarming than my second scenario.  In the UK, for instance, it seems that about 1% of people are autistic, but 11% of suicides are by autistic people.  The rate of suicidal ideation among people with ASD is way higher than that in the general population, starting in childhood (which I can confirm in my case), when the rates of ideation and attempt are reported as high as 25 times that of the general population.  Also, overall, the expected lifespan of autistic people has been measured at about 54 years.  Even given typical statistical variance, I’m about due.

**Since there is not a single confirmed case of spontaneous human combustion, despite what you may have heard, even a multiplier of a hundred may leave one so close to a zero probability that being hit by an asteroid might be a more realistic concern.

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That one might read the blog of fate, and see the revolution of the times

Hello and good morning.  This is my Thursday blog post.  There are many other blogs out there, but this one is mine.

That’s about all I have to say about that, honestly.  I don’t have any other clue.  If anyone has seen a stylized cartoon paw print anywhere, please let me know*.

I don’t know.  What should I write?  I don’t really want to deal with politics right now‒not even political philosophy, which I sometimes find quite interesting.  But watching the world now, it just seems clear that humans are pathetic and, at least when two or more are gathered together in the name of something, their net IQ seems to be the lowest one of all those present divided by the number of people present.

That’s probably harsher than reality‒by that measure, two people each with an IQ of 150 would together have an IQ of 75.  But I don’t have the patience to work out some more likely formula, which would probably involve natural logarithms and the like.  And how would one test such a thing?  The point is, as Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Men In Black pointed out, a person can be smart, but people are stupid.

If humans destroy themselves (whether or not they take the rest of the world with them) it will be a well and truly earned destruction.  It will be a shame, of course, since there is also great potential there.  But then again, in all the hydrogen atoms of the universe there lies the potential for fusion into larger elements and then the creation of beings and civilizations and technology and art and love and even the capacity to produce civilizations that could not only last well into the livable duration of the cosmos but could possibly even alter or steer the fate of the universe itself, doing cosmic engineering.

But of course, almost no hydrogen atoms will ever be part of such a thing.  Perhaps none of them will be.  Certainly, if humans survive and eventually become cosmically relevant, it will be entirely because of luck.  It will not be deserved.

Actually, I’m not even sure what “deserve” really means most of the time.  When people say things like “you deserve love” or “you deserve to be happy” I don’t see the logic**.  How does one come to deserve love or happiness?  Does one come to deserve them just by being born?

That may be a nice idea, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  How can one earn some reward by doing nothing?  One can have rights of course, but most real rights are rights not to have others interfere with you.  If you can be said to have a right to something that is in limited supply and to which there is no possible guarantee, then that “right” is pointless.  I might as well say that each person has a right to two unicorns and a wyvern.

All that aside, I suspect that the vast majority of humans are literally no more likely to make any significant contribution to becoming a cosmically relevant civilization than are typical nematodes.  The current (and past) political climate of the world provides strong evidence for that much.

And now that we have thoroughly unqualified public appointees calling for registries of the disabled‒very much like the governments of certain well known and rightly despised 20th century regimes did‒I return to thoughts that “neurodivergent” people should take a Magneto/brotherhood of mutants approach to things and rise up and throw off the control of the so-called neurotypical people.

Neurodivergent people are far less likely‒or so it certainly seems‒to succumb to mob mentality and populism.  I suspect they (we) are far more likely to make a cosmically relevant civilization than the troglodytes are.

As I’ve said before‒in some recent post on this blog, I think‒neurodivergent people are more like Vulcans, and the rest of humanity is like the Romulans.  Whom would you rather have guiding the future of your civilization?

Well, that’s all extremely nerdy and probably silly, but it’s nevertheless probably not wrong.  Maybe we can convince most of the morons to refuse to be vaccinated, and then encourage them all to live close together so they’re not “contaminated” by people who have been vaccinated, and then let the viruses fall where they may.

Whatever.  This is all stupid.  Everything is stupid.  Everyone is uncountably infinitely stupid.  And I am surely among the stupidest of all for even bothering, for even trying to do anything.

TTFN

*This is a reference to the kids’ show Blue’s Clues, which my kids (and I) really enjoyed when they were little.

**Probably because there is none.

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Eddies in the flow of reality (but that’s not his sofa)

It’s Monday, in case anyone didn’t realize it.  Actually, whether or not anyone out there realized the fact, it’s still Monday.  Not that nature recognizes anything “Mondayish” about this day; the divisions of the days into weeks and months is all just human convention*.  Years, on the other hand, are natural cycles, as are days.

You can probably tell that I have no interesting ideas about which to write today, so I’m trading in banalities.  I try to get interested in discussing economics and politics and all that stuff, but except in rare instances‒though I lament and bemoan the seemingly indelible stupidity of human “civilization”‒it’s mostly just obviously futile and pathetic.  The people seeking and gaining “power” seem fundamentally deluded about their own importance, as is nearly everyone else.  Yet, if the everyday person’s grasp of even recent history is any evidence, almost nothing is even going to be remembered even a few months into the future.

I don’t quite understand how people live in their world without even a sense of context beyond their immediate environs.  I suppose that’s the natural state of humans.  In prehistoric times it was probably more than adequate, and certainly there’s been little time for evolution to alter the fundamental workings of the human brain to make them more suitable for dealing with the realities of the very large, complex, spontaneously self-assembled system that they call civilization.

Or maybe neurodivergence is the evolution of the brain to adapt to such systems, and the only reason so-called normal humans even still exist is that there were a lot more of them in the beginning.  Sometimes I think that people with ASD and ADHD and so on should do a Magneto kind of movement and rise up, throwing off the yoke of humans.  After all, if modern resurgence of authoritarianism and xenophobia/rights violations even in the US demonstrates anything, it is that the notion of “never again” which refers to the ideal of ensuring that the holocaust (or something like it) never recurs, is a pipe dream.

And yet, to revile and try to overthrow so-called normal humans could perhaps be just such an expression of bigotry, or at least prejudice, as I am bemoaning.  Would that be hypocritical and/or unjust?  If so, could it still be a necessary evil?  Is there any such thing as “necessary evil” or is that always just a cop-out?  (I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on that last question.)

From a physics point of view, humanity itself is not necessary, and there seems to be a pretty good likelihood that humanity is not even consequential, but that the whole of civilization is just a transient, highly local phenomenon, that will flash out of existence leaving no more remnants behind than do the little whorls and eddies of beautiful shapes that happen with you first pour cream into coffee.

In the long run, as far as we can see, the universe will be not just dead but mostly empty.  And though there are theoretical bases for everything starting over again (e.g., a Poincaré Recurrence) almost all of the intervening time‒which is so vast compared to the piddling age of the universe so far as to make 13 billion years like a single flap of a bee’s wing in the history of life on Earth‒will be lifeless.  So, looking at what appears to be nearly irrefutable physics, lifelessness is the natural, usual state of reality.

Of course, in principle, people could get beyond that, as David Deutsch has pointed out in The Beginning of Infinity.  Of course, as he has also pointed out, there is nothing that guarantees that people will become cosmically significant; it’s entirely possible for civilization to stagnate and decay or to self-destruct.

There is, mind you, plenty of time left in the lifespan of “habitability” of the Earth, so there might be time for another species to develop a civilization if humans die out, but there’s no good reason to suspect that they would be any more prepared to develop a cosmically significant culture than humans have been.

Maybe what we should do is split the human race into neurotypical and neurodivergent populations sort of like the Vulcans and Romulans in Star Trek.  Obviously (I think) the neurodivergent people would  be the Vulcans and the “typical” humans would be the Romulans‒you know, warlike, cruel, spiteful, duplicitous, and without honor.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make this morning.  Maybe the point is that there is no point, that all meaning is internal and provincial and ultimately solipsistic or at least narcissistic.  But I am not enthusiastic about any of it, really.  I’m tired already, and it’s only Monday morning.

Oh, well.  Welcome to the new week.  I hope you all are doing well and feeling well as well.

*Which sounds a bit like some weird fan expo by aliens pretending to be and/or celebrating humanity.

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It seems appropriate that coughin’ and coffin sound alike.

It’s Monday again, though I know of no one who asked it to be.  I am not going to write much today (I suspect) because I am quite under the weather‒I’ve been dealing with some form of bronchitis that started Friday, and I’m not feeling much better yet, though my oxygen saturation seems good, and I have no fever (but then again, I am always on NSAIDS and acetaminophen, so it’s hard to be sure I haven’t just suppressed a fever).  By rights, I should probably not be going into the office today, but my coworker is out of town until tomorrow, so basically, I’ve got to keep the office running.

I do have masks to wear, and I don’t just mean fun and/or scary ones.  Neither do I refer to “autistic masking” which is what many autistic people do to fit in with other, neurotypical people.  Lord knows I’ve always tried to fit in, and I definitely put on “masks” and tried to shape myself to please those around me.  I feel almost that my autism presented a little more the way it does in girls than in “traditional” autistic boys, at least as discussed by other people with autism.

Anyway, I’m not really doing this blog as a venue via which to discuss ASD.  That must be the case, since I didn’t even consider the possibility before the last few years, and this blog has existed for much longer.  I suppose it might be interesting for someone (but not me!) to look back at my older posts and see if there are any hints about ASD in the way I write or discuss things.  I doubt that I’m interesting enough for anyone ever to do that, though‒I certainly don’t find myself interesting enough.

It may go without saying that I did not play guitar or go for any walks except to the convenience store this weekend.  I was mostly just laying around and trying to rest.  It’s a bit annoying that I still didn’t sleep well, and only stayed asleep for a while under the effects of delta 9 gummies and 2 Benadryl.  I slept a little more than usual, but of course, it’s not really restorative sleep.

I wonder what it is about the autistic brain that leads to the tendency to sleep poorly.  Is it atypia in the hypothalamus, or are the effects on the amygdala leading to hypervigilance which is consistent with my tendency?  I don’t know for sure how well the neuroscience of autism is progressing, but I guess I could get on Google Scholar and/or check the preprint servers.

Anyway, I think I’m pretty much done for right now.  I’m really very tired and worn down.  I guess I’ll be talking to you all tomorrow, though it’s less likely that you’ll be talking to me.  In the meantime, if you’re able, please try to have a good day.

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What shall I do now?

I wrote the beginning of a first draft of a post for yesterday (which was Monday, since today is Tuesday) before it became obvious as I was getting ready for work that something in my GI tract, something that I had eaten, was taking its vengeance upon me.

I ended up not going to the office yesterday, and I ended up not even posting the draft, which I considered posting as was*.  However, there was really not much substance to it.  I think I realized as I was writing that it was St. Patrick’s Day, so I mentioned that in passing, but it’s never been a holiday that means much to me, at least not now that I cannot eat my mother’s homemade corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, that’s a lot of the gist of yesterday’s post, at least if I recall correctly.  Oh, right, I also mentioned that, starting yesterday morning, I am not taking St. John’s Wort anymore.  I gave it well over the 6 week potential time frame for antidepressants at least to start to make a noticeable difference.  Some enterprising reader can‒if you are so inclined‒try to work out based on mentions in my posts roughly how long I’ve been going, but clearly it’s not been making my depression diminish; I think we can all agree about that.

I was also worried, probably unnecessarily, that it might be contributing to the recent apparent worsening of my chronic pain.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a bit too soon to tell, and the matter is muddied by my recent GI trouble, which still leaves me feeling a bit bloated and sore this morning.

As for anything else, well, I don’t know.  What else do I have about which to write other than depression and illness and pain and insomnia?  I suppose I could write more about autism spectrum disorder, but I feel that would be a bit presumptuous of me.

Of course, I’ve learned a fair amount about autism in the research that eventually led me to seek a diagnosis, and my medical and scientific background gives me other advantages in understanding.  But I have been someone diagnosed with autism (level 2, not just level 1, so apparently I need significant support**) only for a few weeks now, so I don’t know about what even to talk.  What of the people, places, and events of my life are explained or explicated by the autism diagnosis?  Does it, or will it, help me come to terms with any of it?  I don’t know.

I certainly don’t feel that I can just waltz into any discussions of or by people with autism, or communities of such people, and have anything useful to say.  I also don’t feel that I have found “my people”, though I certainly can “get” at least some of the things they discuss better than I can some of the things that other people discuss.  But I still feel very much like an alien, an outsider, a changeling, a replicant, something that doesn’t belong on this planet‒even when I’m interacting with neurodivergent people.

So, I guess we’ll see what happens with the DCing of the Wort.  I doubt it will really affect my pain, though it may pain my affect*** if my depression worsens even from where it is now thanks to stopping it.  In any case, it really doesn’t matter, because I really don’t matter, so Batman knows what will happen.  If I implode completely, or if I crash and burn, or whatever figure of speech you want to use, there will be no significant loss, not even to me.

I don’t know what else to say.  I’m not doing anything creative or artistic.  I haven’t played guitar (or any other instrument) in weeks now, and I haven’t written fiction, and I haven’t drawn.  I’ve barely read anything other than rereading my own stuff to try to inspire or at least trigger myself.  That hasn’t worked.

So, who knows what will happen?  I certainly don’t.  But in the meanwhile, I hope you have a good day.

*The past tense of “as is”.

**I don’t really have that support, but just because someone needs something to be able to thrive doesn’t mean that thing is available to them.  Reality is heartless.

***Ha ha.

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When we fight reality, reality always wins.

It’s Tuesday morning now‒which, fortunately, as far as I know, has never been described as “never-ending”.  Alas, the same cannot be said of Tuesday afternoon.  However, since we are not still stuck in the last Tuesday afternoon‒or indeed in the very first Tuesday afternoon‒then we have to conclude that the line “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending” from the Beatles song Lady Madonna is a poetic figure of speech.

That’s weirdly frustrating for me.  It reminds me a bit of how I remember reading that Tolkien was frustrated with the play Macbeth because Birnam Wood didn’t actually come to Dunsinane, signaling Macbeth’s imminent defeat*.  Tolkien didn’t see why, in a play that clearly involved the supernatural, the wood could not literally come to Dunsinane.

Of course, in the fullness of time, in his own work, the Forest of Fangorn really did come to Isengard, and to Helm’s Deep.  It’s one of the best moments in The Lord of the Rings.

How did I get onto that subject?  Or, as Théoden asked, “How did it come to this?”

Now I’m suddenly thinking about the moment when Théoden, despairing, asks (in the movie) “What can men do against such reckless hate?”  It’s a real moment of doubt and pain, but Aragorn is there to support his spirit.

And that makes me think of doing a “parody” version of Sympathy for the Devil, in which we would have the line, “I was ‘round when Théoden had his moment of doubt and pain / Made damn sure that the uruk hai met our swords and sealed their fate.”  It could be called, perhaps, Sympathy for the Ranger or Sympathy for the Strider or something like that.

We could have lines like “Just as every Noldor is a kinslayer, and all the Nazgul slaves / as East is West just call me…Aragorn, ‘cause Minas Tirith I will save,” or something along those lines.  It’s a bit silly and cheesy, I guess, but that’s okay; it’s a parody.  Anyway, I don’t think I’m actually going to try to produce a whole set of lyrics for it, but who knows?  I’ve done weirder things for more frivolous reasons.

As for what to do about relatively more serious things‒i.e., my diagnosis of ASD level2‒I still don’t know.  I don’t know how I’m going to go about following the recommendations in the report, such as they are.  Knowing at least some of the explanations for many of the difficulties I’ve had in my life, including my relatively intractable troubles with depression and with insomnia and social anxiety, is a good thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t necessarily give me any idea how to approach things from here.

In some sense, it is a little discouraging, especially regarding my depression and insomnia, since there is no cure for neurodevelopmental disorders; they are a product of the fundamental structure and function of the brain.  At best, they can be managed.  This also explains why many traditional or typical treatments for such things do not work well in those with ASD; evidently, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t tend to work as well for people with autism as it does for “neurotypical” people.  And I know that antidepressants have more limited efficacy as well.

This makes sense.  We commonly hear of how many of the treatments and scientific understanding of major illness were for a long time only studied in men, and women were treated the same way as males, until slowly, gradually, the medical community realized that many diseases present differently in women, and respond differently to treatment.

Well, autistic and other “neurodivergent” people are a much smaller portion of the population than women are, and we don’t know as much as we would like about psychiatric and related disorders and their treatment even in the neurotypical.  It makes sense that we should be somewhat behind the curve in even understanding, let alone knowing how to treat, psychological and neurological disorders in those with underlying neurodevelopmental conditions.

The universe is complicated.  Any attempt to make it seem or feel less so, as by following the “ideas” of demagogues and demonizing those who might disagree, is just going to leave one vulnerable to underlying, actual reality‒which is not merely a matter of perception.

The universe at large does not care what you believe.  You can definitely be killed by forces and things that you not only don’t understand, but in which you don’t believe, or about which you have not the slightest inkling.  As a particularly gruesome example, it didn’t matter whether JFK ever knew he was being shot at, let alone that he had been hit.  A person can die before they even know that anything is happening; they can be just snuffed out and gone.  Probably most people, and nearly all other animals, die not understanding at all what is killing them or how or why or what death is.

Such is the evenhanded dealing of the world, to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge.  The only thing we can do to armor ourselves is to try to understand as much about the universe as we can.  For one never knows what knowledge will be useful or even essential before one has that knowledge.  Greater knowledge is always worthwhile, all other things being equal.

Of course, all other things never really are equal, but that’s why it pays to learn how to solve partial differential equations.

That’s enough for now.  Have a good day if you can, please.

*Macbeth’s reaction when he receives the news that, apparently, Birnam Wood really has come to Dunsinane Hill, is to hit the messenger and yell “Liar and slave!”  I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s kind of funny and also is an instance of one of the cardinal failures of literary and dramatic (and real life) villains:  they discourage their own people from giving them information by punishing them for delivering accurate but bad news.

by

(ASD 2) x 2

It’s Monday morning now, and it’s a new month, and I’m writing a new blog post, one that will‒or should‒not be like the old post.  Though, of course, superficially it will look like most of the others, and for someone perusing a bunch of them who does not happen to read English, there will almost certainly be no distinguishing characteristics.  Certainly there will be no meaningful ones.

Be that as it may, as of Friday evening, I have now received my autism assessment report.  It is official; I have been diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorder, level 2.

The level 2 part of that surprised me a little bit.  In case you don’t know‒and for most of you, there’s no reason why you would‒the levels of autism, not in order, are:

Level 1:  What would be called “high-functioning” autism by the hoi polloi, though that term is frowned upon by the “neurodivergent” community by and large, because it judges the quality of a person with autism by how well they can pretend to be someone without autism.  In any case, those with level 1 are people who have autism but are not significantly disabled by it, and are able to do okay on their own with minimal or at least fairly easy accommodation.

Level 3:  These are people who are more severely impaired by their autism, and are more or less dependent upon support from others; they cannot really function on their own at all.

Level 2 is mid-range (duh!) and is characterized by needing “substantial” or “considerable” support.  Here’s a quote from a web-search:  “Autism Level 2 means a moderate level of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), where an individual requires substantial support to manage social communication and daily activities, exhibiting more noticeable challenges in social interaction and repetitive behaviors compared to Level 1, but not as severe as Level 3.”

I guess my bias was that, if diagnosed, I would be level 1, since I do live on my own and I don’t really have any support.  On the other hand, there’s little argument but that my life is a complete mess, and it’s not improving.  So I guess I really don’t do so well on my own.  But it’s not as though I have any health insurance or any other access to support services to help me improve things.  Still, at least it explains a little bit about my intractable insomnia and depression and anxiety and so on, as well as all my many failed interpersonal relationships.

I don’t yet know whether this knowledge will make any difference for me.  I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with the result.  I am still digesting it.

There is, however, an amusing coincidence, if you enjoy such things*.  I was born with an atrial septal defect (a hole between the upper chambers of the heart) “secundum type”, that was repaired when I was 18.  In other words, that was “ASD” secundum type.  So, one might say, ASD type 2.

And now I have Autism Spectrum Disorder, level 2, so:  ASD level 2.

These are both official acronyms used by the medical community.  It’s nothing but a coincidence, of course, but it is a peculiar and slightly amusing one.  I have been diagnosed with ASD 2 in two different ways.  There’s only one of the two for which there was a surgical intervention that was essentially curative.  The other is something for which one just has to adjust and deal as well as one can.  Fortunately, I’m really good at adjusting to and dealing with just about anything that comes at me.

Ha ha ha ha ha!  That was a lie, obviously.  I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly good at adjusting to things, except perforce, which has certainly happened a fair number of times.

Anyway, again, I don’t know at all what I’m going to do with this information.  I don’t know how I could possibly actually seek, let alone obtain, any manner of support and/or accommodation, other than the basic stuff that happens more or less on its own.  I’m going to tell a few people at work, I think‒certainly the owner, though I feel a bit shy about that, but also my two coworkers with whom I am closest, one of whom has a child with autism.

I don’t know how much will change otherwise.  But I figured I would share this information with those of you who read this blog regularly‒a rarefied few individuals, I must say.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, too, barring the unforeseen (a caveat that always applies).  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day as you possibly can.

*Well, the councidence’s existence isn’t actually conditional upon you enjoying it, but I think you know what I mean.  Please let me know in the comments below if you do not know what I mean.  I don’t like not being clear.