A New General About Me, Because These Things Need To Be Addressed Again

A general about me:

I am autistic and I am almost 64 years old. I am going to be autistic till the day I leave Planet Earth.

My autism is what makes me the me I am, and I am proud of the me I am, and the me that I have become today.

My autism comes with numerous sensory sensitivities, not because I am trying to be difficult or extra, it is because certain noises or environments are things I literally am unable to handle because they represent for me, actual pain.

I’m not saying don’t paly your nice bass-y sound systems during a car show, just don’t have it so loud it vibrates my inner organs from even 100-200 feet away, in my own living room!

Being around for almost 64 years has been long enough for me to learn to know my body, which includes my mind and how I process, react, and deal with the world outside of me.

When I say a something is an issue, it really is. Please don’t belittle that! Or me!

I KNOW what I CAN and what I CANNOT handle. I do NOT choose to be any given way that I present myself to be, it just goes with being both autistic and quite traumatized, thank you.

I have never liked noises that overpower my body.

I have never liked being left all alone for too long.

I have never liked being relegated and confined and cooped up.

I have never liked being told one thing and then things go differently without there being any notification of these changes.

Abrupt changes send me into hell.

Rude, harsh, abrupt people send me into hell.

People rushing me sends me into hell.

People jumping to the wrong conclusions about me sends me into hell.

Especially when they won’t let me explain before they pronounce harsh judgments on me.

People giving me the “Just think positive! For every negative thought, think of two or three positives in your life,” I ALSO cannot handle. It is dismissive, so dismissive, and just reinforces how wrong my family always thought I was growing up.

People labeling me or judging me, or talking over me, and not listening to me, sends me into hell.

People giving up on me sends me into holy hell.

People expecting me to do their normal sends me into hell.

I have a heart so big that when I see others hurting, it overwhelms me to a degree where I do not know what to say, how to comfort them and be there for them.

Others’ Big Moods and Big Feelings, I feel so hard and so deeply it often scares me, and I will run and hide from you. It’s because I don’t know what to do for you in the moment.

It ain’t because I don’t care.

Patience comes hard for me. So does compromise. I try, even so, to have patience and to compromise, but I can only go so far with that, until I can’t anymore because I have reached an actual wall where I can’t go any further with that.

I DO meet y’all halfway, and I do so every day I live and breathe.

I often come across as self centered or even selfish, and that is NOT who I am, but many who don’t know or don’t want to know about what makes me this way, will just assume I am this, and walk away and throw me in the trash.

I have deep-seated abandonment and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria because of how I have been treated most of my life.

I have loads and loads of anxiety along with those abandonment issues, so when I don’t know what is going on, and, say, for example, people are late getting to me, this anxiety will automatically spike, and build and build up to a point, leaving me wide open to having a meltdown.

I had recent caregivers who made it their daily mission to purposely come late, and they would turn off their phones and leave me here hanging wondering when I was going to get my breakfast, or when I would get to eat dinner, and then, at the very last minute when I would turn into a screaming mess —- suddenly they would turn their phones back on and they would communicate, and then come —- always after I had gone straight into a screaming panicky meltdown.

My lived experiences growing up in a family who on the regular, lectured, and punished me for not being what they expected of me, always being picked on, scolded, corrected, and made to feel like I couldn’t think for myself, and that I was so many levels of wrong, broken and damaged, has done a real deep number on me……

A real deep number that I am still dealing with today. It’s called Complex PTSD trauma, and no, it often does not heal.

Not when it involved me being rejected and scolded to d3@th my whole life, both at home and at school, and then bullied and mind fucked by several mean past friends and past caregivers too, some of which were real living walking
N I G H T M A R E S for me to have to live through.

My autism is not a thing you too experience, because I literally experience

E V E R Y T H I N G on a heightened level.

My autism is as different as Mac is from Windows.

I am hyper sensitive to being thrown under the bus, dismissed, muzzled, and made to feel belittled and like I choose to be the way I am.

In my living room, it is My Sanctuary. I have my TV sound on in front of me and my music playing on my computer at the same time to the right of where I sit in my comfy lift chair recliner —— because this is my security blanket!!!!

I NEED that, because total silence in my home is a thing that literally terrifies me.

I can literally HEAR the silence in my home, and it scares me shitless.

I always keep my TV and music low enough for me to be able to still hear it, but it allows me to be able to converse with whomever comes into my sanctuary, which is usually my two caregivers. But I do turn them up when I want to enjoy them, and also when I watch my daily soap opera, General Hospital, or movies, which I love to watch.

I cannot turn them off, sorry, not sorry, because again, these are my security blanket and I need my music and TV sound ON so I can function sitting in my living room with nowhere to ever go.

I am also a part time wheelchair user. I use my wheelchair to get around outside, and a cane for inside of my house.

I know I live in a world that is still, even in the 2020’s, not made for me.

But it can change —- just as a Mac computer can work with a Windows computer, when certain codes are created so they can work together.

I keep speaking about my autism and how it affects my ability to handle daily shit, in the hopes people will see and understand and get it that this is a neurological disability, and our autism is who we ARE.

I speak about it so the non-autistic world can someday soon be changed to become sensory friendly and accessible for us, and not just that, but accessible for ALL disabled people.