Special Days

I’ve never really been a person who makes a big deal out of “special days”. I’m the one who never sends Christmas cards, the one who sends birthday cards to everyone at the same time about once every five years, the one who never bothered with bonfire night or Halloween or sending valentines or waiting until Easter day to eat chocolate or marking nearly any other sort of “occasion”. I should imagine that greetings card retailers would very soon go out of business if everyone was like me. The only days that have been an exception have been New Year’s Day, when I’ve tried to set goals for the coming year, pancake day, when we have pancakes for supper, and our wedding anniversary, when we have potted meat for breakfast!

Since the advent of the internet, however, these “special days” seem to get rather shoved in my face. And many of them are really ones I’d rather not think about. This time of year seems to be awash with “days”, and I’m not really enjoying the whole “day” experience very much right now.

On Sunday it was Mother’s Day (or Mothering Sunday, depending on your preference). As an infertile childless person, Mother’s Day really really doesn’t work for me. It’s a reminder, every year, of something big and painful and missing in my life. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way about it, for a variety of reasons. This year I tried to spend most of the day staying off facebook, but that was also, in its own way really tough – I now have very little life that isn’t online, and cutting myself off from my only real social life can feel really lonely at the moment because I’m not well enough to do anything else that would otherwise distract me for the day. I had been coping, just about, with life until then, but that really was the last straw, and I’ve really been struggling since.

Then, of course, next weekend, we have April Fool’s Day. Another day when I’ve tried, by and large, to stay away from any sort of internet or TV until midday. I have never understood the premise of April Fool’s – it seems to me to run thus: tell a lie, then when someone believes your lie, tell them they’re stupid! And some people, for some reason, find this funny. I KNOW I don’t get this sort of humour – I never have, and my memories of the day as a child were that people constantly told these lies, then told me I was stupid, and the whole thing is an exercise in embarrassment and humiliation. I got to the stage where I simply didn’t believe ANYTHING anyone said on April the 1st in order to save everyone the trouble. I’m quite happy to declare, these days, at the outset, that I know I’m an idiot, I know I can’t tell if it’s a joke if you don’t put a winky face by it, and please don’t complicate social interaction further by deliberately saying stuff that’s false (the same applies, by the way, to the internet “jokes” where someone then “catches” you and sends you a message telling you that you “fell for it”).

And now, to add to the pain of Mother’s Day, and the humiliation of April Fool’s day, there are two “new” days to add into this time of year. It is, apparently, World Bipolar Day on April 30th and Autism Awareness/Acceptance Day on May 2nd.

So here am I, an autistic person with bipolar disorder, sitting here wondering what I should do about this. Because here am I, supposedly articulate intelligent blogger with insider knowledge of both bipolar disorder and autism, and I should really really be doing something about these “days”.

But I am stuck. I cannot “perform to order”. My husband writes a weekly “column” for an online magazine, and has to produce this thing week in week out, whatever the weather, however many meltdowns his wife had that week, and however many times he was required to go to the shop that day because the only damn thing she’d eat was milkshake and cheese and we’d run out of milkshake and didn’t have the right sort of cheese. He performs wonderfully – he is a skilled enough writer that even when his spoons are running low he can still write, just as even when mine are low I can drive a car and play an orchestral viola part without much difficulty. However, I am NOT a skilled writer. What might or might not be apparent from this blog is that, although I might post the posts on consecutive days, I often write three or more in one sitting but then don’t post them all at once. I have days when I can barely even write a facebook status – so the thought of having to produce something particular for a particular day throws me into a horrified paralysis where I can’t produce anything at all.

So I feel guilty, because I should be doing something spectacular for these days. I should be making memes and posting them on the facebook group. I should be explaining bipolar disorder and autism to everyone I meet in the street. I should be helping others with both conditions (conditions was the best word I could think of here) to understand and to feel less alone and more loved and all sorts of other lovely positive feely helpful stuff. And I really can’t do all that just at the moment, because I don’t have the spoons. In recent months I’ve spent a lot of time on groups with autistic people – I’m becoming aware of the vast variability in people’s experiences of autism, I’m learning how offensive many autistic people find the “puzzle piece” to be and how it’s tied up with all sorts of harmful and damaging therapies that attempt to make autistic people “look normal” from the outside, while breaking them inside (one of the advantages of not being diagnosed as a child is that nobody actively tried to “cure” me, although the exterior pressure to conform and to behave “normally” did damage me very badly anyway – I looked great in my early 20s, and if I’d been known to be autistic as, say, a 23-year old, then I’d have been held up as a model of “success” and my graduation photos would, doubtless, have been turned into memes and plastered all over facebook if it had existed, but the damage was being done inside to such an extent that by the time I reached my late 20s it was a totally different story – they wouldn’t have been making memes about my life at 29, which largely consisted of breakdown, burnout, spending night after night banging my head against the wall, and downing bottles of whisky and boxes of pills in an attempt not to wake up the next day or ever again).

And I should be telling this tale. And I should be learning all the politics and finding out which organizations are listening to autistic people and which are not. I feel like I should be going online and telling parents to let their autistic children flap their hands and jump up and down and communicate in ways other than by speech and eat soft food and wear comfortable clothes and so on and so on and so on. And, as an autistic person who can communicate by writing, I should be advocating for all autistics to be able to be themselves because none of us should have to mask or pretend or to be abused or to damage ourselves in order to “fit in” with a world that is difficult enough to cope with anyway.

But I’m still struggling with my own issues right now. I’ve had my diagnosis for only just over 5 weeks. I didn’t even have a clue I WAS autistic until just over 7 months ago. I’m still adjusting. I look at the people who have written much better blogs than this and had books published and all sorts and I feel like I should be doing the same (I was brought up to be a high achiever – the fault of the exam results discussed in Expectations Gone) but then I remember I’m really very very new to all this. I’m also coming to terms with my own childhood whilst being exposed to parenting issues in a way that is really tough as I’d largely withdrawn from anything to do with childhood or children prior to autism stuff entering my life. And I’m in the midst of the menopause and getting used to the idea that my father has terminal cancer and trying to navigate the stresses of applying for benefits so we don’t end up bankrupt. So my head is rather full.

I lay in bed this morning wishing I’d never met my husband – because he is the one who has kept me alive and if I’d never met him I’d be dead by now and all this malarkey would never have happened. I’d have cosily committed suicide some years ago and my affairs would all be long since dealt with. (This sentence did, of course, prompt me to think that there must be a “suicide day” too, so I googled it and discovered that it’s not until September, so I don’t have to worry about that one for the time being, which is a relief). But that’s how low my spoon drawer is right now. (I KNOW this place, I’ve been there many times, and I’m not in immediate danger so don’t worry about sending the cavalry – my executive functioning is too poor to do anything drastic right now in any case and my autistic adherence to routine is keeping me going in a bizarre sort of a way). I’m better than I was earlier today, but in order to start to feel better my speech had to vanish – I have spent most of the day today completely nonverbal from a speech point of view (I often feel very very ill and extremely bad just prior to my speech disintegrating, and when the words go it is usually a big relief). Fortunately I didn’t have to be anywhere today or make any telephone calls!

And so, for now, I come to the conclusion that the best I can do is point people to this blog, which is the place that, so far, I have best managed to explain the many many thoughts that are in my head, and where I have translated more thoughts into words than, possibly, I ever have before. Of course, I’m not very GOOD at pointing people to the blog (although I’m trying), because I’m possibly one of the worst publicists in the history of publicity, but it’s here, and it is what it is. For myself I need to practise enough self-care to get through all this. I need to try to eat and drink regularly. I need to continue to use this blog as something to help me, rather than something to stress me (I’m not, after all, being paid to write it, and nobody asked me to write it – I sometimes wonder if anybody’s even reading it, although indications are that a few people are glancing through it from time to time).

Maybe I’ll see something on facebook that will trigger a blog post relevant to one of the “days”, or maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll be more equipped to talk about awareness or acceptance or whatever next year, and I need to cut myself a bit of slack for now – I can’t answer every question on facebook or call out every mistaken post or fight with everyone who posits some crazy idea – I just don’t have the energy. I’m very much having to choose my battles right now!