Friday, May 4, 2007

After a few days of being free from drugs--days when I felt calm, centered and joyful, able to think deeply about philosophical and personal issues--the doping has started again. It may have been in the tampered sleep supplement that I had to take last night for severe insomnia (why after a few nights of healthy and sound sleep and dreams, did I become insomniac again?), but it may have been in what caused the insomnia to begin with in the first place.  All I know is that I can smell the drugs in my urine again, and cannot stand the revulsion and self-alienation that I feel whenever I smell drugs coming from my own body that are seriously destructive to my body and psyche, and which cause alienation from reality. For it is being aware of, and fully attuned to reality that creates my peace and joy.   I realized that the other day when for the first time in weeks or months, I realized that I was noticing children playing, and lovers loving, and clouds in the sky.  When I am drugged, I am encapsulated in my own bodily and psychic misery and suffering, and it is all I can think about and focus on.  

While I was clear, I also realized that I am not manic at all.  I recognize manic depressives--not only do they go through clear cyclic patterns, their levels of manic behavior results in destructive and/or near psychotic behavior, and they act inappropriately.  I am reminded of a co-worker who I think is manic, who came to work one day after being fired, and after being reluctantly reinstated from sheer desperate need of a body, began pretending to be a supervisor, giving us orders!

I am not manic, but I do experience an elevated mood.  That is partly natural, because when I am healthy, I just have a "natural high" in regard to life, but I also think it is a defense mechanism against the overwhelming social anxiety that I experience as an autistic. It's the psychic strategy of the best defense is a good offense.  By extroverting elevated amounts of energy, I protect and defend myself from my psychic receptivity of, and projection from other's negative "vibes," and ward off my own personal anxiety that comes from social interaction.  When my energy is elevated like that, my brain finds it easy to communicate--both with myself and others.  When I am in an autistic mode, the communication centers of my brain just shut down, and I don't talk, either with others or myself.  I am aware of what is going on, but it is only later, when I can think verbally again, that I become self-aware of what has happened both as subject and object.  When I am autistic, my self-awareness as subject is seriously to severely compromised.  This happens more often that people realize.  It happens in crowds.  It happens when I am examined by doctors or subjected to unanticipated touch (though I have no difficulty in intimate situations). It happens when I am forcefed these psychotropic drugs (but marijuana certainly doesn't do it).   It happens when I am in a strange or unfamiliar enviroment, or surrounded by strangers or unfamiliar people. It happens in urban enviroments, but not natural ones.  Mountains, deserts, oceans, woods,and places of quiet, nautral beauty, like a botanic garden in the middle of a city actually can put me back in touch with my full, expressive self.  I've known that this has been a problem with me for years.  I remember telling a confessor that I thought I had an evil spirit of muteness--that sometimes I just cannot talk, even if the situation calls for it.  In retrospect, I can see how the autism has impacted me in innumerable situations throughout the years, for even though my brain can't communicate to myself, my memory remembers, and then when I able to go back and conceptualize the experience I do.  The first time I was aware that I was autistic, although I didn't realize it at the time, I was about 13 or 14 years old.  I just could not relate socially, no matter how hard I tried.  After a difficult day or rejection and bullying by others, I would go in the woods by myself and cry.  The woods would open me back up and I would talk to my inner voice, which I now rely on as the voice of God.  I was crying and asking God what was I doing wrong when I tried so hard, and kept failing so miserably, and my inner voice told me, "you are not doing anything wrong.  The problem is that you are autistic."  At the time, I thought to myself, "God is talking to me in an exaggerated southern drawl."  I assumed that God was telling me that I was artistic--that I had an artistic temperment, because what little I knew of autism meant that I would be totally nonfunctional in reality, and I was functional--even if just barely. As years went by, I became more and more functional, and my high extroverted energy is a big part of my being able to function.  When that is absent, I become a top target for negative projection and polarized responses.  I start training for a new job today, and already I dread it, because I am doped up (and the freaking headache that accompanies the drugging has been bothering me for the last hour and an half), and I know that means I am going to be autistic, and life is going to be hell.  It doesn't bother me when others dislike or misunderstand me.  I have endured the utmost rejection and misunderstanding when I have been most vulnerable and sensitive both psychologically and spiritually, and I have the ego strength (and wisdom--I already know who will project onto me, and why) to withstand it.  But I have to live in a social world, and I am sick and tired of struggling to fit in, when my own natural and healthy defenses are chopped out from underneath me by these drugs that make life an enduraance of sheer hell.

 

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