I feel like I am just out of a sweat lodge

Wow, today has been a day full of so many little interesting things that I might even venture to say, as hopeless as I am, I actually feel somewhat inspired, and I am a little but like, wow, I did not know I still had a voice in me. Maybe there is somewhere left for me to go in life after all. Maybe.

I feel like certain blocks and obstacles I have struggled with all my life may be melting away, and all the while there are still enormous challenges, and so many struggles I may never get through, and all I can do is hang on for dear life, whether I ‘make it’ or not, whatever that means, because what’s the alternative, really?

One of the unfolding realisations about myself: I am highly sensitive, but we already knew that, and I am neurodivergent, too, and thinking about how these things fit together becomes *very* useful right about now. The realisation I guess is that I am a sensual creature: bicycles and ocean waves and waterslides were my first loves, and kinaesthetix sensory experience, like moving through space (horseback riding, whitewater rafting, etc.) are things that make me *happy* because they fulfill my nervous system’s need for pleasure and excitement and ideally sharing that with others in a way that is calming and co-regulating and they take me *out* of my head and make me feel like I have *lived*, especially when I get to share these treasured experiences with others. I may be afraid of getting old, of losing safety, security, grieving, dying, and maybe the whole universe is feeling bleakly pointless, and I cannot convince my head to think more positively, people might even suggest therapy, but if I am with friends navigating a rapid where all my attention needs to be on my body’s position on that raft and my oar and exactly what is happening in this moment… does it even make sense to say, this moment doesn’t matter, I’m going to lose it all one day anyway? I might bail on parties, never reach out to friends, stay stuck in life for a really long time because I can’t find the meaning. On the rapids everything transforms to, this is the only moment that matters, because this is the moment I am in, and in it, if I am not careful my life could end any second, and yet I am so excited and feel so totally engaged and alive. Doubts about, does this moment matter, does life matter, become kind of moot: and I created an experience that allowed that to happen! It is as Joseph Campbell says: we are not searching for the meaning of life but the experience of being alive.

Since a whole lot of the time it doesn’t feel so good, there is suffering, discomfort, awkward social interactions, getting to share the sentiment if OMG doesn’t it feel so good to be alive right now???!!! with someone when we’re both really feeling it is one if the most incredible experiences in life. Like, Isn’t this freaking fun? I feel totally myself right now, like other people seem to almost all the time, hear me, this is special, life is so sweet. I am an introvert but I yearn to express my pleasure and excitement in a giddy extroverted sort of way, to jump up and down with my friend and be like, let’s go again!

Maybe I’ll never be understood but as a highly sensitive neurodivergent that is me in my uniqueness, I yearn to communicate with others the pleasure I feel: it’s not just whitewater rafting for me, it is being totally alive and IN my body and you know, if I were rafting right now, my body would respond in a way that would take me right out of my abstract thoughts and into my emotions and senses in a theilling way such that, for a moment, even just a moment, seemingly unsurmountable grief does not feel unsurmountable. I feel like one huge love language for me, and major way if connection, is wanting to gush either verbally or wirh body language about how good that waterslide felt or how amazing some sensory kinaesthetic experience or another feels and how good it feels to be alive when I am indeed in my body and alive. I have felt so alone for so long because I don’t exactly know how to spontaneously create that kind of shared experience of pleasure with someone in a neurotypical world. Emotional regulation for me is intuiting that someone I am with is reeally enjoying how good something like that feels maybe even almost as much as I am… I don’t expect to necessarily ever meet someone like me but so much of my loneliness feels the result of not having a friend to be like aahhhhh that felt sooooo good let’s just chill and revel in it a while together. I don’t know about you, for me the pleasure I get from something like rafting or rollerblading keeps giving all day. I can’t pretend I am the same person after blading as I was before, at least till the euphoria starts to wear off, and it feels lonely not to be able to share like omg I feel good do you feel good? Even just non-verbally being able to convey that to each other. It feels so good and regulating for me, it feels like a place of deep connection with another, even just being with someone who understands and doesn’t think I am too weird for what gives me pleasure. If I tell a room full of people I
love waterslides it will probably make me sad because there is no way to convey how awesome they can feel to me and most people are probably just, blah, not the sort to even care to pay the money for the slides nevermind think, ‘season tickets!!! let’s do this every day aaallll summer!’ but sharing the actual experience with someone who loves it and doesn’t take it for granted is priceless.

I feel like my makeup is such that after sharing such an experience with someone and it feeling really good I just want to hang with them a while and unwind and be with that person in the enjoyment of the continuing pleasure and for me that is intimacy or at least it is one of the easiest ways to create the conditions where intimacy and free flowing connection can happen platonically or otherwise. I especially long to convey to others the magic and sort of gift others with the pleasure I get from these sorts of experiences but explaining this to neurotypical people! I don’t know. For me just knowing someone else is experiencing good feelings in maybe kind of similar way as I am, and therefore is likely relaxed and feeling good being around me and I don’t have to micromanage myself in every way and wonder if I am too weird for them, that is beyond priceless. My nervous system theives on these kinds of experiences and feeling alone in even knowing what I am talking about (and I actually don’t) is so lonely. I guess a lot of neurotypical people feel just fine a lot if the time and don’t have so many obstacles to connecting in a satisfying way in ordinary social situations. Thanks to my high sensitivity, my neurodivergence, my C-PTSD, and who knows what else, and thanks to how harsh the neurotypical world is on the rest of us, and the million ways I might in an instant appear weird and so be out of contention for their social circle, I do not often if ever have the luxury of meeting up for coffee or engaging in ordinary social banter without it feeling hard in some way, maybe feeling jusged, self-conscious, whatever. When I am riding a wave in the ocean or doing some of these ofher kinaesthetic things all those social barriers dissolve and I just feel… without any effort at all… connected… to life, to the person I’m with, and the experience of feeling that in what most people take to be conventional social situations is soooo rare. So it’s not just a wateride and it’s not just a swim in the ocean, it is the only chance I get to experience the kind if natural, easeful social connection that the neurotypicals seem to take for granted every time they get coffee. So going to an amusement park with me or a hay ride or… whatever it might be… matters. It is not enough though just to invite someone (and likely risk alienation and despair about life because no one else is obsessed with waterslides).

It’s not just another activity for me like grabbing coffee or going to a party, it’s like the only places where I feel I belong to myself enough to truly settle inti belonging with others. I relax when I know they’re into it too and you can’t fake these things. 🙂 And then time to chill out and process after having a great day like that, that’s how I make friends.

None of this is what I was planning to say, though! I actually got diverted from a comment I was going to make about a book sample I downloaded: Gretchen Ruben’s book Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses got me Out of My Head and Into the World. I love the idea of someone intentionally devoting themselves to appreciating the ‘five’ senses and finding spiritual depth and meaning in that. That is my kind of simple hedonism! I love taking pleasure in the senses and I love the idea of doing it intentionally one by one. It is one of the things I like about meditation: deepening into receptivity of them and getting to share these simple pleasures of life with friends. I just noticed the subtitle is about getting out of your head and into the world and… that is exactly what I was getting at about how my delight in kinaesthetic pleasure heals me. I am often way too in my head to fully enjoy the five senses but for me it’s the kinaesthetic experiences that truly get me out of my head, out of despair, and into the world. After I have experienced a much needed fix of some kinaesthetic high all the other senses become so much clearer… I am actually, for once, in my body. And this happens cuddling with goats, too (which is a *very* kinaesthetic experience, the way they tend to tumble you down and push you around!!!)

These are not ordinary run-of-the-mill experiences or semi-interesting date ideas for me. They are sacred and part of a necessary and integral framework for finding balance and harmony in my life. I love these experiences so much I want to share these ways of being with someone who really appreciates them and not having that is a whole lot of grief to the point where I stop doing these absolutely necessary things for myself though they so often are ways out of despair and back into the world.

And yes, having more of these things in my life feels a whole lot more necessary to me than therapy. It was suggested to me a few days ago that my thoughts on traveling to South America might be the right path for me but his sense was the first thing I need is resources like therapy and who knows, maybe an anti-depressant ir something. I have to respectfully disagree, or at least, disagree about the nature of the resources I need in terms if priority: I need resilience and access to my internal resources and the sorts of activities that are much more likely to happen when traveling. I need freedom of movement and I hardly have that now. I need to learn things, to make meaning in my life, even when it’s hard. I need to feel secure financially and in terms of having shelter that I can count on (it was strange he put therapy as a priority over even making sure I feel safe and secure as far as my living situation). I think all these things can be done, if I spend time traveling, and then I could get some online therapy if I feel it will be helpful. But one way — the way of waiting around here trying in this mental health system to find a therapist and sticking around here doing who knows what except being depressed about my life and not having transport or anything — is pretty much a path of drawn-out misery. Months of torturous waiting but at least you’ll eventually get a therapy appointment… I understand how when others do not see you and can only form the barest outline of your situation it is expedient to suggest that therapy might be a priority but the idea that, one option being living, in South America, that is, having space at all for the best to come out of me, and the other being constant stress and fear of wasting my life and staying stuck in a rut here in the US where I feel alienated. You could caricaturize it as a choice between staying in alienation, staying stuck, to wait for local therapy that might actually be awful, or omg deprioritising therapy a bit to risk living my life, to take action, to feel more stable and safe, to feel better… and that doesn’t stop me from getting therapy if I want it, it might actually broaden my choices. Maybe I am out of alignment not because I am in need of a drug — if I were on anti-depressants or got therapy maybe I could adjust to living in the US, and then I can get a job and climb the ladder like everyone else… but what if what I want and need to do is not here but there? This is my life and travel is me letting it speak. When I think about that, I feel relaxed and even hopeful. When I think of staying in Massachusetts until the holidays juuust so I can get set up with some appointments that are aooo unlikely to help me as much as things I can do myself, life feels so hopeless again. I think I know which way I am leaning…

Today was one of those rare days that, aside from one driver whose car I walked in front of (with another car in front of him) who was rude for no reason, it felt like the universe was conspiring in my favour. My host was very pleasant this morning. He explained how Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle can be shown with Fourier analysis, we talked about a possible wolf or coyote I saw last night a couple houses away. I went for a walk. I was so pleased, though I haven’t finished reading the comments, to see a diarist relating to my entries like showing actual connection and engagement with what I am writing which felt so good… I really don’t mind if you take up space on my diary with anything that my writing inspires you to think or feel or want to write down, and I don’t mind being called Sam. I am honoured you have found my diary worth engaging with and that is about all I can ask for, as a writer or artist.

It was on the verge of rain all day and the fear in my heart and in my body built up so I felt I couldn’t take it anymore and I felt like a dam had built up inside me just enough that I might actually cry. I haven’t yet, but for the first time in a whike life does not seem quite so stagnant and I am curious what happens next. I felt like there was a meetup I should attend but based on where I was walking I wasn’t going to get to it on time and I got really stressed… like, it is too stressful to be social but at the same time something nudged me: you are not in a good place right now, you need this. So I let myself be beaten alive by mosquitoes to hang out with autistic and neirodivergent folks who… wow, offered exactly what I needed to hear in more ways than I can say. Being neurodivergent is *hard* and we all have so many other things that compound our suffering whether that be mental health issues or gender identity issues or addiction or whatever it may be and just being neurodivergent in an NT world is impossible enough, the sense you can’t do anything right, being constantly misunderstood, and on and on… pile up the other stuff onto it, like my recent trauma and experiences in these hospitals and insecurity and lack of safety a lifetime of grief that I finally need to address… it is a wonder I could even still be here. There are so many ways an autistic-insensitive world could have killed me, at that shelter, and in so many ways. How am I still around? I have no idea but… the moment I was expressing how hopeless it all felt there was a huge energy shift and somehow just sharing it made everything better. It was like a really fulfilling therapy or energy healing session and actually I feel right now a little like I’ve just been to a sweat lodge. So cleansing. This was THERAPY! We sooo need neurodivergent safe spaces where we can be ourselves.

I found my voice like I hadn’t in a really long time, I found what I care about, I found something that gives me hope in the same breath as I expressed my hopelessness and despair. We talked about being weird how much it hurts to be (or feel) abandoned or rejected for being *weird*. I don’t even think it occurred to me that I felt that but it feels like that insight turned absolutely everything around for me, like aga, this is a huge part if your energy you are denying, your true self, your weirdness, and oh how much energy I’ve put into trying to do it everybody else’s way instead of just being my weird self! It does not matter if you are weird: let go of people who don’t like you, focus on those who like who you are and can see and appreciate you or are willing to work with you and learn. For me as neurodivergent and gender variant and with C-PTSD and on and on it is a constant self-conscious barage of, oh, I did another weird or awkward thing, and another, and another, oh, every nanosecond another comes slipping off my tongue or some such thing, they must know I’m weird now (meaning, they must think something is wrong with me now) and it does not take much, and when you expect this again and again and again… you start to comform in sooo many ways so you won’t look
as weird anymore, or you stop believing that weirdness can be an attractive quality in you because you are surrounded by people who do not appreciate weirdness and around whom trying to be yourself is exhausting, but trying to fit in is exhausting too.

So some kind of obstacle, some way I have been getting in my own way, came down, as I publicly declared my weirdness. I asked, where do you just find people who are accepting if other people’s weirdness while caring about being respectful of course but where do you find places you can declare, hey, i’m weird! At the same time I started thinking, wait a minute, where do you even meet people to date when you are this weird, where it seems that every exposure of weirdness or ‘too weirdness’ on dating site profiles means you are more and more likely to just be passed by… one more weirdness, 50% less likely to find a match, aeems to be how these sites go, and that is so alienating. It is people’s weirdness, their difference, that so often makes me want to get to know them, but they hide it so much I can’t see them.

After starting the Society Promoting Weirdness with my first love and that painful breakup and everything from
that point on I guess I became ashamed of my weirdness and felt I had to hide it because nobody was going to like me *for* my weirdness ever again, or at least that is what I told
myself. So much grief and heartbreak and how do you outline the trillions of ways you are weird to give people a heads up or whatever? And neurotypical people don’t have to do that! Anyway, as I was expressing all my fear and how hopeless so much of it seemed I felt such clearing inside of me like I got a part of myself back that I lost and… I do not know if it is hope or inspiration or direction or me just letting go of getting in my own way. Just as I was expressing how hopeless and daunting it all is, this inner alchemy started happening, and so much that for so long has felt so hard maybe didn’t need to be that way.

A part of myself has been reclaimed and I do not know what kind of transformation has happened but that was so surprisingly powerful and to get to relax a little around people who are like me! Something started emerging on the other side of hopelessness and I don’t know what it is yet but it feels like a really powerful energy rebalancing has been done and I am so grateful and curious about where this inner transformation will take me next. I still have the same fears about life but something inside me lightened so much and I feel less alone and I don’t really know what’s coming next but it is aaalmost a little bit exciting!