MelodiousFunk

I got pork lo mein from a local Chinese place once. Found out that they cooked the pork with cinnamon. 0/10, no thank you.

CORDER

I can't even.

I utterly fail at containing and articulating most of these flashes. It's like the data (signal and noise alike) is an incessant thought stream, and the insight is a flash flood. In that instant it makes sense, but turning it into spoken word before getting washed away is a creaky elderly bucket brigade that can never keep up. The buckets leak and end up in the wrong order. I always found it more helpful to go with the flow and see where it takes me, but that doesn't often align with the demands of real life. Teachers want essays (sometimes by the end of the period). Parents want grades. Bosses want results. All demand obedience.

I've got more than a drop of the 'tism, combined with the intermittently squirting faucet of severe anxiety and dank sludge of executive dysfunction going back to childhood. And in hindsight it feels like the gifted label I earned before things got truly awful was just a dunk tank where teachers and parents got to take free shots because they couldn't see unreliable bucket brigade or smell the sludge. "Not working up to his potential." "Lazy." The standard 80's fare for bright AuDHD kids that weren't disruptive (or had stimming etc. behaviors shamed out of them.)

I managed to doggy-paddle my way upstream - undiagnosed, unmedicated, exhausted. To outsiders, it's like I wasn't even moving. Just splashing around. The constant negative reinforcement begat dreary, drizzly depression. Soggy muck everywhere. At first there were breaks of daylight, but those became less and less frequent in favor of more damp, more gray.

And then I got my head held under by the real world. Every breath I was able to snatch came with conditions - just go back to the retail job for a bit after getting laid off, just get through Christmas, just get a real job, just get a promotion, just get a better job, just get a raise, just get a house and finally stop sharing thin walls, fighting the overwhelm and the sludge through all of it and losing more and more of myself. Each snatched breath carried the empty hope that the next breath would be the one to let me keep my head above water. It never happened. I just kept getting dashed against the rocks, the incessant thought streams and occasional flash flood of insight meaning nothing against the might of the sea.

Yet still I adapted. I discovered the sensory deprivation tank of dissociation. The hyperfocues and special interests that once provided warmth and light in calmer tides were now but a featureless bog. No longer drowning, but every movement risked losing something else. A shoe, keys, a prized memory - the bog would take it all. The incessant stream became more of a trickle, much of it passive. But it didn't stop, even if I did. And in the still bog below me I could see reflections of the current trickle. And just to the right, reflections of past streams. Each mirror-like pool showed the reflection of a different stream. Past failures. Regrets for things not done. Injustices unpunished. Mistakes I could never undo. I got lost in some of them. Relived pain. Fantasized about taking different branches in the stream. Had impeccably articulate arguments with antagonists that in real life would have left me floundering for words. And the more I tried interacting with the reflections, the more I realized the ponds weren't quite motionless. There were tiny ripples. And those ripples influenced the reeds, which influenced other pools. In places, the cumulative ripples produced an interference pattern. In this joyless bog where I hid from the world, from myself, unmoving lest the sense of false safety be betrayed, I was seeing tiny crests and troughs modifying countless others in myriad Fourier dances and creating a new stream. No, not new. Just previously undiscovered. One that was there all along, exerting unseen influence. It made me question, well, everything. Myself. My upbringing. My place in the world. The world itself. My beliefs. There was no flash flood of insight. Just a steady drip of reevaluation.

And then it started to rain. At first it was the familiar dreary rain. Then it was the spray from a geothermal geyser that was way too close for comfort. Hot, abrasive. Anger. I couldn't stop the geyser. Couldn't fight it. I could walk away, but I quickly found many more geysers.

Through all of this, the sludge and unreliably squirting faucet kept picking away pieces of me. Until one day a literal tempest hit and laid me bare. It was all I could do to tread water. I managed to find a life preserver, but it's slowly deflating as the riot police hook up the firehose with detached indifference.

I'd apologize for the extended metaphors, but once I got my feet wet I couldn't help but dive in.

Oh let me flow into the ocean
Yeah let me get back to the sea
Let me be stormy and let me calm
Let the tide in, and set me free

• Pete Townshend

Always been weird. I'm probably even weird for a zebra.

My spouse's father was a train guy. When he passed, she inherited a dozen or so photo albums of just trains. Very "normal" hobby.

I'm not sure about my dad. He was an anti-intellectual functioning alcoholic. But I'm pretty sure my grandfather was autistic. His special interest was in historical military equipment, which is "normal" so he got a pass.

Both of these people fell in love, had kids, paid taxes, hell, probably even played baseball. You know, all those things Secretary Brainworm said would never happen.

My main instance came back online... but at what cost?

Server is back up, should be good now 👍

That looks suspiciously like the phaser that killed @MelodiousFunk@kbin.social 🤔

Shhhhhh. You wouldn't import my settings and I was too lazy to re-create. But I have made a fresh backup and I'm going to try again. Right after I get off of the toilet.

WHEW!

Man it sucked being stuck in that transporter buffer.

Congratulations on being one of today's lucky 10,000!