Mrgh.

[kiya]

In a really complicated state of mind and body with dealing with surges of complicated dysphoria and also I have been coughing (particularly at night) for a while now and I'm terrified of having pneumonia again and ...

... why are bodies so hard?

I have this story that I tried to write for DPDSF that fell a bit flat and part of it was because I tried not to make it too angry or too dysphoric (partly because that made it go over wordcount and everyone's wordcount limits are too short, argh) and I think I'm going to try writing it again angry and dysphoric and see whether it works better.

Also I have an opening line of "There was never any hope for me" and I don't know whether it's a story or an autobiographical rant to send to my senator.

I'm seesawing between being basically okay and wrestling with this brainshattering internal existential nightmarespace and it's sort of superimposed waveforms and it's nearly impossible to make mouthwords go about any of that and I don't know if that's cowardice or autism. (Seriously, mouthwords are so hard why do people expect mouthwords fuck I'm crying from the stress of contemplating why the hell do people expect mouthwords to happen about hard things and so maybe that's ... nobody's even asking, anyway. Of course that's because I CANNOT MOUTHWORDS about the things that are upsetting me so nobody fucking knows there's anything to ask about. And now there's the 'do I delete this whole bit because it's passive-aggressive or at least someone will declare that it's passive-aggressive' bit and have I mentioned that it is FUCKING EXHAUSTING to manage all these fucking neurotypical expectations all the time and be told that it's me who makes it weird and I have to be notweird to be acceptable and that DOES NOT MAKE MOUTHWORDS EASIER, FOLKS.)

I'm really tired, y'all.

I haven't been able to work on the novel in over a month, because I'm too tired. Just. There's this bit inside my emotional functionality that feels Thanos-snapped and I can carry on just fine without it aside from the crumbling to dust bits that hey, maybe I wasn't using them for anything important. Like writing that book.

Mouthwords are hard.

Comments

[graydon]

The words you can write down are way more useful than the words you can't speak.

Sounds like you haven't been getting enough continuous sleep for long enough that it's become a major health issue.

Sounds like there's an equivalently-major social issue about the amount of asymmetric emotional labour loading being applied to you, too.

I hope things get better.

[kiya]

It doesn't help that I am coughing literally half the night lately. (Mostly okay during the day, so clearly it's 'something shifts when I lie down'.)

The emotional labour loading on communication thing is ... one of those spectrum/allistic things that I've been contemplating a bit for not-me reasons, but it's one of those things. It's not 'this is a particular current problem', it's a 'I suddenly realize that I have spent an entire lifetime trying semi-effectively to learn how to make people not-mad-at-me in communication and I am wicked cross about it now I've noticed it's a thing that allistic people don't have to spend that much effort on'.

(I mean, ~twenty years ago a related stressor would lead to me dropping a laptop in spouse's lab and sobbing, "EXPLAIN WHAT'S GOING ON TO ME PLEASE" about some conversation or other on usenet. It's not new, just still exhausting after all these years.)

[graydon]

Can you get the coughing looked at by a medical professional? Bringing a patient advocate with you? Because there really isn't any sensible way for a recent pneumonia patient to ignore a persistent cough. ("something shifts" is plausibly "when upright the goo drains down", which is not ideal.)

I am sympathetic about the consistent and eternal difficulty of communication. I figure I have put a quarter of my adult life into building an effective social human emulation and it was not a success.

[kiya]

Coughing less bad last night, just a little, not hours of it, so maybe whatever it is is going away! Will see if it clears, but yeah, have been noodling around what sort of medical attention is warranted....

Human emulations are so damn hard. (I may make a post about my rejection letters later because nergh, I feel like this too is a thing.)

[graydon]

Yay less coughing!

Rejection letters are no kind of fun.

(I have become amused by the "is this even English?" disdainful reviews.)

[thomasyan]

Sympathies. I don't know if I can offer anything helpful besides that, but I'm glad you posted this.

Mouthwords are hard.

Yeah. It is frustrating to have an internal understanding of something that one cannot articulate into an external understanding that others can grab a hold of.

[kiya]

It's not words that are the particularly hard thing much of the time, it's speech.

But neurotypicals get cranky around "I can't talk about this can I send you an email" a lot...

[thomasyan]

Oh! Thanks for explaining further.

I wonder if it would help to elaborate a bit, or would still receive the same (or worse) reaction to say, “I can’t talk about this. Can I send you email instead of gibbering, hyperventilating, and/or standing helplessly speechless?”

[wispfox]

I have no words today, stand by for gestures?

Words can be hard.

Coughing sucks... By any chance do you have asthma? I do, although it's relatively mild, and it gets very grumpy when colds get into my lungs. Inhaler a few times a day plus an expectorant help, but I tend to cough for weeks after the rest of the colds is gone.

[kiya]

Not asthmatic, though I fake it real good when I'm around mainstream cigarette smoke. (Pretty sure that's an allergy to the formaldehyde or some of the other chemical crap that gets loaded in there.)

[batrachian]

*quiet witness*

[brooksmoses]

One of the spatial metaphors that comes for me from that feeling is one of there is this frozen river representing my emotions that I am able to walk on just fine except that there is also this swirling current under the ice that's also a layer of how I am doing emotionally and sometimes I break through. And it's not that the breaking through is actually a difference in how I am doing; it's just a change in what is presenting at the moment -- when things are going well, it's still there. (And when I'm caught up in it, the solid surface is there too once I scramble out. Getting trapped under the ice luckily is a part where the metaphor does not match up to the thing explained, as is hypothermia.)

Perhaps combining the river-under-ice and the crumbling-to-dust metaphors in the right proportions would create a reasonably solid mud?

I find that mouthwords for resolving stress and hard things are, at best, a collaborative process and that means that they work exceptionally badly when one does not have an appropriately-matched and competent (both required, separately) collaborator. Mouthwords without a collaborator are speeches, and doing them extemporaneously about hard things without having preparation or practice to create the pieces to assemble into the extemporaneous speech is not a thing that tends to be functional.

[eeeeka]

I used to write stream of consciousness stuff when I needed to get it out, but couldn't make myself talk about it. Not the same as Cannot Talk, Need Writing, but similar.

Have nothing to offer but hugs and "I See You."