asking for help.It's traumatic. Really

asking for help.

It's traumatic.  Really. 

No, really, it's damn hard for me and part of why I get so kookoo when I have to.

Well, for one, you are giving away power.  You are giving permission to judge.  You have "nothing" to trade. 

Then, every single visit is a new person who wants to hear it all over again. Cry for me.  I know the notes are good, but let's test your story for truth. The why of it doesn't ease the mental trauma of reliving and reiterating things over and over.  I'm not spending that time healing, but stewing, right?  And crying. And feeling embarassed, small, dependant, and infantilized.

Now there's the history for me.  The sheer mass of "no" answers and negative judgement and the nasty things they sometimes say and do when they think I am trying to get more than my share in life through the charity system.  I know people do that but I really never cheated like that. Worst ever was earning $300 and not declaring it because I would lose over half the financial advantage to deductions. That's not cheating anymore, it's survival.  Cheating is when you're not declaring income in excess of your disbursements, sure, but that was about 25% of my income on an income well below survivable.

So then there's the mother thing. The first original traumas around asking for help.  The memory in my mind of a doorknob exactly the same height as me. It was a brass sphere and I see my tiny fingers reaching for it, frozen in the act.  Another lightning flashes through the creepy laundry room windows and then thunder smacks right after it.  I'm maybe 5. 

I can't go in.  It's my parents' room and I am more afraid of Mom's anger than the storm, even though I instinctively ran to my mother when the storm scared me.  But in reaching for the door, I remembered who I was turning to.  I ran back to my bed, hid under the covers and sobbed as silently as I could all night.

Was this when insomnia first attacked?  I remember it as being when the city brought street lights to our area and the ceiling would be full of weird shadows.

I haven't been insomnia continuously since but I certainly struggled with it since.  As a child it was pretty much stay awake till 4am, wake again at 6 till dad left for work, nap for an hour, get shocked awake by my brother at 7:30 am.  Just as I was slipping into REM sleep. Off to school.  5 nights of this, and then two nights sleeping from 1 am when my parents went to bed until 10 am when I would be heartily shamed by my dad.

So on the weekends, 9 hours. Week days, 3 short naps overnight and a lot of tension. 

See, I had to pretend to be asleep.  They said it to me often.  "If you just lay still with your eyes closed long enough you will fall asleep.   If you had tried it, you would know this.  So t=do as you are told or get spanked. (assaulted)

I used to spend hours like that, just like they said, my eyes squeezed tight shut so they wouldn't pop open, or even my arm or covers over them. Somtimes I use my fingers to hold my eyelids closed when stressed.  Lately I have discovered that a hat with the edge rolled out over my eyes does the trick and adding ear plugs, if comfy, can actually dump me into lake morpheus until the bladder demands attention.

So I would lay there for hours and hours trying to imagine myself to literal death.

Yes.  I hoped if I could imagine it hard enough and real enough it would replace reality and I would be dead.

I would imagine it in first person, my parents noises, what I thought it would seem to feel or sound like.  The ride to the morgue, the grave, etc. I really was just a little kid.

I wonder if those hours of time spent ilike that ruined my sense of time some?

Outside help?  Mother wanting to be a drama bitch in her own soap opera, took me to seek help then neatly sabotaged it all by scaring me and lying to me.  I was so young, adults thought I hadn't a brain cell in my head, although I could apparently be "bright, high IQ, expressive, well spoken, ahead of his grade" and crazy?

You know, as an adult I can better understand why the empaths couldn't rescue me .

They had no way to do an end run around my mother and she was not going to let go of her choremonkey submissive victim.

So it wasn't long before I couldn't trust the folks proposing to help either.

And don't get me started on the whole autism thing. Oh boy. Most folks had no clue it existed, the ones who did were looking for the star children,* always gazing up.  I was not that fey, that's all.

*my term, newly coined

Soeven ifthey had known about it, they still wouldn't have known how to interface and the advice and solutions were based on wrong observations, wrong conclusions, and wrong dna. Nobody could do anything for me and the one person whowas supposed to be my rock in the turbulent new world was my primary enemy, but two faced and gaslighting me continuously about how how lucky I was to have such a caring parent.

She could never figure out why I hated to hug.  I din't see any value in telling her that I saw who she was and what she was doing and I didn't have the language to articulate it anyway. 

So is it any surprise I distrust the whole thing now? I feel such swinging moods from hope to despair because this is something I've seen before. As a child, the system failed me after putting me through emotional hell in therapies designed to mold me into a good little NT kid.  ABA before it was a program. It involved involutary druggings and commitments, threats of long term imprisonment, threats of being torn from the only life and home I knew, and constant emotional dragging. 

Dragging.  Yes, what do I mean. Dragging it out of you.  Trigging you to express strong emotions. Dragging your story out of you, over and over, like they did this week. Over and over I had to tell people I was killing myself, but I had this house dream, but my family sucked, and I was homeless and frankly couldn't afford to eat anyway, and on and on, feeling like the most pathetic creature walking attimes.

Oh and the faces. 

Oh My GHod the faces.  I am finding it hard to type through the sobs at how it feels to see that expression at me over and over again. 

The insincere ones are bad enough but today a woman was actually unable to stop her eyes  going red. I doubt she's an especially good actor. I had to cheer her up!

There I am in crisis and I have to minister back at the people who are there to help me.  i still have to reach out into my elderself and put my own feelings on hold for them.

Onthe up side, she gives me hope.

At this point, it's only the system that frustrates me and there seems to be just enough stepping up to help boost me past the obstacles I couldn't stand.  I just need to see those documents stamped and signed saying I'm PWD and registered for everything to which I have any rights.

Then I am willing to hold on and wait like everyone else. Like everyone else.Everyone else. You know, who have all their paperwork in order and their applications filed and their status validated. 

This isn't a case of "give me X, Y and Z or I off myself."  this is a case of "I cannot overcome all these hurdles, I am in despair, but let me keep trying while trying for dying, because I do believe in myself.  I just need support. Help. community, damn it.  Like everyone else.

But I am making clear that my spouse is a problem and dependency on him is the reason.

I also added the two goals notes of divorce and tax lawyer help.

See, I can do a lot for myself, if I am stable enough, but the stress is beyond my control and I cannot stabilize and I've definitely been getting sicker.  I am indeed against a deadline to, and while there's the choice of letting Dan license it, I want people to understand deeply how dangerous this feels.

It really does.

He still rages at me daily if he is around. Almost every time we speak.

I do think it would embolden himto own me like that and I do not think I would stand a damn chance in hell anymore. I tried to press that on the people asking my story. That this guy is likely to start hitting me, finally, when I no longer own my own home.   I do still own his phone account, that's not nothing, but he pays it, which is about the same power.  either one of us could use it to screw up the other. 

But owningme?  think about it. 

owner ship of my bus means ownership of everything in it.  

I am an isolated powerless citizen.  Nobody would hear it. He has the ability to lie and gaslight me with the people around here, just as I have, and what I say vs what he says, it could be amusing to others, but they wouldn't hear any fracas going on and I'd be at risk if I tried to get someone to intervene in any abuse.  Like call the cops and lose everything I wn. Because it's Dan's bus now.

Seriously, my dread and terror returns hard with that image. 

Let's remember, there is almost no housing. There is even less housing my size and budget. There is maybe one lower east side single room occupancy hotel, like 125sq ft with a bed in the middle and a desk and dresser and armchair plunked in it. 

My stuff? Whoa. Oh and the neighbors are worse than Dan in a place like that. Autistic people are at risk of abuse more than regular poeple because of our "NT masks" where we have been trying to please the demands of the world by acting normal, yet failing and creating a sense of insincerity.

Isn't it weird how I am so deeply senstive to insincerity in others? Sometimes I take it personally when somthing outside of my awareness is causing a change in someone's expression. Caught in the grip of the moment, the sense of never being alone, the overall discomfort and built up stress and worry and exhaustion, I just can't remember that. My anxiety is on the rampage and it's running the stats but has math aphasia so doesn't understand what it means anyway.

right, gotta brush the dog. 

But you can see why asking for help has been such a challenge and I've done it so badly.