Not Enough Sleep

Bah. I couldn't sleep until after dawn for some reason, my brain wouldn't shut up long enough. I wouldn't have been able to rest at all, especially once the "lack of sleep" neuro-pain set in, but at 6am I took some Neurontin (for both pain and sleep) and napped until my usual auto-awakening time of 7:30am. This post will thus be quite disjointed. :-(

I "went to bed" around midnight, but then didn't feel tired enough to sleep, so I started reading Temple Grandin's first autobiography, Emergence: Labeled Autistic. That became disturbing after a while, because all of the comments about her, as well as her second autobiography (Thinking In Pictures), had made me think she's among the most severely autistic -- only to find in Emergence that it's not the case. Her autistic traits are uniformly weaker than mine are.

So I put that book down, and turned my Clie to my ebook copy of a very funny novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. I forget exactly how I heard about this book... It's a humorous "murder mystery" novel by (iirc) an undx-Asperger's man with a HFA son, and the main character is completely written accurately from a HFA/AS boy's viewpoint. The result, as he persistently does or says precisely what NTs do not expect (or appreciate!) is entertaining in a cathartic sense, and having it written in the same mental "voice" that I have (but usually conceal from others), with the same feelings, is engrossing as well.

However, I also realized, as with the earlier book, that this child understands concepts that I only figured out a year or two ago. White lies, for example, made no sense to me, seemed no different from full-out lies, until I was about 24.5 years old. (The sense of power and mischief in using them amuses me now.) He also explains other things I still didn't realize about communication that he is taught by his aide, such as that the speed and amount of air one expells audibly through one's nostrils alters what it means, and that raised eyebrows (as well as virtually every other gesture, I suspect) can similarly mean multiple things.

I had a short conversation with my mother yesterday -- short because I was overloaded and hiding. She told me about a commercial that was meant to be funny, in which a growing male does a number of dangerous things throughout his life, and his mother keeps saying "I don't know how he'll live to twenty" only to have him become an adult, produce a girl, and say the exact same thing about her. I told her that it didn't seem funny, it seemed like an example of incompetent parents failing to keep their children out of danger. She responded with, "no, that's just the kind of things kids do." I paused a second, thinking back on my childhood, then responded "I didn't." To which my mother sighed and answered "I know."

It always used to seem ridiculous to me that the government had decided that I am too "permanently" developmentally delayed to function in society -- because all I have really known, until the past several months, is that I am highly intelligent, the sort of person that gets an "A" on both junior and senior theses at Berkeley with little effort. What I didn't realize, but evidently others in my life did, was how severe the delays outside that particular intelligence were. It makes more sense that they consider me permanently delayed, I just wish I knew beyond one test how they figured it out.

I read several months ago that spectrum females in relationships tend to become so stressed just handling it that they shut down otherwise. I think that this is happening to me -- I am always tired, too blah to stim, keep losing interest in things instead of being perseverant, my executive function & general tolerance of life are more problematic than in the past -- but I don't know what to do about it. The only option would be to not be in a relationship, but I don't really like that idea. I wish I knew how to be myself, or feel like myself, have all of my autistic hyper-energy strengths and also be in a relationship. Maybe when things are not as stressful in my life I'll be able to handle it better, and I just need to wait?

Enough rambling now, I am hungry and my neuro system is tingling/hurting all over because I didn't sleep enough... I need to have some breakfast so I can take more Neurontin -- at least that way even if I'm too relaxed by the medication to accomplish things, it will make the neurotorment go away.

Posted by moggy at November 01, 2003 09:34 AM | TrackBack