aspie rhetor

On the scarcity of postings.

I’ve been away for some time — away, at least, from the blogosphere. PhDing has consumed all of my energy. I’ve got lists of things to write about (literally — I <3 post-its), but by the time I’m done teaching and grad-seminaring I’m so tranced that all I can do is sit and space out (preferably to Law & Order). I need to combat this somehow. A friend of mine scared me this past weekend and said that what I describe sounds like epilepsy, not AS or migraine. Of course, the more I think about it, if my weird trances and aura experiences haven’t killed me now, then I suppose adding a new diagnostic label to the mix wouldn’t be so detrimental. Nevertheless, no matter how momentarily incapacitating my “trances” or “episodes” may be, I doubt it’s anything other than me decompressing after having experienced great stress.

I’m trying very hard to prioritize my stress. I realize that I can’t, with Asperger’s, selectively choose what’s going to stress me out. But I almost feel as though “society” (whoever that vague term represents) privileges some stresses more than others. It’s acceptable for me to stress over my classes. It isn’t acceptable, though, for me to stress over how to greet my bus drivers. (There’s more than one — that’s hard to deal with.) It’s probably pseudo-acceptable that I stress over my stimming. I mean, the things I do with my hands and lips do make me seem freakish at times. Plus, it’s not as though I can quit stimming, cold turkey. I probably shouldn’t stress about routine changes, like, if the bus misses my stop by 3 meters and I have to walk AROUND a phone pole, which I’m not used to. This causes huge momentary panic, because I now have to account for this thing in time and space that wasn’t previously in my way. Sometimes, I feel like walking is a screwed-up physics that I’ll never master.