My Brain on Books XXVIII

 

I am reading for The Office of Letters and Lights the folks who bring us NaNoWriMo today as I love what they are doing for literacy with their Young Writer's Programs and because I've participated in NaNo every year since 2004.  I have been blessed to have it in my life and would like to give something back if only kudos and link love.  I'm putting this plug at the top in hopes some who stop by will check out their site and see all the great things they do to foster love of reading and writing and story in kids. 

This post will be organized like a blog inside a blog with recent updates stacked atop previous ones. I may be posting some updates on Twitter @Joystory and the Joystory fb fanpage. But this is where I do anything more than a line or two.  Including mini-challenges that don't require a separate post..   

Be sure and see my tribute poem to Dewey and the Thon she birthed at the bottom of this post

1:11AM Sunday - Too engrossed in reading...

Did not take into account, when planning to spend the whole readathon on my bed, the time consuming and frustrating task it is to set up my laptop on my lap desk, open and wake it and then when finished with the task of updating and/or visiting various readathon social media to dismantle the setup, putting all of its elements away in their various slots within arms reach.  If I had, I think I might have considered it a better plan to leave the laptop set up at my desk in the other room where I could stop by on my way back from bio breaks.  Because of the frustrating experience with the first update upon waking this morning, I kept putting off new updates preferring to keep reading.

My expectation to finish Julia Fine's What Should Be Wild by noon was as fantastical as the story itself.  The factors contributing to that include my messed up sense of time passing, my need to savor the language of so many phrases and paragraphs by rereading them and/or highlighting them, my petulant bladder and a nap attack that robbed me of over an hour between 11 and 1 and the lengthy kitchen raid that followed that.

Based on my memory of the window light in the room as I switched books, I judge that it must have been between 7 and 8 PM.  The Libby App tells me that I read for 11 hours and 47 minutes but that includes the 38% that I read in the two weeks before this morning.

The book I picked up next was Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza.  I have advanced even slower through this collection of essays by a Latina feminist and human rights activist about the decades long War on Drugs and the impact its horrors have on individuals, community and national unity/identity.  The state of perpetual fear and loss is dehumanizing unless grieving becomes a communal response actively weaving them into solidarity across all classes and borders against the power brokers imposing atrocities with impunity--the drug cartels, the police/state and the northern empire.

One of the themes running through these essays is the efficacy of storytelling (oral, written or visual arts) in processing the grief.  Storytelling from personal diary to social media, from novels to journalism, from poetry to photography, from music to statuary, from whispered confessions between intimates to testifying at small and large gatherings, story subverts the efforts of the Powers That Be to divide and conquer via the dehumanizing butchering of language and bodies.  Thus storytelling is the ultimate resistance against tyranny.

7:55AM - Oh Darn! Forgot to Set My Alarm.

Will be starting out with Julia Fine's What Should Be Wild.  I started it earlier thus month after I had put a hold on her newest, The Upstairs House, via the Libby ebook library I have access to with my local library card.  My turn came for the new one a few days ago and I'm eager to start it but I am also eager to finish What Should Be Wild.  It is a surrealistic or magical realism story about a young girl whose touch both kills and brings back to life anything organic.  It has something to do with a curse on the women in her family.  The plot is complex, the ambience is eerie and the prose is luscious.  I'm 38% in and hope to finish by noon. 

5:00AM - Opening Survey!

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?
   

Longview, WA  USA

My Mom's home which is where I live.

Will spend much of it here:

 

That's a pic of my bed on the floor of Mom's room taken for a NaNo prep post last October but it looks about the same except the pillow pile is about double that now so that it is like a recliner.  it is the most comfortable and quietest space in the house and because Mom is at my brother's home for the weekend I don't need to worry about disturbing her before 9am and after 9pm.

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?

    

NF Grieving by Cristina Rivera Garza

Fic  The Upstairs House by Julia Fine

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?

Blueberry Yogurt Smoothie dark chocolate.

   
4) Tell us a little something about yourself!
   

   As of next Monday I'll have been a widow for seven months.  The grief, tho not as fresh as it was during last October's Thon nor as constant, can still fold me over intermittently in moments as sudden as a gasp.

Tho, I managed to participate in the Thon and NaNo last fall with sporadic posting, I took a 'brief' hiatus after mine and Ed's anniversary December 2nd and am only now returning.  

I had been just about to resume posting with announcements of my ROW80 goals for January right after Christmas only to be hit with another grief blow when Ed's brother died.

This spring I started working with a long term caregiver who comes in three times a week to help me with chores, errands and taking me for walks.  Because of my visual impairment and high-functioning autism I will always have to have this kind of help; especially to live in my own apartment.

In March my long time counselor had to quit her job and shortly after that my first caregiver quit her job with the company providing my care.  I'm currently on my third caregiver since the first week of March.  These losses have been compounding the grief over Ed's death like applying icy hot ointment to a healing burn.

I made the mistake of allowing grief to steal my words though.  For months after December 2nd I neither wrote nor read.  And I know I need my words to process any changes in my life and boy or boy change seems to be gunning for me.  Like most on the spectrum change is not my friend.

But reading has been returning for me this month.  In the last two or three weeks I've finished around a dozen books.  Which means focus has returned.  And the completion of several emails proved that focus is working for writing as well.  So i figured I better use the opportunity of the Thon breaking the blogging ice to recommit to regular posts.  So as soon as I've recovered from the Thon, I'll rejoin ROW80 writing accountability group with a goals post for the Wednesday check-in.

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? 

   Tho I have many tree books, ebooks and audio books via Library of Congress talking books for the print disabled, I'm putting most if not all of my focus for the thon on the fifteen ebooks I have checked out from two Washington State libraries via the Libby app because both cards are tapped out and I have holds about to become available and besides more than half of them are due by next weekend and several of them had been on hold for weeks or months and if I don't finish I'll have to get back in line.

It is interesting how many of them have some connection to the concepts of grief, loss, widowhood or broken hearts--both fiction and non-fiction as will become clear as I share the titles in my updates as the day progresses.

4:44 AM - I'm setting this to go live at 4:44 AM but it may be as much as an hour before I check in.  Making coffee, Getting eyes focused.  Settling in at primary reading station.  But I will be reading by 5AM.

Ode to Dewey

by Joy Renee

vote, fav and share for Dewey

We Miss You Dewey

Read more...

Sunday Serenity - Sads & Hugs - LOLcat Therapy - ROW80 Check-in

 

Yooz doing it alls wrong
visit and vote it up :)

So, I used to illustrate my posts with LOLcats.  Some made by others but mostly made by me.  I would spend hours on the cheezeburger.com site choosing pics and captioning them.  The antics of kittens and babies were my secret joys.  I treated them like mood medicine.  Then our Merlin crossed the rainbow bridge in 2014 and it just made me too sad to hang out there.  I just recently started dabbling on the site again and made this LOLcat for a post I had in mind but before I got that post ready, I got an email from cheezeburger.com informing me that my creation had been voted up to the front page. 

I was almost embarrassed at what a silly delight I took in that news.  But I so needed a dose of delight as for the first time in many months my mood had been tanking.  I was in the middle of trying to figure out if this was just something I needed to ride out or did I need to consult with my Rx nurse about going back on the meds.  I was pretty sure it was the former.  I was pretty sure it was partly related to all the #metoo dreck I was digging up while journaling and partly related to passing the second month-a-versary of the day I broke up with my husband and having never yet cried about it.

Then there was the fact I had been fudging on my sleep requirements big time every since Mom got home from the hospital. So until I'd tried putting that right again and finding it didn't set things back on an even keel I would not resort to putting my feelings back in a chemical straitjacket.  

The real problem was that in one way or another since infancy my feelings and I were divorced from one another.  Some of it due to the way autism made it difficult to identify emotions.  If you can't name them you can't claim them. If you don't own them they will own you.  But a great deal of it was due to the rules about emotions created by my parents' parenting style and that was all mixed up with the strictures on expressive behaviors created by the churchcult I was raised in.

I'd reached these insights in the process of journaling and was hanging on in anticipation of my weekly phone appointment with my counselor.  But then the Internet and some of the phone systems in our area went down for twelve hours Thursday and I not only lost the emotional anchor of my fifty minute phone chat with my counselor but I lost access to the ROW80 support community, missing my midweek checkin rounds because I'd been sick on Wednesday and was in the middle of prepping my checkin post Thursday morning when we lost the Inernet.

Then Thursday night during my part of Mom's bedtime routine as I was about to shut out the light and take her water bottle back to the bathroom, she started trying to say something.  'You need.....You need...You need...... Awwwwrgh!'  She said.  And repeated a version of it three more times before I asked if there was something I forgot to do as I went over in my mind : set the bed position, start the bed vibrator, supervise drink of water, speak the goodnight ritual.  Everything accounted for.  

In order to ask my question I'd taken several steps back towards her as we'd already taken her hearing aides so I couldn't just stand in the door to converse with her.  Suddenly I found my right wrist gripped by her strong left hand and my arm being pulled inexorably toward her face.

What the...

And then she said 'Hug....Hug...Hug...'  funny how her speech efforts tend to come in threes when she is struggling to get a stubborn word past the aphasia bulwark.

'Oh!'  I exclaimed.  'You need a hug!'

'No.'  she said emphatically.  'You need...You need.  You need...'

'Oh.  You think I need a hug?'

'Yes!  Yes!.  You need....hug.'

I let her pull me in and found my face pressed between her face and shoulder as she reached her left arm over my back and pulled me all the way down.  That's when my eyes first started stinging.  But I got through the rest of the lights out ritual before they did any more than shine a bit.  I got all the way back to my desk before tears started falling.and my face started feeling like melted wax.

Now the hug has become part of the lights out ritual and so has the tearing up. And melted wax face.

Until today though the associated emotions were relegated to Mom's bedtime routine and for fifteen to thirty minutes after.  But today they started up over my morning coffee and had nothing to do with thoughts about Mom or bedtime.  I think the mood came from whatever I was dreaming about when my alarm went off but I can't remember anything about it.  I also think it has happened fairly frequently of late that I wake up in a mood rooted in a dream I can't remember but usually I"m able to deflect my attention on to one of the many distracting activities--crochet, reading, research, sorting projects both virtual and physical, social media, writing, videos, video games, podcasts, audio books, music.  

The thing about that list is there are few things on it that don't depend on vision to at least get it started and with my eyes tearing up uncontrollably I can't see well enough to unlock my screens to access the aps where even the audio only activities reside.  I do have video and audio books on non-computer devices but if I don't already have a DVD, CD or talking book cassette locked and loaded and the device plugged in or otherwise set up so that I don't need my eyes to prepare it for use... Well I'm afloat on a mood sea with nothing to deflect the crashing waves.

The moodiness this morning was accompanied by restlessness and I had no safe way to discharge that.  Besides I'd woken with a deep ache in my right hip that had me limping and I was hoping that there was nothing more to it than having slept wrong on it.  If so it would dissipate if I could 'walk' it off.  But as I said there was no safe place for that.  

Except my mini-tramp.  But altho I'd finally cleared it off during the big sort while Mom was away for three weeks in July, I'd begun setting things 'out of the way' on it again within a week of her homecoming.

I realized that having been 'sheltering in place' since mid March I'd not been out of the house but twice since (once to retrieve my stuff from my husband's apartment and once to fetch a Joann.com order) I knew I was at as much risk as my Mom post-stroke of loosing muscle mass and joint lubrication if I didn't establish a better exercise routine.  I decided that clearing my mini-tramp off again, decluttering my desk and craft table and setting up my LOC talking book machine and my DVD/CD player within easy reach of one or more of those locations would be my project this morning.

I finished in time to spend five or so minutes swaying and gently bouncing with one hand on the wall for balance before time to fix Mom's lunch.  I discovered that there is something about that activity that is going to encourage not deflect the tears.  I had a difficult time getting Mom's tray ready.  I had to keep leaving the kitchen to go in the hallway or bathroom to wipe my eyes or face and neck and get control back.

The whole time I'm wondering.  Is this simply too long repressed sadness?  Or am I just feeling sorry for myself.  The answer is important because apparently sad is an legit human emotion and naming and claiming it is necessary for emotional health.  But 'feeling sorry for myself' well that is loaded with shaming messages.  

How is one to tell the difference?

Well it's about time to start dinner so I better post this as I won't get another chance until Mom's in bed between nine and ten.

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2020

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

2020 Round 3 ROW80 goals check-in:

* Sleep 7.5 hours Daily Minimum --  Unsatisfactory effort

* Move/Breathe/Meditate 15 min Daily minimum  -- Satisfactory effort

* Storydreaming with note-taking tools at hand. 15 min Daily Minimum -- This is a technique I learned from Robert Olen Butler in the book From Where You Dream. -- Unsatisfactory

* Read Fiction 30 min Daily Average --  Above and beyond

* Read/Study Craft 15 min Daily Average --  Above and beyond

* Social network activities 30 min Daily Minimum (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc) -- something I've a strong resistance to.  --  Above and beyond

* 30 min Daily minimum engagement with a scavenger hunt though all my creative writing files including Joystory looking for better than shitty first draft scenes, sections, stories, poems and essays and edit, organize and make hard copies. --  Unsatisfactory

* To prep for self-pub: Gather all my poems into a single Scrivener file. Minimum one poem per day until all accounted for.  Adding new ones encouraged. --   Unsatisfactory

* Personal Journaling 45 min or 1000 words whichever come first Daily Minimum -- This is the heart of the writing challenge.  The preceding provides the structure and the nutrients that nurtures and honors the work which I've learned over time must exist to ensure that this becomes more than just dabbling.  --  Unsatisfactory

For an explanation and links to backstory see the ROW80/Camp NaNo Goals post.

Read more...

Of Truth and Words and Rude Epiphanies - ROW80 Round 3 2020 & Camp NaNo July 2020 Goals

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2020

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

Camp NaNoWriMo July 2020

I'm back.  And I'm committed.  

It's been a long four year hiatus struggling with conflicting priorities and personal drama that choked off my fictional storyworld like bindweed overtaking the yard, garden and house.  But I finally broke through the denial and excuses and woke up to reality and made the hard choice that will, as a side-effect, allow me to put writing back in the central place it always has been whenever I'm allowed to be myself.

On June 7th I gave up on my 41.5 year marriage because the only other option was to give up on myself.

The backstory for this can be found in the early posts with the Lifequake label but a succinct summary that hits all the emotional high notes can be found in these four poems written in 2013, 2015 and 2020 in this order:

Piles of Painted Echoes
Our Broken Valentine

My Heart is the Lake of Fire
Who Am I Without You?

Ed's an alcoholic who refuses to admit he is and I've been taking half or more of the blame for it for decades because I believed he drank to ease his anxiety which was high because mine was always hovering at panic levels. Or because being responsible for a legally blind wife was too stressful. Or because my infertility denied him the children we both craved.  I gave him a pass for his pathological lying because I believed he told his stories to 'protect' me or out of fear I'd freak out when confronted with bad news.  And I endured the random withdrawal of affection or communication as my just punishment for stressing him out.  

So I believed and so I behaved until this latest three week binge and withdrawal in the middle of the shelter-in-place pandemic rules, during a time my anxiety levels were the lowest they've ever been in my memory (in spite of the near apocalyptic current events) and in the midst of my months long accumulation of one triumph after another over the various deficiencies in my character that he'd named as most anxiety provoking for him.  This proved the falsity of the hypothesis I'd been operating under for over 40 years.  

I was not to blame for any of his choices.  Not this time.  Not ever.

About a week into last month's withdrawal I smacked my face into a hip-high bookcase bending down to pick up something I'd kicked into due to my visual impairment.  This gave me the opportunity to verify the truth of the metaphor I've repeatedly used to describe to him the pain his withdrawals inflicted on me.  I would say that I could not imagine a punch in the face could be any more painful.  Now I know for sure that is true and not hyperbole. Now I can testify that being emotionally and physically frozen out by someone whose 'love' is the center of your world is equally painful, equally cruel and equally unjust as a physical blow.  

By any other name it is abuse.

By no definition available in any dictionary or philosophy does this behavior have one whit to do with love.

Another epiphany related to how all this impacted my writing came to me while watching a YouTube ad about Joyce Carol Oates's Masterclass in which she is emphasizing the importance of being a truth teller to any kind of serious writing.  That you have to be willing to look fearlessly at even uncomfortable truths and not flinch at revealing them in your work.  I'm totally paraphrasing but the gist is there.  

I came to realize that there were two levels on which my refusal to face the truth of my marriage's dynamic was sabotaging my writing. The first level is in all the unconscious effort my psyche invested in not seeing the truth and the second level was all the conscious effort that went into protecting him from being found out by family, friends, acquaintances, employers and landlords.  The primary way I protected him was by keeping my mouth shut so that I never contradicted something he may have said when I wasn't present and this always devolved to shutting down the flow of words on paper and screen as well. 

It also resulted in my sabotaging all the relationships I had before marriage and prevented me from developing any other close adult friendships.  If you are always watching every word you think or say for potential booby traps you eventually learn to practice silence.  True friendship cannot thrive where truth is not welcome.

That doesn't even begin to touch on the aspect of being willing to speak the truth publicly once you are able to say it to yourself.  This post may be considered TMI to some and even completely inappropriate. Though I have had Ed's permission since 2005 the year my Dad was dying to share on my blog some of the negative impact his behaviors were having on my writing, I know there are those in both my family and his that believe that you don't air dirty laundry in public and might find some of what I share shaming to the family.

Even Ed might find some of what I'm willing to share now objectionable but since he is now completely ghosting me he is unlikely to encounter it. Thus it is far from my intent to weaponize my words to exact revenge on him. Or even just influence him in any way. He is neither the target of my words nor my intended audience.  

My entire purpose is to excavate my own soul and reclaim my own sense of self. So to prevent even accidental negative blowback on him I spend some minutes every day holding him in the Light of Divine Love praying for him to find his own way back to his own true self. I no longer feel any duty to be the one to rescue him.

This post is written for my writing community and any family member who might encounter it will just have to deal because I am through being silent about the central truths of my life.  I am through having others dictate to me what is OK for me to think, or say or believe. I am through protecting everyone else from their shame while taking it on myself in silent agony.

This is almost precisely how I felt in 1994 when I broke from the cultish funde church I was raised in when the Elders were splitting up extended families with excommunications over doctrinal minutia while quietly covering up domestic violence, child abuse and molestation perpetrated by those allowed to teach from the pulpit. I wrote in my journal at the time:

 all those sober Elders who appointed themselves our teachers, who point proudly to the missing Rev. before their name and the lacking Ph. D. following, are far from lacking in B.S.  Their head’s and heart’s are stuck so far up inside their hollowed out egos--that echo chamber where they hear nothing but the sound of their own voices, but think it God’s--they couldn’t see the light if the sun orbited their eyeballs and they couldn’t know God’s love if Jesus himself walked up and kissed them on the nose.  None of them will ever have any further authority over me, mind, body, soul, or spirit.  I would wash their feet in my spit!  And anoint their brows with the sweat of my pits!  They are worse than the blackest hearted crook.  They are hypocrites!  When they try to make out like they got God’s mouth in their ear, I want to ask how far he sticks his tongue in!

That's me writing as a fearless truth teller.  I need to find her again.  To own her again.

I thought that over the following decade I'd learned to think for myself but now I realize that I've never been able to feel comfortable with any conclusion I came to on any topic if I sensed any disagreement or disapproval from Ed.  I thought I'd repudiated my need to proselytize but apparently I still had a burning need to convince someone besides my own self of a truth before I could own it completely.   My husband became my guru.  Not by his conscious design but by default because I had not yet learned to own my own mind.

Now I have to go back over all that old ground all over again.  That is why, like with my last several NaNo projects, this ROW80 round is going to be focused on personal journaling.  There will be some stream of consciousness word flow but for the most part I'll be writing to a slew of topic or specific memory prompts I've collected in those recent NaNo files and will continue to add to as concepts or memories occur to me.  Some of those memories will be written using the same techniques as in fiction which I hope will re-enliven those skills and hone them for a near future return to my storyworld.

2020 Round 3 ROW80 and July Camp NaNo goals:

Sleep 7.5 hours Daily Minimum --  This used to be a major challenge for me but I've got it managed since mid March.  No more all-over-the-clock sleep 'schedule'. No more multiple day awake manic episodes.  And I've done all that in spite of going off anti-depressants over a year ago.  I switched to over the counter 5HTP, tripling the dose I'd been taking as a supplement for over a decade.  Done with med nurse supervision.  The process proved that most of the mood disorder symptoms were rooted in sleep deprivation fueled by anxiety which is part of the sensory information processing issue in Asperger's.   

Move/Breathe/Meditate 15 min Daily minimum  -- Swaying on the mini-tramp can include all three simultaneous.  There are a number of other ways I can do any one or combine two but it is essential that each one is included every day.  And this represents baby steps as it is barely a quarter of a healthy level of these activities.  Besides they have proven to provide a high yield return on investment as whenever I've practiced any of them it stimulates creativity, memory, and insight; lowers anxiety, and increases energy, stamina and a positive mood.

Storydreaming with note-taking tools at hand. 15 min Daily MInimum -- This is a technique I learned from Robert Olen Butler in the book From Where You Dream.

Read Fiction 30 min Daily Average

Read/Study Craft 15 min Daily Average 

Social network activities 30 min Daily Minimum (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc) -- something I've a strong resistance to.  The autism diagnosis helps explain this but doesn't let me off the hook.  If anything it makes it more important.  Plus this is preparing the ground for future promotion once I'm ready to publish

30 min Daily minimum engagement with a scavenger hunt though all my creative writing files including Joystory looking for better than shitty first draft scenes, sections, stories, poems and essays and edit, organize and make hard copies. --  It's been years since I've made clean copies of manuscripts in my portfolios and for most of the noveling writing challenges I've never printed hardcopy.  That is a lot of words to mine as between 2004 and 2015 I participated in more than one such challenge per year-- Nanowrimo, Junowrimo, Camp Nano, ROW80 and Sweating for Sven.among them.  That is a lot of novella length WIP just gathering electron dust.  A conservative estimate is over 20.  I've been wondering for sometime now if the neglect of these stories after the challenges were over is at least partly responsible for the storyworld's elusiveness over the last several years.  I'm hoping that this exercise in honoring their existence will cure my character's recent shyness.

To prep for self-pub: Gather all my poems into a single Scrivener file. Minimum one poem per day until all accounted for.  Adding new ones encouraged.  This will take most of the Round as there are over 80. See Poems by Joy Renee Portal.  Another exercise in honoring old work to encourage new work.

Personal Journaling 45 min or 1000 words whichever come first Daily Minimum -- This is the heart of the writing challenge.  The preceding provides the structure and the nutrients that nurtures and honors the work which I've learned over time must exist to ensure that this becomes more than just dabbling.  This is not intended for future publication tho I do expect that eventually material begun here will lend itself to development into personal essays for blog posts and new poems and stories.  This is what I've been doing for the last several NaNo and I'm hoping that the addition of the new willingness to seek and own my personal truth through this exercise will unlock the fictional storyworlds for me again by the first of the year if not in time for this November's NaNo.

Read more...

Finishing Joy

Crochet Bag for Travel Blanket

Earlier this month my sister asked me if I had any pink yarn or thread in my stash. 

Well, duh, yeah. 

With several individuals on my potential giftee list having affinity for either pastels in general or the pink/red spectrum, I had accumulated some.  Not quite as much as the blue which is mine and Mom's favorite or the purple which is Carri's but still a significant selection.

She was asking because she'd bought a travel blanket for a friend on discount that was missing the carry bag it was supposed to come with.  Carri showed me her own travel blanket in its bag and asked if it was feasible to crochet a carry bag for it and about how long it would take and how much I might charge her for it.  She was hoping to see this out-of-town friend in person sometime in May.

I spent the next couple hours pulling my stash bags out from under my craft table and going thru them looking for possible yarn and thread in shades of pink or colorways featuring pink.  After dinner that evening I had Carri look them over and she settled on the Lion Brand Cobo in Magenta which was very close in color to the blanket itself.  It was a good choice for its fiber content of cotton and bamboo blend.

Before I went to bed that night I had crocheted the bottom circle and the first two rows of the tube.  The bottom took me several false starts before I got the right starting number of stitches in the center so that it continued to lay flat until it reached the required six inches across.  Turned out to be twelve.

The next morning I added several rows of the mesh--double crochet, single chain, double crochet--before I was needed for Mom's shower.  I showed it to Carri and told her then that instead of cash I wanted her to take me yarn shopping at a discount store she had messaged me photos from last summer and to one of the branches of the Fort Vancouver library system where I could sign up for a card and for having items mailed to me because of my disabilities preventing me from traveling to pick them up in Woodland. 

Both excursions would have to wait until after the need for quarantine on behalf of Mom is past.  That might be longer than the official shelter-in-place protocols remain in place since our 88 year-old mother is extremely vulnerable to the effects of the virus.

By Wednesday evening, May 6, I had finished it, including all the finishing touches like tucking tails and adding the elastic headband for a drawstring.  That was five days since I began after dinner on Friday and finished shortly after dinner on Wednesday. 

Little to no work got done on either Saturday or Tuesday as those are Mom's shower days for which I'm on duty in the bathroom with her for three hours followed by another two hours making and supervising lunch.  That means it could easily be a three day project. Even less if I super focused. But that super focus is a power of mine I must use with care as it tends to push out all other activities from my life--reading, writing, researching, videos, socializing, chores, self-care, eating, sleeping...

I was eager to start another one or two or three for myself.  I pictured them as carry bags for crochet project kits that will hang on my wrist while I work.  Or as bags with shoulder straps for my coffee and water thermoses.

But I knew I needed to rein in that urge as I've got dozens of WIP.  In fact the bags containing WIP are beginning to rival in volume the bags containing unkitted yarn and thread--somewhere in the neighborhood of 66 gallons each. 

I've been working steadily at finishing projects since I began the holiday rush last fall and resisting starting anything new until I finish a significant number of them.

The real story here is that of the thrill I got from starting and finishing one project inside of a week.  It felt so exhilarating I even asked myself is Joy actually experiencing joy? 

If so, I concluded, I  needed to finish more projects more often.  Then it occurred to me that I had enough projects scattered among my WIP bags with from under an hour to under six hours of work to complete that I could finish something every day for a month or more.  Starting with this large trash bag containing things I crocheted for myself and never got around to tucking the tails and other finishing touches like buttons, bows, belts, tassels etc.

Contained in this bag is also a few things that I didn't make myself including kit bags that need minor repair but it is over 80% yarn and thread crochet WIP.  Sitting in Mom's recliner it takes up significantly more room than her torso and head.

Instead of starting a finish one a day agenda tho I decided to return to the project I'd interrupted to do the bag for Carri's friend.  That was a sweater identical to the one I made Mom for Christmas for her friend who lives with my brother's family where Mom spent weekends before the quarantine protocols kicked in. 

We had implemented shelter-in-place on account of our elderly Mom in mid March about a week before our Governor Inslee instituted it statewide.  And about two weeks after I'd targeted the sweater for Mom's friend as my next focus.  I'd hoped to have it finished by the end of March.  I just finished it a few days ago. 

I backed off crochet in April in favor of reading and discovered or re-discovered another old thrill:  finishing novels in less than a week after starting them.  In fact after I'd collected a significant number of finished titles across my devices and reading aps I set about counting them and discovered there were over fifty titles and the ratio of fiction to NF was better than three to one.  But that's a topic for another post.

Shortly after the read-a-thon in April though I began to gravitate back to crochet for a bit most every day with the focus on that sweater for Mom's friend and I knew that I needed to keep my focus on that until it was done because focus for me is a fragile thing.

Yes, fragile.  in spite of having just described it as nearly a super power of mine.  The fragility is in keeping the balance between flitting like a butterfly from shiny object to shiny object creating WIP and other clutter that takes over my space and the hyper-focus that can take over my life like bindweed a yard.  The difference is between owning the focus and being owned by it.  This issue is part of my autism spectrum profile.

But when I finished it the other day, including tucking the tails just hours after taking the last stitch, and handed it over to my sister to be laundered she informed me that she had just done the gentle cycle load so it could be a week or more before there would be enough items to warrant another load.

When I suggested Mom's sweater also needed washing since I'd been using it as the pattern, had handled it a lot and dropped it on the floor where it picked up fuzzies and who knows what all else, she said the two together would balance the load so she might consider it but I told her to hold off a couple days while I collected nearly finished WIP with similar fiber content to see how many of those I could add to the load inside of a week..

Last night I handed over three hats and three scarves after about three hours of effort.  All of them I'd made for myself.  Several of them I'd been wearing without having tucked the tails; even with the stitch savers still protecting the last stitch.

I decided to wait until they were all back from the laundry before getting pictures.

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With Respect to the Spectrum (Revisited)

Earlier this month I reworked and updated the post I wrote here the week I received my Autism Spectrum diagnosis nearly 5 years ago for publication at Wellness Works NW.  With their permission I'm cross-posting it here.

At the bottom of this essay is appended a list of some of the books on autism I've encountered since my diagnosis. That list is short compared to the TBR list I've collected on the topic so tomorrow I'm participating in Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon and intend to devote at least 50% of my reading time to the topic in both fiction and non-fiction.

I was diagnosed with High Functioning Autism in the Fall of 2015 the very week of the annual fundraiser for Autism.  How ironic is that?

I was 57 and 10/12ths.

Essentially I had self-diagnosed a few months previous while reading aloud to my Mom The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome by Shonda Schilling wife of Boston Red Socks pitcher Curt Schilling about their experience with their son Grant.  As I was reading I kept finding myself identifying with the behaviors she was describing.  After the first few evening's readings I went back in the ebook and highlighted all the incidents that resonated with my own memories of similar incidents.  There were already over half a dozen and as the days progressed I continued to highlight something nearly every day.

After stewing on it for a week or so upon finishing the book I got up the nerve to ask my counselor if we could look into having me assessed for Asperger's.  It turned out she was already considering the possibility.

A few weeks after that it was official.  Although they don't call it Asperger's anymore as the new manual subsumes that diagnosis under High Functioning Autism. 

Most of my issues are in the social, sensory, emotional, and perseverating behaviors.   Sensory overload results in (or is the result of) an inability to process all the data flooding all five sensory intakes in real time which is likely (in my self-observation-informed opinion) the root of most of the other issues. 

Who wouldn't have social anxiety if every conversation is conducted in a room with multiple blaring TV's and radios on different channels, tuning orchestras and marching bands, and a window open to big-city traffic on a sunny day with its constant flicker of light and shadow and cacophony of horns, engines, sirens, brakes, raised voices...  Now add to that a sixth channel for an equally chaotic swirl of emotion.  And yet another channel for a cascade of sensory and emotional memories triggered by all of that.  Who could be expected, under such conditions, to assign meaning to subtle changes in facial expression, body posture and tone of voice to figure out there is more meaning being proffered than the dictionary definitions of the spoken words.  It was hard enough and often impossible to capture the words and their meanings in real time.  No wonder conversations held in my presence often sound like they are being exchanged between the staff at Charlie Brown's school.

This untamed chaos accompanied by awareness of incomprehensible expectations on the part of others creates the anxiety (performance anxiety on steroids?) which leads to the 'unacceptable' behaviors like social isolation, rituals and rhythmic movements, OCD, inconsistency, getting stuck in a groove, zoning out (Earth to Joy!) giving the appearance of self-involvement or selfishness.  

That is where the name Autism for this condition originated--from the cognate 'auto' meaning self.  But I believe that is a misleading misnomer born of limited information and lack of imagination on the part of the early researchers.  What if it is all evidence of instability of self-hood--an inability to maintain a coherent sense of self in the midst of sensory chaos.  If that is so then all those manifestations of information overload and attempts to self-soothe are evidence of monumental courage and tenacity.  

Modern theories use the term Mindblind which has potential to be less judgmental and pejorative but only if those contemplating it realize that it is a two way street.  To accuse those on the spectrum of 'mindblindness' because they exhibit little evidence of being able to predict the output of other minds by extrapolating from personal experience while exempting themselves from the visa versa is nothing more than hubris and will only lead them down another blind alley.  

The assumption in play is that only the neurotypical mind is a legitimate manifestation of mind.  I reject that as I reject the idea that someone speaking another language is less human than I.  

Originally I felt enormously relieved and full of hope having the diagnosis.  It explained so much--like:

• Why as a child I had few close friends and got along with adults better than my own age group and as an adult I continue to have a dearth of close friends and gravitate towards children and teens as my confidants.
• Why at nearly 20 months I spent the entire night following the July 4rth fireworks until past dawn screaming "BOOM! BOOM! Mama. BOOM! BOOM!"
• Why I'd always avoided crowds and my first and only attempt to attend a high-school pep rally ended with me hiding in the girls restroom in the school library with the lights out in the grip of a full blown feels-like-a-heart-attack panic attack that overcame me just seconds after entering the gym where the band and cheerleaders were warming up and the bleachers were full of nearly 900 students all talking at once.  With a mirrored disco ball shooting light shards.  I had previously spent the pep rallies in the library but they had just made attending them mandatory.  After that I made sure to be in one of the library typing booths with the light out-sometimes hiding under the desk-until I heard Mr. H. locking the front door.  Or I'd be conveniently home sick that day.  (I wasn't faking it as severe anxiety can create symptoms that mimic illness like sore skin, low-grade fever, sore throat, nausea.  It plays havoc with immune systems as well.)
• Why I tend to get intensely focused on one topic or activity to the exclusion of others like watching all five Star Trek series inside of four months or all ten seasons of Criminal Minds inside of five weeks or crocheting for twenty hours straight or spending most of forty some hours writing a short story or listening to the same album twenty times in a row or until my brother threatened to break it if I didn't give it a rest...ad nauseum.
• Why I research every subject that catches my fancy like I'm going to be writing a master's theses on it.  Wanna lay bets on which subject got that treatment in the year following my diagnosis?
• Why I dislike being touched
• Why I like handling things with different textures and shapes and feel a compulsion to touch every object in sight.
• Why I get lost in a zone while staring at something--or nothing.  "Earth to Joy!"  Which may have resulted in the loss of my first close friend in sixth grade after I refused to respond to her calling my name during a rainy-day-recess hide-and-go-seek game in the classroom.  I suspect just like the pep rally I was in sensory overload and had gone into my version of a virtual booth.  
• Why I resist meeting peoples eyes.
• Why I'm such an extreme perfectionist I prefer to not do it at all than to do it wrong.  In grade school I'd start the assignment over each time I made a mistake because even the erasure smudges offended my sensibilities.
• Why I have OCD tendencies
• Why I'm ritualistic about tasks, liking to do them in a certain way or having difficulty doing them at all if some element of that ritual or the ability to establish a ritual is denied me.  But sometimes the ritual for just setting up to do the task consumes the allotted time for working on the task.
• Why I have difficulty following oral directions without needing them repeated--several times.
• Why speaking on the phone is nearly as difficult as attending pep rallies
• Why I'm clumsy
• Why I jiggle my leg, tap my fingers or pencil on the desk, swivel my desk chair side to side, tap my tongue on the roof my mouth or teeth (one of the ways I learned to disguise the compulsion into socially acceptable behaviors along with rocking babies, bouncing on the mini-tramp or exercise ball, sitting in swings or rocking chairs, drumsticks...)
• Why I like to collect things and hate to give them up--even things most would toss in the garbage without a qualm--like the old asbestos bathroom floor tiles I hid under my mattress when they put in new linoleum when I was six.  I was heartbroken when Mom discovered them and took them away.  I'm still saving weird stuff but nothing quite as disgusting as that. :)
• Why I dislike change.  Even transitioning from indoor to outdoor, from dry to wet, from awake to asleep...and visa versa. Switching tasks, changing clothes, changing routines....
• Why it took me nearly ten years to earn my bike via the star chart devised by my mom in which completion of each day's chores without reminding and with good attitude earned a gold star and for each gold star Daddy would put a dollar in the bank for our bike.  My baby sister whom I had a seven year head start on earned her bike several years before I did.
• Why I dislike any social gathering but especially of more than three or four people.  One on one is my preference.  Well...not counting one on none which I suppose doesn't count as a social gathering anyway.   Although--maybe, if I were allowed to count all the characters that inhabit my storyworlds.  :)
• Why I cover my ears and feel tempted to tantrum when sirens or trains go by within a block.  Or jets approach or leave runways.  Alarm clocks are barely more tolerable.
• Why I have such massive startle reactions anyone standing too close can get hurt.  More than once someone coming up behind me or touching me unexpectedly got an elbow in the gut or ribs.
• Why even listening to conversation takes so much effort and wears me out. And participating is a whole other level of enervating angst.
• Why I think in images and video clips and struggle to translate them into words before whoever is listening loses patience.
• Why my thoughts go into a free association at light-speed in which I see patterns and relationships I can seldom convince anyone else are relevant
• Why conversations with me can wear out the other person trying to follow my train of thought all over the map of ideas.  And that's even if we started out discussing the menu for the next meal.

Nearly all of that can be explained by a neurological condition that makes processing and integrating multiple streams of information in real time impossible.  Each of the five senses is at least one separate stream.  Verbal content another--one stream per person speaking.  Non-verbal content another--one stream per person present.  Emotions another, if not separate streams for each emotion present in the environment--mine and theirs.  Spatial relationships yet another. Time yet another.  Self/Other boundaries yet another.  If having a stable sense of self requires integrating all of that and more in real time, what is the meaning of the phrase 'self-involved' in this context?

Some of the relief the diagnosis generated in me when I first received it relates to the pervasive sense of failure as a human being I've carried for decades because of what seemed to be character flaws preventing me from conforming to expectations--mine or other's.  This sense of failure feeds the depression I've struggled with since at least age 4.  A depression that reached suicidal levels several times before age 40.  As I wrote in my blog at the time: 

Forty odd years after earning my bike I'm still expecting gold star days of myself and never achieving them.  But the chart I've created for myself contains dozens more requirements than Mom's did for me back then.  It's probably impossible for a neuro-typical.  But for someone with the issues I just described above its just cruel.

Now I'm getting a glimpse of a future in which I've forgiven myself for the failure to accomplish the impossible.  For isn't it as unrealistic to expect someone with sensory processing issues to be at ease in a crowd or capable of accomplishing each days tasks to perfection without reminding and with good attitude as it would be to expect a blind person to drive a car or a person with only two limbs to jump rope?

With Respect to the Spectrum

The hope that accompanied that relief was rooted in the expectation that the diagnosis would open new doors for me like counseling that was more like coaching targeted at the issues that prevent me from living an autonomous and productive life.  I believed that defining a problem was the first step in fixing it and thus I was on my way to a brighter future.  But not so much.  Turns out the community mental health system where I'm at doesn't provide such services for adults.  And all the information I've accessed in my year's long research project has just added more data streams to the chaos.  

Yes, the information from the dozens of books, articles and videos has helped me understand my situation and develop compassion for my self and even forgiveness but it hasn't yet helped me stop creating new need to forgive myself on a daily, even hourly basis.  It has given me a sense that it should be possible to organize my self and my life to create competency and self-respect but I've yet to find a way to apply the knowledge with a consistency that even begins to mimic normal adulthood.  And now, at age 62 it is getting harder to cling to the hope for a self-actualized life and I'm overwhelmed by the sense that my self will remain as unfinished as the dozens and dozens of novels, essays, stories, and poems in my files and the dozens of unfinished fiber art projects in boxes and bags surrounding me.

But if I've learned nothing else it is that consistency like perfection is overrated and and neither are viable goals in the first place.  Hope is the prerequisite for effort and effort nurtures hope.  The process itself is the goal.  Trying the next thing when the last thing fails is the mark of maturity.  So I will continue the research and the efforts.

Following is a list of some of the books I’ve encountered since the diagnosis that have informed, nurtured or empowered me:

Academics: Science, Theory, History, How-To, Sociology, Psychology, Journalism

• Asperger’s on the Job by Simone, Rudy
• Asperger’s and Girls by Wrobel, Mary et al
• Coming Out Asperger by Murray, Dinah
• NeuroTribes by Silberman, Steve
• The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum  by Grandin, Temple
• Exposure Anxiety – The Invisible Cage by Williams, Donna
• An Anthropologist on Mars by Sacks, Oliver
• Mindblindness An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind by Baron-Cohen, Simon
• Natural Genius : The Gifts of Asperger’s Syndrome by Rubinyi, Susan
• Neurodiversity by Armstrong, Thomas
• The Neurofeedback Solution by Larsen, Stephen
• The Social Skills Guidebook: Manage Shyness, Improve Your Conversations, and Make Friends, Without Giving Up Who You Are by MacLeod, Chris
• Working With Adults With Asperger Syndrome: A Practical Toolkit by Hagland, Carol & Webb, Zillah
• Self-determined Future With Asperger Syndrome : Solution Focused Approaches by Bliss, E. Veronica & Edmonds, Genevieve
• In a Different Key by Donvan, John & Zucker, Caren
• The Highly Sensitive Person by Aron, Elaine N.
• Autism and the God Connection : Redefining the Autistic Experience Through Extraordinary Accounts of Spiritual Giftedness by Stillman, William
• Writers on the Spectrum by Brown, Julie
• An Exact Mind: an Artist With Asperger Syndrome by Myers, Peter

Biography and Memoir by those on the spectrum and those who care for them

• The Best Kind of Different: Our Family’s Journey With Asperger’s Syndrome by Schilling, Shonda & Schiller, M. J.
• Carly’s Voice by Fleischmann, Arthur
• Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic: A Comedian’s Guide to Life on the Spectrum by Michael McCreary
• Nobody Nowhere by Williams, Donna
• Somebody Somewhere by Williams, Donna
• Born on a Blue Day by Tammet, Daniel
• Look Me in the Eye by Robison, John Elder
• Raising Cubby by Robison, John Elder
• Be Different by Robison, John Elder
• The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism by Barnett, Kristine
• Temple Grandin by Montgomery, Sy
• Thinking in Pictures by Grandin, Temple
• A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin’s Mother Tells the Family Story by Cutler, Eustacia
• Raising Blaze by Ginsberg, Debra
• To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines by Newman, Judith
• Life, Animated by Suskind, Ron
• Following Ezra by Fields-Meyer, Tom

Fiction

• House Rules by Picoult, Jodi
• The Speed of Dark by Moon, Elizabeth
• Love Anthony by Genova, Lisa
• Best Boy by Gottlieb, Eli
• The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin by Knipper, Stephanie
• Shine Shine Shine by Netzer, Lydia
• How We Deal With Gravity by Scott, Ginger
• Ginny Moon by Ludwig, Benjamin
• The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Haddon, Mark
• The Art of Fielding by Harbach, Chad
• 600 Hours of Edward by Lancaster, Craig

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