I’m taking a break for the holidays.
To my usual readers – catch you later!
—-
To those of you out there on the spectrum with me:
I feel the irksome woes of routines being all askew this season.
I don’t like that much either.
Christmas and the holiday season should be fun, but I get it, it’s just different. The shake-ups can shake you up.
They’ll be doing the same to me.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
H2
My wife, a wonderful human, has come to me quite often before, expressing her jubilation over legitimately awesome things: artwork, design, experiences, even things that happen to me — you name it.
She’ll then turn and ask:
“Aren’t you excited?”
I nod.
I grin, even.
I do try to sell it.
“…yeah….no?”
She hasn’t yet stormed off after asking what’s wrong, or how any normal human could fail to be excited or enthusiastic about things.
But we know.
I’m not a normal human.
I don’t get all that excited about stuff.
While depression is a serious challenge that many of us autistics face in some shape or another, that’s not always the root of our excited-less-ness.
Emotions are tough for us to understand, to process, assimilate, and synthesize. Not that we lack them, but they wax and wane in different ways, and not always for what we should get excited over.
But it’s OK.
We get that you’re excited, and we’re happy for you.
We’re just not always on the same bandwidth. We get excited about different stuff.
My wife chided me for being more giddy over the BattleBots final than I was for when I was promoted at work, or something truly important.
We’d help if if we could.
So am I excited, ever?
Rarely.
But I’m OK.
/reads title
Oh man, Hunter’s got a SUMMER CAMP story!
A poorly adjusted autistic teenager, packed in a bus with a church group who rarely talked to him, going to a camp more than three states away.
What could go wrong?
Folks, I hate to disappoint, but the camp story is boring.
It was uneventful.
I didn’t embarrass myself, didn’t fall off a zip line, never had someone stick a lobster down my swim trunks, didn’t sit on a vaseline-covered toilet seat, and didn’t melt down in an awkward, autistic mess.
Not yet.
After a week of camp, my family came to pick me up and drive me back home.
I was elated – nothing went terribly wrong, and I felt like I got along and went along with everything that went on, so I babbled on during the car ride back home.
As we drove, I noticed my folks taking a different way home.
“Mom’s got to handle something at work,” Dad said, as we drove onto the nearby Navy base.
So on we drove, keeping on in conversation, when I noticed something in the distance.
“Oh, look! That person has a New Beetle just like Mom’s—”
At that moment, they all (all six of them) shouted:
“WE MOVED!”
Yeah.
My family literally moved houses while I was gone for the week.
Moved.
Up and relocated without me knowing.
On the plus side, at least they came to get me.
I did have my own room there.
Did I have an awful, abject, autistic meltdown and weeping fit?
Yep.
And did I ever go back to summer camp?
NOPE.
The Life Autistic 