Of course

Meet up from a dating site, have a nice walk: don't hear from him for months

I start dating his friend: he's suddenly interested in me

I move away: he moves to be with me

I initiate relationship talks about moving in together: he moves to a distant city

I de-escalate from anchor to comet relationship: he asks me to travel to meet his parents and college friends

(no subject)

I've been thinking about what I like.

That's not right. I've been thinking of what the world looks like when what I do is a straight-line expression of who I am. I have interests and values, and instead of trying to mediate that for the outside world, what happens when I just let it flow out?

I do animal things. I lie on the floor in the dirt. I make clothes. I make gardens. I transform meat into charcuterie. I write and write and write.

The guy who does the "Autism from the Inside" youtube channel has been working on his burnout cycle for awhile. Most recently, he's decided that what prevents burnout for him is not just more rest, but an adequate amount of play as part of the cycle: work, play, rest.

I've been thinking a lot about how I play lately.

A lot of my play is super autistic. That is, to observers socialized to this society, it looks like work and/or capitalist productivity. Kids line their toys up or sort them by category or think up situations so complex it can be hard for other people to follow them into that play. I line my spreadsheets up and sort my seeds by this category and then that, looking at the different patterns they make. I do projects that are environmentally-reactive, responding to surroundings so complex that other people have trouble following me into the game.

But.

It's not capitalist productivity. It is play. Every meme that said you need to rest chipped away at how I thought I was supposed to handle being tired until I didn't know what I needed. Performativity seeps in the smallest cracks, and even though I wasn't performing for anyone in particular I saw the template - neurotypical maybe, though I have a lot of autistic friends that follow it - where rest was equated either with doing nothing or with consuming.

It did not serve me.

Now I keep busy, but I'm busy doing things I like. I don't feel external productivity pressure to do these things and I work very hard at that, it's key; I don't feel guilty if I don't do them. I slip like quicksilver between activities as I need, my attention pooling long and deep sometimes and skipping across many activities other times.

Doing these things energizes me. It pulls me into the world, and then I want to live in the world instead of hiding from it as I do in burnout.

It's also just so opposite of all the advice I see. I guess I should be used to it now; that society and those recommendations are not built for me. It's weird to think they work for some people? But I guess it's just as weird for those people to learn that all this "work" works for me.

(no subject)

Oh look, someone's been observing my relationships

https://aspergersfromtheinside.com/2017/02/10/being-too-direct/

Therapeutic Gathering

I've been chipping away at this idea of what I need socially up here for awhile. When my old company, with its ready-made set of compatible friends in proximity, went away, I was feeling pretty lost. Then covid happened and it kinda didn't matter, I backburnered it. It still popped up from time to time, I chipped away, but I didn't have a solution.

Talking to my therapist the other day, I thought: you know, we do have the arts space in town. They have the pottery studio, sure, but they also host workshops and things. I wonder if they'd be willing to host a monthly or twice-monthly craft night?

One of the big issues in this town is that its super, super patriarchal. The men work and support their nuclear family, which is the woman who cares for the kids outside of school-time and the kids who are present until they grow up and leave. So a lot of the interesting things are done by women during the day, so I can't attend (farmer's market, craft and art stuff) and also there's a bit of a disconnect talking to folks who haven't really navigated supporting themselves with out-of-home work and the accompanying pressures.

There isn't often an interesting workshop outside of work hours.

Hosting something in my home involves dealing with the dogs, dealing with my small space (I can seat 4-5 people easily-ish in my livingroom if not everyone needs a soft seat, but we can't all sit at a table or do a project in the kitchen).

Hosting something in the community arts space, or the women's shelter kitchen (which is a commercial kitchen owned by the women's shelter, not inside the actual DV shelter space), would probably be welcomed by those groups and removes some of the logistics.

I'd got that far with my therapist yesterday, then put it kind of on the back burner.

Except today a friend mentioned that they're reading "The Art Of Gathering" by Priya Parker, and I poked at that a bit, and it gave me a starting point. Her tedtalk says:

1) What is the purpose? Meaning/need it fills? Design it to fit that.

2) Create good controversy (I love this generally, not sure how to apply it here). "Give people a way in to each other"

3) Temporary alternative world through pop-up rules. Think of this after the meaning is sorted out.