Keeping the lights on

Oh goodness, put me in a group with other plant people, even just virtually, and I just light up. It's particularly obvious because I've been watching myself on all these work meetings, and now I watch myself on the landrace plant group meeting and I go from barely managing not to look completely bored to just glowing.

Ok, message received, data collected. What to do about it is the harder question.

Definitions

How are you feeling? Autistic.

What does this mean?

I feel like my emotions are too large to fit in the room. I'm kind of accustomed to this with the traditionally negative emotions, but it's also true of the traditionally positive ones. When I'm feeling enthusiasm about anything anyone else has a hope of understanding, I'm generally riding the brake really hard. Hard enough to leave rubber on the road. Hard enough to create vibration and heat and need to stop and let it dissipate from time to time.

While I didn't really have access to plant people growing up, this is probably another reason I am hesitant to do shared projects. When I'm enthusiastic about something only I am involved in, I can do it at whatever pace I like. If I bring other people in they either expect me to continue my enthusiasm indefinitely (and I do need breaks) or they get overwhelmed by it.

I don't entirely care how my enthusiasm is met? That's secondary to it being met. It can be read as flirty and there's some accuracy to that, but it's not really about sex. It can go that way, or it can go the way of intense conversation or ?maybe? co-projecting but I don't really distinguish between these things? That's why I'm poly, to be honest. I don't want to have to grab something in the middle of the experience, hold it up against a chart, and parse out a bunch of arbitrary detail. I want to be able to trust whoever else is involved to know their own consent or at least ask for the space to figure it out, and then engage in a good way for them, even if that means backing off and shutting the door. My enthusiasm is a force of nature. Dancing with it and closing the door to it are equally reasonable.

Curating the face you turn to the world is such an autism thing.

But: feeling autistic.

I also just feel unable to fit my thoughts into allistic-shaped communication. I want to say this ties in to that and that and this one other thing and weave the points of to-me-obvious connection from several conversations into a line of inquiry. I want to springboard off someone else's thoughts and then have them springboard off mine. This can be confusing, evasive, and irritating to so many people.

Feeling autistic: I feel ill-equipped to navigate people's unspoken emotions. I'm impatient with the apparent need to attach disclaimers to every thought: I could be wrong or this is a thought to explore, not a declaration of One True Way or this other lens on the subject isn't the only one, it's just another one to consider. At the same time I wish other people would include a few more such disclaimers: this is true for many people or this is true in my general experience or this is a feeling, not a fact about the world.

Feeling autistic: transitions are hard. Transitioning from being inside a subject, from thinking deeply about it, into anything else, is full of grinding gears and showers of rust. It's a drop and then a disorienting static, especially as my cognitive stuff declines these days, and I feel physically dizzy and much less able to process especially vision. I want to get up and walk around an unfamiliar room and pick up and put down a thousand different objects after glancing at them without really seeing them. I do not want to dive deeply into another subject, but I don't want my mind to be left empty and blank either.