Greenstorm's Journal

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.

A friend of mine wrote this:

could this body be a wilderness
instead of a garden?
could it thrive, grow mysterious & intriguing,
develop shadows & secrets
and wild glens where herbs sprawl green
on the banks of burbling streams, and
aspens shiver gently in soft breezes,
their clean straight stems welcoming sun and wind.
could i be filled with endless summer sun
and the passionate torment of monsoon rains?
could i freeze hard in winter and come
to a complete stop
just breathing?

We played around in the comments a little, and eventually I added this:

could these humans be a garden
instead of a wilderness?
could they thrive, grow gracious and perceptive,
develop tolerance & knowing,
and walled rooms where creatures sprawl safe
in the murmurs of shared conversations, and
bodies melt in sympathetic support,
their nerves and muscles welcoming desired contact.
could i be filled with challenge and answer
and the passionate torment of empathy's exploration?
could i shed my armour in society and come
to a complete stop
just breathing?

She is yarrowkat / Kat Heatherington and you can find more of her here, her work is excellent: https://www.patreon.com/yarrowkat

But I want to talk about the process for a minute, because this felt really important to me.

I'm different from other people. That's really been the crux of this whole autism/PDA/whatever thing: it's that my experiences are just not the same as other folks, even given the same events. It makes folks very uncomfortable to know that my experiences are different from theirs so I spend most of my energy smoothing that over in various ways: highlighting the overlaps, shrugging off statements about "universal" or my own experiences, denying my own senses and the reality of my own thoughts.

A lot of folks don't seem to feel like people can be different from each other, so when I assert my experience they argue with me: no, I must have actually thought/felt some other thing. Or, if they accept that difference, they feel like then stating their own experiences somehow challenges the existence of mine, so they get real quiet. The concept of neurodiversity helps me put this into context. These folks don't believe in neurodiversity.

When someone states an experience around something I'm interested in, I want to find it fascinating. I want to dig in and compare. I want to both know their experience and share my own. Through this process I feel like I am both acknowledging/legitimizing this new experience and building knowledge about my own. So many folks view this as an adversarial invalidation, though, that I don't do it often. It's viewed as contrarian.

(I'm a little bitter: I grew up with "celebrate our differences" slogans and then when I go to do it folks feel attacked)

So when Kat wrote this poem (there's a bunch more to it) I kind of played with some of the lines. She identifies as a human, she is within the social and human sphere, and in the poem she's experiencing wilderness as external. I identify as a piece of nature, I guess, outside of the human sphere but interacting with it, and I identify wilderness as internal and humans as external.

In the comments of the poem we went back and forth: she'd write something, I'd use her formality of thought and her structure to invert her writing and gain a better understanding of myself, by using her lens. It was tremendously valuable. The exchange also reads as if I'm contradicting or challenging her. So for instance she'd write: "the wilderness is what doesn't fit. outside the comfort, the sunlight, the fence itself, it is what lies nameless and unknowable and necessary" and I'd write "humans are what doesn't fit. outside the intuition, the body, nature herself, they are what trade words for truth and congealed facts for certainty and busyness for the work of living and dying"

And through this process we built a thing, I learned a lot, and I also felt like I was allowed to exist as my actual self in the world: like making statements about myself didn't harm or challenge someone else. It was a precious experience for me. PDA never lets me just accept things, it always makes me assess them on their own merits (well, usually, I definitely have blind spots) and this leads to a worldview that's just... different. I got to play in that difference with another person, and I liked that.

Not quite sure where I'm going with this but I wanted to put the poem up there and to mark this. Notice what you like, so you can steer towards more of it if you see it around.

I'm part of a group on fb (Indri's vanilla bean group) that does co-op direct buys of vanilla beans in addition to its retail store -- it's extremely fair trade consumption and gets me a luxury good affordably. They're putting out a cookbook, so I'm doing some recipe testing for them.

On my list:
x The Coffee Cake (it's topped with toasted oats, which is nice)
x Panna cotta (this one needed a little more gelatin)
x Egg pie (it's a custard pie with flour as a binder, definitely not a delicate custard so it seems like a pretty robust recipe)
o Custard pie (another iteration, I'm curious to compare them)
o Filipino butter mochi (this is in the oven now, I'm interested)
o Emergency milkshake (milk, cream, vanilla, and ice, sounds great)
o Microwave caramel corn
o Vanilla bean instant pot rice pudding
o Creme brulee
o Semolina pudding

It's more than I can eat (needs to be done in two weeks) but it's a fun project. I also submitted my shockingly good vanilla lemonade (seriously, just add a teaspoon of vanilla to a tall glass of lemonade) and I hope it gets in there.

Very interested to see how some of these turn out. I've never heard of oven-baked mochi before!

Edited to add: the butter mochi is truly delicious and much easier to make than the rolled mochi I'm used to. Plus it's gluten free. Hm.

So last year I lost a packet of seed I really wanted to plant. It was a problem.

This year I'm cataloguing all my seeds in a spreadsheet-- not carrying them over from previous years when I bought them but doing a full inventory. Then I'm putting them in a cabinet. They don't go in the cabinet until they're catalogued. Theoretically they don't come out again until the packet is empty, and I just pull out the seeds I need to plant very briefly.

The activity itself is pretty fun, cataloguing, and I'm expecting the spreadsheet to be pretty helpful in building my planting timetable for the year.

I've got a couple new things I'm trying that I'm excited about: skirret, for instance, and scorzonera. Plus I'm trying a couple baccatum peppers and some new corns, a bunch of breadseed poppies, and things like that.

Anyhow, looking forward to completing the cataloguing and starting ot build a picture of what my garden will look like this year. It'll be big; it's also a moving target since some of the original garden is perennializing/turning into roses and haskaps.

Can't wait to see how it turns out.