Autistic Hedgehog

Still Alive. Kinda.

You may have noticed that I’ve answered a few questions today. Something that I said I was going to do quite a while ago. Well, I certainly thought I was going to.

The first two months of 2014 had other ideas. Very shortly after I started feeling better in December, I got worse again. I started having a great deal of back pain, which brought along depression and sleep deprivation. It was a pretty vicious cycle. The back pain causes both more depression and more sleep deprivation, the sleep deprivation caused more back pain, etc. etc.

Last month the sleep deprivation got really bad. We got a new pillow for me and that aspect, at least, is mostly sorted. I’m almost feeling human, but I’m still dealing with a lot of pain in my back and neck. We’ve tried every trick in the book, just about, and it won’t go away. I’m hoping my visit with the chiropractor tomorrow helps.

I will be answering questions as I can, but I don’t think it’s fair to promise any sort of consistency right now. I just have no idea what the year is going to throw at me next. It might be I’ll be fine, but there’s just no way of knowing. But AH is not dead. I know a lot of blogs of this sort have gone away or gotten very inactive, and I know we need a place where it’s safe for us to be prickly, and I’ll make AH that place for as long as I can.

Crawling Out from Under

I am still here. Still alive. I’ve just been struggling with depression a lot lately.

For a little while it seemed like I might be able to go off my depression meds. They weren’t helping that much and I thought maybe if I treated the fibro, that would be enough. Only the medicine change to treat the fibro didn’t work, and then I went off my depression meds, too. I kept trying to fight my low mood, because I didn’t want to accept that I needed to go back on meds. I’ve been on medication my entire life, literally, and I get so tired of it always hanging over me. The problems and the side effects and all of that.

Then something happened at the beginning of the week that sent me into a meltdown and I had no choice but to accept it. I’m on a new medication now, one that’s supposed to treat both fibro and depression, and I’m stabilizing somewhat. 

I hope to get back to AH next week. For the weekend I’ll be closing the inbox, and reopening once I get it cleared out. As well, I have an idea for April this year, that I’ll be sharing soon, so stay tuned.

So uh…I’m an aunt

And apparently have been for 7 months.

Before anyone congratulates me, I’d like to explain that this isn’t really happy news for me. It could have been, but instead it left me devastated. Allow me to explain.

I haven’t spoken with most of my family for years. My mom is abusive and neglectful, and most of my family members treat me like I’m a soulless freak. My sister was the last family member I was still talking to, but a couple years ago that ended too. Something happened, and when I was honest about my feelings about it, my sister twisted everything I said and made it all about her. As usual, the way my emotions are is not acceptable to my family. And the fact that I believe forgiveness takes work and won’t simply continue sweeping the way they treated me under the carpet makes them believe I’m a heartless, unforgiving monster. 

So I walked away. For the sake of my health, so I could stop hating and doubting myself, I walked away and hoped that one day my family would understand my point of view.

Clearly, they don’t.

Last night, out of the blue, I received an incredibly passive aggressive email from my sister, stating that I’d been an aunt for seven fucking months and she

was going to write sooner but wasn’t sure if I could handle the response or probably the lack there of.

Because obviously I am an evil heartless monster who wouldn’t be happy for her. 

I wasn’t even given a chance. Just like always, my family makes huge assumptions about my emotions, about whether I even have them. After all this time, they still believe they’ve done nothing wrong and I’m just cold and heartless. They think I have no heart to break, no soul to bruise, and that’s not true. I took me a long time to stop crying; my eyes still feel swollen and cruddy. I’m trying my best to cope with this, on top of everything else in my life, on top of the fibromyalgia and the depression, but I’m just so tired.

And the worst part was discovering how easy it is for all my hard work to be torn down. I thought I would go the rest of my life without wishing that I wasn’t autistic, that I was just like everyone else. I thought I had finally accepted that the problem isn’t me, it's them. Last night I discovered how fragile those things are. Those feelings don’t just stop, simply because we’ve removed ourselves from what causes them. Now I know they might always be there, waiting for me. 

I hurt so much. I’m angry and frustrated and in a complete lose/lose situation. Unless I want to give in and ask for forgiveness when I’m not the one who’s in the wrong, nothing I do here will make a difference. I’m not like the rest of my family and so I will always be the cold, heartless one to them.

I guess the reason I’m mentioning this is because it might be a little quiet here at AH for a while. I’m still struggling to cope with all the other things; this has knocked me on my ass. It will take a little time to put the pieces back together, and I don’t actually know how much I’ll get done during that time. I figured an explanation was in order.

Not Dead Yet

I am, in fact, alive. And I’m finally, slowly, beginning to recover.

Back in April I was hit very suddenly by a depression, and a damn bad one, too. So bad that I found myself crawling back into bed and sleeping for hours on end. Medication helped, but slowly, and in the meantime I was going through a pretty stressful situation.

Just when I was getting on my feet again, I was hit with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. I’m still coming to terms with this and learning to deal with it, but in the grand scheme of things I’m feeling much better and I have more good days than bad now. My stress levels are still somewhat high, and I’ll be fairly busy at times, but things have cleared up enough for me to reopen AH.

Starting Monday, I’ll be opening the inbox again. However, instead of keeping it open constantly, I’ll close it once it builds up to a certain point to give myself time to answer without more coming in. I’ll also go back to posting submissions, so feel free to send any Hedgehogs you might have. 

Guess you can’t keep a good hedgie down. :)

- Kaia