as small as a world and as large as alone

4:16am September 27, 2014

scribbleowl:

sango-hentaitenshi:

necktie-nyxeth:

longleggedgit:

r-dart:

Now you know the truth of what’s going through my mind at parties.

oh my gosh the last panel actually made me tear up

gpoy

I can’t tell you how accurate this is

This is a really good depiction of social anxiety because it focuses on inner states rather then outward actions. As someone very good at concealing his anxiety, I appreciate it.

GPOY especially the one with the eyeballs.

And the cats.

There was a time when I was in the media, and I was being stalked, harassed, and defamed by people who claimed far more knowledge of my life than they actually had.  And I constantly felt as if I was in this tiny little room, almost like a cage, with a giant eyeball fixed on me at all times from just outside the cage, and by giant, I mean giant.  And there was nowhere to run where the eyeball couldn’t see me.  And I lived like that for over a year before I figured out there was no eyeball.  Just a lot of fear and a lot of cyberstalking and cyberbullying taking its toll on my mind.

I’m writing this in case anyone else ever felt that way too.  I’ve been afraid to admit it in public, in case they knew how badly they got to me back then.  But honestly, I’ve gotten over that.  And I think that given the severity of my adrenal insufficiency at the time, I’m incredibly tough to have survived that.  Given that stress brings on adrenal crises, of which I had several during that time without knowing what they were.  And given that the most obvious onset (or worsening, it’s hard to tell in hindsight without lab tests) of my adrenal insufficiency came right after all the scrutiny started.  I basically literally collapsed and couldn’t turn over in bed without help.  

Between the myasthenia (or whatever it is, it could still be mito disease according to my GP) and the adrenal insufficiency, I could barely do anything.  But knowing I was under scrutiny, I made sure to religiously post to the web boards to maintain the illusion that everything was okay.  I didn’t want anyone to know that I was too weak to fend off a physical attack, when they were busy threatening to kill me and posting my address online.  So I spent valuable spoons hiding my disabilities from online people, and then didn’t have the spoons to get up and go to the bathroom throughout the day, so I fell a lot.

But I will never forget the feeling of the giant eyeball staring at me like I was a scurrying rodent who couldn’t get away from a giant, giant predator that was toying with me.  And I’m quite certain that they created that image on purpose to fuck with my head – as in they may not have meant to create that exact picture, but they certainly set out to create an image in my head that had them as all-powerful and me as tiny and scared.

If you find yourself in that position, remember “I’m okay, you’re mean.”  It will help more than you imagine.  I know this is a post about social anxiety, but that eyeball post reminded me of anxiety caused by real danger from real bullies, not just imaginary danger.  And in that case, “I’m okay, you’re mean” becomes vital, especially if the bullies are trying to constantly tell you and everyone else who will listen that you’re the one at fault, you’re the bully, you’re the one who’s done something wrong.  (In my case, they called me a fraud and accused me of stealing the life of a woman i’d barely heard of until I had the misfortune to meet her online.  I was a fraud because I’d been in gifted programs and used to speak, even though I’d never hidden these things.  Simply the fact that I was now nonspeaking with an 85 IQ meant that I must be a fraud, because abilities don’t ever change over a lifetime, do they?  I looked up the outcome statistics, by the way, and between 1/3 and 1/6 of autistic people lose abilities during adolescence.  So I’m not even that unusual.  Autistic catatonia is a little more unusual but not as unusual as previously thought, with something like 1/10 or 1/11 autistic adults showing catatonic features in one study.)

Anyway…

I hated the eyeball feeling.  I’ve always, despite living my life online and in public, felt like a private person.  Or like a person where certain aspects of my life deserve to be treated with the same privacy as anyone else’s.  These people were deliberately passing around copyrighted material of mine, mostly to mislead.  They were talking about aspects of my life that had always been private, and adding in lies and half-truths that nobody could know were lies or half-truths unless they knew me and my family well enough to know these people were talking bullshit.

And it was hard.  It was hard knowing these people were deliberately cutting me off from acquaintances, sometimes even friends, certainly from any community that I hadn’t pre-vetted.  Of course they shot themselves in the foot a few times by attacking anyone who claimed to have been diagnosed with Kanner autism.  Even though Kanner autism doesn’t mean low functioning autism, it means autism that is like Kanner’s patients, most of whom would be considered high-functioning.  If it weren’t for my speech regression, I’d have in childhood fit into Kanner autism extremely well.  My brother would have fit even better.  (If Temple Grandin’s categories of Kanner-Asperger and Regressive-Epileptic are at all accurate, my brother is the first and I am the second, easily.  Just as if Donna Williams’s categories of sensing thought and interpretive thought are at all accurate, I am the first and my brother is the second.)

Anyway I’m rambling at this point.  But those eyeballs… wow.  Make it one eyeball.  Make it a cage with me plastered against one corner of it, my back to the corner, shaking and looking up at the eyeball (outside the cage, looking down at me diagonally) in fear as it follows me everywhere I go… that’d be exactly how I felt.

Oh and I have no problem calling these people bullies.  I know some people think that diminishes what they are.  But several of them were actual bullies from actual childhood school.  And some of them just acted like a school bully, with about that level of maturity.  I see the word bully as diminishing them, not diminishing the severity of what they diid to me.  School bullies can kill, after all, and can play complicated mind games and gaslight people.  So it’s not like saying someone’s a bully is saying they’re any less than a horrible abuser.

Fortunately for my would-be killers, I’m still alive.  The death threats didn’t work.  The solicitation for murderers to come and get me while my staff were gone didn’t work. The attempts to follow me to my speaking engagements didn’t work (although it did make one woman put herself in the role of being martyred by me, long story).  The apparent attempts to get me removed from receiving disability benefits and services didn’t work (which was a thinly veiled death threat from people who knew full well I needed this money and services to survive, but who were able to convince some people I was “bilking the system” – fortunately for me, I have literally piles of paperwork proving that I can’t work, need services, and was diagnosed as autistic at the ages of 14, 15, 18, and 19.).  I’m still alive.  I’m pretty damn hard to kill, actually, as my struggles with adrenal insufficiency during the time all this stress was going on should tell you.  My galvanic skin response may have dropped to near zero, I may have lost the ability to breathe on my own a few times, but I came out of this alive and kicking.

I’m okay, they’re mean.  I'm really okay, and they're really fucking mean people who shouldn’t be allowed near vulnerable people at all.  (Even though at least one of them has deliberately chosen a job where they are constantly around vulnerable people, and I worry for their clients.)

And I know my secret name.  That is something they can never know, because their malice prevents them from being able to see that deeply.  That’s one area where I do feel sorry for them.  There are so many things in the world, beautiful things, that become invisible to you once you take the path of fucking with people’s heads and lives for the fun of it.  It’s physically and mentally impossible for a deliberate, hardened bully to see the true self of any of the people they bully.  They think I’m ugly, they parade the fact that I’m fat and hairy and ugly around like a trophy.  They can’t see that to me, being fat and hairy and ugly is beautiful and right and proper and perfect for who I am right now.

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