Done yesterday

( to.done 20090319 )

The high point of the day, definitely, was the phone call to Callie. She called me her "favorite geek". *blush* (She told N. about that part, and said that she could hear me blushing all the way from California. I believe it; I wonder whether I could get such a thing from nothing but tone of voice.)

My IM conversation with Naomi wasn't far behind. The main insight of the day, which I've already posted about, was that my social phobia is probably the root cause of my depression. That's both hopeful and depressing: hopeful because now I know something else I need to work on, and depressing because it will be a whole lot harder. Working on the social phobia will require learning new ways of interacting with people, which is, well...

My old self-image is in tatters right now. I guess that's good, but it's the weirdest damned feeling when I stop to think about it.

I love my friends.

River: Turning a corner

Somehow, today, I seem to have turned a corner of some sort that I didn't even notice while I was turning it. My mood has shifted again.

This is probably going to get long.

The last few days I've been slightly depressed and very discouraged. I'll get into exactly why in a bit, but each new insight seems to open up whole new realms of things -- some solutions but mostly problems -- that I hadn't realized were there. My mind is becoming a very strange and unfamiliar place.

Anyway, I said something to the effect of getting to the top of the first hill and seeing how wide the desert is and how far away the mountains are. pocketnaomi (who I very much hope doesn't mind being quoted here) said that it sounded like a line in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. I said that I ought to go back and re-read it.

"You probably should," she replied, "if you're getting into intensive personal psychological analysis."

"Never been there, but it sounds like that's where I'm headed, doesn't it?"

"Don't look now, Steve, but you've been there the last year or so."

I've been saying as much for a couple of days, maybe even weeks; I think this may be the first time someone else has said it to me. It would, of course, be Naomi who said it -- she's provided me with most of that analysis, and she is very damned good at it.

This evening, looking up "...Rose Garden" so I could find it in our collection (which is alphabetical by author, of course), I felt a sudden wave of anxiety. Tight chest, dry mouth... Weird.

Then I pulled the book down, re-read a couple of pages, and now I'm calm. I'm damned if I know what corner I just turned, but the view is different somehow.

 

Now, where was I?

A hill, a desert, and mountains in the distance.

Over the last couple of weeks my old self-image has been left in tatters. My old theories about how my mind works -- Asperger's, emotional blindness -- no longer fit the facts. There are old habits to unlearn, feedback loops to break, new ways of interacting with people to learn. I don't even know how to go about doing any of those things, or even what questions to ask to get the right kind of help.

At the same time, my old coping mechanisms are gone. There are still things I'm afraid of, but I can feel the fear now. I'm still lonely, and I don't want to keep avoiding people, but I never learned how to start interacting with them. Colleen always taken care of my social life; I've been to my last four cons without her. It's getting late; I'll expand on this over the weekend perhaps.

The task ahead is daunting, and frustratingly slow. I'm in totally unfamiliar territory, and I don't even know who I am, let alone where.

But somehow, a couple of hours ago, I seem to have accepted that as a challenge instead of turning away and crawling back into my cave. It's the first night of Spring, and it's dark out there. But somehow there's a change in the light again.