Although summer isn’t officially here yet, it feels like it has arrived. The humidity where we live in Maine has hit around 80% and I’m just about dying. If it weren’t for the beauty of the untouched trees here I would find some excuse to find some place else to live. Seriously.

When we lived in central Alaska back when I was a little girl, the cold was dry. We went from there straight to the dry heat of New Mexico. Here in Maine everything feels wet year round. It’s insane. And I don’t even live on the coast!

Anyway, whining aside. I know: my blog has been silent. There hasn’t been anything to complain or rant about in my life other than the weather. Crazy, no? I truly have no idea what to do with myself when I’m not running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It’s weird.

So I’ve been working on my outline for the novel web series project. The rough outline is complete and now I’m breaking it down by chapter and outlining each of those. There’s still a ton of world building to do, seeming how I’m still on step 17, but I feel like I’m making great progress with this project.

I’ve also noticed an increase in migraines, but I haven’t been keeping a mood tracker for awhile so I’m not certain exactly what has caused them. Dad mentioned today that a big storm front is headed our way so that might be why. I’ve spent all day dealing with what I would rate as a level 2 migraine (so on a clinical scale of 0-10, it would be somewhere in the mid-range).

The past few weeks I’ve spoke to my therapist about a couple of subjects.

One being identifying my emotions. This is something I haven’t been doing well and I think this is why I don’t put it on my mood tracker. I’ve been following a therapist on YouTube named Kati Morton for a little while now and she has brought up feeling charts many times in her videos. So I asked my therapist about it and she thought it would be a good idea for me. Because yes, I do come in to therapy to emotionally vent but don’t really spent a lot of time expressing emotion so much as processing things that have happened.

Two of her recent videos have also caught my attention. One on adult ADHD and the other on the differences in how Autism presents in females. Which incidentally are both reasons why I’m getting a full neuropsych and the first appointment has already happened two weeks ago and involved me filling out a true/false self report based upon the past year. Next month I will be meeting with a neuropsychologist for an in-depth interview. We’ll see how that goes and I’ll update you on that as it comes as well.

The thing that really struck me about the Autism in Females video was her statement that the prevailing observation is that girls with ASD are often viewed as “too much” – especially those who are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. That and the difference between boys with Autism typically expressing a lack of interest/desire in socializing/connecting while girls with Autism typically expressing a interest/desire in socializing/connecting.

It’s already a known fact that those with Autism are usually more direct individuals with their interactions, taking people at face value, and this is something that she brings up as a point of concern when it’s combined with a desire to connect with others. It increases their risk for abuse. This combination often makes them a target for manipulative and controlling people. It also makes them more likely to develop PTSD as a result.

So I’m starting to understand more now why my therapist pushed to get me on the waiting list for this neuropsych, especially after she found out my mother had me screened as a child and that it was my mother that first flagged Tuxedo Cat as possibly having Autism. I’ll be honest here, took him in to prove her wrong but she was right and I’ve been apologizing to her ever since about it.

I’m not going to apologize for saying here that the more I learn about my childhood and the more we learn about how Autism presents differently in girls, the more I am convinced that I do in fact have Autism.

Because it wasn’t just my parents that would tell me as a kid that I was “too much” growing up. It was teachers too. And I would have pull out time to have a teacher work with me on assignments one on one in some of the schools we went to, but not all. And now that I have children of my own with IEPs, there is so much of my school experience that I understand now that I didn’t back then.

The other subject we’ve been talking about is rediscovering my authentic self. You know, everything I read on this topic talks about setting boundaries and being true to you but for some reason I feel like I’m missing something really important in all this. All my life I have felt like I’ve been waiting for someone to give me permission to just be myself. I have spent my entire life struggling to fit in and never getting there. For what ever reason, the person that I truly am has never been allowed.

• I’m too loud.
• I’m too silly.
• I’m too ridiculous.
• I’m too talkative.
• I’m too sensitive.
• I’m too whatever.

And now here I am at a point in my life where I honestly want to say, “Fuck you all” to the invisible masses of the world and just be myself and suddenly I realize that I have no idea who that is.

I know there was a time in my life that I knew who I was. I know I did. And I know I was proud of who I was. I just wanted a chance to show people the real me.

How did I lose that? More importantly… How do I find me again?

I don’t have an answer to that. And that’s something I hope to be working on with my therapist in the coming weeks ahead along with all the other projects I’ve got going on.

But! I do suspect this issue is connected to the onset of my PTSD so I did a little digging and came across these two articles that I found interesting, valuable, and comforting:

• PTSD and Your Lost Self: 3 Ways to Reconnect
• How To Recover From Emotional Trauma of Domestic Abuse

Once again, I’m not alone in this. Neither are you. There are others out there who have walked this same path.

So here are my current goals:

• continue with world building and outlining my web series
• find a feelings chart I’m comfortable with and start using it daily
• restart my weekly mood tracker
• understand, develop, and practice authenticity in my daily life
• have patience with myself
• continue self care
• hold myself accountable by keeping you all posted with my progress here

I’m hoping that doing all this will get myself back on track health wise and keep me on track with my creative projects.