I am like a freight train that drives around the same long loop day after day, in a content sort of way. My speed varies but I am always going fast enough to have the external world be nothing but a blur I don't really see or pay attention too. It is not in my path, or field of vision therefore I have no interest in it.
Everything I need, is on my train of many cars.
When I lived with my son, it was like I always had to have my first boxcar's side door wide open and my speed would have to slow so I could holler, interact, you know, throw the mailbag onto the hook and pick up more mail off of the hook. My engine had to slow enough so I could see and hear and interact and think about him.
It has been almost two years of me living with me now. My train typically moves pretty fast. I do have a therapist that I talk with once or twice a week. I have to slow down my train. Stop at the station. Disembark in order to have an hour long interaction. Then, I jump back on my train and it takes me quite a while, hours, mostly days to get back up to the speed whereby the outside becomes that pleasant, inconsequential blur again; back to my old Aspie self.
Because my train slows down for the therapist station, I sometimes find other smaller stations to stop at. My normal speed slows way, way down and seeing the outside world I end up engaging in it because I see something I want to experience. The one therapist station, week after week after week, is like a platform that leads to other stations.
When the therapist takes one of her many multi week vacations, that station is gone. My speed stays high and may go even higher. The outside is a bigger blur. My inner world becomes more engaging, richer, headier. It becomes challenging to slow down enough to function and interact even online. It's like with that station gone, the rest of the world is completely gone, too.
I get lost into my train and my track and nothing else matters. And, and this is important, I am perfectly content on my speeding train with no one to talk or interact with. Truly. So all is well and good, until therapist returns.
This gets me each time, but, it takes weeks to slow my train back down enough to stop by that station. It's like therapist is standing near the tracks waving, and I don't know how to wave back but I kindof want to. I have to go countless circles of loops and loops, applying the brakes ever so bit by bit to slow my engines down. Weeks and weeks, every single time.
I am a person of patterns, clearly as any good Aspie is. Having that station to stop at, especially when it is twice a week, allows me to be a part of something outside of my self, that external world. When that station is closed and boarded up, even though I know, I know when it will open again, I cannot easily transition to slowing down and stopping.
If I have one person, one station on the Outside, it allows me to see and interact with other stations.
I hope that makes a little sense.
That's all this writing really is...I'm trying to make sense of it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment