Unsettled
I’ve not been myself now for a few weeks. I don’t know how far I follow the typical aspie pattern of needing routine, but I have been back and forth on trips with one still to come - we will be taking a couple of students out on Monday - and I’m in between houses with a real worry about not having time for writing when I move. I have been unsettled, and caught myself too worrying earlier in a real waking sweat (I needed to lie down for a nap after dinner, as I increasingly do) over whether I will become a writer at all, despite the ideas in my head.
I don’t know, perhaps this is typical for me. It’s hard, if not impossible to compare your mindstate with some time in the past. I do hope this is not typical. I have been so unsettled, unable to sit down and do one thing. Constantly angry, restless, distractable and irritable. I have been suffering (and truly suffering) angry reveries in re-run and re-runs throughout the day.
This morning it was unbearable. I didn’t want to be around people. I was depressed, and, there were the most difficult people, one of the cliques, with Jaffa and the others who work with him who I’ve always felt look down on me somehow. I can’t deal with their banter in the mornings and I was particularly gauche in the morning. Helgar, unrelated to the clique, made some unnecessary comment which pissed me off and the others were just giving some with the banter which just goes on all around me making me feel all the time like I’m playing piggie in the middle.
I was angry all morning, and didn’t want to be around people at all. I couldn’t make conversation. Less than usual even. I wanted to eschew coffee, and the clique was all gathering around a percolator and some decent coffee. It smelt good but I went outside. Dave, my immediate boss came in to make a couple of sharp comments as he does - he’s a good bloke, but gets irritable at times - about how we were sitting around, and it was one of those days I couldn’t do anything right, everything I tried to do to help was just that little bit wrong; we all have days like that with him.
There was a new member of staff in the morning meeting and I was stood next to him. I wasn’t able to greet him and make him feel welcome. I wasn’t in that frame of mind. I was feeling belittled, condescended to. That my face doesn’t fit. I was having reveries such as handing my notice in, telling one of the guys who is leaving, and with whom I get on best, that I can’t deal with it anymore, and that two years is generally about my limit in a new place. They were talking about new people who were going to replace him, and a direct boss above us, and I was fearing the worst, and feeling like my time with the place has come to an end.
I was glad to be asked a little later to go out on an errand to a guy called Cal one of the scrappies we’ve got to know. I noticed they went out of their way to describe the items they needed in excruciating detail due to my failures in the past to identify crimp connectors and the like. But I was glad of the walk to the car, and then the drive. First, though, I sat down in the car and cried. I’ve been crying a lot recently. And then I drove, got everything they needed, pretty much, and drove back to Sweet Child of Mine blasting out as load as my speakers could take. I parked up, and then sat and listened until the song was over, switching the engine off to reveries of having a discussion about heavy metal being cathartic as we once had in one meeting, discussing the students taste in music, its place and importance in their lives and our policy towards it.
I walked back along the canal and sat and watched some moorhen chicks barely the height of my thumb, until a couple of students came walking by, at which point I stood up and walked back. I was hoping to be missed. To have people realise the state I was in. I was feeling I was going to crack. That I needed to talk to the nurse.
Things got moving then, and more students were around and I got to feeling a lot better. I got through the day. And got through it with no coffee.
It was the last day and we went for a beer after work. I had one, and then had to shoot off to give my dad a lift to the garage where he had left his car to be MOTed, extortionately as it turns out.
I came back, had some food, and then a tiredness came over me so I had to lie down. This tiredness, and the rest of lying down was intermingled with the anger and frustration of not being able to write, and the fear of what it means to not write, this creeping responsibility and even family I feel from time to time.
It was a kind of tiredness that was all over, but in particular in my legs, completely out of proportion to any exercise I had done. It was similar to when I felt what I came to think of as candida “die-off” when I was taking Caprylic acid every day for a few months. This heaviness in my legs, like the aches of flu.
I lay down and slept a while. Now, I’m tired again.
07:15 no coffee, tagine, vit b6, zinc
13:00 chicken drumstick, coleslaw, waldorf salad
16:30 beer
18:30 toasted GF bread with peanut butter, three slices. tagine, with rice
23:15 no hunger!
ps. I managed little conversation over the beer, just more of my slapstick efforts.
