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Aethra's Blog
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Yay! Cakes!
posted at 05:35 pm on 07-29-2008
So, I went back to work on Monday, and surprise surprise, it turns out everyone doesn't hate me after all! :D I thought everyone would be really weird with me but they weren't at all. I think we got some really good stuff agreed on with my manager and the support lady. I've made myself a tasklist thing on Excel that hopefully will help me sort myself out better, and everyone's been told that certain jobs get done (say) once a week, and I'm not gonna jump up and do everything for everybody when they say so anymore. Which is great. But the best thing of all is that they had a collection for me and gave me a card, and chocolates, and £20 Lush vouchers to say "welcome back"! How nice is that of everybody?!! I'm so pleased!
I made a card today and baked cakes to take in for everybody. I thought two batches of fairy cakes would be enough but when I counted up the signatures there was 28! I can't figure out who two of them are, though. :S So, I made flapjack too. I made a recipe out of my head again - honey almond this time. It's kinda brittle (I suppose the honey instead of syrup needed less cooking time) but it tastes okay. I made vanilla fairy cakes and chocolate ones with cinnamon icing. Hopefully most people will find something they like out of that.
I dunno what to write in the card, though... I suppose I'll figure it out.
Anyway, yeah - for once, I feel like stuff is actually going okay. Yay! :)
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Back to work on Monday...
posted at 05:20 am on 07-26-2008
Yep, I get to go to work on Monday morning. Woo. I'm totally not sure how to feel about it, tbh - on the one hand I'm really looking forward to getting back into it, and on the other I'm really scared. It's been sooo busy for months before I went off, and now me and a colleague out of a team of four have both been off long term sick since June. There is going to be a hella backlog, I'm sure. And I'm worried about how folk might treat me different since everybody's gonna know I have asperger's now. *le sigh* I guess it means they might listen when I tell them to write stuff down instead of telling me, now.
Hopefully I can work part time hours for a couple of weeks to get me back in because I know i'll be knackered for the first while, and I get to have a meeting with the welfare person & my manager to thrash some stuff out. Wish me luck with it, anyway.
So, re my last entry - I finally got that mess sorted out in my bedroom! Yay, go me! Good old self-bribery did the trick - I bought a lovely soft sheepskin for the floor and told myself I couldn't put it down until the floor was cleared. Had it done the next day :) Only trouble is I think I got scammed on the sheepskin, I'm sure the lady said it was £40 when I asked then charged me £45. Oh well. Wish I'd said something but it was late and the shop was full of foreign tourists, I was just a bit embarrassed to say anything. Scam artist.
Oh, also - tip of the day, never use suncream if you don't know how old it is. I got myself frazzled from it, and also have a lovely white seatbelt mark across my chest. Yay for comedy tan-lines. :S You can even see the mark where my necklace was! Worked it out and I think the lotion might have been 3 years old... Oops.
Okay, I'll try and check in Monday and let you know how my return to work went.
Aeth xx
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Messed up bedroom/head
posted at 05:18 pm on 07-21-2008
Okay, since I was diagnosed I've felt like my whole prior existence has been rerunning in my brain, with a checklist alongside comparing notes. The annoying thing is that it seems to have been dragging up old feelings and memories about stuff that should have been forgotten ages ago - like nightmares from when I was 10, arguments from when I was 8... and it's really f-ing with my sleep pattern.
I'm scared of the dark, now. After about 10.30, I just get scared and I can't sleep and I HATE it. It's so stupid. I wasn't even scared of the dark for long when I was a kid, my parents got me this glow-in-the-dark penguin that kinda sorted it out. Henry the Penguin was around when I was 6, unfortunately 17 years later I have no idea where he is.
I can't sleep in my bedroom, only one morning out of the past week has seen me waking up in my bedroom instead of on the living room sofa bed and it's really beginning to do my head in. I dunno if it's because the curtains are light so there's streetlight getting in, or if it's the softer mattress, or if the room is cooler or what. But it's a bit strange to be essentially living in one room.
I hate my bedroom, too. Since I moved out it's full of binbags of junk I had to lift out of my room the weekend I moved out. I'm so angry with my parents for not giving me decent time to move it, that I just get light-headed throwing-stuff angry as soon as I try and sort it out. It's so not fair, my sister had a room full of stuff at my parents house all the (admittedly short) time she was married, and I didn't even have 42 hours. I suppose it makes me angry just to be in the bedroom, which would explain why I'm not sleeping right in there. It's the only thing I'm really angry with my parents about, we get on great most of the time so it's really annoying me that I can't just get over it. So then I hate me as well as them, and the room.
I suppose the solution to it all is just to get down to it and clear it out. But how?!!?
Well, that was cathartic. *sigh*
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Aspergers, the 23-foot crocodile
posted at 01:41 am on 07-15-2008
Dream analysis, anybody? Okay, my theory on dream analysis is that if a meaning doesn't come to you fairly easily within a couple of days, then there isn't one - which applies to most of my dreams. But I had this dream the night before last, and the meaning came to me this morning when I woke up (suddenly, from another unrelated bad dream)
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I was staying away in a strange place, I don't know why so it's not important. I thought I had rented a room with it's own bathroom, but when I arrived I was shown to a cabin, which I was to share with another occupant - an Australian man called Ben, maybe about 25 years old. I was less than happy about the arrangement, and not too friendly to Ben, but he was a nice guy and we ended up having a laugh. There was something on the news about a 23-foot (!) crocodile which had escaped and was on the loose, and with him being Australian I made a couple of Steve Irwin references. Heh. I still wasn't entirely comfortable with the arrangement though so I went to be quite early.
I woke up (still in the dream, btw) curled up in bed, with a needle-like pain in my right knee - and woke up to find this massive crocodile nibbling on my knee! I screamed for Ben and he came running in and poked it in the eye. I'm not sure what happened after that but I was still scared when I woke up (for realz this time!) so I don't think it went away.
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Anyway, I tend not to force a meaning unless I have a bad feeling, so it just came to me today - the shock of finding the crocodile nibbling on my leg is like the shock of finding out 10 days ago that I have Aspergers. I know what a crocodile is, I know that you're supposed to go for the eyes because they're so heavily 'armoured', but I have no idea what you're supposed to do if faced by a crocodile and I had to turn to somebody I didn't know to help me deal with it, even though I didn't want to. The fact that the crocodile is so huge, and I didn't notice until it was nibbling my knee, indicated Asperger's presence in my life prior to diagnosis. I suppose the good things I can take out of it are that it was only having a nibble at my knee so far, I wasn't exactly half dead (just a little bloody), and Ben was willing to help even though I had been rude to him earlier.
So, I guess that shows that I can cope, and I have to trust that other people can help, even if I can't chase the crocodile away entirely.
Yay metaphor. *shrug*
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What day is it? No, really...
posted at 05:44 pm on 07-10-2008
Well, it's Thursday, and it'll be a week tomorrow from my surprise AS diagnosis. I'm now taking it...not quite as well as I took it initially. Okay, I'll put it like this - every little thing is freaking me out at the moment, and I can't seem to settle down to do anything. I can't even remember what day it is most of the time. Hopefully it'll sort itself out soon. I don't know if I should go back to my parents for a few days, but my niece has my old room now and I don't want to sleep in my old room with it all redecorated different and sharing it with someone else. It's not nice.
I discovered today that a former manager that I used to get on really well with - his wife apparently works with ASD folks in some regard. I don't know what it is exactly. Anyway, he's apparently come across as very understanding and stuff, and would like to give me a call at home. I'm okay with that, I think - I get on really well with him, I found I worked well with him as my manager. Still not sure how I feel about everyone at work knowing, but with the amount of meltdowns I've been having leading up to the diagnosis everyone's a little bit...curious.
Oh, and the counsellor type woman from work will be calling again tomorrow, I think. She's nice. Hopefully we can get a meeting sorted out soon with my current manager because I'm not going back to work till we've talked all this through. Even if I just get from him that I can have any/all instructions written down. But I need somebody there to help explain it - I seriously feel like I can't do this by myself. And I hate admitting that. Whatever. If I freak out from going into HMV at the moment, i'm not going to be able to handle everyone coming at me like before at work. This has been building up for way too long.
But hey - at least maybe we can find ways round some stuff now? I hope so.
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Copy/paste
posted at 03:43 pm on 07-09-2008
So, I suppose this means I'm starting a blog.
Well, I can't be bothered coming up with some big long introduction, so I'm just going to copy/paste my first post from the Wrong Planet forum. Coz I'm lazy like that. Also, I need to do some ironing.
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Hiya, I'm aethra. *waves*
So, yeah, here I am. I'm 23 years old, I live in Scotland and up until Friday I had no idea I had Aspergers. I was pretty surprised, tbh - but none of my family are. Apparently, my mum suggested it to the doctor when I was in primary school. Whatever. See, why this has kinda caught me by surprise is because I have a cousin who is non-verbally autistic, and I have done some stuff in the past to try and raise money for autism. So, it's something I have been around. I have in the past idly wondered if its the same kinda thing as I feel, but just passed it off. I don't know. Whatever. I'm just going to ramble on for a bit, don't mind me.
Right, okay. I've been finding stuff really difficult the past while. I work for a large organisation that has been undergoing some restructuring lately. This didn't really affect me until the start of November when my manager changed and everything keeps changing. Add in to the mix that my sister split from her husband and moved back in with me and my parents with her baby girl. So, it's been cramped at home, so when my name came up on the list for a one-bedroom flat a year earlier than I expected, I went for it straight away. I moved out last April. Now I totally wish I didn't because I haven't been coping with anything ever since. Which is why, after various problems and pills, I ended up in the cafeteria of the local psychiatric hospital last friday clutching my baby niece's toy cow and waiting for the psychiatrist to finish grilling my family about my 'quirks'.
And he says I have Aspergers.
I've been up and down for the past couple of days about it, but my inital reaction was to be really happy. I felt like the sun had come out of the clouds. I'm up and down about it, but mostly I'm just glad that there's an explanation for all this stuff about me. Like how I could read a newspaper at three years old, but it took me three years to learn to ride a bike without stabilisers. Like how I can't order drinks at a bar because I feel like I'm missing the script for it.
Most of all, I'm pleased that it's not that there's something horrible about me that nobody likes me, because I never felt like anybody really wanted to be friends with me. That's okay though, because I like to be on my own anyway. It's just good to know there's not something nasty about me that I'm missing.
Either way, I'm online now because it's 4am, and I can't sleep because I'm worried about the phonecall I'm getting from my work support counsellor type person at 10.30 this morning. This is something to do. So, whatever. Hi. *waves again* This is me.
Sorry for the great big long ramble. Thanks for reading it, if you got this far.
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That was Monday morning, it's now Wednesday. Phonecall went fine, I popped into work with my current sick line (the whole getting-my-head-round-it thing isn't going as well as I'd hoped), and I'm now blonde.
I suspect the blonde thing is a big two-fingers to my diagnosis (you can't handle change? Handle THIS!!!!) but whatever. I've painted a big purple streak in with spray-on colour so we'll see if it does actually wash out later on. Hehehe.
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