Taking Up Space

Today marks three weeks since we moved. We’ve both settled in a bit. Pepsi is positively blooming; multiple windows to look out of, boys to play laser pointer with, Dad’s undivided attention. She’s a pretty happy cat right now, though I can’t wait until she adjusts to daylight savings time, as her wake-ups are now at five in the morning, and she starts crying for dinner an hour early as well.

I’ve gotten most of my stuff from the house. It’s just a matter of picking through the basement and garage to find the last few things. I’ve been stocking the kitchen and cooking, which is a fun shift. The next big step is decorating. I’ve got to get some picture hooks and a hammer and start hanging things on the wall.

The boys have spent the night several times, and we’re starting to settle into what is likely to be our custody routine moving forward. It’s been nice having them here, instead of babysitting them at the house. My time at the house is down to about four hours a week, but I feel like I’ve gotten to spend more time with the boys since the move. It’s been really nice.

Me? I’m still hanging on, grappling with the big problems. My big problems, not the general big problems floating around out there. There’s a lot of grief, and the tears come pretty easily. I’m so frustrated with how useless my emotions are. Yes, I’m sad, which makes me cry, but crying doesn’t seem to do any good. I let myself cry as best I can, but at this point I’ve been so well trained at holding it back that the most I can muster is a few half-hearted sobs before I want it to stop. The crying never seems to match the depth of the grief, except in that it’s always present, just under surface, ready at the slightest touch on an emotional sore spot.

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. My blog has never really been any sort of public journal. At the most, I’d let myself write personal experience essays, but honestly, I always labored to make a point. I don’t intend to make one here; I’m just writing about my life right now.

But I feel like things are turning, in the sense that our lives aren’t really linear but rather an ever expanding gyre. I’ve been focusing on my handwriting lately, but in what feels like a subversive way to me. I found a YouTube video that discussed the relationship between drawing and handwriting, in that in both you are making intentional marks on the page. The video promoted handwriting “like a draftsman”, ie, all caps, block letters. All of the block letters can be made from the basic shapes of C, S, and I:

Basically, the video advocated printing block letters as a warm up exercise. Instead of just writing the alphabet over and over, I’ve been journaling in Good Notes using the Apple Pencil:

Making the letters in these simple block shapes has been making me think of Assyrian scribes making marks in clay tablets 5000 years ago, as I make digital marks on a digital tablet with a digital stylus.

For some reason today I wanted to make marks to share with the external world. I realized that the way I write in my journal is really blogging. I leave quick little notes about what’s happening around me, things that I’m interested in, so forth. I used to be a prolific social media poster, but over time I expanded my privacy to the point now that a lot of stuff I used to share I just keep to myself. In an arena with infinite space, I was determined to take up as little of it as possible.

But that’s just the way my life was at the time. I’ve been trying to take up less space for a while, a long while, my whole life. A recent interaction with my father drove home how much I feel I am not allowed to take up space. At the house, I was frantically trying to take up less space because the messages I was receiving that were telling me that I was the problem. It was only resolved when I removed myself entirely, so I guess I was interpreting them correctly.

But now I’m in a new space now, my space, and I’m taking up as much of it as I want. I’ve swallowed a lot of garbage through the years that I’m now trying to work through, and part of that needs to be the notion that I am allowed to be, just the way I am. I am allowed to take up space, but I need to do more than just acknowledge that fact, I need to believe it, and to do that, I need to feel comfortable sharing of myself. To feel comfortable sharing myself with the community, because it is through the community of autistics that I’m building that I will learn to see myself as someone good and whole as opposed to bad and broken.

Hmm. I think I ended up making a point. I didn’t mean to when I sat down to write. But maybe some part of me did, and that’s what was pushing me to sit down at the keys.