I began this year in very poor condition, but on the 10th or 11th of January I woke up without the weight of depression that I'd been dealing with for the majority of my life.
I wish this was in the private section because some of this was a lot of details.
Basically I woke up that morning & didn't want to die. Which was pretty damned shocking to be honest.
I have been:
--improved my relationship with my family some, even though it's not exactly stellar.
--met my old psychologist who has offered to help me become a schoolteacher,
--figured out what town I want to try to live in, and have realistic goals of a 2br apartment,
--got into taking riding-lessons & started learning how to ride & care for horses,
--finally hit a normal, healthy weight for a man my age and height. Goodbye underweight
--improved my shaving routine so it doesn't look like I initiated fisticuffs with Edward Scissorhands
--improved my grades & began passing my classes routinely again, putting me on track to graduate soon
--survive an attempt on my life, even without ammunition for my shotgun.
--finally see Canada,
--found an autistic girl out there, terribly intelligent young lady, educated, beautiful, fell in love with her & now she's my girlfriend,
--fought a three-way Mexican standoff of words with a Catholic priest, and we won against him (he was grievously mistaken about something and cultivating conspiracies & fear in his church)
I finally look & feel like a normal & competent human being again. Haven't felt this well since I was a kid about ten years ago. I'm still figuring out how to be a human again, figuring out how to write again. My typewriter used to be my closest friend when I was little--I would sit down & crank out five, six, twelve pages at a time but now I barely can write. Today was different. I feel like it's starting to come back now. This is good.
There is no new year's resolution apart from:
--move my books and my old parlor organ from storage to a new apartment, where I can keep playing the organ,
--Learn to canter & take some low-level fences on horseback, be at the point I can say I'm solidly intermediate,
--learn to shoot a revolver competently (I'm all right, but I could be a lot better!) so probably take an inexpensive .22 single action with a long barrel & decent sights, and go from there. Being able to shoot a pistol involves fine motor skills much like horseback riding or calligraphy or playing a musical instrument.
--get back into some foreign language studies, be it Latin, German, or French,
--be teaching school by this time next year, or be in the act of getting qualified,
--get much stronger, so I have the physical endurance proper to my state in life.
This was the year I became my own self, at least a little bit, and I like what is happening. When I was little, I thought I would become a priest of the Church of Rome. This was something I longed for ever since I was a toddler, but the irony of it is, that's how I found out I was autistic. The priests I worked with were the kindest I've seen (at least in my home diocese) and they had pretty good commonsense enough to introduce my ultraconservative, accidentally-fascist teenage self to MODERN SCIENCE AND MEDICINE back in the 2017-ish stuff, and now I'm actually doing okay. Once I got past this quasi-medieval mindset I was able to become a human.
Depression had been part of my life for a long time. Diagnosis of autism cleared a lot of it up but it returned with a vengeance for a few years, exacerbated by college and other situations. (I've been around a little bit, lived a few places.) Since I'd built my whole life around a sense of purpose bigger than myself, living for other people seemed like the only thing I knew how to do. I was filled with confusion & a certain hatred born out of fear, but the only thing I really knew how to do was to try to love people. Combine that with the tumult of the 2020 pandemic (Never go to a conservative college in a pandemic, okay) and my own confusion over stuff like ideologies and sexual orientation, well that got pretty damn tough.
I didn't realize I was basically asexual, I thought I was basically just myself. Got along suspiciously well with other guys in the all-male environment of a Catholic seminary so it's not like I don't have friends, but I was never gay either.
It's almost impossible to try to become what you are not. I am a firm believer in the power of free will (not quite to the point of Nietzschean thought, but more like a Thomistic belief that we really do have a free will that may get influenced by some outside force. Nietzsche's free will writings are a little bit terrifying considering how well they dovetailed into Nazism.) But nonetheless I cannot be my former idea of who I was, for that was false. I'd been living the life of a man who never existed--a neurotypical, conservative, heterosexual man of the Catholic intellectual right wing. But I find out that there is room for more than that in Reality. I cannot live unless I'm true to myself as autistic, as someone who actually is me, as human first. We evolved around campfires in caves; we don't need the radio or television to tell us how to think!
For me this year was the last chapter of the magazine serial, the final reel of the adventure picture. The craziness was over, the graduation is in sight, I escaped the situation where the guy tried to kill me, ended up doing something I've always wanted--a written duel with a Catholic priest for the lady's honor. Surprise, I ended up winning her affection as well--which didn't actually take that much to win; she was every bit as lonely as I was, and now she's my girlfriend & it looks like we might end up married and teaching school in a few years down the road--I sure hope so. My God, this was a long one.
Sorry this was rambling, I've been deleting bits of it for the last several minutes trying to prune it down to readable size.
