I think I am in a painful but fruitful healing phase right now.

But first : the biographical update. Had therapy, talked about my life situation and becoming depressed and so forth. Got an important bit of lore from him : when you load money onto your reloadable VISA, the reported balance will not change… but the money’s there nonetheless.

So, no financial Phantom Zone except for the delay in updating the balance. Still have no idea why they would do that, but I assume it has something to do with security.

Because honestly, what doesn’t these days?

So when I got back home, I was able to pay the deposit, so THAT hurdle has been surmounted at least. The system, last time I checked, is still not letting me register, but I assume that it will just be a matter of time before the system updates itself, or somesuch.

So I least I have that as an achievement for today.

Back to the healing thing. I think therapy was quite productive today as, in the process of explaining my situation, I ended up coming to a greater understanding of myself and what I go through.

That’s where the cycle of healing comes into the picture. I realized that my recovery process has a predictable cycle. It goes like this :

1. An iceberg calves off the slowly dwindling glacier that is my damage, my depression.
2. I feel worse than usual because I am processing the pain frozen in that ice.
3. As the iceberg floats south and melts, the pain lessens.
4. Eventually the iceberg is completely melted, and the pain is gone for good.
5. Honeymoon period where I feel so much better with my now smaller glacier. Such a relief!
6. Period of stability where things are more or less normal for a while
7. The pressure of the healing process starts building up again, eventually leading to..
8. Another iceberg calves off, and the cycle begins anew.

The product of this healing cycle is not measured by how I feel at any given moment, but by how much that glacier has shrunk over time. The fact that it’s cyclical means that it is hard to see the progress moment to moment if I only concentrate on how I feel right now.

But when I look back at who I was even as recently as last August. and try to remember what it was like back then, it is all too clear how far this healing cycle has taken me, and it gives me faith that some day, the glacier will be gone and I will be able to truly feel the warmth of the sun on my soul.

It troubles me to truly contemplate how numb I have been, and how that has effected my life. I was so frozen and stiff inside that it really didn’t matter what was going on outside my fortress of solitude^[1].

It would have been very difficult for anyone to reach me anyhow.

And that is extremely tragic. I had (and have) a lot to offer the world, but that frozen prison of depression and social anxiety was too much of a handicap. It preserved my intellect and other scholastic skills, but it froze out a lot of important social instincts and social information that might have been very useful in my attempt to get along with my fellow humans.

Speaking of which, I have been thinking more about the idea that I might be somewhere on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum some more thought. I have not considered myself to be “on the spectrum” because I don’t show any of the usual major symptoms of Asperger’s, like trouble reading facial expressions, difficulty in understanding why people do things, poor theory of mind, or any of the sensory issues.

But lately I have been wondering. I was a pretty weird kid right from the getgo. I never had an imaginary friend and I had no interest in playing out scenarios with my toys. For as long as I can remember, I have had a very serious, literal, inquisitive mind that rapidly saw through the usual illusions and did not feel the compulsions of authority or the fear of adults and their power.

And let me be clear : I was born this way. I can’t blame it on any of the bad things that have happened to me in my life. This attitude came pre-installed in my particular model of brain.

But it’s a very strange model to have. From what I gather from pop culture, most kids go through stages, like having an imaginary friend and playing out scenarios with toys, I never went through at all. I never decided I was some kind of animal and acted that way all day.^[2] I didn’t have elaborate Calvin and Hobbes imaginary play sessions. I never really saw the appeal of the sandbox or the monkey bars. I never even finger-painted or drew lines with crayons on construction paper.

I was, in many (but by no means all), far too mature for my age. Those things all seemed silly and pointless to me. Maybe that’s just a function of high intelligence, I don’t know.

But even the high IQ nerdly folks I know did things like play obsessively with their Lego sets or draw fantasy maps or things like that.

So what the hell was up with me?

I have never even heard of another kid like that. Even the Asperger’s people I know did more of the usual child type things than I did.

All I wanted was books and TV and video games. And later on, stimulating conversation.

That seems strangely… specialized to me now. It’s almost as though, in a way, I focused in on one or two specific interests to the exclusion of all others.

Kinda sounds like Asperger’s to me. And again… I was born this way.

Maybe in some ways, I am not neurotypical at all. I’m just a really high functioning autistic.

Or maybe I am just a nerd. I dunno.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.