In crayons

She asked me what I was going to do next.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll try going back to writing. Not fiction. Essays, maybe.”

I like to explain, recount, opine, speculate.

I’m autistic. For forty years I did not know that. I just knew that it was hard for me to small talk. My go-to strategies were to 1) get the other one to talk about themselves, or 2) pontificate. After my diagnosis (and another term ending in -splaining started to get popular), I called it aspie-splaining.

It’s self-therapy: I feel better when I explain things, like I’m taking control and making a part of the world more understandable. To go on Medium was to some extent a no-brainer for me. Where else would I be? But then Medium became an unconquerable white paper for me. You know, when you have so much to write, but the paper is so empty and blank that you do anything to avoid staining it. So I’m breaking out the crayons. I wrote the title, and started writing without knowing what I was writing about. I’m explaining.

In this long heatwave, which has turned the normally wonderful Swedish summer into stale and sluggish misery, my life became unworkable too. Hence my discussion with her. She was worried about me cutting myself off from my remaining friends. She is probably right that this is a bad thing, but so is the feeling that every single friend is someone I should be doing things with, and not feeling up to it. (Oh, did I mention that I have had clinical depression for most of my life too?)

I need to get moving again. Start conquering the blank paper. And for that I need a clean slate. I need to stop feeling that I’m neglectful and disrespectful towards to people I love and care about. (I won’t cut myself off from my nearest relatives, obviously.) I need to start expressing myself again. Focus, find a voice. Write something. Essays, maybe.