November's ending and I'm still here

Hello everyone, welcome back to my Ted Talk. It's been 12 days since my last post. (wow, sounds a little like blogging anonymous.) I just haven't had much to say the past two weeks. I feel like I'm finally starting to level out from my depressive episode, but at the same time, still experiencing strange emotions and really coming to terms with my undiagnosed Autism. I don't know the best way to explain it but I've just been reminiscing about my actions, reactions to situations and it feels like my life makes more sense. What I'm still not entirely sure of is how there are certain situations like books/movies/shows/etc that really grab my attention and I get emotionally invested. I start to take on the emotions of the characters and I feel heartbreak with them, and I anticipate the coming together of a flourishing love story.

In this particular instance, I went to visit my sophisti-sister for the weekend, two weekends ago for my birthday. We had plans to go out and go to a country bar and what not and we just ended up doing some shopping and mostly binge-watched an anime called "Fruits Basket." I'm not one who is really interested in anime. The furthest my anime reach has gone has been for Pokémon and Sailor Moon- both shows I started watching in the 90's and still love to this day. Anyway, motherfucking Fruits Basket. I don't like to admit that I really enjoyed the show but I thoroughly did. It kept my interest, a love story developed and I felt people's pain. I managed to finish the show with 4 days dedicated to watching it. There were 63 episodes, but at least they are only like 21min long, so I promise it wasn't as ridiculous as it sounded (and I did other things than just watch the show.) I finished the series on Friday and for a good day or two after, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of something missing, almost like a small void has opened inside me and now I don't know how to fill it. I lost interest in creativity, I started to find it hard to complete tasks and just lived in this emotionally vulnerable state and I didn't know what to do. It's happened before and I ultimately just have to wait it out but it's not the most convenient thing to deal with when I still have family and my husband to communicate with and I can't really give them my full attention. I'm not sure if this is something other people have struggled with, whether it was part of being on the spectrum or just being an odd person who gets into their watched activities, but I don't know what to make of it or if there is a word or phrase for it. If anyone knows of one, help a girl out and send it my way. Does anyone else feel this way? I would love to hear other people's experiences!

In reference to my earlier statement, I have also been remembering previous situations I experienced and I thought about how I reacted to them and how everything seems to make sense with the likelihood of Autism. Many of the thoughts come when I've smoked weed. Smoking weed is not something that I do all the time but I like to do it before bed occasionally because it helps me relax and it helps to lighten my moods. My demeanor can look and feel really serious and I don't find many things funny, so smoking just helps to find things more amusing and it makes me laugh, which I also don't do often. In addition to it making my moods lighter, it also sends me down some rabbit holes of thought and this is where those memories come in. I feel like I can see myself from an outside perspective and my actions are odd, the things I say/repeat are odd, and I don't know what to do with my hands. I have a hard time with maintaining eye contact for too long, my brain spaces out and I have problems comprehending things people say to me, and I am actually hyper-sensitive and overly empathetic to where it is overconsuming. I have visible stims that I have done since I was a child and I can see things in patterns. Regardless, Autism is something that didn't come up on my radar growing up but to my knowledge, girls don't get diagnosed nearly as often as boys, as well as we are better at masking and present symptoms differently. We, as a family, didn't really think much about it until we had my little brother and we knew something was off and he was able to get a diagnosis. Things like Bipolar and Autism run in families and my dad is likely on the spectrum, as well as I believe I am as well based on assessments my psychiatrist sent me.

I know I've talked about these things before but I still have revelations every now and then that help me to understand myself better, and it continues to be an on-going journey of self-exploration and discovery.

So in summary, Fruits Basket is life and nothing I do makes sense 8P.

Thanks for listening to the rambling and let me know of your thoughts.

-A