hate don’t beg

do we believe in the power of love

to conquer all?

hate doesn’t beg patience

and demand generosity

maybe i’d have preferred life in an asylum

in my bedtime mind pops

my first foreign trip without my parents

there i am, eleven,

living in a world i don’t want to live in

still here, alexithymic through fear

decoding signations from the incarcerated adjuster

interpreted via reddit memes

between being diagnosed with a terminal illness, then undiagnosed, then diagnosed with autism, i spent a lot of time with therapists from age 38 onwards. i was first diagnosed with depression as a teenager. i remember waiting ages for a referral to therapy. finally getting there, jittering, a nervous sweaty wreck of self-harming, substance abusing, poetic teenager. i just sort of wanted to unload on someone about this one time, when i was eleven, that i was bullied relentlessly while on a trip to austria without my parents. the trauma of which i had just buried as deep as i could, before trying, flailing, desperately, to make myself an entirely new social circle at high school. and i’d since left high school and found myself in a similar predicament (although this only occurred to me 20 years later.)

that’s not really the sort of thing we do here, the therapist told me. i felt utterly humiliated.

ebitdata scientists don’t budget for trauma: / cutting teeth. immersed in the pain pearlescent

i consider myself to be good with numbers and knowledgeable about business type stuff. i know about politics, law, finance, accountancy, tax. and i’ve read quite a lot of self help re self-management. absolutely useless at telling people what to do. panic and nasusea at the idea of writing my own to-do list on a monday and never plan more than like three days ahead. but nonetheless, confident that i understand business generally. and anytime i see ‘ebitda’ i wince. you may as well be telling me turnover. it’s an irrelevant metric. it means ‘earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation’ – but so what? apple computer’s ebitda may be 100 billion dollars. but it can’t achieve that without paying taxes, paying interest on its debt, replacing out of date hardware (depreciation) and developing new intellectual property (amortisation). apple needs to keep incurring all those costs or it will go bust.

do you suffer from executive dysfunction? how do you cope?

not a repast but the popped french cork starter pistol / for a glorious wedding breakfast.

any meal served at a wedding is a breakfast, in the british isles anyway, i understand. but when my great friends d + k were getting married, i was unaware of this. i just saw on the invitation that there would be breakfast. so i was an undiagnosed autistic at the time, and i was sitting at a table at the wedding with two other undiagnosed autistics. and maybe a few more to be honest. and we were starving because we hadn’t had breakfast because we thought we were getting it at the wedding. the father of the bride’s speech went on for about 3 hours and by the time it was over one of my pals was so drunk he somehow brained himself on a urinal and was off work for half a year. n.n.benn is a fictional character mind.

oil slick sneaker sandstorm set back, sliders for the subsequence

we walked to the next town across for lunch one day. went to a pretty average/crap cafe. it was a longish walk back. an hour or so. i needed to pee so snuck behind a screen at an abandoned construction site. accidentally stood on a plastic jug of dark oil. who knows what it was but it got all over me. ruined my brand new shoes. the only pair i brought with me! traumatic.

and when we got back home, it turned out the restaurant we went to was a chain. and there was another one right next to our apartment. the only half decent restaurant in town as well.