I'm so sick and tired of wondering and fearing that people might angry at me. I'm never quite sure. Experience has taught me that when people are angry they can be:

• obviously angry: yelling, scowling, and the like
• Smiling
• Silent, cold, and unresponsive, which, to be honest, is really hard for me to distinguish from solitary-quiet or sad/depressed
• Ignoring me like I don't exist but talking to other people
• and a number or others that are hard for me to read.
  

See, I'm not always sure.

And if I'm not sure, experience has also taught me that it's best to be safe, because angry people can be violent, and unpredictably so. So usually, if I have even the faintest tinge of fear that someone might be upset with me (which is most of the time, since their anger signals are so variable) I either smile in what must be a rather uncertain, hideously half-hearted grimace, or I start to apologize, hoping to quench the thirst of their anger with my pathetic submission before it gets (horrors!) worse.

"I'm sorry"
"I'm so sorry"
"I'm really sorry"
"I didn't mean it that way..."
"Did I do something wrong? I'm sorry"

Or sometimes I just worry silently and brood over it for a long time, getting more and more upset, unsure of what I could possibly have done wrong, whether or not that remark was sarcasm, whether they're angry at me or someone else, and just replaying everything that could possibly pertain to the scenario in an attempt to decipher where I screwed up (again).

Jesus, people!! Just spell it out! I'm so damned tired of being sorry all the time when I don't even know why or what for or whether the person's even justified in the anger towards me, if it exists at all. I'm f*****g sick of groveling and begging people to allow me to please them.

Who the hell do they think they are, anyway? Can't I be angry sometimes, too?

So, I'm planning my garden and getting ready to place the bulb order. They're cheaper if I order before the 31st of this month. I'm thinking that it'd be cool to make a small bed devoted to strange, off the wall plants, including these. Any one of them is only moderately weird by itself, but all together?

Despair is wrapping its quiet, deadly little fingers around me again. I'm beginning to realize that the things that I say and think don't matter, what I fell doesn't matter, that I'm sort of an invisible person who just exists but doesn't make much of an impact. A cipher. I might not be hated, but neither will I be loved. I'm just going to continue existing day in and day out, like an unseen planet that cycles through the sky, watching everyone else...just circling along in some kind a a semi-ghostlike existence.

I wish I could take my St.John's wort, but the doctor said it'll go through my milk, that I have to wait until I'm done nursing. And I wish that I could have more confidence, that I could be a little more outgoing, but I'm entirely too sensitive for my own good...and when I get hurt, I ball up and don't ever want to talk to anyone again.

I think what it is, is that I need to get some sleep, maybe..... :-(

I'm depressed and pissed off. :-/ It's my workplace again.

There is a girl at work who excels at looking cute and innocent while doing the absolute least amount of work she can possibly get away with, as slowly as possible. She smiles serenely as she works at her very leisurely pace, oblivious to the tension and chaos she is creating when we have to pick up her slack. Imagine our irritation when she proudly and smugly announces that she has received a $1.00 raise (unheard of among us) for being such a good worker! WTF?!!!! Then she adds the nice little morsel: she is going to receive another .50 raise at summer's end. We are all gnashing our teeth and agreeing that this is exactly why our boss admonishes us not to discuss our wages. I haven't had a raise in over a year, and it isn't so much the monetary element that bugs me, so much as the idea that they must not be very happy with me. I work so damned hard and consistently try to improve upon my performance, and this is just very hard to take....I would be delighted with something like, "I see that you're doing a good job, thanks", but no such thing is forthcoming. That raise would have been better spent on almost any other worker in our section....it isn't that I think I deserved it, because frankly, I know damned well that I don't deserve that kind of a raise, but neither does she.

Last night I realized that ultimately, it's their own danged business how they spend their money. I have no right to be disgruntled about whether or not she got her raise. I just wish she'd shut up about it. With that in mind, I resolved to go to work with a better attitude about this, and just put her stupid raise out of my head. I tried, I really did.....

Today didn't make it very easy, though.

Have you ever noticed there there are girls who can do half the amount of work and just look cute and innocent and still come out smelling like a rose, while the others take the heat? I have no idea how they pull this off. I sort of wish I knew, but I'd be too proud and stuck up to do it even if I did.... ::sigh::
I just hate it that people (especially guys) fall for this B.S. My sister was exactly that way. I thought I'd be done with this crap when I left home and got away from her......

OK, I did it, and here is the addy for that blog: This is what happened. Comments are welcome.

On a different subject, I'm becoming interested in the Quakers, a pacifist group. At first I had the impression that you have to believe in God in the conventional sense in order to be a Friend, but apparently there are other agnostic Quakers out there. When I look at the beautiful faces of my five little boys, I just can't stomach the thought of their joining the army and killing other people's children.

I sometimes feel as though my past is strangling me. I've tried counseling; it doesn't work very well, primarily because what the (neurotypical) therapists say is unhelpful to me (as a person on the autism spectrum who doesn't relate very well to the neurotypical perspective). The fact that they don't understand my point of view all that well is also problematic, as are their admonitions not to think about certain things (next to impossible for me).

I'm actually beginning to make a few friends (to my surprise) and so from time to time I mention excerpts from my past, but it's really hard for me to put it into perspective for them. When I tell them that my first marriage (total nightmare) was more or less arranged by my very religious parents, they just go, "What?????" They don't have the context. Meanwhile, people who've known me since I was a kid drift through the store and I get lost in the detritus of the past and the attempt to reconcile it with my present life.

I started to write a book about it once, but at the time I was still in serious conflict about some of the religious/spiritual issues. I tried desperately to salvage some of what I believed in, to justify it....and the result was a defensive, convoluted mess. My sister wrote a book (sampling liberally from what I had written), and her spin on it was that we had fallen into a cult and that she had been rescued and returned to true Christianity...not a point of view that I could share.

A LOT of people tell me that I should simply get over it and not think about the past. Move on, they say! That's easier said than done, when the contemporaries I grew up with come through my workplace, and I see the same struggle in them, some of them succumbing to drugs, others going as ultra religious as their parents, and others ....attempting some kind of a compromise? As though that were possible, heh. Some of them won't even speak to me or acknowledge my presence. We flap and struggle through life like wounded birds...some of us relatively unharmed after all, others maimed and crippled up....

So I think what I'm going to do, so as not to clutter this place up, is to create another blog for that purpose. I'll link to it from here.

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And, an aside, while we're sitting here referring to spirtuality and religious issues. I'm considering the Friends, that is to say, Quakers. Pacificism is something I take seriously. The only thing is, I'm not sure there's a god, or that it matters, so probably I don't qualify, I'd think.