Chess club tonight, I'm at the library waiting for other players (if any) to show.

I am trying hard to.....strike a balance. See, here is the issue: I'm already really weird/different. I know that. I go through cycles. Sometimes it's more pronounced. Since working 7 days a week, splitting up with my long-term partner after 7-8 years, and not having the restorative daily time with the goats, I have been a _lot_ more stressed. Heck...I don't like to admit it, but living independently is very, very difficult for me. The bills, the little thigns that have to be dealt with, the phone calls, juggling everything...and I don't really mean financially or emotionally. Just having to coordinate all that is not as easy for me as it would be for your average Jill. Throw being a single mother into the mix, plus two jobs...and it gets worse. I am proud of myself, that I've actually been able to do it alone, without state aid or handouts (well, except for the food bank occasionally).

However, there is a backlash: the stress comes to bite me in the butt. I've always stimmed, ever since I can remember. The difference is that I now stim constantly, at least one sort of stim and maybe two, and openly, in public. I *need* to stim. My social deficits are much more apparent since I am now forced to interact socially on a more or less perpetual basis (my idea of hell!!!). I am constantly on the line.... True, my social skills are better now than ever before, even though ironically the lack of them is more glaring than before. I'm also, in many ways, more blatantly weird than ever before, and NO!, I'm not doing it on purpose.

BUT I am tired of feeling defensive over who I am, tired of even trying to be normal (futile if anything ever was....I don't even know what normal is, how they think is a mystery to me...) tired of being ashamed of my self, of my identity, of the creative, wacky soul that I really am. I *like* who I am. I *accept* it. There is a beauty to autism, and I embrace it. For the first time in a very, very long time, I feel deeply happy and content; partly because I've finally found another soul that I understand, *one* soul in the world that I can connect to....and partly because I feel at peace- the answers have been found, and I'm OK. Ermmm...those two are interrelated.

I don't like the way normal people are. I *hate* their dishonesty, their sneakiness, their subtleties, their emphasis on phony ritual niceness and insincerities. I DON'T get on their case, even though wehat they do infects and permeates the entire world with their taint. WHY in the heck can't they return the favor and leave me alone, to be the way I am, without undue criticism?