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.