Tag Archives: personal

Anchor chains

I was laid in bed thinking last night about the connections we make with other people, especially our families. My brain came up with a metaphor. I get metaphorical at times, it helps me understand the world.

Our links to family are the anchor we’re born with, keeping us firmly in place. We learn to know who we are and where we are, just the basics, a starting point. That’s our port of anchor, our home. Eventually we grow up, and want to sail away, so we haul in the anchor and head out to sea. We take our anchor with us, a security against losing ourselves. Got lost? Drop your anchor, check your compass and charts, rest and then head back out on your journey, safe in the knowledge that you can stop and rest if you need to. You can go home if you need to, to repair the anchor, replace the mooring ropes, get a decent cup of tea.

Sometimes the rope is rotten and the chain rusted. It snaps in time, and you flail around unconnected until someone throws you a new rope, and you can get yourself a new anchor. You might have tried to keep going, with that rusty anchor chain and the fraying rope, hoping to repair it soon, but never being able to. The break, though inevitable, still comes as a shock.

If you’re lucky, you have a few spares, ready and willing to help hold you steady (friends). If not, you’re thrown about on the waves, struggling to get to shore. This is how I think of those with abusive families. From observation, the rope, to an outsider, is fatally flawed, but the sailor keeps sailing, hoping one day things will change but they never do. The rope gets more frayed, the anchor chain rustier. Eventually it breaks, it was going to, but the break is painful for the sailor because they’ve relied for so long on the faulty equipment. This is the part of your brain and society that reinforces the message that says “No, you mustn’t cut of your narcissistic/abusive/controlling mother/father/sister/brother, they’re family.”, or the abusive person that tells them they have no one else, that none will ever love them, look after them, the way the abusive person does, even though common sense and your friends say “Run away as far and as fast as you can. Cut off all contact, they’re bad for you.”.

The fact is, the anchor – the abusive family member – doesn’t care, it’s doing its own thing and now at least it isn’t being hauled around by/constantly connected to the ‘demanding’ sailor. Oh, it might wish you were still there, but only so they can continue abusing you. They’ll say you cut the rope, it’s your fault they left, but that’s just deflection. They were rotten to start with.

Leave the anchor, deep and lost on the seas.

Sail away and find a new way to get to shore.

Call for help.

If you have spare ropes (friends) that’ll hold you for a while, you can tie up elsewhere, find another anchor, one you choose, rather than one foisted on you. Maybe the old ropes and anchor stopped you from getting spares, (social isolation) and you struggle to get to shore.

Call for help.

Someone will answer, maybe they’ll lend you a temporary anchor, just until you find yourself a new one. This is a support group, or a therapist, that sort of thing.

Some people have perfectly fine anchors and ropes, strong, unfreyed, uncorroded, and still choose to cut themselves loose, leaving a dangling rope and a lost anchor. They have their own reasons, even if they don’t make any sense from the outside. They might have other anchors, ‘better’ ones, waiting to be used; or they might believe their perfectly fine anchors and rope are damaged and they need to be thrown away.

Or, maybe they just want to go on an adventure, are tired of being in one place, feel stuck or scared. So they cut their mooring ropes and sail away. Maybe everything will go well, they find temporary moorings, borrow new anchors and rope, and eventually come back. Full of stories, ready to fish up their old anchor, clean it off and start again. And maybe they’ll need help. Maybe, they’ll discover they left the anchor on the seabed for too long and it’s rusted and too far gone to be cleaned up and reused; maybe someone else fished it out, appreciated that it was a fine anchor and decided to make it their own. So, disappointed, they have to get a new anchor. Maybe they’ll keep the one they abandoned but tried to recover as a memory or souvenir, or they’ll see it hanging from another ship’s anchor chain, having been rescued soon after being abandoned, and feel sad they’ve lost something they hadn’t really had the chance to appreciate. And they’ll sail on.

Make of that what you will. My brain in a strange place.

Dissertation Update: Week 5

A couple of days late, I know, but I was busy Tuesday and spent a lot of Wednesday asleep, recovering.

Anyway. I wrote 2000 words about the representation of autistic women in crime fiction, only to be told by my supervisor that I was doing it wrong. So that essay got put to one side and I re-wrote it, covering a range of subjects in relation to my dissertation. I’ve sent that, and an updated draft of the creative piece off on Wednesday morning.

On Sunday, before all that, I got an email with feedback. As usual, the supervisor doesn’t like Lucie or the murderer. I accepted that there was something flat about the murderer, because in the first 13,000 words I’d been concentrating on setting up the situation and establishing Lucie. What I didn’t appreciate was being told Lucie wasn’t recognisably autistic.

I may have been a bit blunt in my response email:

I have written Lucie based on my own, and other women’s experiences of being autistic. If you are unfamiliar with autistic women it may not be immediately obvious that she is, but to those who know or are autistic women, it is. Current representations of autistic women in popular culture are limited to socially-inept autistic savants, an unrealistic stereotype. The vast majority of autistic women are not Sheldon Cooper with breasts and I’m not writing Lucie as such just because the rest of the world are too ignorant to look past stereotypes created by non-autistic people about autistic people. She needs to be realistic, to widen popular representations of autistic women beyond the ‘autistic savant’-type, because there are autistic police officers and to provide a role model for those autistic women who aren’t Saga Noren. That’s what I’m trying to do with this character.

 

My description of her autistic traits goes beyond the ‘likes pattern and order’ you mentioned:

  • She is described reacting to sensory stimulation in several chapters. Sensory Processing Disorder is a common co-morbid condition, as is anxiety. She mitigates her processing problems with the use of noise-cancelling headphones
  • She stims, tapping and running her fingers across patterns and materials
  • She blocks out visual stimuli in meetings and in busy rooms so that she can concentrate on her work or the meeting by looking at her computer screen and by building her file fort
  • She has hyper focused on the idea that someone at Witham View is the murderer and is ignoring the other lines of enquiry. This is based on her putting together small clues that others have missed, and looking at it from a different angle. Her autism is relevant because it helps her see the case differently.
  • She struggles with social interaction and communication, forgetting her carefully learnt ‘scripts’ when tired or stressed, and oversharing personal information with colleagues. This causes conflict with her colleagues and will be a subplot that evolves through the full length novel. This is where her autism is also relevant.
  • She has a limited sense of danger – wandering around Lincoln, a place she doesn’t know well, in the early hours of the morning to take photographs in the rain because she enjoys photography and needs to relax.
  • She’s blunt, although she’s learn to hold back when dealing with witnesses – for instance in her conversation with Vera. And it is a learnt behaviour, she doesn’t have the instinctive ability to gauge other people that neurotypical people have.

These are recognisably autistic traits. Your response was the equivalent of ‘but you don’t look autistic’, an insulting comment the majority of autistic women hear at least once in their lives that is used to dismiss their experience of autism because it doesn’t fit with the stereotypes.

I have yet to hear back, either about this complaint or my dissertation drafts; I suspect my dissertation supervisor is ignoring me now. I added extra stuff, making it obvious when Lucie was stimming and her anxiety about dealing with work colleagues. I felt like I had to exaggerate to appease the ignorant.

I don’t like humans very much, at times.

Some of you are okay, I suppose.

30 Dogs Sleeping Like Awkward Doofuses - The BarkPost
Not my dog. I found it doing an image search and thought it was cute.

In other news, I went to my first Adult Autism Forum Cafe on Tuesday evening (after going to craft club in the afternoon); the topic was supposed to be ‘confidence’ but I ended up on a table with two other women, we drew trees and talked about yarn. One of them got out her spinning so I got out my crochet. It was fun. I think I’m going to go to the sensory group on the 18th and the Forum on the 19th. Also, I have an appointment with a clinical psychologist and a support worker from the High Functioning Autism Service (I didn’t name it – I don’t like the functioning labels) on Tuesday morning to see what support they can offer. I need to write a list.

Right, it’s 5.15 a.m., and I should try to get back to sleep. The dogs are snoring at me.

Conversation; or I can’t do small talk

No, really I can’t. I find it boring and shallow. Unless the conversation is going to quickly move on to something deeper, I’d rather not talk at all. From my reading around the subject of my provisional ASC diagnosis last year, it would seem that it’s normal for me, but possibly not for most people.

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University update: Week 7

I haven’t written much of anything about university this year. That’s because, after the first two weeks this term I haven’t been. For various reasons the workshops have been cancelled.

Week 3 – tutor sick, no replacement available

Week 4 – tutor sick, no replacement available

Week 5 – reading week

Week 6 – cancelled due to snow

Week 7 : Authorised absence

Only this week have I been responsible for me not turning up, and that’s because I had my first ASC Diagnostic team appointment. I arranged an authorised absence for Wednesday.

According to a colleague, I didn’t miss much; the tutor was still not up to snuff so he showed a film called Fat man on a beach by B. S. Johnson. This isn’t Bloody Stupid Johnson, famed architect and inventor of Ankh-Morpork, but another with the same initials. The film was quite daft, but the discussion got philosophical, and all I can think is did STP know of this film and film maker? Because something that obscure would appeal to him.

There are two weeks left before the end of term, my assessment booklets have arrived – they’re getting the proof copies, not ones I plan to sell. After the Easter break there are three weeks of workshops and I understand that at some point there will be three extra sessions to make up for the three cancelled workshops.

Then it’s on to the dissertation.

I probably won’t be reviewing many books between May and September.

Enjoy your weekend, I will be reading books and cuddling my hounds.

What I’m reading today

Morning all,

I’m not feeling fantastic today, so I’m listening to the ‘Small Town Murder‘ podcast and reading Veronica Bird’s autobiography, Veronica’s Bird. Veronica was born in 1943 to a coal mining family in Barnsley. Her father was a bully, although I suspect the brain injury and alcohol abuse might not have helped.

Clever and driven, Veronica got a scholarship to a girl’s boarding school at the age of 11, but was forced out two months before she was due to take her GCSEs because her brother-in-law wanted cheap labour on his market stall. Later she joined the prison service at a time when women didn’t. I’m really looking forward to reading about her time in the prison service; reading about her abusive childhood is painful.

There will be a full review as part of a blog tour at the end of the month. I’ve got other books I should be reading but I’m really intrigued by this book.

 

 

New Year’s Eve and I’m listing the good things

So, there’s three hours of 2017 left and I’ve been thinking of the good things that have happened this year.

  • I published the first two novels in the Fire Series in June and December;
  • I survived my first year of my MA in Creative Writing;
  • I’ve reviewed more books this year than last;
  • I’ve made useful connections with book publishers and promoters;
  • I made some progress, medically, getting my MI and autism diagnoses and decent medication;
  • I survived moving house!

I’s a short list, but it’s progress.

End of year grousing about mental illness and autism assessments

I don’t often post personal updates these day; the blog has evolved over the last year. Of the last twenty posts, sixteen have been reviews, or blog tour related. The other four have been about my novels. I feel like I need to write a personal post today though.

Continue reading “End of year grousing about mental illness and autism assessments”

Novel updates, leaking roofs and doggie birthdays

Nothing much, I’ve finished another edit of Fire Betrayed and sent it for reading by my beta readers. It’s getting there slowly, but I want to polish it some more. I expect to be sworn at again.

Continue reading “Novel updates, leaking roofs and doggie birthdays”