Wednesday, August 21, 2013

side effects...

first i must report the extent to which i seem to be in holy flow. i can't enter traffic without it turning into stressless courtesy everywhere i look. parking spots magically appear, i'm running into people in dramatic, synchronous ways, everything feels so soft, and open, and warm. information and tools find me right at the last minute every time.... and they keep finding me, even when i don't know enough to know i'm woefully misinformed, doing the wrong thing, or not doing what needs done. that's a big one.

but here is the second whammy thing. i knew going into the start of the oxygen treatment that one of the reasons clinics like this exist and can thrive even at current prohibitive prices is that they're rapidly gaining renown as a very effective treatment for autism spectrum disorders. i'm an aspy and i can report after just three sessions some very dramatic changes i would never have expected.

i'm no longer as scattered mentally as i usually am. i seem to have inherited a sudden dose of social intelligence. i don't interrupt people and talk a blue streak but rather give and take in conversation, in fact, i can really hear what people are saying to me. its as if inside my head there's a new space that wasn't there before that allows me to relax when people speak. i'm not shuttling between their words and my own inner ticker tape. in fact i can see myself and my circumstances from the outside looking in, in a way i never experienced before and its acting as a natural inhibitor of these problematic patterns of behaviour (which i never really recognized as such). i don't get as lost in circuitous overprocessed inner conversation. i can speak more simply and say what i really feel without any hangups.

what's more, i suddenly can't stand to do what i've done for almost twenty years. content to hide from life and either loose myself in my mind and its books or fritter away my talents at a desk out of the game's circulation, taunting life with what i _could_ do if only....

now that i have to leave base camp to head to the north of the city for my HBOT every day i have a launching pad that i've started using to return myself to social life, to effort to see the people who i love and appreciate and who love and support me and make me feel good, to do the things that put me in new situations around new people so that i can improve my ability to interact with others. i was always good at making friends, but i lost most of them to neglect and just always never coming when called. i suddenly can no longer keep doing this.

in this way and by these strange means, i'm just letting myself become a bumble bee, moving from honey pot to honey pot wherever i go.... like woody allen said, 70% of success in life is showing up. suddenly i'm showing up. people are getting phone calls from me. i'm actually answering the phone. people are getting visits from me and during them i'm not screwing things up so much by anxiously projecting myself forward or getting bogged down, endlessly reprocessing hurts from the past. stupid things that are true but not best to voice don't fly out my mouth. that is a HUGE one that has led to so much unnecessary social tension. what i don't understand is that these seem to all be judgment issues, so why would oxygen lend me better social awareness, listening skills, and judgement? its not. its resolving the aspy adaptive habits i built over the years that have come to represent the peanut gallery within me that has made finding happiness and healing such a challenge.

onwards!


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