A La Aspie

Crossposted to Trusera.com

In September, my husband was physically violent to me. I experienced the typical shock that goes with an incident like that. It’s taken me 4 hard months to get to the point where I feel like I’m about halfway back to normal. On one hand, I’m lucky that I have healing skills and self knowledge that make my survivability better. But on the other hand, I was also more deeply traumatized by the incident because of my disability.

It’s no big secret that people with autism have a hard time coping with change. Now, 4 months later, I’m starting to be able to pick apart the elements of the incident. What was trauma and shock, what was logic, what was survival - and now, what was my disability.

The actual incident it’s self was traumatizing, obviously. Someone you trust attacks you. ANYONE attacks you physically… it’s all traumatizing. But neurologically, the actual way it was perpetrated just HAPPENED to collide with my sensory profile making it that much worse. As soon as the shoving and jerking around started, he could have stopped right there and I’d have been a mess. Even encountering something mildly jarring can send me into a sobbing puddle of tears and a day of recovering from shaken nerves. EVERY jarring incident can become traumatizing because my body doesn’t understand the input and so it’s automatically a threat. Cue meltdown.

After the fact, usually, someone just runs out and gets a job and everything is hunkey dorey, I guess. Maybe. But I can’t just work any job. I can’t work a job dealing with customers, I can’t work a job that really depends upon me working with people at all, unless it’s on my terms - and an employer doesn’t look too kindly upon that.

I’d finally come to a happy medium with work. I was self employed and I was really thriving at it. But being self employed means that if *I* am not working, the business dies. I couldnt work for 3 1/2 months and that is precisely what it did. So, somehow, I have to make up for my income AND his, now that his sorry butt is out of the house. Not to mention the medical bills and other expenses attributed to the incident. Facing expenses one can’t pay and the death of a business would be stressful to ANYONE. But they can run out and get a job - any old job. Rinse and repeat.

I’m accustomed to him taking over dealing with companies and people we depend upon as a family… like service providers and such. Now, I do it. That’s one more thing to my list. To anyone, adding one more thing ‘to do’ to the list of things we do day to day is a hassle. However, for me, dealing with even ONE of those phone calls is a huge event. It takes hours of nervous build up, if I can’t manage to put it off another day, that is. Once I get on the phone, it’s a rushed, anxious conversation in which I try to get it put to bed quickly. Cue meltdown again.

He really didn’t contribute that much around the house and I suppose I’m grateful that I got used to doing all of that. He also didn’t have much sympathy for ‘I cant deal with that, will you please handle it’ so I was pretty overwhelmed as it was. But adding these additional stresses is about all a girl can take.

It’s overwhelming. I have days where I would just much rather give up and walk away from society than deal with one more excruciating moment of confusion and strain. Every time that I have to re-explain to someone that I took them literally, didn’t understand what the form was asking or didn’t express myself properly, it’s just one more drop in an overfilled bucket.

Also may have been crossposted to my Asperger's Syndrome blog on Trusera.com, a site where people show health related stories. Check it out!