autnotes 003: literal 💩💀

A lot has happened.

I relapsed in recovery from atypical anorexia.

I wanted to cease existing, and I’ve worked so hard to not want that. I don’t want to die. It’s just the struggles of that.

Dissociative identity disorder makes me a DID system, but the headspace is glitchy due to not eating much for three days. When I say not eating much, what I mean is just that: eating a bowl of Malt-o-Meal only because my body required the nutrition to function. Including sleep.

Once the adrenaline of stress and the trauma response wore off…I needed more energy. I was exhausted. I slept and woke up and slept and woke up.

I kept my apartment between 74-75°F because I was freezing. Texas heat was 99°F+.

Microsoft Bing kinda sent me over the edge with their algorithm pushing out harmful autistic content on autistic search terms. They also deindexed at least a hundred autistic blogs, as if they don’t even exist on the internet.

But you know what? Izzy.blog does exist, whether Bing says so or not.

Allowing companies to pay to corrupt a search engine, beyond basic search engine ad results, to the point that sites don’t even show up; recommending  people with autism symptoms seek emergency medical care and “at risk” of having autistic children seek medical attention before or during the early stages of pregnancy; and then having the audacity to say they cannot manually manipulate the algorithm they literally designed is perhaps the epitome of everything wrong with companies romanticizing autism.

They support us for clout. It makes them look good. They do not actually support autistic people. ✨

So I’m sitting here writing this from a toilet in an apartment that I don’t know I’m going to get to keep. I paid the rent three hours into today, and I am hoping that that is enough to allow me to stay.

I don’t know if I’m going to throw up, and I think the lemon lime soda is helping. Two slices of Pizza Hut’s Hawaiian pizza, and my stomach is having words with me about not eating for three days. 😬

Why aren’t our struggles shared?

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity, who I am underneath the autism mass, and vulnerability. And I’ve realized that I don’t know exactly who I am without the autism mask, but I do know that I don’t feel safe sharing my struggles without being perceived as someone attempting to trauma bond.

What happened to being vulnerable with each other, to forming actual connections with people? People connect when they relate, and the best friendships that I have happened from that vulnerability. We shared various struggles with each other, and it wasn’t trauma bonding so much as it was just connecting.

Actually, after looking up the term, I think people don’t really understand what it means. A trauma bond is what you form with your abuser or what your victim forms with you.

It’s not the relationship you form with someone when you realize you both experience the same thing, you both struggle from similar things. That’s called connection. It creates intimacy (not always about sex). That’s crucial to long-lasting friendships.

Maybe that’s why I struggle so much to make new ones. Because my long-time friends, we’ve read each other’s posts and had the hard/vulnerable/immature/etc. discussions.

I don’t know. I do know that I’m going to start sharing mine, because somewhere down the line someone is going to get the help I needed when I was younger and everyone presumed I wasn’t that autistic.

I was, I was just really great at masking.