You know the before-snack snack? That’s what this theme is.

The amazing Georgie is designing for me a theme. 2020 is shit, and my theme was bugging the crap out of me, de-inspiring me to write anything here. We don’t give our themes enough credit, ’cause when we get tired of ’em, there is nothing that drives a wedge between us and our blogs more.

After searching around, for several days and hours, for a low-cost alternative that wouldn’t break the bank, I settled on Sylvia, from Nose Graze, because I’ve always liked it, anyway. I won’t be using it long-term, but it’ll get the job done and offer a lovely intermission from the theme I coded, until my next custom theme is ready to go live.

I’m just so sick of the bright, sunshine-y shit when, first of all, there is a global pandemic fucking with even the extroverts’ lives, even if this theme is obviously going to break certain functions I coded into my last theme. Er, CSS. Maybe both. But I don’t care, because it’s not like it’ll be legit broke, like Humpty Dumpty when he fell off the wall.

Later, I’ll copy the select functions over to my custom plugin for this blog, but it’s way past my bedtime and I’m going to sleep shit and then awaken disappointingly only to go to work at a job that doesn’t pay well and is inevitably going to be the death of me if I don’t leave as soon as I move into the apartment complex I get approved at, which I don’t yet have but hope to have because, tentatively, I am moving the first weekend of 2021 even further away from civilization than I ever wanted to in the first place, in favor of cheap rent, because even though the cost of living has increased, wages haven’t — and Americans are grossly underpaid because we do not organize into unions because large corporations brainwash us to believe unions are terrible all the time, would never be able to please us, and are actually constantly working against us.

This is why I want to work for myself, as a professional content creator, developing my own brand, even though it is such a mighty plan of unpredictability. But then you have what’s going on at my current job, at a billion-dollar company, that pays me $11 an hour, gives coronavirus relief bonuses for PR stunts, and then cuts our hours and says everyone’s hours are being cut because of the holidays — all the while apartment complexes dream of tenants who make minimums of three times the rent, forcing me to ask fam for help and find loopholes because

1. I have crap credit that keeps getting worse because of something that legit is not my fault, that happened in December 2019,
2. no one can cosign for me,
3. and I don’t make 3x the rent, but then I also don’t apply for housing assistance because I make too much money.

Don’t even get me started on how this pandemic is affecting me as an autistic person. Though I managed to get off the floor and out to my car in time, I had a meltdown at work. I wanted to pull a Mindy Lahiri and lay down on the floor, regardless of social protocol and logic and expectations about how a neurotypical-functioning person should behave in public, but I held it in and cried as I speed-walked to my car.

I’m overwhelmed and stressed and adulting in a world that already didn’t understand people like me, but now there is a pandemic featuring people who are experiencing similar stressed and tell me I’m not alone because they, too, are in similar boats — but the thing is, they’re not autistic. I’m lonely because 1) I’m a single lesbian, but 2) I’m actually autistic, and that means something to me. Non-autistic people experiencing frustrations caused by COVID-19 may relate to actually autistic people, and vice versa, but there is still a major difference between us, and it is autism. You cannot erase the autism from the person, so just because an autistic person shares their frustrations, it isn’t an open door for you to say that you — and everyone else on the planet — is experiencing the same, or similar, frustrations.

Because, at the end of the day, you’re not autistic.

It’s like when single, heterosexual women say they’re lonely, too, when single lesbians say they’re lonely: heterosexual women have a whole fucking ocean of fish, while lesbians have a fucking river.

If you’re neurodivergent, fine. That’s fine. It is. But it’s like…you have different ways of coping. Do you get meltdowns? I’m just sick of the non-autistic people, who don’t claim neurodivergence like it’s a good thing, going all #MeToo because they think the pandemic leveled the social field. It didn’t. If anything, it made it a million times more confusing.