I’m writing this on Saturday, January 4, 2025. The idea behind it struck me last night for the second time since I started writing here, and I’m at the age where I recently laughed and told a young person on the phone that I no longer buy green bananas; so it’s probably a good idea not to wait for the lightning to strike a third time.
I’ve been here — lurking — since 2004. But as a Fed, aware of the Hatch Act and also aware that punitive workplace rules have a way of being misused, lurking was all I was going to do until I was well and truly retired. So in 2018 I joined here.
I’m an Aspie. And until there’s a more empowering label for my condition than “Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified”, which is what the pros recently decided to do because they thought we were getting uppity*, an Aspie I remain.
Being an Aspie means I see the world somewhat differently. Can zero in on the actual issue in most discussions in a matter of minutes, can ask a nonconfrontational question [yes, I really can do that] in such a way that people actually stop and think about it. And I have synesthesia, which until very recently I thought everyone did; and though I will never be a virtuoso at anything, music really is my alternate first language.
This is all relevant, take my word for it. Anyway. This diary has a title and you’re probably wondering what on earth anything I’ve said here has to do with it. Well, the thing for which I’m grateful is coming right up: bear with me, because it still needs some intro.
Being Aspie also means, for me, that I have a very lively subconscious and it’s close to the surface all the time. [Temple Grandin has written about this, as she has something very similar.] I also have a fairly retentive memory [it has quirks, I’m horrible with names] and that subconscious of mine does a whole lot of associating. REAL fast.
I also, by virtue of being female and gifted with an invisible [mostly] [oh who am I kidding?] disability, have had ample opportunity to develop empathy for others, and not just humans either, based on things [mostly unpleasant] that I have experienced myself.
So what? This what.
All my life, my first, most visceral response to very emotional situations — a crisis in the moment, another’s grief or pain — is that my subconscious instantly KNOWS of a piece of music, a fragment of a poem or book, a remembered work of art, and presents this to me as part of my deepest, truest response. And all my life, this deep response has gone unspoken, because the spoken word can’t properly convey it. People just don’t respond to others’ tears by suddenly singing to them or playing a tune — not out in public when the guitar is back home, anyway. And to start quoting “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” at someone when you KNOW, you KNOW, the last verse is JUST what they need to hear RIGHT NOW, is doomed to failure because they won’t be able to wait long enough for that last verse to arrive before they decide you’re an insensitive nutbag and leave in a huff, crying even harder…
But here I CAN offer the first best comfort that I know, the things that come to me unbidden and say, please, give this, it will help, it will console. And here, because of how the internet works, the music is at my fingertips; the poems can be embedded in a quote box so that people know instantly what I mean to do, and can hang in long enough to see what I meant to convey.
And here, because you folks are who you are, 99.9999999% of the time, what I mean to say, with the song or the picture or the quoted words, is instantly understood, taken in, and does indeed help, does indeed console.
For the first time in my life, I feel that I am able to help in the way I was born to do. And using Aspie talents to help people seems to be the Aspie Prime Directive; so for the first time in my life, I am actually able to fully act on the whole, sole and only reason I even exist.
Don’t get me wrong. I would far rather have no occasion, ever, to offer comfort, because I would far, far rather live in a world where comfort was never needed. But for the first and only time in my life, I am able to offer the best and deepest comfort that I know, because the medium of communication allows it, and because that in turn allows the people I seek to comfort to understand and receive it.
For the first time in my life, I am actually able to really say all that I mean when it’s most important. And people can hear it. And do.
You can’t imagine how this feels… has felt, for almost the entire time I’ve been here… or maybe you can. Not merely to wish good things for people, but to be able to do actual good.
No matter what may come, I will be glad of this, and remember it and be grateful, until I finally lay me down to Sleep.
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*yeah, really. In industry and at FDA my primary focus was mental health, and I worked side by side with professionals in that field, and I know what I’m talking about here.
