journal - day 7

the first thing to mention is that in spite of trying to keep a daily journal i have only managed to write a weekly one so far. for someone who only works 2 days a week, with various other stuff dotted around, it is amazing that i haven't managed to find time. it is not that i haven't had slots of time but that i need head space to write this sort of thing. one thing that my life seems completely devoid of is head space. because my son is at home all the time at the moment there is never a time when i am alone in the house. if he is not in the room i am in i can hear him - gunshots and police chases on the computer, bb gun in the hallway (we won't let him use it in the garden so i have made him a board to catch the ones that miss rather than the wall getting it), getting tools out to make things. this is the nature of someone with autism and adhd. i wouldn't change him but it can be very much in your face, and we have a very small house.

that in itself is not insurmountable. i could go to an internet cafe, or indeed take my laptop to the beach or somewhere. i think what the issue is that i need to learn to give myself permission to have some head space. when i don't have it i am aware that i get more buzzy and distracted. so lesson 1 is to timetable in an appointment for me to write this journal, and take photos and just be me.

this week has had more than its fair share of stress. i have been waiting for a job to be advertised at work. it is a job i can do, i would be good at and more importantly it has job security and a decent income. to start with it would be full time (which would mean even less me time) but after a period i would aim to go down to 4 days a week. last week i was off work with a dreadful throat infection. this week i came in on wednesday and found via a friendly colleague who knows i want this job that it had been advertised internally, only for a week, and that i had missed the closing date by one day. i would not have found out had my colleague not had dinner with someone who mentioned it. this week we were moving offices so i had no computer and could not have got onto the intranet.

when i found out about this i was speechless. then i was furious. in the past i would have cried about it but it is so vital that i get some sort of stable job that i just lost the plot. my colleague arranged an extension of time for me to get my application in and i wrote it overnight and got it in the next morning. my first thought was that it was a total stitch up and that someone had their eye on the job but my colleague says this is much more likely to be sheer bad luck. she worked in HR for years so i trust what she says, but the whole thing left me very shocked and shaken. thank heavens i am very good at putting job applications together. they have to give me an interview because i am disabled, and they know i am not someone who will roll over if they treat me unfairly so i hope i am back in with a chance. but this destabilised me quite a lot and left me very buzzy.

also there is the business of my son's education and trying to sort out a place that can bring out his many strengths. we have been to visit somewhere that is ideal and so now the battle for funding starts. i am quite good at battling but it is tiring. also we have had a big breakthrough in that we managed to get my son to come to an open day at a local agricultural college. he was very resistant and it was hard going but he stayed for quite a while in what cannot have been an easy environment for him and even said he liked some bits of it. on the way home we drove by the potential school so he had a visual idea of it. as i drove i was aware that i was rigid with stress. i ache from head to foot at the moment, and it may well be stress related.

as well as that, i have a couple of friends who are in a bit of a bad way. i am trying to learn the skill of supporting my friends but not wading in and rescuing them. i need to let people develop their own solutions to problems but to be there for them. i am a compulsive rescuer so this is a new skill to learn. i need to trust that people will ask for help if they need it, which a lot of people won't. i think i hate to see people's distress and not be able to help them. i suppose the distress bounces off my own memories of distress and current feelings of distress and kind of prods them.

what i need to learn is that people's feelings are related to who they are, not who i am. so if someone is feeling rejected, for example, they are feeling it within their own framework of beliefs and feelings. they are not necessarily feeling rejection overlaid with the long history of rejection that i have. so while my feelings when i am rejected nowadays might be somewhere like 13 on the richter scale, other people might be feeling it at say 5. i need to learn to avoid ascribing my feelings to others. i think there is a term for this but i have no idea what it is (note to self - look it up on google).

this thing was something i was very aware of when my son was younger. autistic kids have huge meltdowns when the world gets too loud for them (i use loud to mean all the senses, not just hearing). my son used to cry and scream and exhibit signs of devastating grief that i found completely overwhelming. my husband, who does not have the same baggage as me, used to deal with them so i could go out of earshot when it became too much. it was because i could not put myself in my son's shoes; could not see that his grief was not that of a child whose mother doesn't want them but was entirely different. it is ironic that one of the ways autism manifests itself is an inability to place oneself in someone else's shoes. while empathy is something i am good at in some, less pressured, circumstances, when i am stressed i tend to over-empathise. or more accurately to climb inside someone's pain. rather than holding their hand, i try and scoop out the pain and take it away.

from writing this i can see that there are two facets to this. one is that i can't separate my own history of pain from other peoples; the other is that i compulsively rescue people because of my history. it is not a great combination. if someone exhibits pain i feel compelled to help; yet i then buy into their pain way more than is helpful to either them or me.

i think how i will approach this is not to avoid people who are in pain. that would do me even more harm as i would feel i was rejecting them, which sets off yet more alarm bells in my mind. what i will do is to look at it using the same model we used when i worked in a community law centre. lawyers in private practice take people's problems and sort them out for them. the law centre aimed to empower people by helping them to sort out their problems and at the same time equip them better to deal with the next problem that comes along. so i think i will adopt that approach with people who are in distress. holding their hand and walking alongside them as they work out their own answers. and trying to keep in mind that they are not me, either now or when i was young.

in practical terms i think it helps me to support people online or by e-mail rather than on the phone. i am not great on the phone, due to my hearing and lack of focus, whereas e-mail allows me to read over what i have said and spot any signs that i am over-identifying with someone else's stuff.

so this week's goal, among quite a few others, is to stop and think about my emotional response to other people's pain, to use my skills to support them in their journey rather than picking them up and carrying them. and to book a massage...