Life update (05/02/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
This morning I woke up rattled from a nightmare. I suppose most people’s nightmares involve being physically attacked or pursued, but in my case, my worst nightmares are about ceasing to understand. As far as I remember, most of last night’s dream was like that, but the part I remember the most involved a meeting with my boss and two other coworkers. I wasn’t able to follow their conversation, nor couldn’t understand my boss’ icy attitude toward me. Then he asked me something about a suitcase (that may have been an expression, but the details have slipped through my fingers). I sat there trying to comprehend what he was asking, while my coworkers and my boss looked at me with a mix of disappointment and irritation. I asked, “What does that mean?” My boss looked pissed at my stupidity or ineptitude. Then he asked me if I had done the “context packet,” or something similar. I said that I had no clue what he was talking about. He became irate toward me. When I tried to defend myself, without getting particularly agitated, I was accused of being unable to control myself.
As usual, a mere recounting of a dream doesn’t properly transmit the experience, that of sitting there in that dream office trying my best to understand what was being demanded of me, and yet failing to do so. That’s not far from my every day experience living in the world as an autistic man. In fact, most meetings serve as reminders that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s, as most of the exchanges feel like non-sequiturs to me. I’m usually waiting for the part when someone specifies what needs to be done.
It doesn’t help that I have experienced such moments of my brain failing to comprehend the world, mainly through my experience with migraines. I’m still not convinced that my last one wasn’t a mini-stroke. Back in April of last year, my then boss put me in charge of organizing the replacement of about nine hundred printers throughout the hospital complex where I work. It was a fucking nightmare. Near the end of it, during a day in which I was also hit in the balls by the careless Gen Z worker I had to deal with at the time (he told me a couple of times how eager he was to get back home and play some more Fortnite), I suffered a hemiplegic migraine: suddenly, I started having trouble understanding what I was looking at. Then I smelled something like burnt dust. The right half of my face, and then my right arm to my fingertips, went numb. I ended up in the ER. Three weeks or so later I had an MRI done, but they discarded brain damage. However, I’ve read online that some strokes don’t show up on an MRI. I’ve experienced trouble writing coherently: I sometimes skip letters or mix them up, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t happening beforehand. Maybe it’s just part of the general decay. In any case, one of my biggest fears is suffering a stroke that renders me incapable.
I turned forty about a week ago, and that made me think back to my experience with people over the decades. Growing as a human for me has meant becoming increasingly aware of how much my brain lacks when it comes to social processing. I see myself back as a child, hunched over and drawing because I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, and couldn’t even keep a conversation going for a minute without feeling lost. Of course, when I became a teenager, the problems grew tenfold. My intimate relationships always ended up hurting others as well as me. And I lack the sense of connection with human beings that is generally referred to as “empathy,” so it would be unfair for me to try to get close to others, which in the past I’ve done mostly for curiosity or for writing-related purposes. I do fantasize about intimacy, and I don’t mean just sex, but I guess I’ll have to wait for reincarnation, or incarnated AIs.
Not much else to say beyond these semi-random thoughts. I’ve been busy programming my platform for text-based immersive sims, which is a challenge I’m eager to tackle every day. Whenever I go outside, it’s almost exclusively to delve into a wooded area and play my beloved guitar. If you’re into playing string instruments, you know how much your calloused fingers yearn to return to those strings, to immerse yourself in the emotions captured in the songs, each a unique spell. Playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” for example, puts me in a trance that snatches me away from this lackluster world into a better place full of meaning.
The wooded area I head to most times is almost unknown, located by the side of an incline road heading into the hilly depths of the province; in the Basque Country, the moment you start heading uphill, it’s like going back in time, and you’re bound to come across very few people, if any at all. The last four or five times I went to play at my usual spot, I only saw one person, and he freaked out when he suddenly noticed a guy sitting there in silence with a guitar (I was about to start playing a song).
Anyway, only six days of work to go, and then I’ll enjoy two weeks of vacation. I hope that along the way, I manage to snatch my one-track mind back to writing; the longer I stay away from it, the more unhinged I feel.
This morning I woke up rattled from a nightmare. I suppose most people’s nightmares involve being physically attacked or pursued, but in my case, my worst nightmares are about ceasing to understand. As far as I remember, most of last night’s dream was like that, but the part I remember the most involved a meeting with my boss and two other coworkers. I wasn’t able to follow their conversation, nor couldn’t understand my boss’ icy attitude toward me. Then he asked me something about a suitcase (that may have been an expression, but the details have slipped through my fingers). I sat there trying to comprehend what he was asking, while my coworkers and my boss looked at me with a mix of disappointment and irritation. I asked, “What does that mean?” My boss looked pissed at my stupidity or ineptitude. Then he asked me if I had done the “context packet,” or something similar. I said that I had no clue what he was talking about. He became irate toward me. When I tried to defend myself, without getting particularly agitated, I was accused of being unable to control myself.
As usual, a mere recounting of a dream doesn’t properly transmit the experience, that of sitting there in that dream office trying my best to understand what was being demanded of me, and yet failing to do so. That’s not far from my every day experience living in the world as an autistic man. In fact, most meetings serve as reminders that my brain doesn’t work like other people’s, as most of the exchanges feel like non-sequiturs to me. I’m usually waiting for the part when someone specifies what needs to be done.
It doesn’t help that I have experienced such moments of my brain failing to comprehend the world, mainly through my experience with migraines. I’m still not convinced that my last one wasn’t a mini-stroke. Back in April of last year, my then boss put me in charge of organizing the replacement of about nine hundred printers throughout the hospital complex where I work. It was a fucking nightmare. Near the end of it, during a day in which I was also hit in the balls by the careless Gen Z worker I had to deal with at the time (he told me a couple of times how eager he was to get back home and play some more Fortnite), I suffered a hemiplegic migraine: suddenly, I started having trouble understanding what I was looking at. Then I smelled something like burnt dust. The right half of my face, and then my right arm to my fingertips, went numb. I ended up in the ER. Three weeks or so later I had an MRI done, but they discarded brain damage. However, I’ve read online that some strokes don’t show up on an MRI. I’ve experienced trouble writing coherently: I sometimes skip letters or mix them up, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t happening beforehand. Maybe it’s just part of the general decay. In any case, one of my biggest fears is suffering a stroke that renders me incapable.
I turned forty about a week ago, and that made me think back to my experience with people over the decades. Growing as a human for me has meant becoming increasingly aware of how much my brain lacks when it comes to social processing. I see myself back as a child, hunched over and drawing because I couldn’t relate to anyone around me, and couldn’t even keep a conversation going for a minute without feeling lost. Of course, when I became a teenager, the problems grew tenfold. My intimate relationships always ended up hurting others as well as me. And I lack the sense of connection with human beings that is generally referred to as “empathy,” so it would be unfair for me to try to get close to others, which in the past I’ve done mostly for curiosity or for writing-related purposes. I do fantasize about intimacy, and I don’t mean just sex, but I guess I’ll have to wait for reincarnation, or incarnated AIs.
Not much else to say beyond these semi-random thoughts. I’ve been busy programming my platform for text-based immersive sims, which is a challenge I’m eager to tackle every day. Whenever I go outside, it’s almost exclusively to delve into a wooded area and play my beloved guitar. If you’re into playing string instruments, you know how much your calloused fingers yearn to return to those strings, to immerse yourself in the emotions captured in the songs, each a unique spell. Playing through Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher,” for example, puts me in a trance that snatches me away from this lackluster world into a better place full of meaning.
The wooded area I head to most times is almost unknown, located by the side of an incline road heading into the hilly depths of the province; in the Basque Country, the moment you start heading uphill, it’s like going back in time, and you’re bound to come across very few people, if any at all. The last four or five times I went to play at my usual spot, I only saw one person, and he freaked out when he suddenly noticed a guy sitting there in silence with a guitar (I was about to start playing a song).
Anyway, only six days of work to go, and then I’ll enjoy two weeks of vacation. I hope that along the way, I manage to snatch my one-track mind back to writing; the longer I stay away from it, the more unhinged I feel.
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