My head is infinitely spilling over with ideas and things to get round to. Amazing stories that i forget, jobs I would like to do, things I would like to try, ideas I want to explore and they vanish quietly as I carry on with my life.
This life that I slowly try to keep a float, where the work I'm paid to do is a drop in the ocean to what we actually need. Where my peers are telling me about their academic and professional projects that do seem to pay them to have the lives they want. They get to travel and have choices. Here's me cleaning houses. I actually quite like it, I can switch off just enough, it's the simple, repetitive task that lets my brain go into free flow. With the radio on in the back ground, stimulating my thoughts and teaching me new things.
I have great ideas while I'm cleaning, sometimes practical ideas, sometimes really good plot ideas for films or stories, sometimes I work out really great ways to fix the worlds problems, if only that really mattered and I was in a position where I really could help.
Toby's mental health is a constant worry and burden, he shouts his head off about needing peace, he bangs doors because we clattered something. Everything he does is a laudably violent retaliation for the audio sensitivity he feels. It's exhausting and relentless. I hear myself saying, well he does do stuff like take the kids sledging or step in at the weekend when I had flu, but there's bound to be a fall out of spasms and shouting that follows and I am very selective about when I choose to give myself that time to be sick. I have to because, I know if I don't i will be no use to anyone, and when I do have a break, knowing that it will make Toby suffer his illness worse for that short time, it's so that I can carry on and pick up again. I'm cunning and ruthless short, but it's so that we can keep going long term.
My whole life I have day dreamed wonderful ideas and created special interests to distract me, sometimes they coincide with work, or actual stuff to do, sometimes it's accompanied by me reading books or watching stuff about it. They vanish as quickly as they appear, and I'm left with the residual broad general knowledge which is useful and makes me a very rounded person.
But I have no expertise, I want one, I need one, I just want to focus for long enough so that I can do something useful. I catch myself, I find something, I become fanatical, then I can feel it loosing it's magic, I complain internally and externally, then to my relief, I release it. Usually to allow more space for an emerging priority, this priority might not be self generated, but it's generated by utility or love, urges, necessity, survival, aspirations. These things are so overwhelmingly powerful, they take me over and yet they are ultimately self generated by me, they are powerful, I move mountains for myself, for others, I am powerful, energetic, creative and clever, tenacious and resourceful. Then there's something new, first I need to recover, to flop, to collapse, to sleep, to sloth, maybe a day, maybe a week, my back goes, I lie down a lot, it makes my back worse, then I rest, I slowly get more active again, recover, the energy returns and I am back for the next project. Except they are not projects, they are hugely inefficient and I am wasting all this energy being very useful but not really. I can justify this as motherhood, my kids get good parenting, better than i see some of my peers doing.
But then I see others doing so much better. Money can't buy so much of what parenting involves, but it damn well helps! there are lots of things they are not getting because we can't afford it. There are lots of things they are not getting because I don't have the bandwidth, between my own autism and Toby's I can't fit it in. We schedule, we plan, we create strategies, but we are still somehow not getting it right.
Some of these I can justify, excuse, explain, some of those explanations are justified others explain alright, but I can't justify and I don't excuse. I want to improve and each time I see something, I resolve to move it in the right direction. I can't see everything, I can't be everything. I wish i could be paid to do what I'm good at so I could pay someone else to do what i'm not good at.
I desperately want to create something useful, fulfil a purpose and get paid enough to be comfortable to do it. I have denied my passions and special interests as too niche or too pointless, I have diluted myself and hidden myself under a facade of responsibility and respectability, I don't know who or what I am any more.
I change my mind so many times as to what I could do with my talents, but I don't have the time or energy to practice my talents, I don't have the executive functioning to remember to practice them more's the point. I want to break these patterns of aimless idle dreaming, dreams are great, but how can I make at least some of it reality, I don't need much of it, I just want something to become real.
Reality shouldn't just be drudgery and obligations, or just the empty pleasure of a telly show, a trip to the pub, a board game or a day that the spa. They are never going to go away, and i don't want them to, but that world, where people study for stuff, they make stuff, the create possibilities that become useful stuff. People go great, nice stuff you are doing, or even what do I do with this stuff? But they have produced something, like it or not.
I want to produce more than just waste.
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