Negotiating care needs

[Content notes: abuse, disability]

I'm autistic and I'm an abuse survivor; I have learned, over and over, that people are a system, and if I can model them well enough I might be okay.

So I learned to model them; I learned to game them; and because I am me, I can do this really well, and really very consciously.

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A quick note on brain stuff

Also worked out last night: part of the reason I find it so very hard to ask for help is that I still - still - think of myself as toxic and unwanted; I work really hard at not vanishing from social groups, not deliberately fading, because for most of my teens that is what I did. I would show up for long enough to help, and then I would try to vanish again before I did any serious harm. (The reasons I believed I would are... long and tedious.)

So I position myself as caretaker and as advisor; I listen well and carefully and I offer opinions and I try very hard indeed not to "impose", even in the slightest, by requesting (or expecting!) reciprocation.

This is, as it turns out, a really bad basis for an equal and mutually-supportive relationship.

[other people's poetry] Wonder

A day
drunk with the nectar of
nowness
weaves its way between
the years
to find itself at the flophouse
of night
to sleep and be seen
no more.

Will I be less
dead because I wrote this
poem or you more because
you read it
long years hence.

-- Maya Angelou