I'm eternally grateful for all my friends here. Truly blessed to know lovely people. And I really do count everyone on the SN board as a friend, for my part, though I'm sure some have despaired of me.
So hard to go through a real aspie catastrophic-thinking patch with almost no "spoons" (see the Christine Miserandino 'Spoon Theory' for an explanation of that - you can google it fairly easily). My brain switches back to to visual imagery and a visual way of encountering the world, and my ability to connect different social things together or handle conflicting ideas and situations is then very bad. I guess I've been through so many emergencies so fast that the panic-switch just ended up permanently switched on. Was just so scared and so sad, and not much good at saying that correctly either. And cross at a world that is forever so very difficult to encounter safely for so many of us. But there isn't a perfect answer to that.
It was great listening to Dean Beadle at a conference recently. He was talking about how he does an 'Aspie Egg Whisk' style of thinking, and it was such a good way to explain it: Take a little bit of egg white. Whisk it like mad, and you get a huge froth. That's what happens. When stressed, one probably smallish problem gets whisked by our brains into the End of The Entire World, then he said we need about ten repetitions of reassurance over time before it'll shut up. Yup. 'Normal' brains can apparently feel reassured by people saying something once. No idea how. How does that work? How do you get it to switch off the panic thing after only one repetition? That's an amazing skill.
Parents see these things all the time with their children, but I think they hope we grow out of it .
Had to cope with a hell of a day yesterday. It was not only the funeral day of my two old friends, but also the big disability conference, so I had more than 60 guests and many national and international speakers turning up to speak. Thank goodness for the brilliant team I have, and for the quiet space in the prayer room at the centre which me and Aspie colleagues were able to retreat to when we needed it. Brought along the z-bed and covers, and big squashy cushion to hug. I think the security guard and centre manager hadn't had a conference organiser like me before . They coped. So good, though - I think it might help make a big difference to the three counties, thanks to the excellence of the speakers. And it ran on time to within two minutes, which they hadn't seen done before. Phew.