Quiet

I love the quietness of this, my little blog, which I've had so very long (and, not to mention, having deleted 99% of my posts over the years). I come and I go as I please. Say something, mostly to the universe ... or to a couple of people whom I trust and have known me in the "blogging" sense from back when blogs were relatively new. LONG before Facebook ever arrived. These people know I'm a little (eh, yeah, well very) flaky. I have no expections of them, nor should I. I am happy when they stop in now and then to say 'hey' or whatever. Or just stop by and wave. I'm not a blog friend collector in the same way that I'm not a FB friend collector. I prefer to collect inanimate objects.

FB is a bad place to show your true feelings, or your state of mind (or lack thereof). Too many people who have no business knowing these things can form bad impressions of you (not that they may be entirely warranted ... but I'm just sayin').

I'm a miserably sad person. No, let me correct that. I'm a miserably sad person with occasional flashes of joy, happiness, free-spiritedness. I wonder consistently whether those occasional "flashes" are a sign of manic depression, or bi-polar disorder. My shrinks have all (yes, shrinks in the plural, there have been many) ruled bi-polar out a long time ago. I believe my current diagnosis is something called dysthymia, a chronic type of depression in which a person's moods are regularly low, but not as devastating as major depression. My last shrink, the ONLY shrink I've ever had who made me lay on the proverbial "couch", was a skeptical man. He hated labels and he hated formal diagnoses of things so very complex as ailments of the mind, or of the spirit, or of the soul. He would never put it just those terms, I but I know he would feel the above description of his philosophy toward psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic diagnosis was "about right."

I also have been told by my shrinks that I have a) survivor's guilt; b) post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); and, last but not least, Asperger's Syndrome ... which is on the Autism Spectrum, but it is very high functioning autism. I've done a lot of reading on this lately, and I believe that diagnosis is entirely in keeping with what I have experienced in my life. I have told very few people about this, but they don't understand the concept of the autism "spectrum." When they think of someone who is autistic, they think of someone who is either like Rain Man or suffering from mental retardation. Those are places far further along the spectrum than I have ever been or ever will be.