the heretic genetic algorithm

I still twitch and tear up at the songs I used to rewrite to honour my wonderful kitty. It still crushes me that she's not here.

We've decided to go and bring her home from the vet tomorrow, with her ridiculous oversized basket that my ex bought for her. I've asked him to take care of that for a bit, and we will work out what to do with her ashes. In the garden, in her favourite spot. But my therapist suggested jewellery or something too, and I like that. I want to keep Ziggy close in some way. She was some epic talisman in my life.

When we were talking about the basket and that last trip, I remembered taking her to the vet back around Easter when things started going downhill, although we didn't know it. She had a bum abcess that needed checking, and my car had broken down so we put her in her crate and carried her. It's only a short walk.

At the time it reminded me of a book I was reading - the Travelling Cat Chronicles, about a man taking his cat places. I won't spoil the plot, but it was poignant. When she started getting really ill, I wondered about putting her in her basket and taking her to see the river at the end of the road. But it never happened.

That time back in April, things seemed ok anyway. And she loved the walk to the vets - peering out of the slats with interest and enthusiasm for all the weird noises and smells of a busy street. She'd probably never seen that, and she loved it so much more than going in the car. She'd yell all the way in the car, trapped inside a box inside a box. I can't blame her. I wish I'd walked her there more - I would have if I'd known.

But then I think I probably did know, a little. In my guts. And I got the best of both worlds in those 4.5 months - appreciation, without too much agony.

I wouldn't change it I don't think. But I do cry bitterly when I remember her stood in her basket watching the cars and sniffing the air as her fur ruffled in the breeze.

I'm currently really profoundly grateful that my kid doesn't start college until a week after the schools go back. This summer was awful for a variety of reasons. Yet this week of grace is perfect warm summer weather and I can at least get back some of what I lost.

Because it's hot, I've turned the aircon on. It's a cheap little water cooled portable unit that I bought over the winter because last summer was just really fucked up hot. Nightmare dystopian hot. This year, not so much. But the air con is on. And whenever I start it up after a break, I chuck half a steriliser tablet in it because I don't want legionnaires disease.

LOL

And I profoundly miss my little cat. I've had two cats, both of which shunned catnip but would go a bit loopy for chlorine-y smells. And the steriliser tablet makes my room smell of swimming pool.

And I miss Ziggy. I miss her casually strolling in pretending it was nothing to do with the faint aroma of chlorine. And sniffing the air delicately and ecstatically to get her kitty hit.

Loss is often the small details.

Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of my first ever blog post. In Livejournal. Just after I turned thirty and just before my dad died.

Boy, that was a crazy couple of decades... :P

I meant to write a cheery Imbolc post right at the beginning of the month, and now the month has ended and still no words. I've actually forgotten what I was going to say. I noted Terminalia, the festival of boundaries and that seemed more wryly apt to celebrate. I want to write more. This has been here for very very nearly 20 years and those two decades have been BIG. And I'm 50 this year, so it seems a good time to start putting things in words again.

February has been rough. I have new jobs now and they're amazing, but I bit off more than I could chew, overestimated my emotional capacity, and anyway it's all been on fire out there. The last week has been frantically catching up on work shit, and that's boring. I hope that's done and I've learned my lesson. I want to be in my garden more, and I have pressing domestic stuff to get through.

I do just want to fold myself in a little this year. I've a few bruising relationship crashes under my belt, and people have drifted away. I don't have the energy to drive social stuff any more, and Facebook's seething anger has just got to me. Again, I've learned from this too.

The news is full of women dying and the media disgusts me. I cried a good deal of the month because a trans teenager a few months older than mine was stabbed and died walking in the park. I cried because she was beautiful. I cried because her poor fucking parents. And I cried because I did not want my daughter's world to be like this, so thoroughly selfish and wicked.

And I had to let her go off on a trip to London basically on her own a few days later. "Had to" in the way you do as a parent. When every atom of your parenting self wants to lock them in a box and keep them safe forever, but they're actually nearly grown up and flying and you have to accept that. And I learned from that, and from a random encounter with a person I only vaguely know from the odd party or club night collecting glasses in a Wetherspoons in Islington. They looked like crap, and I've been way more fucking sober since then because, well just because.

I think really I just know now that I have to be a proper grown up and make it all count a bit more. But seeing the beauty in a world gone particularly bad is going to take some work.

I've finished "Homesick - why I live in a shed" by Catrina Davies. It's really good. My friend recommended it to me and I nearly recommended it right back to them it was so good. It talks through the author's shitty experiences of the housing market and how they tease out what home actually means to them emotionally and psychologically. Which is interesting. I'm trying to work that out for myself.

I actually 100% fully own my bricks and earth and mortar now. That's a thing that happened that I've not fully assimilated. I feel a bit guilty about it, maybe? But I combined luck and hard work and it's all I'll be able to give the kid. But it's a good thing to give. Neither she or I will ever be without at least a pile of rubble in a patch of land that we can call our own and nobody can take from us.

I think that's important to me. My childhood home got wrenched out from under everyone's feet with very little to show for it. I was lucky my dad's family were generous in spirit when my grandad died and I'm not ungrateful, but that's my lot now. But it paid off the final transaction to get my sticky paws on my house deeds and I feel more free to fix it up and plant vegetables and just know my kid is never going to have to scrabble about for shelter.

Fingers crossed, anyway.

I think as I slowly rearrange my physical home, I'm learning to be emotional home to myself. I lost myself, with 10 years of parenting and a couple of years of relationship trauma and pandemic. And I was just raised and trained to not really have much of myself going on anyway. Add an autism diagnosis and the great etch a sketch in my head has been given a thorough shake.

It's ok. I'm grieving the trauma and the loss of bits of my life. But there's no point in that eating up any more precious hours. I've suddenly noticed how precious they are. I guess that's a midlife crisis but compared to the long string of crises in my life, it is not the worst.

So yes - I'm learning to be as familiar with my brain insides as with my domestics. And that's a pain in the arse.

Today was the saga of the leaky boots. I have boots as my everyday footwear - I'm heavy on my shoes as I walk a lot, weigh a fair bit, and have hypermobile draggy limbs. It's taken me this many years to realise that those composite layered sole hiking boots are a waste of time as I just scuff off the bottom layer and then they leak. Mine started leaking a few weeks ago. When the weather changed. And it's taken me this long to just not be able to cope with that any more. I suspect I may even be taking long random naps to avoid dealing with it. That's how rubbish I am at adulting.

I'm shit at wardrobe maintenance. It's girly stuff, which is complicated. It means spending money. On myself. That's another nope. And I have a fair bit of trauma from my last relationship around the way I look and dress.

So today was forcing my brain to acknowledge that a constantly damp left foot makes me miserable and I need to attend to it. And gently coercing myself into getting the army boots I'd abandoned because I just didn't have the energy to sort the laces out. And sorting that. And dealing with my ex's little snarks echoing in my head. And you know what? They're great and my feet are dry and cosy.

And I can just buy another pair when they're not that any more. I'm scared of fixing things or buying new things in case it goes wrong and I can't sort it out and then that's just energy or money resources that I can't afford to lose.

Honestly, the world is really awful right now. But I at least have dry fucking feet, despite the psychodrama of refurbishing my boots.

Two band quotes.

I was diagnosed with autism last year. I discovered autism, it discovered me. Whatever. But fairly regularly people will ask me what difference a diagnosis has made to me.

It gives me the grace to accept who I am.

I can't make any purposeful positive change without that. And I accept that too.

That...idea...that mental holding of something tricky. I'm embracing that. I took my kitty for surgery yesterday (a whole 'nother post) and it was stressful and high on admin. I tried to take the easiest road and do a direct charge to pet insurance, but there was a stinking administrative charge. Which I did not grok until payment and collection time. I was waving my arms randomly, when some bitch walks past behind me and tells me, it is on the paperwork yaknow?

And I felt really inadequate. In the past I would have accepted that yeah, I'm pretty retarded with forms. They just form a swimmy blur every time I look at them. When I did expend energy to pick it out, yes. The admin charge is a sentence in bold font.

In two A4 sheets of packed 10 point font of defensive gibberish. And that's the form, I get it. But it isn't exactly user friendly and to be honest, I think that's a them problem.

I think I have some combination of distracted menopausal mum aspect that means some dickish much younger people assume I'm stupid. I'm not. I just gave up on active engagement with a noisy complicated outside world that drains me. My spoons are my own personal currency that I get to choose to use. And "being autistic" cements that.

One thing I really love about this is how much my daughter has my fucking back. She's 15 and a bit of an arse, but she utterly defends my right to be who I am right now.

An example. We went for burritos recently. I love burritos but the ordering process turns my brain to beige. When it came to pay, I wanted to scan my loyalty card and the till scanner was being awful. The lil male douche behind the till kept mansplaining how to scan a QR code to me. And I think he probably misinterpreted me wrestling with feeling like I wanted to punch him with actual genuine confusion about hwo the scan The Thing.

Suddenly the vibe changed. He came round from the till, looked at the scanner, wiped it clean and scanned my card for me. He didn't apologise, but he seemed bent over. Incidentally, I really pity the women who work for him.

What changed?

I just got this weird sense that some 6 foot strip of brick shithouse was becoming pissed at her mum being patronised and had loomed over my left shoulder to stare him down.

I love that she calls me out on shit, but utterly has my back

Today I write about space. I think I have just nipped a meltdown in the bud - I've not had quite enough processing time for some really important personal stuff. About 80-90% of enough. Parenting and running a house are both demanding tasks, and I'm working on streamlining the latter, but you can't skimp on the former. I had a possibly life changing interview today. And everyone wants a slice of my attention and is slack at getting back to me and closing the loops so those plates are still spinning. That's something that can be pruned too.

And I am still not getting around to all the things I want to do.

So today I've listened to my whizzy buzzy brain and its impending overwhelm and just stepped back. One of the things I identified needing was my space. Space to just be me and self soothe without yammering. It's surprisingly hard - I magnetise people with shitty boundaries. It's been interesting just sitting and holding myself and my reactions when people don't constantly push at my boundaries and demand my attention.

So there are all these things I want to do and don't get around to. Dressmaking, writing, making things. That's a thing. And it's a thing that has been warped a little by people pressuring me to do those things.

And there are a couple of things that give my brain some space to actually simmer down and uncoil and be its best self. Those first things are not going to happen until I get this defragging down to be a good and effective habit. Colouring. And playing computer games. Those two things put a healthy dissociative fence around my brain, let it heal, and recharge my batteries.

Computer games I have pondered for a bit. I've played those for 40 years, and often questioned whether it's a healthy thing. There's a lot of debate about whether it's a healthy thing, and I've read it all.

It isn't a major force in my life. I enjoy gaming, I'm evangelical about gaming, but I don't feel massively sucked towards it when I'm not doing it. I think I just do it to unwind, and nothing seems to suffer from me doing it except my kid occasionally gets cranky that I'm not making her enough snacks.

LOL.

And colouring is just a nice thing to do. It stretches my brain just beyond itself without hideous consequences. And actually, gaming does that. They both act as distress tolerance techniques, which I wish I'd worked out earlier in my life. And I love the exploration in gaming - I can get absorbed in a whole new world.

So yeah. If I can't be entirely on my own (which is a bit unreasonable most of the time) colouring and gaming give me space. They soothe and stretch me, but are secondary to anything better going on.

I am really really enojying the gaming. I get to explore new worlds that I would never ever see in my life. I've finished two new games and I'm redoing an old previously completed game now. There's art and cinematography and stories. And all the things that make me go OOOO.

I use that title line ever such a lot in the two decades I've been blogging. Nearly two decades. All these dates are starting to resonate. Anyway, it's from this:



My relationship with sleep has always been strange. You can blame the ubiquity of media. I can blame my parents making night time an unsafe place. But even before I had either of those things, I'd be watching the stream outside my house roll past at one in the morning before I even got to High School.

It could be a neurodivergent thing. Autism, anxiety, ADHD. They all fuck with your ability to switch off. And I am heavily introverted, so night time is definitely peaceful and quiet. And it's generally the time I can get stuff done. Self care shit. One of the ways I'm taming my perpetual insomnia is getting up and doing whatever scratches the itch. COVID has helped. I'm working at home and making my own schedule, and if it's nap o'clock then so be it.

It's easier now I have my room to myself. I think that just has to be a privilege in relationships now, rather than an expectation. I never really got that needing to glom to each other in your sleep thing. I've been OK with it in long term domestic relationships - with S and D it came and went. Other relationships too. I've learned that having my own duvet makes a massive difference. Simple things.

Sleep deprivation makes me absolutely batshit. That's an established thing, and given I have to parent, work, drive, and run a household...things can get ugly quite quickly. The two most chaotic and hurtful relationships were ones where I was massively sleep deprived. A and G had no real adult responsibility in their life, both really really wanted us to share a bed, and both snored like fucking hippos with no personal responsibility for that. Putting that aside, I can't keep doing things that make people like that happy, although to be fair A got their head around it. AS an interesting aside, both A and G used to lecture me on how awesome they were at Relationship Anarchy.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_anarchy)

Biznatch, I was always doing that.

Anyway, I need my sleep and if you don't like it then we are not going to work. I always sneakily thought that living next to my partner but not actually with them would be my ultimate plan.

And now I snooze to my heart's content. The enemy of sleep seems to be obligation. I crack my window open an inch. All my princess-y pure cotton bedlinen, my multiple texturally different pillows, my two thin lightweight duvets. Why shouldn't I have that? I used to joke that my daughter was the Princess and the Pea in reverse. Seems that we both need it to be just so so to let go and drop into Morpheus' realm.

An autism diagnosis is letting me let go of the things I tried to do for other people. I still have to hold myself accountable. I need to make sure I sleep. But how I do that is nobody else's business now. Except possibly B and Ziggy who are the only two mammals I can successfully share a bed with.

I read a book on sleep fairly recently. My friend said I absolutely shouldn't read it. She's known me for years, we were pregnancy pals, and she is familiar with my battle for the ZZZZs. But being who I am, I read it anyway, and I'm going to make some notes before I return it to the library.

(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep)

It's by-line is unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. COVID recovery is making me sleep like a pro to be fair, albeit on a strange schedule. I remember this when I was pregnant, the ability to just drop into sleepy satisfaction. And even though sleeping 14/24 hours is frustrating, the healing is amazing. I dream of my ex and my mother looking down on me with their chilly smug little faces. But I also dream of people looking at me with interest and desire and love.

Anyway, notes of interest:

- Code cracking and problem solving. Sleeping on it is better advice than you know - sleep defrags your brain and sorts your memories and experiences. I have the same relationship with my dreams that I do with tarot and astrology - they aren't magic, but if you leave your brain to rest it isfar cleverer than you give it credit for. Which is easier said than done. Rest will do it. There are many forms of rest. Don't force it.

- Get the nighttime chills.Oh yeah. I was right on it with the open windows and skimpy duvets. The book recommends 18 degrees C which is way warmer then the Free Miltonia household enjoy, but it's important to me. One of the issues I had with A was their need for everything to be locked up and insulated with huge duvets. They spent a lot of time sleeping rough, and I can understand their need for what they needed, but I can't deal with it. Nights need to be about security for me, but in a different way.

- Electric light. This is just a reality of our world. I've recently seen research that a little media before bed might be a good thing, despite popular folklore. I know my sprog likes to have the lights on and listen to music. My brother used to need this, and it did my head in. I chalked it up to my parents being a complete loose cannon once dark fell and they got drunk and shitty. But I don't think electronics are the definite terrible thing people make out. I like to subdue my lighting, sure. But I also need audio books to shut out the quiet that my brain fills with gibberish. I like whatever Monty Don wrote and recorded about gardens in the past year or so. And Jerusalem by Alan Moore. Long soothing tracts that hold no surprises for me. With a bit of luck I fall asleep before the 45 allocated minutes, but I have also left them gently chattering at me all night when things have been awful.

And that's it. I just need to keep listening to myself and not giving in to other people's needs. By the end of my last relationship I was heading to bed at 1, lying there while my ex looked at HotUKDeals, trying to sleep through their snoring for an hour or so, crashing on the sofa and getting 3 or 4 hours sleep before getting up at 7 to get B into school. Then putting up with my ex's bullshit when I tried to get them up a couple of hours later.

Utter bullshit.

I'm in the post Covid phase of viral exhaustion. More so now than before I wake up not knowing if I'm here in my house, or in my childhood bed. Some configuration of bed and window and sidetable and door. It may even be subconscious, and I have to map my awakened surroundings in my head, check if there are stairs that anchor me in now. It was happening before I was sick - I think that's being transported to another time where drunks fucked my life up. Now I am sick, it's just taking me back to times where I was young and feverish and didn't really understand what was happening.

Ziggy the cat has been there with me these past few weeks. When I was bed bound, she slept next to me the whole four days while I gently held her tail in my palm and dozed in and out of sickness. I don't remember her not being there, although she must have wandered off to fulfil her needs to cat. Now she's back to her own routine, but as I struggle to regain my energy and buggered sleep pattern, she still keeps me company in the weird wee small hours of the night.

I'm dipping back to times when I was exhausted like this. After I gave birth. Back at university when I had suspected Glandular Fever. I saw a couple out in Gloucester on Saturday and they reminded me so sharply of my first love that poignant nostalgia twanged my heart strings. I envied them their youth and beauty, I wondered if I would be in love like that again.

And I remembered back 18 months to where I first started to properly mentally break down. The sheer fucking exhaustion and aching of it all. I spent a lot of time on the bed then, blankly curled up, often cuddling Ziggy for comfort. She was first of all blatantly my ex partner's cat - he pushed hard to get a kitty, and Zig was the one of many I actually fancied myself. I remember envying their bond a bit - she was the centre of his attention, and she adored it. For about 4-6 weeks. It might have been one of the things that triggered my breakdown, looking back. Watching his attention for her fade until she became something that got between him and his first cigarette of the day, while I generally did the feeding and fussing.

I empathised too much with that little cat right then, and it wounded my heart. She actually glued it back together with her love and affection. Like me, sweet and desperate to nuzzle and bond. Most people want to build attachment. Most mammals want to build attachment - after parenting a human child, it was easy to just be there, meeting basic needs and supplying unconditional love.

And I've been up a few hours now and already exhausted, so back to cuddle my furball and slip in and out of dreams.

It's the weekend again. Last weekend I walked across the transporter bridge in Newport. I'm proud of that - I hate heights. I'm proud of my week. I have done many brave things.

I opened up to my therapist about my non standard sexuality and relationship modules, and it felt ok. I can go back to my original plan, and this time I will stick to it. I come home and my cat is thrilled to see me again, and she takes up much less space on my bed. My kid loves me, and we have a pretty much perfect relationship for two autistic women on opposite ends of the hormone journey. We do our thing, we help each other out, we regularly and happily reconnect, we own our shit.

What I'm saying here, I think, is that if I look into my world I see perfect templates for how I want my relationships to be - I just have to act on them. And I am more than capable of that. I can pick through a menu of what everyone needs in our interactions and make that work as well as it can.

I am not incapable. There is the fear of growing old alone, but I won't. And you can't totally defend yourself from that. People who are going to disappear will just do it anyway.