A friend sent me that image this morning and I teared up as I read it but quickly stifled them.  I've had a complicated relationship to crying.  I was out of control between toddlerhood and age 7 when my Mom taught me how to cry silently.  That link is to a flash fiction piece I wrote in 2007 and is entirely fiction except for the scene between mother and 7 year old daughter but even that is fictionalized. The only autobiographical part is some of the aspects of the method Abigail's mother taught her for self-stifling her bawling.

I believe now that wailing I practiced as a small child was related to the undiagnosed high functioning autism.  Those of us on the spectrum have issues with modulation of mood, voice, and behaviors.

As I encountered that image I intended to give permission to the tears today but I'm just too practiced at self-distraction.  I've been wallowing in a profound discouragement all week that might have been relieved by a brief weeping session.  But the fear of it devolving into something I loose control of....  Well.  So I read.  I watch YouTube.  I play wordle.  I rearrange the virtual shelves in my ebook libraries and fixed meta data.  I crochet.  I eat.

I also started work on this post in the late afternoon and fiddled at it off and on over the evening only getting serious just after midnight.  Hmm.  I wonder if that would work on other days for other posts: start a draft at a random time when I have five minutes to fiddle with it and then come back to it as I can.... Same principle could work on the storyworld goals...   Hmmm.  Must think on this.

Wednesday's post hinted at the source of my distress and mentioned my attempted defenses against it, including seeing it as a wake up call.  But though it helped somewhat to slow the descent into the swamp it wasn't a magic wand to whisk me completely out of it's clutches.  I have to keep reminding myself that it is completely understandable and not frivolous excuses that keeps me from fulfilling my goals. 

The short version: a moderate fall a couple days after signing up for ROW80 followed by a couple weeks of moderate pain and stiffness followed by a sudden spasm in my upper back one of the areas affected by the fall which necessitated an urgent clinic visit after which I spent five days on steroids that took the pain but left behind a mood as floppy as a fish out of water that a week after the last dose is still summersaulting. 

And as if all that was not enough, the day after the last dose of prednisone I woke with a massive infection in my gums and at least two teeth which led to an urgent care visit and an antibiotic prescription that I'm on day 5 of 10.  Both antibiotics and prednisone mess with my mood and sleep.  The infection feels almost exactly like flu without the respiratory symptoms.

So why, why, why am I still feeling like a failure?  I think that feeling is more cultural than personal.  I'm wondering if it is a Western culture issue or specifically American.  Or maybe it is the engine of capitalism.  

• It is the culture of productivity at all costs with no value assigned to health until after the medical bills for fixing a crisis.  
• It is the culture of walk it off when you injure yourself.  
• It is the culture of punch the clock even when running a fever and coughing all over your colleagues and clients.  
• It is the culture of if you can't keep up then drop out of the race.  
• It is the culture of profit over caring for self or others or earth itself.  
• It is the culture of make BIG promises but if you bite off more than you can chew then you can just choke on it while your colleagues and clients laugh you away from the table. 
• It is the culture of competition that creates a million losers for every winner and anyone showing weakness will be labeled a looser.   And most players of the game are so eager to slap that label 'looser' on themselves before anyone else can to prove they know the rules of the game and are willing to abide by them as if that is going to increase their chances of eventually earning the label 'winner' which they are not allowed to bestow upon themselves.

That is the dark place my mind has gone this week.  But looked at another way, I see the potential for a decent essay or more likely for me, a story demonstrating all those points with characters interacting.  Which in a sense is one of the themes of my storyworld.  So maybe the fact that I just saw that potential means that things are not as far gone as it feels right now.

But the health issues are not the only thing going wrong this month.  In the middle of the week on prednisone I was required to submit to an annual housekeeping inspection.  I thought it had gone well and spent last weekend celebrating that being over only to find in the mail on the day I woke with the infected teeth a notification that I had failed the inspection and I had until the 21st to rectify the issues or face eviction.  That is next Monday and we are in the middle of 90-100 degree days.

The inspection failures were:

 The first two are fairly easy to address but the Cooler issue is not.  The cooler has a 4ft cord and the nearest outlet to the window it is mounted on is six feet away.  The only solution is a MAJOR rearrange of my unit.  My caregiver is here in the afternoons in the height of the heat and we'll have to at some point turn off the cooler for as much as an hour to switch windows. 

Then the placement of the cooler is going to be behind the beanbag chair atop the mini-tramp.  See the image near the top of my last Read-a-thon post.   Which means the cooler will be blowing directly on me if I choose to sit there during the hours it needs to be on.  And it will be hard to get to the jug the tube is draining condensation into in order to dump it at least once a day. 

All of this effort for one more month of using the cooler as the HUD rules require them to be winterized by October 1.  And as I learned last year it doesn't matter if there is a heatwave at the end of September that carries over into the early days of October.  Rules are Rules and rules have no heart.

The fever dreams referenced in the title have included dreams of eviction and of my caregiver not showing up or a sub instead, fed by the fact that my caregiver's boss is pissed at her for 'stealing their clients' because I've elected to go with her as she goes independent as I MUST have the continuity and routine.  Especially now in the midst of the crisis I just described. 

As with most on the spectrum, I do not do well with change or chaos.  And before my current caregiver the agency sent me 17 new faces in the first 12 months.  And even once we all agreed this gal was a good fit because she'd had experience with clients on the spectrum, they kept messing with the schedule even mid week without notice, taking hours from me to give to another client, leaving me sitting in high anxiety waiting for the doorbell for an extra hour or conversely having a massive startle reaction to a doorbell ringing an hour early.

I don't like confrontation either and I let the state agency on aging that dispenses the money for my care give the news to the care agency.  I'd hoped avoiding knowing how they felt about it for sure but then my caregiver had an encounter with her boss on the phone that upset her and her being upset upset me. 

Don't believe it when they say we on the spectrum have no empathy.  My caregiver and I have something very like a friendship after 16 months and 'professionalism' discourages that especially with a for profit agency making the rules for both of us.  Maybe I should have ignored the signs of her distress and not asked questions and maybe she should have waved off my questions but that in the context of a caring relationship feels really heartless.  And we are back again to the theme that whenever money or productivity is in the picture the heart gets excised.  Even when the mission of the company is 'caregiving'.

That went down in the last hour of her time with me on Friday so I went into the weekend riding an anxiety bronco.  Maybe if I hadn't already been knocked for a loop by an infection and bad med reactions I could have handled it better.  But the result was two days in which sleep was short and riddled with nightmares. 

And the phenomenon that started a year ago of waking to the sound of a phantom doorbell escalated.  The sound is so real that the first time it happened I got up and opened the front door at 4am before I realized who I was let alone where and when I was.  After that first time I always waited for a second ring for confirmation of 'real' versus dream.  In the beginning it happened once a month or so and then this summer it became at least weekly or twice weekly but this weekend it was more than once a day. 

I'm sure it is related to anxiety.

I just Googled doorbell dreams.  Apparently that is a very common question as there were about 6-8 different versions of the questions as soon as I'd typed 'what does it mean when you dream'.  There were a bunch of links to spiritual meanings or dream interpretation for psychological meanings but the one that rang the most true for me was this one: Hypnogogic Hallucinations

Eeeeek.  There is already window light.  Now I will for sure have little more than a nap before needing to be awake to prepare for my caregiver's arrival.

 ROW80 Round 3 Goals:

• Morning pages daily.  Average 40 minutes (ala Julia Cameron The Artist Way and Writing For Life) YES Started May 20.  Probably would not have jumped into NaNo and ROW80 without having had a month of morning pages behind me. Must must must watch my posture.  No hunching over.  No leaning on elbows. But the very fact that I've hung on to this YES throughout the crisis' is PROOF that I am committed to the writing and still belong in ROW80
• Storydreaming with notebook for noting ideas for characters or scenes. (ala Robert Owen Butler From Where You Dream)  30 minutes per day NO for over two weeks.  (The notebook is the key to this goal as without it the storydreams go to the same place night dreams go an hour after waking.)
• Working on the Fruits of the Spirit (aka FOS) Storyworld Bible at least 30 minutes per day at least 5 days per week.  I'm sure this will expand as I get involved but I need to set a minimum for that jumpstart. NO for over two weeks  (still hoping to make this and storydreaming  my ROW80 main project for the remainder of this round as I need a substantial start on it in time to use it for Preptober and NaNo next Round.)  Two weeks ago the reason was days of pain.  Last week the reason was pain and side-effects of steroid treatment for pain.  This week it's a tooth infection going on for a week now.
• Weekly Artist Date (ala Julia Cameron)  This is about doing something to recharge your creative battery.  I'll go into more detail in one of the check-ins. NOPE  
• A minimum of 5 minutes of physical activity daily.  Either a walk outside with my caregiver or a session on my mini-tramp, or pacing the floor between front and back door. YES (may need to look at upping the expectation soon.  this is getting too easy.)  Solid yes in spite of tooth infection and feeling like I have the flu.  Definitely need to up this eventually.  But right now I need at least one easy YES to keep me in this game.
• I want to reengage with my blog so: Two blog posts per week besides the two check-ins. One about encountering other people's stories via print, video or audio which can include formal reviews.  The other about a current fiber art WIP or about one of my personal challenges: widowhood, independent living with visual impairment and autism and issues related to health and aging among them.  NOPE  (I've continued to choose reading over blogging.  I've been finishing 2 to 3 books a week so there is plenty of fodder for reviews. I think the main hurdle is my personal issue with transitions that is part of my high functioning autism.  (this week the main reason for NO is the tooth infection with pain and flu-like symptoms including extreme fatigue.