I sit here in this weird sabbatical in my Omaha enclave, everyday basking in the wonderfulness of being alone with hardly any responsibilities as I improve my health. The only thing nagging at me is that lots of people I like are reaching out to me, and I’m not so good at reaching back. Which gives me guilt. But in my aloneness, I’ve had time to think and overthink and analyze why the hell I am such a social procrastinator and dreader when I really don’t have reason to be. And I guess someone could name it some pathology like agoraphobia or social anxiety disorder. And that might be accurate. But again, I think—like I do about many such pathologies—this implies there is something inherently WRONG with me. Not saying there isn’t. But to me it feels more like a natural response to what’s wrong out there.
So here is a brief history of how I got here by decade. (Like as if you’d believe I can be brief. Bwahahaha!)
The 1970s
I was a fairly quiet but normal kid. I had school friends, neighborhood friends. Occasionally saw cousins, etc. I was never super extroverted. I never got in trouble at school for talking or being loud or anything. I was just a kid.
One thing that I remember that was significant about the 70s was that in 4th grade, I got these crazy glasses. I had worn glasses since I was 18 months old, but these glasses were very weird and unusual looking. When I got them, I was late for school because I had been to the ophthalmologist that morning. I walked in the room wondering what everyone would say. My teacher, Ms. Hopper, looked at me as I sat down at my desk. She immediately addressed the whole class. ”Lisa got some new glasses that help her see better, which is the most important thing. Everyone needs to be supportive and friendly and tell her how nice they look.”
I kind of wanted to sink under the desk, but for the rest of the day, kids came up to me and said,, “I like your glasses.” And they never teased me about them or anything. I was self aware enough to know they looked weird. But I think people knowing me from before, being used to me and Mrs. Hopper setting the tone immediately stopped any teasing in its tracks.
The 1980s
Which all went to hell when in 6th grade I moved to Omaha and went to a different school. I was teased relentlessly about my glasses, first at my elementary school and then in 7th grade when it started all over again in middle school.
Thus began my practice of becoming invisible. The more invisible I was, the better my fate. Although I had skipped school a few times in 5th grade, this also started my skipping habit and realizing that literallly no one cared if I was at school or not. No one noticed. Not teachers or kids or anyone. Unlike my contemporary, Ferris Bueller, this Ferris did not worry about having to barf up a lung to miss another day. This was a victory for me. Also around this time was the start of my segregation with the other special ed kids for some parts of the day. I was pulled from PE class and put in the resource room. There was a stigma of going on that walk down the hall, but once you were inside the room, it was a relief. I had fun with those kids, although often we had nothing really in common except for having an IEP. We hung out together at lunch and at other times not so much because we liked each other so much (although it wasn’t like we didn’t like each other, but it was more a friendship of survival than really coming together on common interests). We were using each other for strength in numbers, and we all knew it implicitly.
High school was better but largely because I continued to be as invisible as possible. I had the long stigma walk to a different resource room at the end of the hall, where I remember things like this guy in there saying he wanted to marry me but only if I got a job and supported him because he wasn’t going to work for a living. I said, nuh uh, so he upped the offer by promising to cook and clean for me. It was stuff like this. I had no interest in him and he had no interest in me, but we knew we were at the same status in the school hierarchy and we had to accept each other no matter what, because it was not coming so much from outside that room.
There were things that were just perceived by me to be out of the question of participating in. I would not go to something like homecoming or prom or whatever because the stress of that, and the possible visibility of it was just something I didn’t have the energy to deal with. And to be honest, I wasn’t that interested.
In my junior and senior year, I joined more stuff like journalism and “rifle squad” where we twirled rifles with the band. Rifle squad was ridiculous for me to join. I had gotten out of PE because of the risk of retinal detachment if I was hit in the head, but then I joined a group where I was throwing essentially a large, blunt instrument 2 inches from my face. I had basic competence with the rifle, but I caught the rifle in a way that was wrong and I could never correct it. Instead of just having it land in my hands, I reached up and “cheated” the last half turn. I bring rifle squad up because it was an example of how I seemed to purposefully pick the most impractical, underdog group or activity out there.
In rifle squad, we wore cute short skirts, but we were not on the same level as the cheerleaders or the drill team. People made fun of rifle squad, so it had to be right up my alley. We would perform at pep rallies and if anyone would drop their rifle, it made this huge BAM! BANG! BAM! on the gym floor and everyone would hate cheer. Then, if it was you, for the rest of the day you would be mercilessly teased about it. I got demerits from our captain once because I dropped my rifle and laughed. She thought I did it on purpose. I did not, but I could not help laughing at the whole half cheer/half boo response to it all. I had long ago developed a hard shell about being made fun of, and I didn’t care. It was just such a funny reaction. Being in rifle squad was like being in the resource room. There was safety in the group, and even many of the very popular drill team girls, who we shared 6am practices with, were usually nice to us, and sometimes that alliance helped outside practices in the HS hierarchy. But we were not popular outside of that. This was becoming comfortable to me as a place to live. Barely visible Freaks and Geeks or what have you.
Journalism was better and became a safe place, in regards to the physical rooms that journalism was in, I was accepted there and could hang out there safely. But I did not really hang out outside of school with them. I think I was too invisible. They were nice to me but just didn’t think about me that much. Looking back, I probably could have tried harder but never bothered. To me at the time, I had to be very careful to stay in the narrow zone I was given to walk the halls in peace and so that meant staying pretty low-key. But I liked journalism and it certainly made my last two years of high school more tolerable.
The 1990s
The 90s were when I was the most social of all. Granted, it was largely (though not entirely) with blind and disabled folks—which meant it was disregarded by some others in my family, etc. (Why can’t you find a siiiiiiiiighted guuuuuuy to date so he can taaaaake caaaaaare of yooooooooo??? I heard a thousand times.)
I spent my freshman year at Baker University, a private Methodist liberal arts college in Baldwin City, KS. There were only about 1000 students, so less than half the size of my high school. Besides the other blind student who was a year ahead of me so everyone called me her name all the time, I mostly hung out with the girls on my wing in my dorm here, went to a lot of frat and some sorority parties, went to games, activities and what not, and was more or less accepted by people there. I probably have other blind girl to thank for this, actually. She had paved the way. But also, I had grown into my blindness by this point and had started using a cane and thus sort of “outed” myself as blind and proud for the first time. So, unlike high school, I didn’t think there was any great thing wrong with me anymore. I learned how to effectively take the blows, looks, treatment, etc. that happens when you are a non passing blind person with a cane. My thick skin came in handy and I just let all that stuff roll off my back.
Baker was not a good fit for me financially or academically, so I transferred to the only school I could afford, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. This is where my blind friends were and my boyfriend was, and so although I had a lot of friendly acquaintances with roommates and classmates at UNL, I largely hung out in the blind community. When I started establishing my childcare business with disabled kids, I would reach out to organizations like the ARC and met more adults and kids with disabilities. Back then, the nascent disability services office was just starting and so that was another place I was required to hang out to do tests or use the computer. Since we were kind of winging it because there wasn’t well established services, the disabled students who met in that office traded services. So, I might carry books and walk with a person with cerebral palsy and they might read for me. I got rides from a quadriplegic woman and in exchange I cleaned her apartment for her. Stuff like that. We were very much in it together.
One thing people don’t realize is how much disabled people are segregated into sort of being forced to hang out together. From the resource rooms at school to separate housing in dorms to taking tests separately in class to being seated in the gimp section at concerts and events. You are always put with other disabled people so that is who you meet, befriend and get comfortable with. In these years, I started to see how my social life was diverging from the mainstream. I got along with nondisabled people ok, but it’s a different culture and you find yourself sort of code switching. Which you literally have to learn to do to make good in the world. You have to try to keep one foot in the nondisabled world and not completely surrender yourself to the crip world. But it does get exhausting. You have to know how to keep nondisabled people comfortable all the time and understand how they feel, educate them about disability stuff in a nice way, be self deprecating, laugh at their dumb jokes you’ve heard 80 million times and patiently answer their questions. It’s not like you don’t like nondisabled people, and the vast majority mean no harm and are just trying to connect the best way they know how. But it’s like, when you go back to the disabled crowd, it is just like…sigh of relief. My people!
For example, one of the reasons I think I was so social in the 90s was because in college, a lot of people don’t have cars and college campuses are very walkable. So, I was able to come and go as I pleased for the most part, which gives not only myself, but other’s who might have felt the obligation to drive me more freedom to do what we wanted when we wanted. The disability community does not give a shit if I take the bus to meet you somewhere or take the bus home after midnight because I am tired. The nondisabled community acts like this is a fate worse than death which makes it awkward all the time.
When I went to KU for grad school it was more of the same. I was put in the gimp basement with the other disabled people and we hung out. I got involved with the Blind Students Division so befriended more blind folks. One interesting thing that happened was that a professor was really pushing me to be friends with these couple of women in my class (in grad school you have class with like no more than 8 or 10 people and you sit around a conference table with the same 3-4 professors, so it was a small group.) These women were nice enough, but they sort of treated me like a charity project. Again, I gravitated towards the student with CP that typed with her toes and the student with a hearing loss caused by a cleft pallet which still left some disfiguring of her face. There was again the assumption that I should socially “do better” as if I should drop the disabled friends and “marry up” to some nondisabled friends. I think her motivation might have been more inclusion/less segregation. But again, I was put my entire life with disabled people in all the rooms and seating and dorms. Every single day of my life I had to walk into the classroom, grocery store, workplace, etc. as the only disabled person with all eyes on me. You need time off from that. The flipside of that was that all these nondisabled folks were spared exposure to us as well and we became like a novelty to them. It is hard to create genuine friendships under those circumstances, even if everyone has the best of intentions. We all got along ok, it was just never a very deep friendship.
When I moved to Oregon and was looking for work, I started substitute teaching, which brings up another thing that happens socially to disabled people with very visible and stigmatized disabilities. Every time I went to a new school, I was afraid of what would happen when they found out I was blind. What saved me with subbing was their desperation to have an adult body in the room at the very last minute. Subs were assigned via an automated phone system, so no one knew I was blind till I got there. But in other areas, I did not have that leverage. I think every disabled person carries around a low level (and sometimes high level) of anxiety about what kind of social barriers they may run into. It doesn’t happen all the time, but happens just enough to make you always worry about it. When I go to the doctor, will they help me with the paperwork or kick me out? When I go to the parents meeting, will anyone talk to me? Will I be able to participate? Will they bother with the accommodations I asked for? When I go to the skating rink, will they let me skate? Will they call me a faker? When I cross the street, will they stop for me? When I go shopping, will someone help me find my item? When I go to the bar, will anyone bother to tell me where they are sitting and ask me to join them? It goes on and on and every time you leave your house, there are always these things to consider.
I ended up getting a job at OHSU and worked on grant-funded projects that provided research about and some service to adults with disabilities. There were a handful of my colleagues that had disabilities as well. Mostly it was good there, but sometimes I felt like they pulled the disabled people out and hid them away like props depending on whether they thought it politically advantageous or not to have us around.
At my job performance reviews. I got good reviews for my work. But I also got that I was not friendly enough. “You just don’t care,” said my supervisor. I shut myself in my office and didn’t go around and talk to anyone like I should to built rapport. It was not true that I didn’t care. I certainly did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings or be an inconvenience for anyone, but I think this was more of a logistical issue for me.
By this time, I was starting to be a real deafblind person instead of just a blind person. As an accommodation, I had my own office because I was on the phone a lot and my phone was really loud and it was easier for me to hear without background noise. Also around this time, I was starting to have kidney issues. I was in and out of the hospital and was on some medication. I was FREEZING in that office ALL the time. Like wore my coat freezing. Another coworker who was quadriplegic needed it to be cold. So the compromise was that since I had an office, they gave me a small space heater and I shut the door. All I wanted to do was be in that office with the heater on and the door closed. It was not meant as a snub to anyone. Anyone was welcome to come in my office and I talked to them when they did. But generally, it was becoming exhausting to talk to people all day, I was on the phone for my job enough, I was cold and sick, and I was not making a grand social statement. Just trying to get through the day really. But I guess people read into it that I didn’t care and was antisocial. So then I made myself do a twice a day tour of the side of people’s desks. Thank god I had my guide dog, Mara, to socially intercede for me in these sort of contrived interactions. Everyone loved the dog, so face it. That’s probably what they really wanted.
The 2000s.
I had started skating in the late 1990s in Oregon when the #adultsskatetoo movement was just starting. I noticed here that a shared skill or interest can sometimes trump a disability. That was the majority of my social life for many years, adult skaters. None of which were disabled. Well, I did have a friend who worked at the skate rental desk who had Down Syndrome. I needed him to watch my dog as I skated and we had a whole thing where he called me his sister and I called him my brother and Mara, my dog was our little sister and what not.
One of the adult skaters I was friends with said, “wow, you are so comfortable with him, how do you do that?” And I was like, because he is a person and he’s funny, and he takes care of my dog—what? I told him he needed to get over himself and he needed more exposure to disabled people. I asked him if being around me made him more relaxed around other blind people and he said, well, I don’t think of you as blind. You can skate! Here is another thing that happens with nondisabled people. It’s this trying to classify you as anything else than just an equal person along side them. Maybe, like this guy, they would get it in their head that you are not really disabled. I can skate. Blind people can’t skate. Therefore, I must not be blind. I told them that there are other blind skaters who have no vision who skate. I have some vision, but I can’t drive a car, I can’t see at night like at all, I can’t really read print, I am always working and strategizing out on the ice to not run into people and it does limit my progress as a skater. But his version was just to not think of me “like that.” He meant well, and we were friends for many years before losing touch.
The other versions of this are to either put you up on a pedestal (“you’re so amazing that you skate”) or put you down as an object of pity (“I’m so sorry for you, here, let me hold your hand every minute on the ice and hover.”) Both may come from good intentions, but neither put you on a level playing field. The problem there is that you never get past the acquaintance phase of friendships. It gets stuck. People don’t see you as someone they can relate to if you are up on a pedestal or down in a pity pit. But mostly, I had good relationships with the fellow skaters because despite whatever they may have thought about me being a disabled skater, we didn’t talk about it. We talked about skating.
For a while, when I became a parent, this seemed to be the case, too. I was involved with mom groups at Gymboree, or at the UU church or at my kid’s homeschool coop. For a while, momming or homeschooling seemed to be enough of a shared interest to trump the whole disability thing.
Then, the most flippin’ bizarre thing happened. And Nik and I have talked about this, so he knows what I am about to say. I had worked for 6 years, with some success, to build communities for my kids. When Nik came into my life in late 2009, it all collapsed. Like instantly and unequivocally. It was bananas. People who I’d talked to for years stopped talking to me. People who I had volunteered with and for did not want me to volunteer any more. It was sudden and always happened soon after the first time they met Nik. Whatever tolerance they had for me before, as a mostly normal looking, low vision/low hearing person was tipped over the edge to intolerance and ablism when Nik, who is totally blind and very visibly blind with eye abnormalities, came along. Instead of being Lisa, the mom who has trouble seeing and hearing sometimes, we became that blind couple who are really, Really, REALLY fergin’ disabled. So disabled that it’s freak show time.
Which pissed me off. Here I was in all of these supposedly liberal communities that are all about acceptance and tolerance and inclusion and it was all virtue signaling crap. DEI, my ass. . It made me not want to deal with any of those people anymore, although in every group, there were always a few nice people who were not like that, it was annoying and you never quite knew what you were going to get. Even when Nik won some of these people over because he is such an extrovert networker, they still scaled back to the sort of acquaintance/tolerance stage. I had volunteered in childcare for years with no issues, and now I had people coming in to watch me and criticize that I let the kids be too loud, when it was the same as always. We even saw people get up and leave when we sat down at a shared table. We became outcasts, because I married a guy.
A problem that many disabled people have, especially in the mom social economy, is the problem of reciprocation. Before Nik’s appearance apparently marked me as TOO disabled, I had participated in the sort of mom economy where we share childcare or rides or food or birthday party invites or cupcake bringer or what not. I did favors for others, they did favors for me. After Nik, I was effectively kicked out of that economy. (To be fair, I had always had trouble with this issue, but for a while, the mom thing seemed to trump the issue. It may have been a case, like skating, where if I was a mom, it meant I wasn’t blind, because blind people aren’t moms. But then Nik proved my blindness bonafides to a level they couldn’t ignore). Suddenly, even though I still offered to watch kids, bring cupcakes, etc. I was no longer asked to. When people perceive you as not being able to offer anything to the community, they largely stop sharing with you as well. Sure, there are exceptions, but everyone who drives can get the occasional ride to work or to the airport because implicitly, they know they can ask for that favor in return. If you can never drive them to the airport someday, and they don’t even perceive anything else you could do to be worthy enough, you are knocked out of the shared community economy. It doesn’t matter how inspirational they think you are, you are not one of them and you are not included. So, after a while, I just kind of gave up the stress of even trying much in these communities. (I mean, it had been YEARS of trying.) I started not setting foot in my kids’ school unless it was a very special event they were involved in. They seemed to fare better that way.
This is also why “asking for help” is such a bloody minefield for disabled people. First of all, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked for help and been told no, or gotten a reluctant yes but with the caveat that they can’t do it all the time (I had not asked them to do it all the time.) But there is this idea that if someone gets dragged in to helping a needy disabled person, they will set a precedent to be burdened for life. OR they want loads and loads of thanks and appreciation (beyond reasonable appreciation) and it becomes sort of a white knight thing where they are pushing help upon you not because you asked for it, but because of how it makes them look. Or if you ask for help, you will be percieved as being incompetent. For example, if you ask someone to help you look at something on your child’s skin, all the sudden stories will come back to you that you can’t really properly raise your child because you needed someone to look at a thing on your child’s skin…when that was exactly what you were doing to take care of your child. The person saved you an unnecessary trip to the doctor maybe, they did not save your child from you. Or they may help you once with dinner and then go and talk about how they cook dinner for you all the time because you are blind, and never think that you cooked all the other dinners yourself that month. On the other side of that, if you don’t ask for help, you must have a chip on your shoulder. You must be an angry gimp who “has too much pride.” You can’t win this no matter what you do with many people. You learn that people are going to think whatever they want to think, and asking for help when you are disabled is not the same thing as asking for help as a non-disabled person. The whole asking for help thing can be a rather insidious tightrope to walk.
The 2010s
The irony of Nik’s effect on my social life is that he is the most outgoing, extroverted person who literally does not give a shit if you don’t like him because you think his eyes, the way he moves, his weight or whatever makes you uncomfortable. He networks with everyone, all the time without any reservations whatsoever. For me by the 2010s, between a combination of anxiety about the odds of which person is going to exclude, reject or put barriers in front of me and my decreasing means of being able to communicate in the usual nondisabled ways, I started throwing a lot of the social communication responsibility onto Nik.
Nik was making all of my medical calls, school calls, etc. If I couldn’t do it via email or online application or text, I threw it to Nik. But as he got busier with work, it became a problem when I would have to wait 3 days to have him make a doctor’s appointment for me or return the school’s call about a field trip or something. So I know I was going to have to find effective ways to communicate on my own.
At that time, my deafness had increased a lot and I didn’t really have a workable method of making phone calls. Or sometimes, even talk to people in person in loud situations. I looked to the Deafblind community for advice. Say what you will about the evils of social media—which I get—but for some communities like the DB community, social media opened up a whole new world of connection for them. Deafblindness is extremely rare and before social media, it was extremely difficult for any one DB person to talk to any other DB folks. Now there are DB communities of several varieties online, and DB people can directly communicate with each other, which they often couldn’t do before without the use of multiple interpreters.
Deafblind people communicate in a variety of ways depending on their background and skills. Many come from the world of ASL and ProTactile and might not have good written English or read braille. Some, like me, come from the blindness world without a strong background in ASL, but a good background in Braille and written communication. I took my cues from people similar to myself, like Haben Girma, who communicates with a braillle display and a QWERTY keyboard that she hands off to the person she wants to communicate with. That person types, she reads it on her digital braille display, and then she is able to vocalize back a response, as am I.
Since everyone texts now and no one hardly calls anyone, changing up my communication to text based and TTY based for the phone did not seem like it should be that big of deal. Nik and I spent countless hours practicing with different keyboards and braille displays and apps to find out what would work. I made a concerted effort to work to improve my braille reading speed and accuracy. I started taking over some of my communication tasks from Nik. First by doing my own phone calls with TTY. (TTY works via online app. A relay operator talks to the person I am calling and types what their response is to me,which I can then read and respond.) I was a bit excited to try to get back into the world again with my new adaptations.
>>>>record scratch<<<<<
From the time I was a kid with funny glasses, to when I started using a cane, then a guide dog, then a guide dog 2.0, then marriage to a capital B Blind person, then TTYs and Braille, I have noticed the difference in the ways people perceive you as to them, you come off as more and more disabled, even if you can—using accommodations—effectively do the same things you’ve always done. You are essentially the same person, maybe with a couple more accoutrements, but the same person you were yesterday. Yet their whole perception of your ability and worth as a person keeps circling the drain deeper and deeper into the toilet.
The way I was treated when trying to explain to people that I either needed to text or use TTY or hand them a keyboard to communicate was nothing short of appalling. Although my actual physical disability was gradually changing as such a minuscule rate as to barely be noticed, adding one more thing, like just explaining that I need to text, or message via MyChart—things people largely did anyway—took the ablism I faced to a whole new level. One of the reasons I am sitting here in Omaha, with an Omaha transplant team is largely because my first interactions with OHSU during the height of the pandemic when no one was meeting in person and I was communicating via TTY with them. They about lost their shit, and never seemed to fully recover, even though I eventually was able to meet with a couple of them in person and use voice communication.
So, this was another set of anxieties for me. Every time I communicated, it had the possibility of turning out disastrous where doors would be slammed tight instead of opened. In all these situations, it is never everyone. There are always people who are cool and who just adapt quickly, and work with you. But there are always just enough to create that anxiety about every interaction. Is this interaction going to be positive, or workable at least, or a dumpster fire of ablism?
The anxiety causes me to try, somewhat subconsciously as I’ve done a lot in my life, to *Pass* as nondisabled as I can pull off. This then becomes sort of another reason to be anxious. Because trying to see and hear and act like sighted hearing people do is REALLY HARD WORK. And often it doesn’t work so you miss a lot and then have to use your brain to figure out what you are missing and fill the holes and think of a proper response. The responsibility always falls to me to make the other person more comfortable, not the other way around. The deal seems to be that I have to meet people all the way, straining as far as I can, because if I can’t or won’t do that, I will fall into their category of too disabled to deal with.
The 2020s
My ability to communicate in traditional ways is limited by time before my brain gets too exhausted to do it. It’s like, if someone was throwing math problems at you, you could probably sit there and do them in your head effectively at first. But after hours of it, your brain would fatigue and you would just start flaking off and you might get headaches or stimulus overload or something.
As I’m dealing with this brain and auditory/visual stimulation fatigue, I’m also well into stage V kidney disease and on the transplant list by now. This brings in what I will call physical anxiety in social situations. Especially as a person who cannot drive. If you have a serious chronic illness, you become high maintenance. Maybe you need a bathroom, or a source of water at all times, or a chance to lay down and rest, or less noise or light or access to pain meds which may make you dopey or you h ave good days and bad so it is hard to commit to anything. All of these things make going out to socialize kind of scary. When you have to depend on someone for a ride, it becomes more out of control and more anxiety ensues. Again, I’d rather take the god forsaken bus than have to worry if I can go to the bathroom because my ride has gone off somewhere or whatever. Or if I will have to bow out early because I’m just too tired. So these physical aspects became Very Big Deals in the last few years and basically overtook much motivation and energy to try to socialize.
…and finally here we are in Omaha…
At six months post transplant, I’m still trying to figure out what my body is capable of. I am not cured, I was given a bit of a reprieve from running towards death. I seem to have more good days and more energetic days thus far, but I still have bad days. I have been able to improve my hearing aid situation in the last couple of years which now allows me to make short phone calls and hear a bit better. There is also new technology like automatic live captioning, which is far from perfect but can help to the point where I don’t need a relay operator for many calls. I still have communication fatigue, and I still have “holy shit, is this next interaction going to be positive or hit the fan” anxiety.
Nik went back to Portland to be with the kids but also specifically because he knew that I needed to not depend on him so much and see what I can do. (The irony there is most people assume by looking at us that he is the most disabled one who depends on me, That was never true, but it the last few years, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. He has really taken on the role of caregiver, and I’d like that to stop or at least significantly decline.) In the first few weeks without him, I was struggling to do the basic things to just take care of myself and my dog. Cooking, laundry, taking the dog for walks, getting myself to my own appointments without his navigational and communication help was all I could concentrate on. I have gotten much better at it, but it took a while.
Lots of people have reached out to me. People who I like and who I want to connect with. And I have ignored a ton of them. I have sat there and spent days working myself up to replying to a simple text. Then I think, I’ll just do it already. Then…they text back and I have to reply!!! Oh NO!!! The relief was short lived. I know it’s ridiculous. These people who are reaching out to me are not people I need to worry about much or be scared of. They are the old crew who’s been around for years. And then I still have to talk to people I don’t even really want to, like the pharmacy financial office who CAN’T DO ELECTRONIC PAYMENTS LIKE ITS 1989 and can’t fathom that its hard for me to pay by phone because I’m deaf and blind so can’t read the card easily and OMG can’t your caregiver do it for you??? ongoing bullshit ad nauseam. So, then that means that I’ve worked up all my mojo to deal with their asses so someone I actually like got put on hold for another day. Still, that is where I’m at. I guess the grand very obvious conclusion from all this is, DUH! I guess I have developed social anxiety disorder for SOME reason. <shrug>
So, I’m trying. I have a list of people. I’ve not forgotten anyone. And THANK GOD for my online friends who’ve known me for like 20 years and never expect me to show up in person or talk on the phone. Thank you guys! Decades long online friendships are the best, it’s the new normal, right? But to everyone else, it really isn’t you. It’s me. That and my above mentioned 15 paragraphs of shit.
And also? I’m good though, besides this. I love my little solitude in my little apartment more than is probably healthy too. But I will be going Back to Life, Back to Reality soon and taking whatever nerosies want to come along with me.
Writebook 