Ok, so previous post was about the experience that I call monitoring. Is it possible to be on one? What about privacy issues? I’m not sure I fully like the idea of that. I mean, if it’s true, it certainly helped me to get home safely in 2017, otherwise I could end up arrested somewhere in Prague, without even a health insurance. That would be a traumatising experience… it was already difficult to recover as it was and the less psychotic I was, the more frightened I was getting. At some point I remember I had a panic attack every evening. It was so tiring. It’s possible I’d end up ending my life. That’s how bad I felt as it was.

But then, what about privacy issues? I don’t understand. Is it allowed to monitor people like that? And, BTW, my psychiatric nurse, this one with strange name, is not at all bothered by my experience. ‘If it becomes distressing – she said – we’ll think about some medication’. So if it’s not distressing I don’t have to be on anything – I take it as an indication that yes, I am on it. Because if I wasn’t she’d take my symptoms extremely seriously.

And why I’m not told I’m on it? To teach me social rules: if you help somebody, you don’t tell them that you help them, do you?

The only person who could come up with this and make it work would be my diagnostician. I did state here already that when I spoke with her I had the impression that she adjusted language into something that I can instinctively understand instead of what other people do which is explaining to me every single time when I misunderstood things.

I didn’t have an idea of Google-ing her directly for some reason. I was Google-ing her indirectly by using phrases like ‘how to talk to an autistic person’. I did think she’d be there somewhere, rather close to the top, but I’ve never seen her name. It was very confusing. Now, from her LinkedIn profile it doesn’t even look to me like she works in autism field directly. Really strange.

I’m thinking, she must have learned all that outside of traditional route. Possibly someone in her family is autistic and she took time to observe them? It reminds me of that guy who I was at the university with. Let’s call him Alex. He seemed interested in me in a strange, non romantic way (he had a girlfriend). He would be coming up to me on breaks to say something just to see what I’d respond with. It seemed to me that, although my perspective was different to his, he was really seeing how I came up with what I had to say, instead of, like other people, thinking that I was strange.

Unfortunately, after a while I started seeing that as annoying and was avoiding him. I made me think like he was researching me. But that experience makes me think now that it takes certain type of neurotypical brain, someone who’s good with both patterns and social understanding, to work out how we, autistics really think. And possibly both Alex and my diagnostician have those types of brains.

It’s really strange.

I feel half asleep today. I was shopping and got just a few things, now have to take a bath and then I guess I’ll be back on the sofa.

I don’t know what I want to do about mum’s funeral. I thought yesterday that I want to have it all organised by funeral director, now I’m thinking, I want to go there and organise it myself. Maybe I’ll feel better about it.