I still have a blogroll. It just doesn’t show It will later today. I don’t know whether I’m going to put my blog on hiatus until I’m more settled or not. I wanted my blog to glide along effortlessly until I was ready to return to real blogging. However….

I want to scream. All week it’s been too hot to go to the beach during the day. Not that I go all that much anyway and I live less than thee blocks from it. There are always errands; always things keeping me from it. But I go in the evening and walk miles. Last night I looked at the beautiful light falling over the ocean. Duh. Lightening–and not heat lightening.

Today I had to do something for the lawyer. Not my lawyer. The buyer’s lawyer. This might be a buyer’s market but I resented that. It was something stupid–I had to pay something that really wasn’t expensive. But the damn principle. I guess I hate it when people nickel and dime me as I’m so the opposite.

I feel like screaming. The walk made me sweat but didn’t do jack shit for my mood. I walked back with groceries, and groceries, a mile and a half at least and 90 degrees feels like 110 don’t go well together.

I hope to care about something other than this someday. But I thought I was through with renovating that apartment. I have to take the wall unit down–it’s built in–redo the wall and paint the living room. Well no, I’m not going to do it personally. I have a best friend who used to be a girl contractor. Though she volunteered and offered her daughter and all our friends I feel weird. Very weird.

I have to face up to demons, my own personal ones, I have been avoiding for a few years. I have to pack, arrange for the move, and do everything in one month. For so many months life dragged on but i was tied to my computer and cell. Glad I didn’t get a Blackberry or Apple Phone–would have died in the great cell in the sea incident.

I was so tired of waiting and now I don’t know how to describe how I feel other than crazed.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

There is nothing you cannot achieve if you want it enough, and if you keep telling yourself that fact you will be surprised at how quickly your dreams start coming true. Just make sure that what you think you want is what you truly desire. Don’t lie to yourself.

Usually I do feel like this. Today however my apartment is taking too long to go into contract and everything feels out of my control. I will probably feel differently tomorrow or maybe even this afternoon, but I so need to feel control over my life.

Being in control has always been the most important thing to me. I have been trying to learn to live without so much control, and thought that I was succeeding. But waiting slowly for each step with my apartment and then feeling guilty and as if I can’t write about it because at least I can sell my apartment. Why should I feel so guilty about something I have worked so hard for? The contract should have happened already and each hour that it doesn’t makes me think I will have nothing to feel guilty about.

It’s not as if selling my apartment is my end goal, though at times it feels it. I want to sell my writing. I know we’re supposed to be coy about that and if we get a book contract say that was the last thing on our minds, until the first comments come telling us how we didn’t work hard enough or some such thing, and then we’re supposed to say “What do you mean? I had a plan. I read every damn writer. I mimicked their styles. I studied proposals. I did this….”

I’m an insatiable reader. However I’m truly incapable of the master plan. The only way I can get a book contract is by writing a book. I have been.

My blog will be four years old this month. I will probably put in a lot of picture posts once I stop getting an error message when I try to. My article explained my problems. They’re not excuses but it’s hard to have my problems and feel that I’m not excusing myself from things that are so easy for most people.

I hate feeling the way I do. Vulnerable. Sad. Scared. Lately I have been imagining what my life would have been like if I didn’t have NLD and I have to deal with that loss also. The loss of self that could have been, and really should have been. I do feel robbed as I’m so close to “normal” and can truly visualize my more “perfect” self. I try not to do this but I have a feeling that it’s part of the process of reclaiming me.

And I do like me very much. I’m a great friend, sister, relative. I’m fun. It takes very little to get me laughing. I want to be laughing a lot more and hopefully will be shortly. I know I will be as I will be in New York for most of September, friends will be here later in the month, family will be here when I come back.

And hopefully I will get to buy a house. My bff Lucia said that’s when I’m going to turn into a true Puerto Rican as she’ll come down (she was a girl contractor) her sister C will be here, C’s husband W who was one of the original VP’s for Home Depot and a supporting cast–everybody has to inspect everything.

I was going to write a post about how my three best friends and I decided to share our homes when we get older. We will have two Manhattan apartments, a house in North Myrtle, a house on a Long Island Sound town and a house in Sag Harbor.

This way we can remain in control and not be dependent upon the one child among the four of us, or hopefully anybody else. And we will be laughing. A lot.

I updated my other blog. I’m doing all apartment stories, past and present, in it.

Somebody close to me believes I have no patience and expect people to do things when I snap my fingers. Most other people, close to me, think I’m a total jerk for having so much patience.

I should be submitting. I’m not for many reasons including paralysis, and fear, not of being rejected but of life itself. It seems as if it’s an endless to do list that I never come close to completing. The new sub contractor is supposed to be here at noon. “Do you have a point list?” my best friend asked. “Uh, if a point list is what’s to be done than I have it.” Read more…

Read my new blog. It’s funny and nothing like this. Ask for the URL. I just got a dotcom. Knowing me I will figure it out by 09.
•••••••••••••••••••••••
I don’t really care about offending other people. I do care that my life has been made unnecessarily difficult as I’m held to the same or higher standards than most people. Higher as my intelligence has always shined through. Yet just changing a server from one to another is a major technical issue for me.
Life’s not fair and nothing will ever change that. The blogosphere’s a compassionate place. I have seen that often. My problems are more spatially oriented than anything else. They led to high anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias. I have never been eligible for any services or disability.
My parents would have sued even then had I told them I was kicked out of Driver’s Ed for coming to school stoned. I never did and was too ashamed to tell them for twenty years.
I shouldn’t have had to live much of life in shame for things that weren’t my fault but were my problems. Now I’m coming to that final third of life. Though I have saved more than most people I have every reason to fear old age. I refuse to be a person society forgets or casts off with a “her, she’s different. Doesn’t count.” Nobody has said that iat least so I can hear in many decades. But I heard that too often when I was young.
I don’t like to post on this subject for two reason. It makes me depressed, and I guess I get depressed as the reaction is you’re not an autistic bi-polar transsexual with amputated legs so why are you complaining? I mean nothing against anybody with any or all of those conditions. Nor should I have to say that, but the blogosphere like popular culture reacts to sexy conditions. Preparing Brittney Spear’s obit is sexy–forget what paper or magazine is doing that. We’re such a frigging sick society.
Now that I’m in recovery mode, from the flu, I guess I’m angry. There are so many books about disabilities. So many blogs about problems. But the one I have NLD–non verbal learning disorders gets no publicity. There aren’t many blogs about. My new blog has nothing to do with it.

I don’t want this blog to be about it.

Yet it would mean so much to me if people began to discuss it. Honestly it hurts to go around the blogosphere and see every problem but this one discussed.

I know that people don’t like me to write about this. But few people are. Sometimes I have to. I do get many hits on my posts about it and sometimes even get wonderful emails. Read more…

We took down the post we wrote on Barack Obama as we don’t want to add fuel to…in any way. We hope that people have the sense to realize that pride in ones racial or ethnic background is a good thing as long as it isn’t used the way Hitler or white supremacists used it. We know that any group Obama is part of would use pride for the good.

That directly leads to how we cut our blogging teeth. We were innocent in the ways of blogging back in 04 and part of 05. We didn’t realize that the radical right wanted to rule the blogosphere and found ourselves in too many fights with them

When we were asked to defend our moral relativist stance we could only say that our parents teachings, our education, our experiences, and most of all something inside ourselves knew right from wrong. Now our favorite and most hated newspaper The New York Times has a cover magazine story on moral instincts. I said “favorite” and “most hated” as it is both, and this article would agree with me.

I have never seen life in black and white but many shades of gray. This article shows why. I say, jokingly some of the time, that I have a built in guilt meter–again just read this article.

Morality is much more complicated than biblical teachings. Our brains are hard wired, usually, to do the right thing. Now that much is being learned about how the brain operates we’re learning about how morality takes place in it, and our morality is fashioned by our brains, our experiences, the communities we’re part of.

The article is much more complicated than that and very worth reading. But yes I was right all along. Our inbred guilt meter–we’re half Russian Jewish/half Irish Catholic, and were raised in our family of choice, a wonderful, funny, smart and oh so anxious family. Our guilt stood no chance. We have been learning to feel less guilty and less anxious as we want to ive a long and healthy life. We know that anxiety played a role in both our parents deaths/ They covered in public so well, nobody but me really knew the extent of their anxiety. Our sister was too learn more about our mother in later years but we were the older daughter.

We knew the first question was a trick one as we have long not thought Mother Teresa to be the saint people thought she was. She healed people but did nothing to better their life conditions.

We here at Courting are unapologetic about the people we have angered. We do wish we had spent less time trying to be rational when we were dealing with irrational people and just said what we think.

For a whole other side of me read my new blog. If you want the url please ask. As this blog is very new and we haven’t been pimping it much, we’re amazed by the number of hits it’s been getting. It’s about a single subject and can be funny. It’s fun to write and is very cathartic. It’s not political or issued based. We might actually include a link to the URL in a few weeks.

It got an incredible comment from the matriarch of a royal blogging family. TLP or Tan Lucy Pez We’re not usually pithy or clever enough for her. It’s OK. We have dreamed of this day

Reason number nine for not voting for Hillary: She speaks out of both sides of her mouth. She claimed much experience as practically being a member of a cabinet during Bill’s presidency. Now she says the opposite.

We speak in the royal we in this post as today we feel like royalty. The things we intuitively thought about morality arre being given a true scientific basis.Sometimes we slip into the first person. What can we say? We’re human.

We probably won’t be leaving for South Carolina until 2/6 so we can vote on 2/5. We will be a legal resident of New York until the apartment sale closes and that might be sometime in 2010. We say sort of jokingly and hope we’re not jinxing ourselves.

Here’s a page to my novel being written online

When I write about this disability I represent not just me but other people who have it. We have no spokesperson. The other day The New York Times wrote about disorganized boys as most people who are, are boys. Great I would be in school and have the same problems I had 40 years ago. Mostly it’s boys who are disorganized with bad handwriting, messy notebooks etc. Therefore I’m lazy and don’t try hard enough. Or the problem would be diagnosed but there would be no real help for me. There isn’t much help available for people with non verbal learning disorder. No role models of people who have made it. I have made it–with a lot of backsliding. Read more…

Chapter fourteen of Colliding Worlds is on the sidebar and in a page. Chapter fifteen will be up on Wednesday with or without the words.

It’s been a long time since we have had a talk with ourselves. We have been eating too many forbidden foods like pasta made from regular flour. We have been encamped at Lucia’s.

Yes and we were the perfect guest. When we asked Lucia if we snored as we had a headache and felt sinusy she said:
No, of course not. You farted all night.

No we snored. But just a bit. We made Lucia snore like us.

Lucia lives just off Broadway and we kind of live on Riverside, but we slept much better than we do here as it’s quieter. Hard to believe but Lucia can turn her heat off so the windows don’t have to be opened and closed all night. We get steam pipe bursts. And we live across from a school, a little private school where all the kids are well behaved unlike the largest middle school in the city we lived across from in Riverdale. We have to make sure that we don’t live near a school.

Uh, you’re saying something negative about your street and you never know who is going to read this. You don’t want to say anything bad about your apartment.

It’s yours also. And we’ve been saying bad things for over three years. But we have the nicest neighbors who we really should have taken the time to know before.

It takes from five to ten years to get to know the neighbors in Manhattan unless you have kids or a dog. We decided not to have either just to be friendly with people

But we’re just getting to know our neighbor who is a doctor and works with people with HIV. Our kind of person. And she’s so friendly, and we like each other so much. She gets our humor. Actually most people do in person, we just put it on hiatus. We went through a long spell of working with old people who complained and would compare them to our mommy. She never complained to the general public, doctors, nurses etc, just me and Elka. The etc. were usually social workers. OK she would tell social workers that her daughter was one and much more knowledgeable and brilliant. Really endeared them to us. But we miss our mommy and for some reason our father. Not that we didn’t love him much. Father’s died. Mommy’s lived.

We, all of us, want them to tell us we’re doing the right thing. Though mommy refused to believe that Greenpoint was cool. She grew up there and it was the last place she wanted to believe people really wanted to live in. Our father grew up in East Harlem and always thought it was cool. Back in his day. Please never let me grow into a person who can’t think a neighborhood can go up or down.

This isn’t the post to get all teary and miss dead parents in.
Why not? We have always wrote multi tasked posts.
The new generation of bloggers don’t get them
So?
We just said we didn’t want to get set in our ways.
But we don’t want to please. That’s not why we write.
Maybe you. I’m a recovering link whore.
You’ve been many kind of whores. Link whore was the tamest.
No it wasn’t. Oh let’s stop this. It’s almost Christmas Eve day where we get to listen to Christmas music all day and night.
We used to never say such things publicly. Back to the post….

Our apartment’s becoming beautiful again. But the floor guys forgot to put the cable back on–and did something so that the microwave and stove can’t be used though the circuit breaker looks fine.

We can live with disorder in the house now that we realized our mind is like jumbled knotted frayed wires. And we don’t know how to unjumble, unknot, unfray. That’s why we hire people. That’s why we’re leaving our really good life. So we’ll always have money to hire people.

Though our first day back in North Myrtle the TV and stereo didn’t work. First thing we checked as we have our priorities. Love to watch Horry County TV stations. Love living in a place called Horry County. It’s got that great Ho in the name. It wasn’t the circuit breakers, so we ran out and ran into Jerry in his pick up truck with “licensed” this that and everything. We offered to pay him. He wouldn’t take our money.

We don’t drive for the sake of humanity and refused to take cabs most places as we like to walk even in 90+ degrees. Especially in very hot weather. But we would have to take cabs sometimes, when we were dodging Jerry. Each time they would lower their prices. Not that we don’t like Jerry, we just didn’t want to be dependent on him or….

We think this is going to be a good move but we’re so obsessed and yesterday in the disorder thought we lost our passport and checkbook. We were crazed basically because we’ve been eating white food and things with sugar. Too much socialization. People keep telling us we’re going to be bored as we’re such social animals. OK, animal. We like solitude also and really miss it. We need solitude to refuel and rejuvenate. We’re not ashamed of that.

We feel strange. We wish we had allowed ourselves to be really happy before. Happiness is a choice. We figured that out last year or the year before and now we’re reading a book What Happy People Know that’s the first self help book we have ever loved. Though we have to say we have come to most of our thoughts on our own.

Ho Ho Ho–know how cheap that is but couldn’t resist. And a Merry Christmas to all.

I have no idea where these pingbacks are coming from–they all seem to really be one blog, and a new form of comment spam. Some even have the same IP address. This is a post that is hard for me to post. I was thinking of turning comments and pings off as I often do, but was curious to see the types of comments I might get. I closed pings but not comments.

Once again I put a post into draft as it was poorly written and I don’t feel like redoing it. I can’t write a post I like.
I’m having a total anxiety attack. There is something I reach for when I do, but I try so hard not to.
Nobody thinks of me as a smoker. I’m not sure what a smoker is supposed to look like–not educated, not well dressed, not clean, not a good person, smells of cigarettes in body, mouth, hair and clothes. There are “closet smokers” who dress well in clothes that don’t smell of cigarettes, with bodies etc that don’t smell of cigarettes. Actually I couldn’t even go into bars and restaurants where smoking was allowed as I can’t stand the smell. They’re not allowed in New York basically anywhere and I don’t lament that. Read more…

I put my adoption/Google rant on the sidebar. Now it’s gone to a Courting page
I don’t know why I was picked up by a Wall Street Journal blog on balancing being a mother with a career. I have never been a mother.

Being a single parent, of either sex, has to be the hardest job in the world. Unless you have the most incredible support network that never fails.

Little Luce is going to be a Senior in high school in the fall, and it’s harder for Lucia than ever. Little Luce is a great almost woman. Her Mom just wants to make sure she gets the best college education she can, at a school not in New York City.

Their bond is strong. It’s time not to sever it, but to expand both of their worlds. In a couple of weeks they’re going to the condo in North Myrtle, and I’m demanding pictures of Lucia asleep in the bedroom. They live in a one bedroom and when Lucia and George first separated she gave Little Luce the bedroom.

Given my closest friend’s situation, it’s hard for me to complain about my life, but I do it so well….

Last night at dinner I felt, once again, Little Luce, has two moms as I told her stories about her childhood. But Lucia deserves solo credit for raising an incredible girl. Many years she used all her vacation days for Little Luce. I don’t think I could ever be that selfless. Not that Lucia is perfect….

Seven years ago I decided that I wanted to give my lifetime dream a real chance. I had no idea how to go about so I took some courses. When I was offered a job as a reporter five years ago, my teacher then stopped speaking to me as she thought I was selling out by working for an alt paper rather than going the lit journal route.

Maybe it was, but i was able to use skills I had become expert in during my three prior careers. They all entailed interviewing and assessing individuals, and researching and critiquing in many subjects.

Because I didn’t have the worlds greatest imagination, was the opposite of assertive (when it comes to things for me), and didn’t think the world was clamoring for a book or magazine articles by me, I thought this was a good way to break in to publishing–given my advanced age.

“Offered” was the key word. Somebody believed in me. That we have both believed in each other and have driven each other crazy since our late teens was, truthfully, comforting. While it was comforting, it was also awkward for basically the same reason. If those two sentences appear as if written in code, they almost are.

I couldn’t advance any further than I did. That said I wrote a damn good cover story for any reporter, including one in her first year.

I didn’t look for other reporting jobs because i really didn’t want to be a reporter. I would say it gave me the confidence needed to pursue other venues but I began a blog, and vowed to complete complicated dental work in two years, some months. My long time readers know more about teeth than anybody wants to know.

I was so goal oriented I completed the dental work in 21 months. My amazing healing ability had more than a little to do with that as did my true want to get this over with.

And, duh, I’m obsessive. I have to complete what I begin–hence staying in social work school after I knew it was the wrong career for me. I wish I had gone to school for something I really love such as sociology or urban anthropology. I purposely didn’t say writing.

I have come to the conclusion that one can really learn to write from doing. So I wrote in this blog. Wrote chapters for books, edited them, revised them, edited, and threw out. Hence the 1783 posts–two thirds in draft, the endless word documents, and my gmail capacity being up to 26% because sometimes I write in gmail. If I know I’m going away, I save to an external modem and write in gmail as a back up. I have to have something saved to the Internet to feel secure. Possibly falsely, but…..

The story I’m now telling comes easily to me at times. At other times, there’s a huge concrete wall between me and the material.

Actually, just when I need to rev up, I have hit the wall. Hence my apartment is incredibly organized, I’m planning my move, and accept three out of five invitations.

In a few weeks I’m going to do something I would have laid bets just a few months ago I never would do. Have dinner with three girls–always to me, I went to Jr/Sr High with. Then we’re having drinks with at the pre-reunion of the class ahead of ours.

I was so intent on being miserable, I never gave the girls in my class a chance. Two of the girls were in almost every class with me from Seventh through Twelfth Grades. Our school rotated teachers not students. The other girl, I just knew, because our community was so small everybody knew each other. Almost. There are a few people in our yearbook I don’t remember at all. I might have stood out more than other girls as I had the hippie thing going before it was fashionable in our Long Island community.

Or maybe, my parents asserted less control over my clothes and life. In the end, of course, this gave them more control as I listened to them, very occasionally because I liked and respected them. Though my father did attempt to run my life I never let him.

My Friday Flashback will be on Thursday. It’s a letter my father wrote, but never gave to me, on my 16th birthday.

Reconnecting with people who knew me, even if slightly, in those pivotal growing up years has caused me to reexamine my life. Fortunately I had already written much of a first draft about Senior year, can bring up the feelings at will, and the story takes place outside our community.

Even more fortunately the only people I bad mouth are me, doctors and teachers. I’m not about to change this book, and I want it to reflect my truth.

My parents come off as much more permissive than they were. When my mother called Shelby’s Mom, she had no idea Shelby’s mom would lie for me.

It’s hard for me to remain mired in the past. I have developed a big want and need to make new great memories and to just do.

When I wrote that i was busy, I meant assimilating recent events, writing, organizing my apartment in preparation to sell it, and a few other things necessary to making a living and/or career.

I have spent so much time prepping that I forgot there are more steps. No I didn’t forget but began to feel entitled. Something only pop princesses should ever feel.

This road I’m traveling is a hard one. It feels good to have people from all junctions of my life aboard.

I do believe that we can make our own destiny. Yet obsessive as I am, I feel that I might give up before I have even really begun to try.

Sometimes I stare at the same piece of paper for hours, and play games with the words. I have never had such organized files, dressers, closet, and kitchen. Had I known that the secret to organizing myself was to become close to the end of a first draft, I would have done this years ago. I have come close to the ends of first drafts; they weren’t organized. I wasn’t ready to be organized.

I only look like an organized person and have an organized apartment. Inside I’m still as disorganized as ever.

I saved my final grad school evaluation. Nowhere does it say that I’m disorganized, quite the contrary actually. The person it presents couldn’t have Aspergers; my only “four” out of “five” was relating, and caring, too much. To do that job effectively you have to almost create a Plexiglas wall between you and the residents, and I could only do that with one schizophrenic who drove me crazy, but less crazy than she drove the rest of the staff. Yes, I was staff as well as a student. The Newt cuts had taken affect.

I’m still assimilating the realization I was right all along and my problems are borne out of spatial relations. The knowledge made me feel empowered immediately but I kept waiting to be prove wrong.

Instead I have taken charge of my life in ways I could only dream of before. I don’t think that this time next year I will say “I was wrong, it is___”

So much is going on in my head, it’s hard to feel the passion needed to complete a book about the teenage me. I think I recognize that this is one of the times I have to both be gentle to me, and to just do it.

While I don’t belong in a mommy and work blog and apologize to anybody who has come here looking for one, I do belong in a person, work, and shaking up your life one.

A life long friend told me recently that if I ever learned to drive he wouldn’t just hand in his license, he would do PSC’s warning people that danger is lurking.

Actually it was funny. I have long believed that laughing at or with myself is the best offense. I encourage my friends to laugh with me at my ineptness.

Then there are days like today. It’s the third day of rain. The first two were good. I got a lot of work done. I was forced to dig deep into myself which isn’t my favorite thing, but is necessary if I’m going to write a truthful book.

Yesterday I took a walk as it was just misting. My Cannon is large and bulky. I wanted a small cheap camera I can keep in my pocket, and I did forget the installation disc so that I can put pictures in my laptop.

I bought a cheapish camera. I couldn’t put in the memory disc properly. If that happened to you, you would probably laugh it off, return the camera or have them put it in.

But i didn’t want to walk two miles each way in the rain, today, as it was pouring most of the day. Nor did I want to take a cab though the cab company owner keeps lowering the price. Frequent keep this girl off the street discount as she can cause an accident just attempting to cross a street

I hate feeling the way I do today. I don’t find my ineptness funny. I realize, once again, the Asperger like symptoms stem from a lifetime of not being able to do things correctly.

They stem from people either thinking that I was an idiot or that I just didn’t try hard enough when I tried enough for ten people.

I go into panic attack mode when I’m like this. I lose perspective and think that I’m just not good enough in any sense.

It would be so easy to cast blame. But who? My Dad was hard on me, but he had no understanding of this problem. Though I think he did in the beginning, but so many doctors put the blame back onto me. I can’t blame them. Who knew about spatial retardation?

I have nobody to blame so I blame myself. And that’s the part that I really hate.

The ground’s drying, and I know the sun will be out all day or at least most of the day tomorrow.

Always thought my middle name should have been Annie though that’s not one of my top thousand plays.

Posts like this make me very very nervous as my disability is so hidden most people are never aware of it. Except when I can’t judge which car is coming how fast from what lane and just kinda stand there.

I have struggled with a problem for a long while now. I have blogged about how the parts of my brain that perceive space are wired differently, or maybe not wired at all.

I’m never sure if I have said too much or not enough.

How many people really discuss problems? If they don’t isn’t there a good reason for that? My problems are atypical. They aren’t easily defined or put into categories.

Hell, the biggie, the mother ship for all the rest doesn’t even have a name.

If I have been defensive in my fearlessness, it’s solely because my life has been one of many uncertainties. When I was 36, I felt as if I were breaking down.

I wasn’t hypomanic. I never went on wild spending sprees or thought I could do impossible things. Quite the opposite. I was hyper and walked the streets constantly so I wouldn’t think about all my bad qualities.

When I was diagnosed with massive learning disorders, I fought the psychologist.

He told me that I shouldn’t have been able to accomplish everything I had done. I had. I should have trusted in that. But how do you find trust in your own accomplishments when you now feel that you used smoke and mirrors to fool people into thinking that you were smart?

And you had always felt like a fraud?

I exist; therefore I’m defensive.

I’m also fearless in some areas. It’s a weird combination. A defensive fearless person.

I wish that I had never had that testing. It only served to make me question everything good about myself.

Nothing I did to combat the feeling that I must really be inferior helped. Finish grad school with a 3.84 cum and outstanding field placement evaluation. Not good enough. It should have been a 4.0. I don’t know what to think about the “outstanding” as there’s nothing higher. I did get a few “5″s. They all should have been “6″s. Each attribute and skill was ranked “0″ to “6.”

In college I had been ecstatic to get “B”s in anything but my major. I held myself to much less lofty standards. Just because I had managed some huge projects, and did two years at SSI so I could tell stories about the bad old Bronx, was older, and was still out to prove the psychologist wrong, I screwed myself.

I didn’t realize why I was doing what I was doing. I knew I had something to prove but couldn’t figure out what as everybody I knew thought me smart, successful, funny, and the like.

I felt like even more of a fraud when I finished grad school because I could have gone on to become a full fledged therapist but therapy had always made things worse for me.

It wasn’t that I was resistant. I desperately wanted to understand. My problems are outside the scope of therapy today. I was seeing two other therapists when I got the learning disabilities diagnosis. Neither therapist could help with what he didn’t understand.

Nobody could point me on the royal road to help, because nobody knew who could help.

i forgot about the Asperger’s diagnosis because I didn’t want to search for help that wasn’t there, and because there were so many buts:
“You’re atypical because you have excellent social skills, know boundaries, have excellent judgment, are intuitive, love people not animals….” I do have the clumsiness, motor skill problems and awkwardness, but I long ago learned how to make most of that work for me. Not the motor skill problems. I bless the inventors of digital cameras.

Searching has been a theme of my life. I have searched for my birth mother, am thinking of searching for my birth father’s family and am searching for the answers to problems.

I’m tired of searching. It feels that as long as I keep searching I won’t feel settled. I want to. I deserve to. It does amaze me that I continued having a life during all this.

When I began to blog I made the mistake of writing about not being a linear thinker before I knew many people. Fortunately many people came to my defense when I was bombarded with personal nasty comments.

I found it unbelievable that people would say such rude things. Yet didn’t I deserve it? That’s not a conscious feeling nor is it one that I want to feel.

Yes I was defensive. It would have been impossible for me not to be given my history.