I am not allowed to be sad, not because of my autism, because it’s too-much for the people in my life.
I do not like to be depressed either, but sadly since my late teens, I have not been allowed the chance to emote properly. The highest range is happiness, and the lowest range is mildly sad. If I have long face, that sends triggers to the mama-bear who feels a need to “fix” the problem to make her feel better. Because the old woman cannot distance herself from the lower thresholds of emotion, I cannot be sad. And if I am sad, she becomes sad.
So sadly, I have been stoic for the last two years in an unique way. I am gracefully being happy while so much shit has been falling to the fan behind me. My mother prides on a quote from a no-name author with zero credentials of “Your only happy if you have the happiest child”, some random BS like that. And being the only child, just makes that pressure even worse, and the mother who can’t sympathize with the autistic child, I mean hierarchal autistic child, doesn’t get it and she refuses to understand.
I know i have a survival rate of 2 years if SHTF, but it has not been tested for a really bad recession (of which I had been calling since 2019) to follow a pandemic. I do not care how my mother wants to spin a version of reality, I want to be able to feel the way I need to feel, and my mother wants to project arrogance (masqueraded as “pride” – of everything’s chill.) At this point the ol woman is acting like a notorious abusive man.
The inability to have proper emotional control has made the situation inherently worse than like any child of any age, to have the self trademarked feelings of present events. To dismiss and project, is basically gaslighting. And if my mother is wondering why my contact has been limited, to even in some instances no-contact while living 24x7x365 for the last couple of years, her brused ego has gotten in the way for me to process the emotions I want to process.
I do not sense any level of recovery anytime soon. I think the best days of my life have passed by me by pure maternal politics and unreasonable control over autonomy and the only way to grieve is silence. Then she wonders why I am so quiet, but the moment I start talking, she goes back to the projection, unhealthy optimism and poor feedback when it comes to empathy.
As my mother would say (and I never use this personally) I cannot win.
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