Original work from our Writers, Guest Bloggers and Freelancers
“It doesn’t help me if you hide your feelings.”
“I’m not hiding them, I just don’t know how to verbalize them.”
“I get that. I do. But you can’t just not talk about these things. It will eat you up inside.”
“Maybe. But I’m not nearly as scared for Isaac as you are right now. I don’t see surgery as elective. If he needs surgery at some point we will deal with it, but otherwise, for me, worrying while waiting isn’t going to help him.”
As I bring out the tomatoes and pull out an 8” kitchen knife my right arm grows tense and my palms start to sweat. The weight of the knife all of a sudden feels firm yet alien; it feels almost too comfortable in my hand. I pretend to not stare at the few thin residue scares from bleak years before that faintly decorate my wrist. An hour earlier I had a tumultuous confrontation with a close friend and so my funneled thoughts overturning each said word makes my mind and body feel separate from one another. I feel distant but desperate to reach a mental conclusion to the argument so that I can stem the bruised emotions. My obsessive mind can’t move forward without resolution, so it gets stuck in a mental cycle of repeated half-assed solutions. My soul is dying to stop being tormented by the sickly familiar parasite that randomly turns thoughts into a low pressure-chamber.
We depend on the weekly therapies that our children get, because we want to see them increase their skills, and not lose them through disuse. Unfortunately, at least in our case, all therapies have gone virtual, and so now our weekly hours of therapy are spent sitting in front of a screen.
Do you support businesses that support a better life for everyone? If you don’t know the answer to that question, it’s time to reevaluate your spending habits. Fortunately, you don’t have to have a huge budget or significantly change your shopping patterns to have an impact on causes that matter to you. All you really have to do is direct your resources to businesses that funnel their financial power into the right channels.
Dating is not always easy and everyone experiences uncertainty about whether they are reading the signals from their potential partner correctly. However, when you throw autism into the mix, this can complicate things further.
If you are on the autism spectrum, it’s only natural to want to tell if a girl likes you so let’s look at some of the signals, both via text and face to face, which can make reading the situation easier.
Since the Stay-at-Home order was put in place in Illinois back in March, Heather and I have been pondering what ‘next year’ would look like for our family in terms of schooling. Since that time, we have been weighing options and doing research and fretting endlessly about how to give our kids the best possible education while still living under the threat of COVID-19.
Within a week of getting the vitamin-D, Isaac’s speech had improved so dramatically that his speech therapist almost cried! I can’t begin to express the joy our family experienced celebrating this turning point with Isaac. He has worked so hard to get to this point, and although we still have a ways to go, we can see the end result approaching, and more importantly, he can too and it is motivating him to try even harder. These past few weeks are a testament to the long hours Heather spent doing speech homework with Isaac. Despite that, at our neuro’s suggestion, we still kept our appointment for the MRI.
Neesa mutes the side effects of doses and medications. She’s a part of a housing agency that offers safe space to people who experience mental illnesses. She doesn’t walk up to the residents just to prescribe them certain drug tablets and capsules wrapped in tin foils. Instead, she morphs into a sponge that absorbs their dripping anxiety, siphoning their exhausting heavy thoughts as her own to ease the burden that weighs on their mind and shoulders. Neesa heals lost souls as a Mental Peer Health Specialist.
No, I’m not bragging. I promise I have a point. I spent a lot of time on vacation thinking about parenting and life in general. As a dad, I spend so much of my time trying to do things for my family, that I don’t get much time to do things with my family. I tend to miss out on moments when I could connect with my kids because I am focused too much on other things. So, for the week of vacation, I make it my goal to spend every second I can with my family. And I learned some lessons on vacation that I’d like to share.
Feminism was something I had encountered, like many things I now consider myself, in high school. There were the typical guys who would cry out “feminazi” about any girl who stood up for herself or who was mildly assertive. That was when I first became acquainted with the term. It was an awful introduction in all honesty. People also would react in horror to Marxism and thought Buddhism was cool, but just didn’t make sense (almost everyone was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant at my high school). I now label myself as many of the things that people found odd back then.
