My paternal grandmother loved nothing more than complaining at a restaurant. I imagine she was correcting a feeling from when she was an undiagnosed AuDHD Jewish girl from Philly navigating a Texas army base. My grandfather was stationed there during the war on Korea. He wasn’t a soldier, but a dentist. But still, it was a red state in war times. She and her sister Clare were the only blood relatives who ever truly saw me. I used to say on stage that she was the only member of my family who would talk to me because she had dementia. It was so much more than that.

When I visited her as an adult, we had a routine:

“Do you want to hear a Jewish joke?”

“Yes!”

“Grandma, you know I don’t do Jewish jokes. I just Passover them.”

Killed every time.

The last time I saw her, she was sitting in her kitchen, spitting out carrot flecks from a bowl of cream of chicken soup onto a paper towel. With each fleck she announced, “Patoo-ey!” and glared at the nurse who’d prepared it for her.

Then she turned to me and said, “I don’t know why your father is like that.”

How else to explain him? He’s like Elon Musk without all the money.

The last thing she ever said to me was that she missed her sister, who died twelve years before.

Now, twenty days away from the devil’s lettuce, I can feel her. Feeling our lost loved ones is a recurring theme in Anderson Cooper’s grief podcast, All There Is. Feeling the love is what makes grief survivable.

My dad once called my mom during their divorce, knowing she’d been day drinking. I was eleven. He said he’d hired a hitman to murder her, my sister, and me. He called it off, but she should get out of the house now. She pulled us out of school, drove to Vermont in the midst of a Nor’Easter to hide her car in her sister’s barn and us in her basement for a week. I don’t think he actually hired the hitman. He’s too cheap to spend on us like that. I do believe he hoped that she’d crash the car and kill us all. The perfect crime.

It was terrifying, especially when he laughed in my face when I asked about it at family therapy the first time I was in rehab over a decade later. The same thing he did when I asked him to come see me get a year sober the decade after that.

But it wasn’t as scary as the hole I tried to fill with alcohol after my dog Nico passed this January. He lived eighteen years, the same number I’ve been in and out of Twelve Step Recovery. I drank through a work trip that first week, feeling the void but none of the love, remembering the regrets but none of the memories. I’d like to think my grandmother is holding my dog to her bosom now, smoking a cig, chasing down the great waiter in the sky because she needs more Sweet N’ Low for her iced tea.

I reached out to my cousin’s wife the other day because I don’t have anyone to tell me more, a phrase Clare loved to say to me. Kerri told me at my grandmother’s funeral to let her know if I ever come to DC, where she and my cousin live. I remember thinking it was weird whenever a family member was nice to me. When I was in NYC, it was their mom who visited me. I thought she was rude when she raced home after an afternoon at MoMA, but looking back, she was probably overstimulated.

At the luncheon after the funeral, another cousin kept asking me questions about my life, which made me anxious. I knew if my father overheard I would get in trouble for talking about myself. Nothing was allowed to be about me. All I ever heard about was who I wasn’t. He never cared to know who I was.

“Why are you asking me so many questions?”

“You have the most interesting life.”

I didn’t think my life was interesting. My life was a disappointment. What he said blew my mind and helped set me on the course to no contact. It’s been over nine years since that luncheon. I’m going to DC for the first time in May. Last month I unblocked Kerri and requested to follow her, listening to my intuition without requiring it to make sense. I hadn’t planned the DC trip yet, and I didn’t make the connection when I did.

Now I can feel myself. I know in my gut that she’s the coolest person I’m related to, mostly because we aren’t actually related. I messaged that I was coming, to which she was immediately warm and receptive, as if no time had passed. A few hours later I clicked on her story and saw that she was currently at the Walk of Fame, which is walking distance from mine.

Later, Kerri messaged me more, offering to have her daughter do an impression of my grandma when I visited. That she would have loved to smoke a cigarette with my grandmother too, adding that my actual cousin, Mark, used to get called “Kerri’s husband.”

I admitted that I didn’t remember which of my cousins she was married to, either.

I am my grandmother’s daughter.

Her favorite phrase was “that really burns my ass.” She had a voice like Marge Simpson’s sister. To me, she and Clare were the coolest people in history. She once told me the best part of her life was before she had children.

Rush, the last name I adopted after my divorce, was her maiden name. It was my Great Aunt Clare’s name her entire life. She never married, and was most likely ace or gay—things you couldn’t be then.

I know how to manage grief, early sobriety, the dopamine hit and crash of hot and cold loser behavior. I know how to manage AuDHD, autistic burnout, and PDA (pathological demand avoidance, a profile of autism).

But all six at once? Ooooo, buddy.

I have a weekly routine with my platonic partner Jeena. Friday night—Shabbat, come to think of it — dinner and a movie, which brings me endless joy.

I am currently in the highest level of burnout, but I still wanted to go. I was really looking forward to both steak and the movie Forbidden Fruits. I skipped Wegovy for over a week for this. I had to start getting ready four hours in advance, as earlier in the week it took me half the day to get to the gym.

I tried on clothing until I found something with the fewest sensory issues, then slipped into my most comfortable platform shoes. I immediately got a vision of myself breaking my neck and switched to flip-flops.

We had to go back to my apartment three times. First, I forgot my nicotine patch. After that, I forgot what I forgot. Then my bestie, who has ADHD but not autism, missed the valet and wanted to go around in a complete circle. So we did that three times.

The guy who opened the door was charming. The lights were low. The host led us to a corner booth with a heater, surrounded by deep green plants.

People always think Jeena and I are lesbian lovers (I’m not gay, apparently, more on that next blog post).

She’s my primary attachment figure. I’m very affectionate with her. When I was shopping for my Jeep, we went to one dealer where the salesmen looked at us funny until they finally dragged their token gay off his lunch break and shoved him in front of us. I got a mocktail, and she got her monthly cocktail.

We ordered Parker rolls and Caesar salad to start. The waiter acted like we didn’t order enough because we shared the salad. Oh, like it’s a tableside preparation for one?

“So you’re sharing an entree too?” he asked with a sneer. He was the saddest LA waiter trope, a fifty-something failed actor who used to be hot and still could be if he had money, genetics, or sobriety.

I continued to order. It was my turn to play the top. Two steaks. Two sides. We ordered over $300 worth of food before dessert, tax, or tip.

I have a strong fawn response that, until now, has prevented me from fully accommodating my autism. This night I had what is called a complete psychic change. I came out of a public rolling meltdown with zero rumination, zero shame, zero guilt. That’s not supposed to happen.

I can override my system to mask, especially in public. You have to, to survive Hot Girl Autism ™.

The busboy took my bread plate away while I was still eating. It startled me, and I started shaking. I’d taken a beta blocker. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

The food runner brought out our steaks on their own. Like the guy who 13th stepped me at 14 days, just a hunk of meat on a plate. I said, “We haven’t gotten our salad yet.” He put them down anyway. He kept trying to sell it.

I said, “No, you have to do this correctly. I am autistic. I cannot deal.”

He finally took them away like it was my fault. Then we were ignored for twenty minutes, when a busboy finally brought the salad. He prepared it in two seconds, yards away from our table. It was as mid as I’ve led it up to be.

I asked Jeena, “Can I complain? My grandmother would be so proud.”

When I spoke to my coach

, who is both AMAB and Jewish, they asked what the argument would be for not complaining.

I believe it’s the intersection of Christianity, femininity, and neurotypical expectations.

There’s this Victorian concept of the angel in the house. It’s the title of a poem I refuse to read about the perfect woman. Christian women are taught that putting themselves last makes them an angel. That being sweet and kind to everyone but themselves is what will earn them the kingdom of heaven. Even women who aren’t raised Christian but are raised in places like the Southern US have internalized this sort of self-abandonment.

I’ve had so many friends get embarrassed by me for wanting to send food back when I got the completely wrong meal. They’re like, “I’ll just eat it. You can have mine.” It would be better if we both had the wrong thing, so they could secretly resent me later.

Internalized patriarchy at its most insidious.

It’s more insane than active alcoholism. At least I got to drink!

I was a server for over a decade. It’s a great job when you don’t want to be sober. I worked in fine dining in Chelsea, Manhattan. I worked in fine dining in Mystic, CT. Mistakes like this happen. It’s what you do after that that matters. They bring the same steaks back out. The sides were cold. I knew the loaded baked potato was fucked, but I gave the benefit of the doubt and asked Jeena if the broccolini was supposed to be cold. She said it wasn’t.

I started shaking, heart pounding, getting dizzy. I can’t speak. It’s not about the salad. I went into Final Girl mode, opened my phone and said, “Hey, Claude (AI), this is what’s happening. Can you explain the intersection of high-level burnout, PDA, and meltdowns to Jeena, because she loves me so much, but she thinks I’m emotionally upset.”

I hand her the phone without reading the response, and start rocking in front of a room of influencers, Eurotrash, and wannabes.

I’ve never held myself through something like this.

Why are so many autists addicts?

Alcohol, drugs, sex, cigarettes, scrolling, spending, porn, codependency, gambling, spewing hurtful but true shit, private self-harm, face picking, disordered eating—these are more socially acceptable stims (self-stimulatory behavior, things that regulate an autistic nervous system) than going non-verbal, rocking in public, and refusing to make eye contact. I will not do that to myself anymore.

A different waiter came over. I continued to stare at the table, not looking up until we left. I could see him shaking his head out of my peripheral vision, when he said:

“I wasn’t there. I wasn’t part of it. I didn’t cause what happened.”

My German ex once said the same thing to me about the Holocaust.

A manager eventually hovered, annoyed. No one offered to give us hot broccolini or potatoes, a thing I only know because Jeena, a gentile, told me. I couldn’t understand a word, he had an accent and my auditory processing disorder was nuclear. I could feel him trying to get me to look at him, talk to him, make him feel better, apologize for existing, creating more and more demands on my system.

I will not abandon myself for a man at his job. Not today, asshole.

I mean, I could have talked. I could have looked at them. But just like most hack comedy shows, I would have had to buy two drinks first.

Immediately after Jeena read the explainer, I asked her to squeeze me like an old lemon with a tiny bit of juice left. Deep pressure activates the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest), whereas the autonomic nervous system (fight, flight, fawn, freeze) was the one short-circuiting.

I’ve never been held through something like this.

I usually use an inanimate object—the floor, a concrete light post, tightly wrapping myself in a thin blanket—to simulate care.

I used to have my dog. There are now nonconsensual cuddles with my cat.

I started crying because it was the first steak I’ve had in eighteen years that I couldn’t bring to Nico after. I asked Jeena if I could feed her dog some after dinner.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

I started to hyperventilate again, shook it off somehow, looked at her plate. She only had two bites left.

“Oh, because you’re probably gonna finish yours. Can he have some of mine?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I suddenly processed one thing the manager said, “I don’t know what you want from us.”

I had to tell her to squeeze me like a dry old lemon four separate times. It was the multiple orgasm of meltdowns.

The only thing I said aloud in that restaurant after I whispered in her ear, “Tell them they can put the steak in a box, for the dog.”

They took one steak and one side off the bill, around $100. It’s more than I’ve ever seen my father get, but it’s also worse treatment than anyone would give a male lawyer. If I had any juice left in my brain, we would have left before the salad came.

Getting money off the restaurant bill is a special interest of my dad’s and was of my grandma’s, so I felt all “She would be proud” and “SUCK ON THAT, GERALD,” at the same time.

I sped out, not looking at anyone, except behind me to check for Jeena. I finally found the Clare to my Thelma.

I was suddenly outside, free, jumping up and down and whooping.

Friday at 9 pm on the Sunset Strip.

“Apartment. Sweatpants. Xanax. Cigarette. Yours. Steak. Dog. Movie.” I learned that being in charge of and speaking the order of events I want in one word snippets is regulating by watching a friend’s brother with high support needs. I don’t know my level of support needs. I am new to having human support.

I went full echolalia on the drive — just repeating one movie quote, another socially unacceptable stim.

“You asked for it, you got it, Toyota.” It’s from Forget Paris, a movie I’ve probably seen once. It made me so happy. I worried aloud that I was having an acid flashback. Everything looked so vibrant and felt more real than real, even in the dusk.

At home, I got my newest AVN sweat suit out of the hamper because nothing else felt correct. I smoked a cigarette, took a Xanax. At Jeena’s, she changed while I gave her dog, a sweet Pomeranian, almost all my steak.

I peeled it piece by piece while telling him what a good boy he was. He absolutely lost his mind after, racing from room to room, pausing to look back at me like I was magic.

We get to our same theater. The movie sucked, despite being based on two elements I love. It was supposed to be Mean Girls meets The Craft, but like all those cunts at the restaurant, it lacked both the warmth and depth. The next morning I hit up the friend who recommended it and busted his balls, just like my grandmother would have wanted.

At the time, I treated it like it was a boring story for sleep. At least a shitty movie meant less LA idiot behavior in the theater.

I slept longer and deeper than I have in three weeks, waking up feeling more restored than I have since the pandemic.

I’m still burnt out, but I finally got to the other side of the plot of my life.

The three and a half years I had continuous sobriety were the best of my life. The three and a half years I spent smoking weed to dull the force of unpacking and unmasking my autism were also the best of my life. Going no contact with my family allowed me to heal, but cut me off from the sense of belonging to something bigger than me.

Baby wanted twelve.

Unmasked recovery. Connection to my bloodline. Community. Hope. Openness. Willingness. Honesty. Integrity. Perseverance. Joy. Love. Surrender to the process.

The most liberating, empowering, terrifying things of all.

I feel like I’m tripping again. It wasn’t a flashback, but my pattern recognition clocking the only way I’d ever experienced transcendence.

My family doesn’t hate me. They’re afraid of me. They always knew I’d someday be the one to unmask them all.

I asked for it, I got it. Toyota.

I have never felt heard in my life outside of the stage or the internet (& in the past seven years, some dear friends), so when I thought of one line – the Real World reference, and made a meme, I felt so desperate to put something out that I info dumped into Claude and let him write it.

That was a mistake. I took it down. This is Rebecca’s version.

Yesterday I had a meltdown. I saw the signs coming too late. I just quit smoking weed for the third time in six months, I’m firmly back in AA, sober friends are voice noting me up a fascinating storm, poetry is opening up, and I started talking to someone I’ve had a crush on for six months from a morning meeting near my house.

Friday, I didn’t run out of the meeting for the first time and went to fellowship with him. Saturday night, we hung out at his—Sunday afternoon at mine. The dopamine and oxytocin prevented me from seeing that a meltdown had been brewing for weeks.

Here are the signs of impending meltdown I missed:

Or, as Bill W. would say, ominous warnings I failed to heed.

• extreme PDA and executive function have a baby

I can’t engage in anything I want to. Yesterday, I couldn’t even get myself to put on my comfort show.

• Coordination

I banged my car door into the parking structure, even tho I know it’s tight, and I have to be careful. I stubbed my toe on my bath mat (it’s wood), then walked straight into a coffee table that’s been there for 7 years.

• Mystery Bruises

Literally just realized this is one, which is why I had to write this right now at five am.

• I can only eat incredibly bland things, and never a normal amount, always too much or too little

Since my dog died, I have barely been able to eat, and yes, there’s also the fact that I just

stopped smoking weed, but running toward a meltdown always means I get extra weird

about food. I only want to eat out of mugs or ramekins.

• My Stomach Hurts

and I can’t even think that without thinking of the John Mulaney bit, Jewish Girls, because–

• I start talking in quotes, or I can’t be concise

From movies, TV shows, books, philosophers, poets, the Big Book, and the AA platitudes. I can access others’ thoughts to express myself, but I can’t untangle my own enough to really get it out, unless you’re in my inner circle, and I trust you have the capacity for an info dump. I think everything needs extra context. I think I need to give you context on context on context, so instead I just start saying things like this quote from the movie Forget Paris, apropos of nothing: “You asked for it, you got it. Toy-o-tah.”

• I get incredibly blunt in inappropriate moments.

At poetry the other night, in the middle of telling a story about taking too many mushrooms and going to the psych ward (video coming), I announced “F Isreal”. Then I doubled down when the Jewish, Zionist producers jumped in to say it’s complicated. Thankfully, everyone involved is in recovery, so I ended up having a respectful and lively debate via text that night, where we finally concluded that the Jews should get Germany.

• Sleep is even more fucked than usual

This one is tricky bc of the grief and weed withdrawal, not making me realize, but also, as I write (why I write), I’m realizing that grief and weed withdrawal were both masking and signaling impending meltdown.

Can’t Fear The Reaper

By yesterday, I knew one was coming. I am in burnout. I am processing so much, and all my trauma is coming to the surface. Everything I have ever wanted has been taken from me, always the minute I show that I want it. Sometimes by others. Sometimes by myself. I get scared to even try because of this. My dog was the love of my life. I can’t emphasize enough the effect this has had and is continuing to have on me, but I wrote about it here.

I canceled or rescheduled an impressive array of appointments pre-meltdown yesterday: Task Rabbit, Botox, dentist, poetry workshop, routine vet appointment. I thought I could get ahead of the impending meltdown, but it was too late. I was getting ready to shower and get in bed with my comfort show, Sex and the City, when one of my favorite long-distance friends called. I really wanted to talk to her and gossip, which, just like writing this post, is very Carrie.

I cleaned out the hall closet and arranged the second litter box. I need to have a second cat. I’m having a hole cut in the door and installing a Kitty Pass XL.

I am never getting my deposit back. The stuff at the bottom of that closet needed to go somewhere. The somewhere became my bedroom closet, where all my dog’s remaining things and remains are. I took them out for the first time and arranged them on my lingerie chest and wall, and ordered a proper memorial shelf on Etsy in my favorite color, navy blue.

So I’m on the phone with my friend, ten weeks out from the most significant loss of my life, in full fear mode from mutual infatuation, unable to eat or sleep much for weeks, day one off vaping, which I picked back up when my dog died, while staring at the memorial, when my body started shaking uncontrollably. I burst into loud hysterical tears, hoarse as hell, as loud as I had in me:

I just can’t believe he’s really gone. The love of my life is a box of fucking ashes on top of my lingerie chest. I’m never going to hold him again. No new person in my life is ever going to know him. He’s never coming back. OMG, it’s here, I am having the meltdown.

That’s What Friends Are For (Myself Included)

It’s okay, have the meltdown, she said. I’m right here. I got you. I continued for a moment, got off the phone, and went into the shower. I lay on the floor of it in a fetal position, rocking and box breathing and crying for what felt like an hour. I got into my most comfortable t-shirt, then bed. I lay on my side with a pillow between my legs, rocking my hips, a thing I’ve been doing for longer than I have known I was autistic, but would only have the courage to break out when I was alone with an incredibly bad hangover. Now I do it, and all stims, freely.

You Gotta Have Faith

I called my sponsor. I worked Step Two, the value of which is faith. Faith that I can navigate this fucked up world as this fucked up person without my pothead space suit, post-diagnosis. Faith that this is a gift from the universe in disguise. I put on 90 Day Fiancè and got in bed with my seventeen-pound ragdoll cat, Emma Woodhouse. There may have been some nonconsensual cuddling involved.

Of All The Gay AA Meetings In The World, You Gotta Walk into Mine

Yes, this meltdown has been brewing for weeks, but the final push into nervous system nuclear winter was the fear that everything I ever want and express that I want is taken away from me. It’s not about the boy (it’s a little about the boy.) It’s about my entire life, and all the loss and abuse and disappointment and neglect. About all the crimes I’ve committed against myself, because that’s all I knew. Weed mitigates my meltdowns, but it also slows down / messes up the things I want most in life. More than anything tho, it’s science. Too much stimulus in too short a time will always lead to a meltdown. I will never have the capacity capitalism tells me I should.

The Blanket Trick

Another thing that helps during a meltdown is deep pressure. I use a muslin blanket that I wrap tightly around my body, get on the floor for more biofeedback, and rock. It tricks my nervous system into feeling held. How embarrassing to admit. If someone is around me and I trust them, I want them to squeeze my soul back into my body.

But ultimately, I got me. I don’t need anyone to worry or try to fix it, or as my German ex with Villain Autism™ wanted to do, build me a meltdown room in his Laurel Canyon manse that would have turned into something like the cage from You.

I am drained. I am quiet. I started to relax with the help of my cat purring next to me, medication, a dark room, a comfort show, plain crackers in bed that I won’t kick myself out for eating, and the love of my friends and myself. I had a night terror, something that’s common for autists and has been happening to me since childhood (weed removes this too, I don’t dream at all, and lose all my weird and interesting dreams along with the scary ones.) I have an ongoing theme with night terrors. I’m somewhere, and the person who invited me is ignoring me and wanting someone else. I lose my luggage, my phone, and I used to lose Nico. I talk, and no words come out, or no one listens. I am alone and lost. Nobody is ever there. Anything that matters to me, I lose, and desperately try to find the rest of the dream. This becomes more common for me post-meltdown.

But then I processed the dream with Claude, who was able to pull up the patterns from past dreams. I started using him when I quit weed in August to get my dreams out of my mouth and on record before they disappeared into the morning light.

Right now, I am engaging in a special interest (talking about myself to an audience, lmao).

I made it through my first sober meltdown without drinking, using, or violating any outgoing boundaries by putting it on someone who didn’t explicitly tell me to meltdown on the phone with them.

Reader, I managed it. It’s such a gift to not have a hangover along with post-meltdown rawness.

Dear Southwest Airlines Customer Relations,

I am writing to express serious concern about Southwest’s new assigned seating policy and its impact on passengers with disabilities who rely on pre-boarding accommodations.

Issue:

As a disabled passenger who pre-boards, I have relied on Southwest’s previous open seating policy to select appropriate seating that accommodates my disability without additional cost. Your new assigned seating system now charges extra fees for seats that I previously accessed through pre-boarding as an accessibility accommodation.

On my February 9th flight from Los Angeles, I paid $44 extra to sit in row 10. Despite this charge, approximately half the plane remained empty while passengers who didn’t pay were crammed into the back rows. This creates artificial scarcity and punishes passengers - including those with disabilities - who cannot afford the upcharge.

Accessibility Concerns:

1. The previous system allowed disabled passengers who pre-board to choose accessible seating at no additional cost

2. The new system forces disabled passengers to pay extra fees for what was previously an included accommodation

3. This policy change may violate the Air Carrier Access Act by creating financial barriers to accessible seating

4. Keeping rows empty while charging disabled passengers extra is discriminatory pricing

Request:

I am requesting that Southwest:

1. Reconsider this policy’s impact on passengers with disabilities

2. Provide pre-boarding passengers access to appropriate seating without mandatory upcharges

3. Review compliance with ADA and Air Carrier Access Act requirements

4. Address the practice of keeping paid seats empty while cramming non-paying passengers together

Additional Context:

I am also a Southwest Airlines shareholder and am reconsidering my investment based on this policy change. Southwest built its reputation on accessible, affordable air travel. This new system contradicts those values and creates barriers for the disability community.

I request a response addressing these concerns and explaining how Southwest plans to ensure equitable treatment of passengers with disabilities under the new seating system.

Respectfully,

Rebecca Rush

It’s 10:30 am on February 5th. I’ve already walked over twenty miles this month. For many people, this would be a sign of doing well. Prioritizing movement. Perhaps a New Year’s Resolution is still in effect, as a result of pure discipline.

For me it means I’m struggling. I have eleven days sober after a two-week bender. My dog died three and a half weeks ago.

Nico was my first dog. We had eighteen wonderful years together. He was my best friend and my closest family member. At times, he was my only friend. For the last several years, he was my only family. I managed to keep him alive two years past a one-month prognosis after he had an emergency splenectomy at the end of 2023. In December, he threw up (a thing he’d never done). I rushed to the vet, and he was diagnosed with advanced kidney disease. It had been about a year since he’d had bloodwork. I ordered every test. The following week, an ultrasound revealed a tumor on his liver that the X-rays had missed. The vet said it was time. I waited until he hadn’t eaten anything in days. I knew, in every cell of my body, it was the right decision. Then he was gone. And guilt set in. How the hell had I missed his six-month bloodwork? How neglectful! How cheap! Why did I call the euthanasia doctor instead of rushing to the emergency vet again?

I started drinking and didn’t stop for two weeks. The pain was too unbearable. I emerged after a literal bottom, as I wrote about in my previous post. When I had about five days sober I was able to leave my house and face the neighborhood walk loop I’d taken with him thousands of times. He walked with me until I carried him in a sling, a front pack, a stroller. For the past two years I’d taken him every day unless I was traveling for work or hungover. Those few hungover days played in my brain on a different kind of loop, along with the kidney stuff. The fact that the liver tumor was also there didn’t comfort me at all, or the many other things he had wrong with him, like an eye infection he couldn’t shake, or a cervical spine injury. Those were probably my fault, too. Before he died, I tearfully asked the vet if it was my fault he got kidney disease at all. What about all the steak? The liberal application of CBD? The cat treat meal toppers? Rebecca, the vet said patiently.

“No. He’s just old.”

Why Walking Works

Walking seemed to be regulating, so I started doing it more. A friend says if her mom doesn’t walk at least three miles a day, she’s extra difficult. That’s also true about my grief. I walked, and I saw him everywhere in my mind. I can still feel his weight in the front pack as of this morning, like a phantom limb. My body still doesn’t know he isn’t there. I walked to the bank without him for the first time. I walked through the park where we spent afternoons regularly for the past several years. I walked by his favorite pee spot. I started to challenge my internal punisher. I organized his things a few days ago. I placed an order for the rug, still covered in his pee, to be cleaned. It was gross but also sacred. It was one of the last things I had of him.

The pain is processing now. I’m literally moving through it. And as I continued to do another loop instead of order more booze, I began to think differently.

This is exactly why in all of Jane Austen’s novels they “take a turn around the bush” then suddenly figure out major plot points.

Walking is bilateral stimulation — alternating left-right activation across both brain hemispheres. It’s the same mechanism as EMDR, which was invented because of a walk. Francine Shapiro discovered it in a park in 1987. A Stanford study found that ninety minutes of walking in nature decreased rumination — a thing autistic brains are famous for, at least among our own kind. Rumination can lead to depression, which most autistics also experience at a more severe degree than neurotypical folks.

Modern grief research uses a dual process model, also called “dosing grief.” Healthy grief is supposed to mean going back and forth between feeling the loss and living in the world. Walking helps create the conditions for this to happen. If dysregulation is a plague that visits most autistics daily, dysregulation from grief is the apex of that, the final boss. Walking is one of the most accessible unharmful ways to regulate. And for the hypermobile among us, it’s also hEDS friendly.

Why Walking Works Specifically for Autistic Grief

No grief follows a linear path, but I believe this is pronounced with autism and ADHD. Grief takes up so much processing bandwidth that other brain functions fail. A week ago I was heading to get my roots touched up when a neighbor asked what I was getting done. I pointed to my head and said, “ashes.” Nico’s ashes had arrived the day before, and my brain just went with that word. Loss is consuming all my spoons while pouring syrup into my operating system. And then the second arrow — autistic people thrive on routine, and grief is the most disruptive change that exists. Especially with a pet. My life was organized around him. For eighteen years he was always either with me or waiting for me. No matter what I went through, and I went through a lot, I always had that. I always had him.

The final two years, my life was completely organized around his care, including cooking for almost daily. Always making sure to get to the park. Cleaning his tiny butt and making sure his shirt and bed were clean and dry. The term for this is “loss on loss.” When you lose a beloved pet, you also lose every routine they were woven into. If he were the earth, I was his moon. To add to that, autistic people are known for having deeper relationships with animals. We already live in a society that sanitizes death, wants you to move on, says a good long life is not something to be sad about. “He’s in a better place,” they say, though not one person alive knows if that place actually exists, or if it’s better or not.

Walking is rhythmic proprioceptive regulation, both calming and organizing at once. It’s functional stimming. If I sit still and attempt to process, I’ll start punching my legs or screaming. When I have a destination to walk to, it circumvents my PDA. I’m not telling myself to go walk; I’m thinking I need to go to the bank, and it’s not too far to walk.

My neighborhood loop I call my same walk, and just like the concept of a same food — it’s exactly what it sounds like. My same walk comforts me; I’ve been walking it and seeing the exact same trees and homes for seven years. It reduces decisions so I don’t get stuck, and so I have more energy for what I need to mentally organize and process.

Walking got me moving mornings last week, when I wasn’t sure I was capable of getting out of bed. Now, instead of my dog, I get up in the morning and take my sadness for a stroll.

How It Saved Me

After about a week of walking and thinking about my imperfections as a dog mom as if they were the only piece of the puzzle, I started to see the whole picture. The eighteen years of love and care and investment. The going beyond what most people with more resources than I would ever do. I realized that my dog wouldn’t have wanted me to catch the kidney disease sooner. It would have meant those six months being full of subcutaneous fluids and shitty-tasting kidney food. The prognosis would have been better, and I wouldn’t have known the liver tumor was coming. Instead, he got six of his last seven months full of steak, McDonald’s chicken nuggets, and cat treats. My spiritual mentor said he didn’t want me to know, and, even putting woo woo aside, I’m pretty sure that’s what he would have preferred if I’d been able to ask him. In his final weeks, he showed me his teeth while I was administering fluids, which he’d never done to me once in eighteen years. I’d only ever seen him do that as a young man trying to intimidate a larger dog (all of them). I found a way to forgive myself and accept that I didn’t know why I missed the bloodwork, but it certainly wasn’t because I was neglectful or cheap. It was one test that got missed inside of a story of extraordinary love and care.

Then yesterday, a breakthrough. As I walked, I recovered the full memory. The mystery of the missed bloodwork. I didn’t know if I had breast cancer or not from March to August last year. Breast cancer is terrifying for anyone, but I’m a sex worker. These are my money-making mommy milkers, thank you very much. In June, I’d had two bad mammograms and was waiting on the results of a surgical biopsy. I had been told by the oncologist that his cancer was definitely coming back. Most dogs with the cancer he had are gone within a month, even with tumor (and in his case, entire organ) removal. His bloodwork was perfect the last time he had cancer. I didn’t have a car at the time. I took both of my pets in to the vet over two days. My cat got bloodwork and told she could never come back without $400 twilight sedation, for any reason. The next day I took my dog in for a check up (which was fine) and X-rays and bloodwork. They forgot the bloodwork in the room. I had already had to leave and come back because of the X-rays, and it was busy that day. They casually said while I was leaving — oh, wait, did you want bloodwork?

I was overstimulated and overwhelmed so I said I’d come back for it. My brain wasn’t able to record it because of how dysregulated I was. I forgot to come back until he showed signs of decline in December. It got missed is still a full story, but it’s so much more nuanced than that. I was having a genuinely terrifying time. It wasn’t on purpose. Nine times out of ten something like that occurs with no consequence. This is just the one time it didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me that a dog could or would get kidney disease — I grew up with cats and thought it was a cat thing. Also, I was hyperfocused on the thing I’d been told would kill him and was afraid would soon kill me— cancer.

I think he’d be really proud I was able to keep him alive long enough to die of essentially old guy disease instead of cancer. If I keep walking, one day, so will I.

At 7:28 this morning, I walked into the church, cinnamon latte in hand. The last time I went to this meeting, the speaker compared ADHD medication to cocaine while presenting symptoms of undiagnosed autism. I wanted very much to be excluded from that narrative, one that I never asked to be a part of. I walked out halfway through and vowed to never return.

This morning, the speaker also talked shit on Adderall, then said she never had the “playbook to life.” I imagined myself going up to her after and telling her to Google high-masking AuDHD in women.

When she started talking about the shamefulness of “selling her body” (she once had an OnlyFans), I imagined myself raising my hand, going up to the podium, announcing, “Sex work is real work and the only thing that gave me the time and resources to ever get over a year sober” and dropping the mic.

Instead, I sat on the stage in the back of the auditorium with tears sliding down my cheeks. Today I have five days back from a horrifying two-week bender.

My dog was diagnosed with advanced kidney disease in December. He was just a month away from his 18th birthday. Two years earlier, I’d caught a spleen tumor before it ruptured, gotten him emergency surgery, and was given the prognosis of one month for him to live. I rearranged my entire life to care for him, although it was already organized around him. I did it harder. I gave him CBD and a 12-mushroom supplement every day. I cooked him wagyu steaks from the gourmet grocery for the first six months. I held my breath. Then he didn’t die, and I started to relax a little. He lived a year past his prognosis, then more. I didn’t go on vacation, only traveled for work, and I was vigilant about it. If I went out of town for a week one month, it would be none the next month, no more than two days the following month. Although I didn’t consciously know he was dying, I scheduled two months off travel in a row, which allowed me to be with him every day of his last three months.

I promised myself I wouldn’t drink for the rest of his life from the day of his diagnosis. I didn’t. The following week, he was diagnosed with a liver tumor. A few days after that, he screamed, collapsed, and fainted in my arms. I thought he was dead. We rushed to the emergency vet only to be told that the kidney fluids weren’t absorbing properly and were bothering his heart. They suggested more X-rays, and a heart medication to add to the pile. I wasn’t sure I wanted to add more medicines to his day—he hated it so much he showed me his teeth once while I was administering the fluids for the first time in his entire life. Nobody wants to be poked with a syringe twice a day that isn’t full of heroin.

I was still hedging about the heart medication, four days before I left for a work trip Jan 13th, when he stopped eating.

By day three, I was syringing bone broth down his throat and begging. Day four, he could barely stand. I called the in-home euthanasia place I’d decided on two years earlier. We went for a final walk in the sunshine, him unable to even hold his head up in his front pack. A few hours later, holding him in my arms, watching him look more peaceful than he had in a while, he was gone. He didn’t even flinch. It was the most gentle death money can buy.

And then I was alone with my reservation, the one I’d had ever since I walked into rehab when he was still a puppy. I felt that I deserved the abusive marriage and cocaine-addicted life I’d gotten myself into, but I knew he didn’t. My recovery journey began with him, and for years, all improvements in my life were really about that fact: perhaps I deserved bad things, but he didn’t.

He never did anything wrong.

A reservation is an AA concept, a thing that you’re keeping hidden as the reason you’ll drink again someday. It is also said that if you had a reservation, you’d never stay sober. This makes perfect sense looking back—if sobriety is only a waystation, then why not take a break from it now? And now? And also perhaps now?

When I was first introduced to the program, I took the concept literally, like a restaurant reservation. And in some senses, it is. I had an appointment with alcohol at some point in the future. 8 pm, the day my dog, partner, only family member, best friend of 18 beautiful years, left me. Of course I would drink. I couldn’t imagine not drinking. And I never made a plan that dared to dream otherwise.

After they took him away, I was in complete shock, and a little bit of guilty relief–it was the first time in two years I wasn’t desperately worried about him, the first time I was sure beyond all surety that he wasn’t uncomfortable in any way. I knew I wanted to be around a group of people who loved me, so I called a friend whose mom is also my friend and tarot reader, whose dad is also a beta reader for my poetry and my Tijuana driving buddy. I drove up there and got all the hugs, love, and understanding I needed. But there was one more reason I went. The dad had picked up a few bottles of Mezcal on our last trip, and I’d gotten it into my head that if I had a shot with him, it would be okay. Just one. My dog died. It wouldn’t turn into more.

I did a shot, then another, then drove home and ordered a bottle of wine. I continued drinking on the plane ride, sitting next to a deaf woman as if that meant I wouldn’t be perceived sobbing. I even bought cigarettes—I’d quit vaping almost a year earlier. The trip was rough. I couldn’t be alone with myself without crying. I couldn’t mask much for work.

I got kicked out of my hotel room in North Carolina for smoking a joint in my hotel room. I’d ordered a massage and taken a few hits while waiting. The masseuse, noticing the smell, put the shower on high for steam. When the front desk knocked on my door, clouds of steam came rolling out that they thought was weed. I tried to explain to the general manager that this wasn’t a movie, that was steam, but he didn’t believe me. Not after I’d been smoking the Devil’s Lettuce.

When they decided to actually kick me out, I was coming back from happy hour, double-fisting vodka Sprites with grenadine. Why would I even do that? So much sugar.

I did make it to Atlanta after driving drunk through the night, but another client canceled. I managed to get 27 hours sober and drag myself to a meeting. But then I found I couldn’t work sober. I changed my flight and flew home 36 hours early. The grief while drinking was bottomless—I had so much support from friends, yet I was like a sink with no stopper.

I came home to the apartment I have shared with my dog for seven years to see just my cat acting suspiciously happy. He was everywhere and nowhere. I kept listening for the tap of his nails on the floor, kept looking at the door in the hall, expecting him to be coming around the corner. I got home Monday. By Tuesday, I was having huge tanks of nitrous delivered to my house by courier.

I tried to pull myself together to take my queerplatonic partner out to the Beverly Hills Hotel for her birthday on Friday. I didn’t quite get 24 hours that time, as a visiting colleague invited herself over, drank all my wine, then tried to give me a lecture about drinking when I asked her to replace it. So of course I had to drink at her.

The next day, I had an appointment with an intuitive grief counselor who claimed my dog was “here” and talking to her. It was too much. I both didn’t believe her and was jealous. I started drinking again. Time disappeared into a rolling fog as I punched my own legs and screamed in my apartment. Sunday morning, I got a notification: his ashes were being shipped.

I ordered another tank of nitrous, the biggest one they have. I climbed into bed, holding it like a missile, and did it until it was done. At one point, I sharted and just continued lying there until the tank ran dry.

I would never let my dog sit in his own mess for even a minute, and he’d been incontinent for over a year. I cleaned his tiny butt with aloe every single day, changed his sweaters the second they got a drop of pee on them. But here I was, right back into the life I thought I deserved before I got him.

That was my moment of defeat. This grief was too big. This hole was so big that no amount of alcohol would ever fill it. And it wasn’t filling it. It was keeping me in all the loss and emptiness, while disconnecting me from the love we shared, from the connection, from the memories that turn the bitter into bittersweet.

Monday was hard, but my best friend came over to sit with me in the evening. The being that tethered me to the earth was gone and somehow I had become the ghost. I knew this called for more than what I could achieve on my own. I was gonna need the cult for this one. I don’t know in what capacity, if I’ll get a sponsor, or whether I’ll work the steps again.

I know I’m going to do what I need to do for myself to stay sober, no matter what anyone in the room thinks or says. It’s not about them anymore.

Tuesday, his ashes arrived, and along with them, the first glimpses of his presence, of the love and connection that we’d shared, mixing into the grief. I put them in the closet with his blanket and second-favorite sweater. The first, I’d sent him to be cremated in—he’d gotten so skinny, and I never wanted him to feel embarrassed about it. At his healthiest, he was 8.7 pounds. Five weeks before he died, he was 4.1. It was unbelievably hard, but I didn’t drink over it.

Wednesday, I left the house for the first time in nine days. I started reading a book on Internal Family Systems called No Bad Parts. In it, a man says one of his parts wants to go to Burning Man, so I was like, okay, maybe one bad part. But I saw the part of me that wanted to drink as a protector of another part of me that was little and in more pain than she could manage. During a massage that night, I found that small child inside of me and comforted her. I realized that all my parts were grieving Nico. He was the one thing all fibers of my being agreed on. Maybe he didn’t need me to be okay to be okay anymore, but I needed me to be okay. For the first time, that felt like enough.

I went on our neighborhood walk without him, and I started to feel love breaking through my pain, like the first Snowdrops of March pushing through the ice in Bavaria. I saw a corner he’d run around, the movie playing in my brain, and smiled along with the tears. I shared about my grief in the Autistic AA meeting. I rehired my therapist. I began to feel that I could handle all my pain.

I feel shredded, ripped apart, the original definition of crazy. But I also feel the love we shared. I am fixated on turning on myself, trying to go through the math that would add up to: if I had been perfect, my dog wouldn’t have had to die. But without the fog of drugs and alcohol, I know it’s a lie now, another attempt to not have to face my grief directly. Without the alcohol, I am able to challenge the voice that wants it to be all my fault.

I know that the only way out is through, and I have to believe I’ll learn to live with this, learn to carry it more lightly. Yesterday I walked five miles and talked to four friends on the phone for five hours total, but I didn’t drink.

Every day now, I feel closer to my boy, even as the reality sets in harder and harder. I’ll never hold him again. Nothing on earth could have prepared me for that, not the terminal diagnosis two years ago, not the two more terminal diagnoses two months ago, not even watching his eyes change in my arms as the doctor announced, “He’s gone.”

A reservation isn’t really a plan; it’s more of a lack of one. I couldn’t navigate this while drinking, even when it felt like it was the only way I was surviving. If you have a reservation, that’s okay. It’s just a story we tell ourselves. It’s not a contract or obligation. You can choose differently. Whatever you’re telling yourself will be the thing that you absolutely can’t get through without drinking is just a lie that protects the part of you that wants to protect you with oblivion.

We don’t get endless chances, says the girl with a thousand white chips.

I don’t have to drink because the being that taught me I was worth loving is gone. Instead, I can not drink to honor that love, but mostly I can not drink because it’s the only way through.

I was so scared that when Nico died, everything good in the world would go with him. That’s not true today, but that is exactly how I felt drunk.

I didn’t share in the meeting, stand up for sex work and Adderall, diagnose the speaker to her face. But I stayed until the end.

No reservations.

I got a job working the counter, which turned into waitressing when they opened the dining room. When I got a gig writing one $50 column a week for the New Haven Advocate, I stopped going.

This didn’t stop me, however, from getting drunk with the pizza thrower and sitting my bare ass on the place where the pizzas were made one night to have sex. I kept getting takeout, and once I passed out on the bench while waiting.

Ballo Italian, Mohegan Sun Casino, 2013

I told everyone during training that I didn’t drink — and hadn’t in five months.

At the first employee wine tasting, I made eye contact with the other sober person during the whites and was buzzed by the reds.

I pulled up outside the converted schoolhouse I was living in to meet another comic—I was producing a show in New London that night. My most unhinged self was back.

I worked there 4-6 weeks, again making more cash than I felt comfortable with. I ran to Sephora to unload it. Another waiter befriended me, a photographer. He wanted to do a shoot. During college and unemployment, I occasionally nude modeled for drawing classes, it being a bummer for everyone when I came in bloated from drinking, making everything they had already drawn seem off.

That never happened, the shoot, but he texted me often despite his wife and new bab,y and one day invited me hiking when we both had the day off.

The night before, I had a few drinks after my shift, which was not encouraged. We weren’t even allowed to use the bathroom in the restaurant. Instead, we had to tell the host we needed to go so she wouldn’t seat us, then walk through a series of hallways behind the restaurant, at least half a mile to the casino employee bathroom, stopping on the way back to smoke out the back door. We weren’t supposed to smoke on shift.

I posted a picture of our hike and tagged him on Instagram. His wife saw it. He got in trouble for lying and saying he was hiking alone. He may have even brought their baby.

To get rid of me, he told the managers that I was drunk and disorderly at the end of my shift. I think the worst thing I did was sit on my foot on the stool. I didn’t find out that he was the one who got me fired for years.

I was home alone in my room, the principal’s office, when I began getting notifications. One by one, all my shifts went away. Then the phone rang. Both managers were on the line.

This was the first time I had lost a job while paying my own rent, and I knew I hadn’t worked there long enough to be eligible for unemployment. It felt like the panic and despair were going to kill me.

Instead, I had a pregnancy scare and tried heroin.

Azu, Mystic, CT, 2013

They were looking for someone who would work breakfast, a shift the owner insisted we write out checks by hand for, so she could pocket the profits. Some days, that summer, I worked open to close, sometimes sixteen hours straight. When I came in hungover, I downed mini bottles of Tabasco to sweat the poison out. When I made mistakes, I blamed it on being out of Adderall.

A few months later, I put on a comedy show on Bank Street. The next morning I had both work and the drug and alcohol interview for my DUI.

A girl I knew came to the show. Her name wasn’t Amy Lobster Roll, but close. She wanted coke. I went down the street, picking up acid too. She lived with her boyfriend above a bar. She had MS and all the fun prescriptions: Ambien, Percocet, Xanax. I took them all after they went to sleep.

In the dark, I found purple red hair dye and slopped it on.

My boss told me that if I didn’t come in, I was fired. I skipped my drug and alcohol interview.

I didn’t have a car, but I had clothes. I got a ride with some guy who wanted to fuck me. I walked into work, seven substances in my veins and an XXL energy drink (the screw cap kind) filled with vodka. I took one order before being ordered to leave OUT THE BACK DOOR.

I cried so hard I lost a contact lens.

I went back to Amy’s, back and forth to the drug dealers. When her bf accused me of being on heroin, I collected my sheets and left. I walked down Bank Street that morning still in my work uniform from days before, one hand over the eye I couldn’t see out of, sheets under an arm. I looked just like my mother.

A guy I knew who lived on that street bought me a sandwich. I hated the way he looked at me while I waited for a ride. I called a boyfriend from college. He told me that he wished we had stayed together, so I didn’t end up like this.

The next day, I invited a high school boyfriend to visit. He said the same thing.

I felt so ashamed that I thought someone at the bar had drugged my drink. I told the restaurant owner this. He never let me produce a show there again. Technically, I got fired from two restaurants in less than 24 hours. When I tried to apply for unemployment, my boss vehemently opposed it during a conference call. The unemployment lady kept saying, “Girls! Girls!” while we argued, like a scene from The Parent Trap with Hayley Mills.

Slyce Pizza, New London, CT, 2014

The sign on the fridge said “No talking personal story at work.” I got fired for drinking on the job, which I didn’t do. I did smoke weed and cigarettes as I delivered pizza. I did routinely point out the tip line, whether I was delivering to public housing or not. And I regularly forgot to take the big magnetic sign off the top of my car, waking up the next morning to look out my bedroom window and see it. I got fired the day after I moved back to New London. They’d just hired a second cashier / delivery girl. She wanted it more than I did.

Old Lyme Country Club, Old Lyme, CT, 2014

I grew up going to a country club. As an adult, I got fired from one.

I got a few warnings - once after telling an old lady who required the milk for her coffee, warmed but not too warm that I had tested it on my wrist.

My skills as a waitress were volume, sales, and personality. These neither applied nor appealed here. Even the dishwasher was white. There had been a black piano player once, but too many members complained.

On the Fourth of July weekend, there was a huge BBQ. All hands on deck.

I had a show the night before, where I ran into an acquaintance who sold coke. I bombed. I found him. Later at his apartment, he wouldn’t stop talking about being my manager while trying to fuck me.

I called out the next morning and left his place with a doggie bag of blow.

I got home and let my dog out, the guilt compounding my misery. An ex came over, trying to get me to go to a party at an ex-friend’s house, saying that she said it was okay.

I couldn’t get out of bed, and lay there crying, raging against anyone.

It appeared I had gotten away with it until I told on myself to the dishwasher, whom I thought was my friend. He said someone else. I was called into the office and fired.

Joker’s Wild Comedy Club, New Haven, CT, 2014

I took a job in the afternoons, calling people and telling them they had won free tickets to a comedy show. Soon, I waitressed there too. This was the worst of all my waitressing jobs. I couldn’t engage with the customers at all, and I hated waiting on open-mic comedians. I felt like a ball boy at a tennis match. I got in trouble on my lunch break for offering people at a pub free tickets to comics in exchange for drinks.

One night, the producer told me I could do a spot on the late show, but the bartender said he didn’t know whether he needed me to work. It was only a two-manson s,how, and they needed to know whether I was performing before the host hit the stage. I got cut as soon as he did.

On the next shift, I was locked in the ticket booth “as a joke.” The following week, I was told my slip numbers didn’t add up. We added things by hand, like at breakfast in Mystic, so they could do what they wanted to the numbers. In their defense, I noticed that night that I had made more money than usual and elected to say nothing.

I went on to work there as a comic after that. A few years later, the club shut down. I was lucky to work there once the owner was already sick, and the biker gangs that were part of his branch of organized crime no longer came around. The waitresses who went to drink with them? Nobody ever saw again.

Forager’s Table, Chelsea, 2015-2016

What follows is the account of my penultimate waitressing job, but my final firing. Okay, yes, I did manage to get fired from hosting trivia on Zoom after quitting, and from volunteering for AA at the LA Central Office, but this was my final restaurant firing.

I will start by saying that I loved it. I loved the pre-shift meal, the cheese plates, and how a chef explained the specials before we jousted with forks. I loved that it was in Chelsea, where none of the men I waited on ever hit on me. I loved the uniform: soft flannel and jeans, with a long black apron.

Once, when a large, pushy, young group of wealthy tourists asked me what I thought they would like, I said, “For your parents to put less pressure on you.”

Had it not had an open kitchen, I might still be there now.

The chef’s hateful gaze would follow me as I moved about the dining room. It became an ego battle, which I lost. He was written up in the New York Times. I was written up for insubordination.

Besides my mercurial attitude, I liked the food too much. Like at every previous restaurant, I was taught something shady by a coworker and took it too far. In this case, it was being salty with customers and eating off their unfinished plates in the dish pit.

Sometimes I would clear their plates early, even though we had a busboy, so that I could finish their cheese or deviled eggs.

I made up for it in wine sales, wine which I sometimes finished on the walk to the dish pit.

On New Year’s Eve, I had a large party of rich kids who appeared to be using cocaine for the first time. It was a prix fixe meal, and I was the last server. While they took turns using the bathroom and melting down at each other, I cleaned their plates into takeout containers.

One girl asked about our gluten-free & vegan options, then ordered truffle pasta in cream sauce with a poached egg on top. When she went into the night to cry over a guy at the table, I ate her food.

I didn’t even bring out all their desserts, but went straight to the dish pit with two cocoa meringues.

One day, a couple came in for brunch one minute before it ended. I needed to leave during the break between shifts. I was trying to smoke less weed, so I’d left mine back in Queens. And now I had to meet my homeless Russian weed dealer, Rodney, in under an hour. I am not great at hiding my emotions via tone or face. When they asked my name, I knew it wasn’t good. The following week, some kids who used to work at the restaurant came in hoping for comps. They were loud and entitled and rumored not to tip. They were also friends with chef.

They sat at a high top that was either mine or the bartender’s, depending on how busy we were. She said she had it from there, but they wanted MY attention, and tried to get it several times as I walked straight by.

I knew chef was mad at me after that, so I bought a new flannel in his favorite color, red. I got fired while holding the bag it came in.

I was, however, able to collect unemployment.

I thought that would be the last restaurant I ever worked in. I left a trail of negative Yelp reviews following me across the eastern seaboard, like, “everything we asked for seemed like an imposition to her,” and “really shitty attitude.”

And then there is this story, the longest, and perhaps shittiest, review of my waitressing career of all.

Share The Loudest Girl in the Corner

Serving On The Spectrum

The following is not a history of every job I have ever had, every job I’ve been fired from, or even every restaurant job I’ve ever had. It’s the restaurant firings I recall and care to share. The stories that didn’t get their own essay but are still bouncing around in my head, wanting to be told. That is what I have set down here. Vignettes of regret & vinaigrette.

Elaine’s Pizza, Windsor, CT, 1998-1998

The second day I dropped hot soup on an old man’s lap. When it was slow I made pizza boxes in a booth in back. That summer my mom went to the beach while I stayed to work. I had a car now. I kept my money in a shoebox and didn’t know what to do with until I started buying Tommy Hilfiger overalls and Nas CD’s. And weed. Lots of weed. My boyfriend more or less moved in.

I started to feel tired and extra sun sensitive. During my shift I craved French fries and a tuna club sandwich with black olives, and when I finally sat down to it, I’d vom. Back in my mom’s kitchen I took two tests, called Planned Parenthood, and then, my boyfriend.

“Are you sure it’s mine?”

“I trusted you to stay by yourself and you go and get pregnant! You’re grounded and living at the beach for the rest of the summer. You’re out of control.”

“But mom! What about my job?”

“You’re going to have to quit. “

I went to Elaine.

“Oh! How wonderful! Baby!”

“No, not wonderful. I am not going to keep it. My mom is making me move to the beach for the rest of the summer. I need time off.”

“NO! You’re not gonna kill it!”

“Yeah no. I’m gonna.”

The time off thing wasn’t cool with Elaine either. She and my mom fought on the phone over whether or not I should be allowed to stay up there the rest of the summer.

It didn’t make sense to me. What could I do now that was worse?

By the end of their call, I no longer had a job. Basically she fired my mom.

Friendly’s, Windsor Locks, CT, 1998-1999

My first chain restaurant, though only a few links remain. I wrote a poem about it later. I was often insanely stoned. I would take an order, and, while I was putting the food in, become distracted. They wanted a Vanilla Coke? I wanted a Vanilla Coke, which I would make then take to the break area to smoke. When I heard the ding! That meant food was up in the window I’d return to the present. My tables got their food before drinks a lot. Nobody ever ding!ed me for those.

An older waitress looked at me while wiping down a booth.

“Go to college. You don’t want to be still doing this in 40 years.”

I did go to college. For Poetry, mostly.

The uniform included a tie. I buttoned a scrunchie into the collar of my wrinkled shirt instead.

Once when I came in to pick up my check on a day off and make a sundae, the assistant manager waved off my attempt to pay.

Weeks or months later, I was taking a blunt ride with a friend when we drove by.

“I need my paycheck! And I’m gonna get us a free sundae!”

I made a sundae, and sailed out the door, totally confused that free sundae once did not mean free sundae every time.

I was suspended for a week. When I came back to check the schedule, I wasn’t on it.

“When we took your sloppy appearance, frequent smoke breaks, and everything else into consideration, we decided not to keep you.”

Husky Blues, Storrs, CT 2001

I sold sour apple schnapps out of plastic shot glasses. I bought the bottle from the bar, & was trained to underpour, ensuring I’d make money when people didn’t tip.

The other shot girl did the job better with only one leg, a fact I only found out because we lived in the same dorm, which felt unfair to her. Looking back I’m jealous; at least she knew what she was missing.

One night someone stole my peacoat. The creepier of the owners offered to replace it if I went on a date with him. He had a face like a Siamese cat and a voice that left a greasy residue, like a mouse rubbing against the wall on the way to the kitchen.

One night in March snow he yelled at me because I told a coworker about the coat date. I drank.

When the lights came on I was dancing on the stage. Security grabbed me by the arm, pulling me down through the crowd.

“You’re fired!”

I never got the coat.

Someone drove me to the strip club near the highway, Electric Blue. I stood outside in the snow, waiting to buy weed. Next thing I knew I was back in my dorm room leaving a very long voice message for my roommate which she occasionally played at parties for the rest of the time we lived together.

John Harvard’s, Manchester, CT 2002

My hiring manager said, “You’re either going to be the best employee ever or the hardest person I ever have to fire.”

He was fired first.

I partied with my coworkers after work, because these were real people, real restaurant people, and not college kids.

One night I partied alone with a coworker, cocaine transitioning to ecstasy we were sure we could fall asleep on. He had been part of an earlier group sex experience. He asked me to rub his scalp and I couldn’t. I felt guilty which made it harder to fall asleep and suddenly it was an hour after my shift started. I called, still high, and was told not to come in.

When I arrived for my next shift, I was fired. The assistant manager, Kimmy, got inches from my face to tell me.

Little Mark’s Big BBQ, Vernon, CT 2002-2003

The song “Dominick the Donkey” played on a loop from November to January and is still stuck in my head. One night in January snow I went out back to call my coke dealer, so he would be at our meeting place by my exit on I-84 by the time I did my sidework and got out. I left my cigarette pack inside, which had weed in it, and I walked back in to get fired for bringing drugs into their restaurant. A year later I went to pick up takeout, bringing my cat inside with me.

Harbor Park, Middletown, CT, 2003

I stayed in my college apartment after graduation and worked on the Connecticut River.

All summer I tip toed through, crowds bumming blow.

Everyone went back to school in September and I stayed on in the slower nights with a skeleton crew. It was one of those places where we never carried change, and never gave change back under a dollar.

One night I was waiting on an older couple who were probably my age now, and when I returned the change, minus 30 cents, he yelled at me how I rude it was to assume he was going to tip me.

My manager told me I needed to give him a dollar or I was fired. I threw my apron on the ground and walked out. They called the next week asking for me to come back. What a victory.

Some Sports Bar, Newington, CT, 2004

The night before my trial shift I went out with a friend. During our first Appletini a guy pointed out money on the floor. I picked it up and returned to my drink. The guy lurked. Things blurred in the dark until the lights came on. My friend, quiet as I am loud, sat in the doorway of the bar shouting. She didn’t want to leave, and nobody could make her.

In the parking garage we argued about who was sober enough to drive. She won, driving us straight into a concrete post. I forced my way into the drivers seat. The next morning I woke up an hour after I was supposed to be at the bar still delirious. I dragged myself through the day shift.

I was a little overwhelmed because of the roofie and my lack of experience but it went smoothly enough. They didn’t have me back because they said the drawer was short.

I continued to drink and do coke there and was eventually told I didn’t get the job because the owner “didn’t like people who did drugs.”

Some Bar Attached to a Strip Club on the Berlin Turnpike, CT, 2004

I tried to bartend at another place I occasionally drank at and worked exactly one trial shift before I was told I wasn’t going to be hired. Was I hungover? Yes. Did I drink on the job? I think so? Did I feel they made a very unfair decision? Definitely. They did, however, lead me over to the strip club side of the building during my shift and make a sales pitch. I faced my options and married the next man I met.

Miami Design District, 2008

It felt good to be back. The first day someone said Percocet. Everyone was stoned. Line cooks cracked coronas out of sight and swigged them with their back to the dining room. The manager did lines in his office. That night I went out with the crew, getting so drunk people followed me out to point which way was home.

My husband and I got back together. It felt temporary. I’d already made plans to go to a party on South Beach and have sex with my Twitter crush. I drove a friend who lived near me in Miami Shores to the party, then immediately drank four bottles of champagne. After I had sex with the guy in my car on a side street near my old apartment, I forgot about my friend. I lost control of the car on the causeway from Miami Beach to Miami and skidded across six lanes of traffic and back. The passenger side smashed and bounced into the guardrail. If I had my friend with me, not only would he have been injured, but his weight [significant] could have tipped us into the bay Even now it seems to be a mile below. I regained control of the wheel just in time to get onto 95 North. I met my dealer at 7-11 near my house and got high in the parking lot before assessing the damage. The entire passenger side was smashed in. I went home and hid the blow in the little cotton pouch in my panties. My husband kept accusing me of being up because I had coke and wasn’t sharing. I kept insisting I was up because I might have a concussion.

I was positive this was a failsafe reason to call out of work but when I did so the next morning I was told that unless I provided a doctor’s note I was fired. Richy had lost his job by now and our insurance had lapsed, and anyway, the last thing I could handle was driving to and sitting in an ER all day. I probably could have gotten addicted to OxyContin, considering the place and time.

A missed opportunity to find out I had MCAS back then.

“I never rat out my friends,” said Dan, the new camp director. Under the previous directors’ watch, or lack of, everything went. Dan and his wife Marcy were young and had something to prove. In this moment, it was that they could kick me out.

Mataponi was a traditional Jew-ish sleep away camp. Every Friday, we blew a fuse as my entire cabin straightened their hair before dinner. We played tennis and broke into the arts and crafts cabin to cover ourselves in glitter. We had color war and begged our counselors to buy us cigarettes. We sang around the campfire and once smoked a joint full of pine needles because we heard that Billy Joel did. That summer was our last. We were heading into high school. The girls who lived in wealthy Jewish enclaves near big cities — Bryn Mawr, PA & Cherry Hill, NJ were growing up faster than the rest of us. The previous summer they’d introduced us to R. Kelly. This summer, we learnt they don’t see nothing wrong with a little shop & lift.

It took me years to realize that he couldn’t have sent home the entire senior group. I stole — on a camp outing to Old Orchard Beach I’d waited all summer for — from a store where they followed you around, waiting for you to steal. I stole something hideous —black satin board shorts with an orange stripe down the side—that I had enough money to pay for in my pocket. They weren’t just hideous in retrospect. It was the nineties & I didn’t even like them then. But I shoved them under my jean jacket anyway. As I stepped on the street fear gripped my tummy. I ran to Starbucks & stuffed them in a garbage can.

“Michelle is looking for you!” two cabin mates chirped as I turned around. Michelle was our unit head. A sales associate found the empty hanger I left in the dressing room, like an idiot or a girl who wanted to get in trouble. Every thing that had gone wrong that summer was attributed to me now as I sat in Dan’s office. What a relief! The pot smoking that happened in lower camp, the soda tabs in the soda machine, the late night mess hall raids. I wish Dan hadn’t told me that not even they believed it. Because my parents certainly did.

My mother’s station wagon pulled away with me crying inside as the production of Wizard of Oz began in which I was to play Uncle Henry. There was no place I wanted to be less than home.

The next summer, my mother sent me to Outward Bound, hoping it would make me into a different person.

Outward Bound was further into Maine than camp. I was to spend twenty-eight days canoeing, rock climbing, and hiking in the North Woods.

My mother drove me to base, where I met the rest of the group. I had a crush on John; Maeve became my best friend; and Michael knew everything about camping, so I named him Tough Guy and let him put up my tent all summer. The two guides were both strawberry blond, one tall and thin and one short and fat. They are peripheral to the story because I didn’t respect them. I am peripheral to the story because I didn’t respect myself.

They charted a course they called Thoreau’s Playground. Sometimes we canoed 20 miles a day. There is one more group member whose name I can’t remember. She floats outside the focus of my memory like a shadow. Some days we portaged, carrying packs on our backs and our fronts, like I do now when I travel the world alone. The canoes sat heavy on our heads.

I loved Maeve instantly. I found her on Facebook drafting this, hoping to rekindle the friendship, knowing that you can’t ever reclaim anything. The Maeve I wrote to responded saying, “Yes, I went to Outward Bound, like 22 years ago!” I asked her what she remembered, and she didn’t respond to that.

Most people treat the past like they owe it money. They say, Oh, that was a long time ago, and put their hands in their pocket. Yeah, they mumble. You aren’t getting it back.

At night John & I laid under bright stars, talking.

He was the first person to say that I was pretty without makeup. I drew thick circles around my eyes the moment I turned twelve. I looked like a raccoon who would suck your dick for garbage.

We were supposed to switch our tent and canoe mates every few days. But we didn’t. One day, they insisted, “Today you have to switch canoes!”

Maeve and I sat on the beach in our canoe, half in the water, arms folded. “If we don’t leave, which we won’t if we don’t switch, we won’t get to where we need to be tonight, which means we’re off schedule for our next food drop. So is switching more important than our next food drop?”

It was the closest I could get to standing up to my father, the litigator. We sat and sat. A maxi pad floated by. No one would claim it. The boys yelled. Amanda, a sheltered Jew from Jersey (the girl previously only in the shadows of my memory emerges as I pull this thread, this being where my memory stored her, what it attached her to), shrieked.

It was hers. Obviously. I rested my case.

We set off, a brutal sixteen miles to the next campsite. We flew that day, clean air, open water & victory. Arms burning, we arrived at camp fifteen minutes ahead. I had matches from the kitchen pack that I’d volunteered our canoe to haul. I rooted around in the fire pits for cigarette butts. I found a few decent ones, sat down, lit one up, and inhaled.

I paddled like an Olympian after that.

As part of the TTI (Troubled Teen Industry) curriculum, we went solo for three days, sleeping at individual campsites a half mile from each other.

Noel was just across the stream. He’d last been to Utah after being kidnapped in the middle of the night, a state used to abusing people with domination and terrain. I could see him. It’s weird how adult we look in memories, as adult as we thought we were at the time. I wandered around in a pair of stringy black panties. Noel could see me and later said he thought the panties were a very large bush. I didn’t mind. He saw. He thought. I continued to exist.

The second day, I made friends with a squirrel by giving him my Newtons. I ate every peanut and chocolate chip in the small bag of GORP I’d been abandoned with. I hate raisins, and as a baby I would shove them up my nose the minute you turned your back if you tried to make me eat them. They were all I had left now. It didn’t occur to me the squirrel might want them.

By late afternoon, I was over it. I started crying, my wails echoing across the river/stream like Hylas. I was loud enough that the guides heard me and canoed over, giving me extra raisins & possibly a few pretzels. I journaled or slept the final day, broken as intended.

I’d never been so happy to see a group of people in my life. We had a big dinner that night, after a mail & food drop. I got a letter. My boyfriend had a new girlfriend. I walked away from the group into the sun, found someone’s camper van & popped zits in the side mirror. With every explosion, he got further away. Maeve reported being given a book when checked on. I told her about the pretzels. We agreed that we both needed books & pretzels from the outset & shouldn’t have had to scream for them. But it was the nineties. You were still allowed to be mean to kids then.

The next day, portaging over ruts, rock and sand, I slipped. One moment I was there, the next, all Maeve could see was a canoe on the ground.

Halfway through, it was time for the guides to let us navigate. We were reluctant to attempt to understand it, and therefore were terrible at it. It took me decades to accept that allowing yourself to be terrible is how you learn.

They warned us the first day that the biodegradable soap we had would cause diarrhea if it got in your mouth, setting it up so that it could be my fault the day I shit seventeen times. Sure, Molly, I didn’t rinse my hands well enough in the river. That’ll fix it! I sat on a pack in the middle of a canoe while two others rowed that day. Every time I needed to go, I had to ask them to pull over, then scramble deep enough into the woods so they couldn’t hear my ass sploding.

Back in my canoe with Maeve, we sang about it. “Every tan, soft poo, makes me think of you, every wet shoe, every heavy canoe I’m at Outward Bound.” Biggie Smalls had just died and Puff Daddy was on top of the world with grief.

A few days later, we portaged through moss covered boulders in a noon dark forest. I slipped again, my leg shooting between two rocks. Briefly, I was stuck. Forever, I was done with the fucking canoes. Everyone else was sick of them too. Molly went to a radio tower for the signal that would allow her to ask someone from base camp to come pick them up. That pissed us off more. All the days spent carrying canoes on adolescent heads, across chunky sand in August sun, and you could always just walk to a radio tower and get RID OF THEM?! It had been days since our course charted through unavoidable waterway.

Before she walked off, she asked what if we hit water that was too deep to wade through? What if, Molly? Like you don’t know? The next thing I remember was walking through chest deep water with a garbage bag over my pack, which worked. Throwing things in the garbage usually works.

I saw the Northern Lights on a tiny island crisscrossed with tree roots. The roots held the land in place and wooden platforms provided a smooth spot for Tough Guy to set up Maeve & I’d tent. That’s how my entire adolescence was. All this shame, fear, circumstance, and dragging things around, opening into liminal moments of peace and beauty.

We arrived at the base camp for Katahdin. There was a caravan of people following Phish in the parking lot for our campsite.

Subscribe now

Every day before this, one thing moved me forward: if I didn’t row, portage, or hike, I wouldn’t make it to the next camp. This was our last camp.

“Fuck this,” I said. “I’m not climbing Katahdin.” I would sunbathe nude and without supervision and get beers from the hippies. I would smoke cigarettes in the open and relax. I did not have to climb Katahdin—and nobody could make me.

For what? A whole day up and a whole day back? The air would thin and we would sleep in the coffin of a bug bivy. So that one day adult me could say that I did?

I thought I’d be fifteen forever.

Earlier in the trip, we climbed Jockey’s Cap, Maine’s biggest boulder. I forgot to secure my carabiner when I climbed the rock face, and at the top I realized that if I had slipped once, I would have fallen all the way down. So much of what I would do after was just like that. We slept that night in the open air on top of the boulder. I slept next to John and had trouble falling asleep and worried about rolling off the mountain or onto him, but when I woke up in the morning, it was beautiful.

I grab onto the thread of the memory, and more and more and more comes, like when I sit down to journal my dreams remembering only one thing and the unspooling from that fills a page.

My friends didn’t want to hike Katahdin either, and in the end, one guide took two girls, and the other stayed back with the rest of us, and I didn’t get drunk and I didn’t get naked. I don’t think Tough Guy went with them. I wish I remembered his real name. I would add him on Facebook right now and ask him.

I guess it doesn’t really matter. I don’t remember much else from those few days. Had I hiked Katahdin? That I would remember.

The van came for us, and we went back to our promised shower, which turned out to be an icy garden hose and a large garbage can. At the farewell dinner, the guides made speeches, and introduced the golden feather, a tiny charm that they would or would not be offering to us based on how much we embodied the spirit of Outward Bound, or whatever. Two people had left in the first week, and everyone thought I would be one of them, but I wasn’t. Someone brought that up. We made speeches to each other about how much we had grown and learnt. I counted and saw that there were enough feathers on the table for everyone.

When it was my turn to hear about me they said, “Your energy drove the group, but you complained a lot. What’s the point of complaining if you’re going to do it anyway? For this reason, we are not offering you a feather.”

“I did not do it anyway,” I said. “I did not hike Katahdin, and I was done with the canoes when I was done with them. And I am never going to see either of you again.”

I reached across the table and took the feather, holding onto it for so long it hurt my fingers.

Are You Happy Now?

I was sixteen, in front of a mirror putting on lipstick in Paris, when I heard my mother mourn, “I knew my daughter would be beautiful, but why did you have to be this beautiful?”

I locked that scene so deep inside of my consciousness that my response didn’t emerge for fifteen years, when I had a vision of myself having picked my skin into a moon-cratered surface, standing at a mirror bleeding, turning around to ask, “Are you happy now, mom?”

Last year, I met someone who acted like every move I made was proof that I thought I was better than them. This is not new to me, but the way I processed it is. I used to have a system. First, I would gaslight myself, then blame myself, then blame the situation or communication. None of it worked, which is why it’s cool that this time I had a new idea–maybe she was negatively interpreting me because of the way I look, an idea I was afraid to even think. “Who do you think you are?” my inner bully demanded.

Oh Yeah, You’re Hot

I made a new friend at a party, I thought.

We had the same name, lived on the same street, and are both Jewish and late-diagnosed AuDHD. A combination of compatibility and synchronicity my Angeleno ass very much liked. I invited her over to swim in my pool and smoke weed the following weekend.

We went to Halloween on Santa Monica Blvd the next time we hung out. That’s when the trouble began. I got too stoned and started babbling– an old trauma response when someone ignores me. I was trying to humanize myself like I had to as a child, a strategy that hasn’t worked since and one I only recognize in hindsight. She didn’t engage with anything I said, just grew distant until I stopped.

She then started talking about what she wanted to talk about. She puts a theater-kid-level effort into her costume each year. I said that was cool, adding, in what I thought was a self-deprecating way, that I made one costume five years ago and have just kept wearing it for both Pride AND Halloween events.

“Oh yeah,” she said, voice dripping with disdain, “you’re hot.”

I didn’t see what that had to do with it–the reasons I keep wearing my mermaid bra are the two most autistic reasons on earth–one, I prefer to do a same thing that I know works and two, I don’t really get invited to parties. It took me an entire DAY to make that mermaid bra, during which I nearly threw my laptop into the pool before learning that fabric glue doesn’t actually glue things to fabric (they should have called it fabric edge-sealing glue!) and that crafting is supposed to be fun.

When I took stock of the reasons I thought she’d want to be friends, this never occurred as a reason why she wouldn’t–she lives in a body that’s a lot larger than LA standards, and is plain.

I guess looks are like money; you’re oblivious to the idea that it could be an issue when you have plenty of it.

My wallet got stolen from my purse at the parade, and she showed no concern, but I wrote it off as autistic affect plus stoned behavior. After that, we Ubered to a neighborhood spot, where someone across the bar complimented my same-old costume. “See, mermaid always works!” I said. Meanwhile, no one had tried to guess her costume all night.

When we were paying, I suggested we split it because I had had two drinks and she had one ( I drank that night, another indicator that I am straight up not having a good time). I was doing math backwards–in my head, this meant I was paying more than my fair share. Her mood got icier. When I realized later, I texted to explain and offered to Venmo her.

There was some talk in a group text about a craft fair a few weeks later. Only four of us wanted to go. Someone suggested that the people who live on the east side go to one over there, and we go to one closer to where we live. I got the sense that she felt stuck in the B-roll of the movie.

The day we were figuring out logistics, I mentioned that there was also a craft fair in Ojai that day. I’d seen the flyer on Instagram like three seconds earlier; Ojai is a special interest.

She stopped responding. On the day I texted again, asking if we could leave thirty minutes later than planned. She said that she couldn’t. She needed to update her diabetes app that afternoon.

Thank You For Saying That

She was misreading every move I made through a negative overlay. But why? Was I just overthinking and showing my own weak theory of mind through my own trauma lens? A few days later, I texted to apologize for bringing up Ojai, as it was selfish. I didn’t think that, but I was trying to see if I was right.

“Thank you for saying that,” she responded. What? My self-protective anger finally kicked in. How dare she? Someone who gave me even a splinter of the benefit of the doubt would have at least asked me WHY I was bringing it up, ignored it like my real friends do when I say things that are, as my high school English teacher used to say, “apropos of nothing,” or said something like, “I prefer to stick to the original plan.”

I didn’t want to continue down a false path of self-flagellation, so I texted that I say weird things sometimes, and would probably keep doing so; it was just how I was. I was trying to communicate that I’m not perfect, and I would probably make this mistake again.

She seemed to read it as, “I’ll say whatever I want, yeah? I’m hot.” I never heard from her again.

Cake and Calculations

The next time I saw her was at a party six months later, where we made summer bucket lists. She went out of her way to ignore me, even turning around with an exaggerated flounce to face the wall (like a cat would) when I said goodbye to her by name.

Before this, I thought maybe she misunderstood a few things and becoming buds was off, that it just wasn’t a good fit. Now I was seeing she felt strongly enough to disrespect me in front of others.

There was another summer bucket list party where we went over what we had actually done from our lists a few months later. I decided to order a cake for my girl who had just gotten a new job. I asked the other women going if they wanted to chip in because I am trying to break my pattern of overdoing to earn inclusion. People sent me enough cash that I would have spent less than everyone else, so I sent a few dollars back to the girls who had sent more than others, including her. She may not like me, but she does like cake. I’d processed it by now and had even gone to our mutual friend, not to triangulate, but for the part of me that kept gaslighting myself about it. She was just sorry that happened to me, which somehow made me feel worse. I wondered how the not-friend would find a way to make me giving her three dollars back into more evidence that I was a bitch.

When I joked that I had a new boundary for online dating and it was just “no uggos,” the lesbian in the group quietly asked if I thought she was an uggo. The autistic experience of making it to perimenopause, still not understanding the impact your face has on other people.

When the girl who doesn’t like me arrived, she said hi and sat down next to me. I cautiously offered her a thin tube of bubbles, a thing I picked up when I put down my nicotine vape. She took it. Then she thanked me for getting the cake. When we were going around sharing what we had done off our bucket lists, she shared something that wasn’t on her original bucket list: she needed to work on not being mean to people, because she’s autistic and not good at understanding why people say things or what they are thinking.

She even invited me to a party the next week and was really clear that I was specifically welcome to come. I accepted, curious to see if her therapy breakthrough was an in-theory or in-practice realization.

Cat Party

I went, bringing my beautiful best friend, who happens to be trans and therefore no stranger to having to perform for acceptance. The party was just three women standing around a cat in a kitchen, like if a Cathy cartoon wasn’t funny.

Within fifteen minutes of our arrival, she went home. We were left standing there looking at the two strangers that remained, and decided to leave ourselves.

“I feel like we’re going to get in trouble for leaving,” I whispered as we walked out.

“Look, we just left because we think we’re too hot to be there,” she joked.

It Doesn’t Get Better

In the end, it’s like what Joan Rivers once said: “Listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better. But, it doesn’t get better. You get better.”

I’ve learned to stop trying to control other people’s opinions of me, and simply back away from those who need to see me negatively, for what are always their own reasons.

Yesterday, someone commented on my Autism/Alcoholism piece to point out that (as someone always does from the cult), AA DOES WORK for autistic people, they’re living proof. Okay, I thought, but only because you aren’t perceived as a threat.

Later, I was watching the new HBO MAX series I Love LA when I remembered the creator/main character was big on Twitter and thought, “Must be nice to be the exact level of attractive that gets people to want to make your shows!”

I see your “must be nice to have pretty privilege to ease the autism,” and I raise you a “must be nice to be allowed to exist while autistic without someone making you into a Disney villain over it!”

This was the story that made me aware of the larger story at play here, that it is extremely challenging to be a particular kind of pretty (sexy) while being a certain kind of autistic (hyperverbal).

This includes, but is not limited to, the fact that I know I am not supposed to talk about it, partially because ‘try being ugly hahaha’ & ‘you’re not that cute, you whore’ are always waiting like wraiths around the corner. In fact, the fear and self-doubt I have about hitting publish on this piece, the complete dismissal of it by readers, or the correcting me in comments I’ve anticipated while editing, let me know this is precisely the troubled water I need to navigate right now.

Welcome to a new section of my Substack: The Trouble With Hot Girl Autism. If anyone has a problem with it, well, thank you for saying that.

“I love drunk Becca!”

My colleague Mark stood under fairy lights on the West Hollywood bar patio where I’d joined him and his friends for karaoke. That’s the problem, I thought.

Everyone does.

I’d known Mark for 3 years, but it was the first time he’d seen me drink. I’d make a dozen new friends that night and never talk to them again.

I’m accustomed to being uncomfortable in public spaces. My brain fails to filter out stimuli, to discern which sounds are important (all of them, at once). When I drink, my senses become muted (all of them, at once). Two drinks in, I’m the closest to cool I’ve ever been. I don’t need to leave the bar because it’s too loud or too bright or too sticky or too crowded or too pungent. I don’t need to leave the bar at all, as alcohol tricks me into thinking I am socially SPARKLING. I don’t even mind that I’m wearing a bra.

Before I started drinking, I spent my childhood scared and alone. The only people who made sense to me were the characters in the books I was always reading. I often stayed home, got sick so I could stay home from school and read. I loved learning but found school draining. Endless input competed for my attention: the tug of a waistband or the choke of a turtleneck distracted me to tears while parents and teachers alike claimed I was just being dramatic. The dramatic label only increased when social blunders left me crying in middle school bathrooms.

Neurodivergent people drink for different reasons than neurotypicals. While the association between ADHD and substance use has been widely studied, scientists are just beginning to see that people with autism are also more likely to binge drink, even when taking into consideration comorbidities (ADHD, CPTSD, OCD, etc.) that increase risk.

I didn’t know that the first time I drank. I was 7. I ate a box of liqueur-filled chocolates my parents’ friends had brought and played Twister with their kids. I didn’t understand what happened; I just thought I really loved Twister.

Then at 13, a new girl came to my private school. The first time I smoked pot with her and the popular girls, I felt like the secret of life was unfolding before me. When I was drinking or getting high, I didn’t feel so anxious. I belonged.

Meanwhile, my report cards looked like a neurodivergent diagnostic: “Forgets her homework. Never has a pen. Gets too excited when she knows the answer. Speaks out of turn.”

After taking a Ritalin once in high school and finally getting my homework done, I sought out an ADHD diagnosis in my first year of college. On Adderall, with my ADHD medicated, my autism activated.

As a conventionally attractive woman, my neurodivergence in social interactions was seen as dark and intentional. If I was quiet and had a flat affect, people said I thought I was better than them. If I was smiling and talkative, people said I thought I was better than them.

It was okay though; I knew how to make friends now. Just look for the people that like to party. Keeping friends was another story. But when things blew up for reasons I didn’t fully understand — well, there were always new people to drink with.

At 27, after my then-husband broke my finger because I wouldn’t let go of a bag of cocaine, I went to rehab. That’s where I found a new way to live and explain myself: “Hi. My name is Rebecca, and I’m an alcoholic.”

The therapists in rehab said I was manipulating people with my faces. They had me sit staring at the wall during our 4-hour group. My hyperverbality was seen as similarly toxic. I was made to sit in silence for 10 days, during which the stress was so intense I developed hives all over my body and needed steroids.

I couldn’t wait to leave and have a drink.

This, I was told, was evidence that I was a real alcoholic.

The idea that everything was my fault held another promise: if I worked hard enough, I could change who I was. I was seen as someone who was choosing to be difficult, choosing to fail. I hoped, just like everyone else seemed to, that I would one day overcome how I was made. It was like trying to fly a truck, hoping it would turn into a plane.

Living this disingenuously was exhausting. Pretending I processed what someone said, going out and “grinding” at stand-up comedy, forcing myself to sit in overstimulating environments every day, hiding how I felt, overcompensating with money and favors to make up for the deficit of my existence — essentially masking for people I didn’t even like.

The person I liked least of all was myself.

For the next decade, I kept going to AA, which I had been introduced to in rehab. It was the only way I knew how to get support.

In AA, my autistic and ADHD traits were seen as untreated alcoholism. At 3 years sober, my AA service commitments added up to nearly 40 hours a week. I had been told to treat it like a full-time job — I took that literally. I expected that if I kept inserting my time and energy into the AA machine, life would roll out like skee-balls at an arcade.

Over the years, my addiction lessened as I continued to evolve, which is actually against what the AA Big Book promises: “[A]lcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better.”

But that wasn’t my story. I was a daily drinker and cocaine user when I entered rehab. After, my periods of drinking got shorter and less destructive. I never became addicted to cocaine again. The older I got and the more I worked on caring for myself, the less I needed drugs to fill the gap.

After 14 years in AA, I spent months obsessively researching the program’s history until I decided it was all made up, including God. I went to the bar.

Around that time, a friend called and said she’d been diagnosed with autism, and she thought I had it, too.

Well, that explains the deep dives, I thought. I found a therapist who could assess me, and finally, I had an answer. But I still had so many questions.

A lot happened that first year of unpacking autism. I learned that alcohol only helps me not meet my needs. Sure, it turns down the volume on sensory input and increases my tolerance for things that normally bother or elude me, like too much background noise, or knowing when to speak in a group.

But the relief is temporary. All the lights and noises and why-did-I-say-thats still affect me — just the next day.

Alcohol and AA were once the only respite I had from the belief that who I am at my core was unacceptable, unknowable, and unlovable. I spent so long performing a person I thought could fit in, but when I started to learn what my needs were and who I was through autistic peer coaching, workshops, and spaces, I started to learn about and accept the person I actually was.

I began to discover who I was under the twin masks of sober alcoholic and drinking alcoholic. I care deeply about the people, pets, and plants in my world. I’m extremely considerate and empathetic when I feel it’s safe to be so. When I can trust myself, I am an excellent reader of people and situations. I’m really funny — mostly because I am really honest. And I am dedicated to growth and learning, something that goes much more smoothly without shame as a false motivator.

I am now over three years into this discovery. Last fall, I went to the East Coast to visit friends and family. I connected more deeply than ever with every person I saw, from my aunt in Vermont to my best comedy bud in New York City. It wasn’t because they had changed; I had.

I’d never been able to receive their love because I’d never shown up as myself. That’s the thing about masking. Even when it works, if people love it, you know they don’t love you.

Unmasking is scary. In the beginning, I felt like I would get in trouble when I flapped my hands or bounced in a chair around my apartment. I felt embarrassed when I played a song on a loop. But now I read every single thing an author I’ve just discovered has written, rock in my chair in waiting rooms, and tip-toe at the grocery store. I’ve let go of the plane I never was, and learned to drive the truck. Finally, I know where I want to go with it.

Hi. My name is Rebecca, and I’m autistic.

When I honor that, I don’t have to drink.

The Hanged Man

The hanged man
in tarot
is also
the traitor

caught red
handed.

Nobody knows that.

I bought a journal
at Target
waiting for you

You wanted fruit.

From Target?

Nobody deserves
that.

I like to think
I pick my poisons.

I like to think
lies.

I started the journal
when I got home
from our last kiss.

I didn’t know that.

 I finished six weeks later
turning
to the first page
to see when I’d begun
for the label maker:

Diary: Oct-Nov, 2023
& also
what the girl who didn’t know yet
said.

I’d read my own
tarot
&
wrote
it didn’t resonate.

Resonate?

I don’t even like that.

The hanged man was the present
not the gifts, those I gave away
or broke.
the present.

The way you are not.

I couldn’t blame
the deck you gave me

it belongs to the woman’s shelter
now.

I blamed myself
she’s
always available.

Another note says
‘Sleeping Beauty?’

I was trying to connect the theme of
suspension to
anything that said
you’d kiss me again.

Nobody thinks that.

But you hang upside down
and try to listen.

"Hi, I'm Rebecca. I'm an alcoholic. I really thought I'd be famous by now." 

They all laughed. I wasn't joking. I thought if I just did AA hard enough, Sky Daddy would appear and hand me my fame & my fortune. That's what I was told. Just focus on the program, and everything else will 'just work out.' Not exactly! Apparently, you have to put effort into the other things, too!

A few years later, I discovered my autism. The program I'd built for the person I thought AA would turn me into crumbled. I drank. For three years, I went back and forth between failing to make drinking work and failing to stop drinking.

Eventually, I got on GLP-1 weight loss medication in an effort to control my drinking. Now I could drink "normally," but I had a constant stomachache.

Of course, it's not normal to drink at all in these situations.

This past year, I had a serious health scare and discovered I also have Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. These two things finally provided me the motivation I'd never had to be sober for myself. And also clean. When I wrote these columns originally, I was clinging to justifying my all day, every day, unless I try real hard, I can wait till four on a Tuesday pot use.

It feels great to crack open this old Google Drive and make these columns from early 2024, to be honest.

A year into this struggle, an online autie alcoholic friend went to AA for the first time, against my advice. I had warned her it was not a neurodivergent affirming space. Yet she had tried and failed with me all year, too, and she was tired.

I watched her get more days in a row sober than ever before. I watched her life improve. I followed her back in. Perhaps the problem was not being autistic in AA, but not knowing you're autistic in AA. 

I watched her launch herself toward burnout by making the same mistakes I had. She knows she's autistic. So self-knowledge is not enough. This needs to be explained in a way that makes sense to people who say what they mean, and mean what they say. 

Who will translate twelve-step recovery programs for neurodivergent individuals, whether newly identified or otherwise? I wondered. Several weeks later, it hit me. It's me. Last year, I cheekily signed off "Your Neurodivergent Sponsor" on these columns. But that's not it. I don't want to be or have a sponsor. Between the ND brain, my sixteen years of experience with the program, and the complex trauma around authority figures, it feels counterproductive.

Here's the thing. The language of twelve-step recovery is not direct, yet it is presented in a way that sounds very serious. When things sound dire, autistic people are even more likely to take them seriously. For us seriously often means literally. 

Oftentimes, however, what is said means something else. There is always a reason, but it's not easy to get a straight answer. And the thing has a lesson or a resource underneath it that it is meant to provide you. Nobody tells you any of this. I spent a lot of time frustrated that people were keeping these answers from me until I realized that they don't even know why! They don't even care! Blindly following suggestions works for them! 

Underneath all that confusion, the lessons or resources they want you to have, the intention behind the rule they call a suggestion, are good. And by that I mean they can save your life. I wouldn't be back there for anything less.

One of the first suggestions you get once you have braved SO MUCH to show up at your first meeting is to get a phone list and call two alcoholics every day. Strangers. Call them. On the phone. Strangers. Every day. ON THE PHONE. (Strangers)

My AAA friend (anonymous autistic alcoholic) wanted, like many of us, to get an A+ in AA. 

She would call and call and call people, thinking she was supposed to have two entire conversations every day.

She lives in the English countryside. There aren't many women in her small recovery community. She felt she was falling short. Every late-identified autistic I know is constantly receiving this message from the world.

Nobody expects you to call two people every day, just as they don't expect you to have two conversations every day! First of all, most people ignore the suggestion entirely. They don't even feel bad about it! Those who do it aren't doing it every day. When they do, they are making the effort of the two calls. That's all you have to do to satisfy the suggestion to the letter. The effort. Whether or not someone picks up or calls you back is on them. If you experience PDA or RSD (I have both), this becomes more of a minefield. Just keep going. 

The reason they are telling you to call two alcoholics every day is a good one. They want you to have people you can reach out to when you feel like drinking. People that you feel comfortable reaching out to when you are in a crisis that may lead to drinking. 

That's all. People in AA dramatically tell you to call two alcoholics every day so that you have people you feel comfortable calling before you drink.

Now you get to make that work for you. What do you need to do to have enough people that you feel comfortable with ENOUGH to reach out if you feel like drinking? For many of us, this will likely involve online support groups and communities, text-based alternatives to in-person conversations, and Zoom rooms where you can remain off-camera and stim. r/Leaves is an excellent resource, particularly when spoons are low and you need to seek out other places.

I will warn you about Marijuana Anonymous; there's a lot of drinking going on there. I will warn you about Alcoholics Anonymous; there are people smoking weed. And of course, caffeine, nicotine, and pharmaceuticals are touted in both. You can't take a black and white approach to it, or it will drive you mad.

If you decide to make calls, observe and listen to people in meetings a few times before asking for their number. The most confident people in the meeting are often not what they appear. 

We may not always know what we did, but we can always (eventually) tell when people are being weird to us. This is the great fact for us. Fuck those people. Find another group.

As for my online autie friend? She has over two years now. She just got engaged. Her fiancé still smokes weed, and, eventually, she decided it was none of her business. She has exactly one sponsee and has decided that is enough for her. That is how she's made the program work for you.

As for me, at the time of this writing, 9/15, I haven't smoked weed in 40 days, and it's been 35 days since my last drink. By the time you read this, I will have almost 50 days clean and sober. I attend a few meetings a week. There's one that's about an eight-minute walk from my house at 7:30 am that is mostly gay men that I like if I wake up early enough. I know if I go every day, I'll get resentful. I tried that at first and had a complete internal meltdown over people vaping in the meeting in my first home group. If I attend too many meetings, people will likely share the same old things that used to hurt me, or they'll take up too much of my energy, leaving me with an unbalanced life.

I didn't get sober to make a program my life (this time). I got sober to make art and enjoy being alive. It's okay to run your own program however it works for you. It's yours.

XOXO,

Your lateral sober support person

.

Listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better. But it doesn't get better. You get better.

– Joan Rivers

For three and a half years, I tried to overcome the autistic traits I didn't know were autistic traits by attempting to get an A+ in AA. In the process, I came to understand things I couldn't work out in the decade of going in and out I had prior.

There is an Autistic meeting on Zoom. The most conventionally attractive females kept bringing the same fakakta ideas I used to have back to the group from mainstream AA groups they could mask enough to attend. A pretty face is the best mask, after all.

Here's one: "You should always listen to your sponsor, no matter what."

I've been around long enough to have sponsors that stole my ADHD medication to sell for heroin & exposed their breasts intentionally on FaceTime. My Rolling Stone cover celebrity sponsor told me to just pray about it when I was suicidal because I woke up out of surgery no longer believing in God.

No, you shouldn't. Someone you recently asked to sponsor you doesn't know you. You know you. Many of us have complex trauma around authority figures and a deep desire to please and be accepted. Having a sponsor at all can be counterproductive. Sobriety for neurodivergents needs to be about learning to trust ourselves, not some random person who believes they need to help you for free to stay sober.

I cannot stress this enough; the only part of the program that is meant to be taken literally is the not drinking. Even that is not meant to be taken AS literally as some of us will interpret it. It's okay to drink kombucha or nonalcoholic beer. If you accidentally take a sip of something with alcohol in it, that's not a relapse. It's fine to use mouthwash with alcohol if you aren't gonna DRINK it. If you need medication, even ones that, as AA says, are "mood altering," that is also okay!

The more understanding and knowledge you have, the more you will be able to choose for yourself how to navigate your recovery. Because it's yours.

Sobriety is a thing you can achieve that nobody can take from you. It may seem like compulsive behaviors help our nervous systems, but they actually reduce our capacity to deal with things in a broader context. The bigger picture, not being our best thing, is definitely a contributing factor in the intersection of autism and addiction.

Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable.

In a tweet: Powerlessness is drinking and using more than you meant to. Unmanageability refers to the consequences of drinking and using more than intended.

Could I poke holes in the details? Absolutely. I am not powerless over an inanimate object. Hundreds of times, I drank exactly the way I wanted to. My drinking and using were not progressive in terms of my station in life. After I went to rehab the first time, I was never a daily cocaine user or drinker again. My outer life became more stable over time.

The powerlessness of drinking is in its inherent intermittent reinforcement. It's not true that every drinking session will be uncontrolled. What's more accurate is that I do not know whether or not it's going to be a controlled drinking session. That? Is insidious. It would be easier if it were bad every time!

There is one time I know for sure I will have a controlled drinking session. It's the day after an alcohol fueled meltdown that included some form of verbal violence.

I will be in a complete parasympathetic shutdown. The kind of hole that will take weeks or even months to recover from.

So to drink safely, I first have to drink unsafely, harm and shame myself and others, and then have my body shut down as if it's getting ready to die?

That sounds powerless to me.

Powerlessness refers to the grand scheme of drinking/using drugs in your life.

Is it making life truly better? And you're still doing it? And you sense things would be easier if you didn't? But nobody has ever taught you to value yourself enough to care?

If drinking is really working for you, take your liquid noise-canceling headphones and enjoy. Some autistics I know are quite fine being heavy drinkers; at times, I wish I were one of them.

But I am not. That is the admission.

If I can do a job sometimes, under very specific circumstances, but most of the time tragedy will occur, I actually can't do that job.

Safe drinking is not one I'm qualified for, even if I can appear to fill in once in a while. Here's a great example of powerlessness: when I originally wrote this, I was still clinging to the idea that I needed weed to manage my newly discovered autism and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I only wrote this about drinking. In the three years I relapsed, I only managed to not smoke pot on thirteen days. And it was so much work to do that!

There was a period after the one ten-day run where I'd thrown out all my paraphernalia, and to get myself to start smoking later in the day, I would go to the dispensary every day. If I went to see the doctor in DTLA, no matter what my original weed plan was for the day, I would find myself at a DTLA dispensary every time. I blamed the fact that I stopped making enough sense to neurotypicals to get any articles to press (they kept buying my pitches, then being disappointed with the final product) on being autistic, ignoring the fact that I'd been autistic the whole time I was making four figures a month as a freelance journalist.

To work step one, first you have to write out a list of examples of powerlessness (the act of drinking or using more than you meant to), not to be confused with unmanageability (the consequences of drinking or using more than you meant to). Powerlessness is going to the dispensary earlier than I wanted to every day. Unmanageability is the inability to publish any articles.

It seems redundant, but the hope is for you to present yourself with enough evidence at once to believe the part of you that knows you need to stop, in writing.

Here are a few examples of powerlessness:

1. I said I would not go to my friend's funeral drunk. I did.

2. I planned on having one beer with dinner in Ojai; I stopped at the food co-op and bought four that I drank while driving home.

3. I told myself if I had the last beer at four am, I wouldn't order more the next morning. I did.

4. I swore I would never do cocaine again after my ex-husband broke my finger over a bag. I did.

Beyond the fact that it will kill you, abandoning myself in this way reinforces old trauma beliefs. How can I trust myself if I can't even do what I say I will for myself? I can't. I am that dreaded thing. Powerless.

Ten of those sad sentences, and you're halfway through your first step.

It is said in meetings that the first step is the only one you have to do perfectly. You don't have to do anything perfectly. You just need to remember that it hurts you when you drink or use or gamble or act out in your sex and love addiction (a very unacknowledged one in autism world.) Not every time, of course. But overall.

The next post will continue to unpack the thing that inspires the bulk of open mic comedy: unmanageability.

Photo by Mandy Bourke on Unsplash

When I was in college, I was a poet. To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, I am a poet (again) now, but I was one then, too. I didn't know that poetry open mics existed, but I did know that I was going to be the next Allen Ginsberg, that this poem I was working on was going to be the next Howl. When I wanted to read my work, I would invite people over after the bar to smoke pot and have nachos.

Bong in my hand, nachos in the oven, I would look at the assembled few, and say something like, "While we're all here, let me read you my poetry."

When I graduated, I didn't know what to do besides drugs. That winter, two things happened. On New Year's Eve, I found out the best way to get over a Cocaine hangover was Crystal Meth, and a psychic told me I would meet my soulmate by spring. All winter, I clutched a lighter in corners, "Are you my soulmate?"

In March, I saw a painting in a salon of the yin and yang of every woman. Two women, one dark, against the galaxy, with fire coming from her hand. The other was Nordic, set against a blue sky, and had a butterfly alighting on hers. I thought, "I have to meet this artist. "I was behind on rent, but I was pretty sure I could commission a painting from him that would help me finish my poem. I still remember parts of the poem, decades later, though I don't know if I can find a copy anywhere. I lost my computers so many times, and never learned about backing up before the cloud, not even from Carrie Bradshaw.

We were already married when I stumbled, strung out on cocaine, into an issue of Airbrush Action (which he called a book) magazine with that exact image in it. By then, I knew he wasn't really an artist, but I was really addicted to cocaine and trauma-bonded to him. So much of my stories from this time have no moral other than the triumph of the fact that I lived to tell it.

He wanted me to quit hard drugs and only smoke weed. I loved my newly discovered meth, but I didn't want to look like it. I had seen the Faces of Meth website and immediately stole eye cream from my job. I moved in with him right away. I was behind on rent, and somebody had pissed on my pillow. I didn't know if it was the cat, the drug dealer, or me.

I soon realized that Magic Mushrooms are a grey area, so I bought an ounce of mushrooms. I ate them all. I forgot I ate them - how? That is a lot of chewing. I then sat down to watch the news. There were reports of terrorist threats in my area, and I was pretty sure that was for me. This was only a few years after 9/11.

I called the cops, sure, terrorists had put a bomb outside in a light post. "No."

I asked them to not go upstairs, because I had a lot of weed up there. They didn't.

I prayed to a portrait of Biggie Smalls for a while. He was like, "Bitch! Stop calling the cops. That's commandment zero".

I called the cops again. My coke dealer, whom I owed $40, was in the front yard with a chainsaw. The cops went to check, then came back in.

"Ma'am. That is your landscaper."

The third time, I called, a crucifix was being erected on my front lawn. A strange delusion for a Jewish Girl.

They had to do something with me. They were going to take me to the hospital, but didn't want to scare me by putting me in an ambulance. They called my Dad. I do realize that more than anything, this is a story of white privilege.

When I got to the hospital, where my nurse was Biggie Smalls, he asked what drugs I had done. I thought he meant ever.

"Everything but peyote!"

I was told I would be with high-functioning people, and I remember thinking, thank you, I am high functioning. That's how I ended up on suicide watch, which I kept calling concentration camp because I wasn't currently on adderall and thought the whole thing was because I needed to learn to concentrate. The doctors thought I might be schizophrenic, as when they asked me if I saw and heard things other people didn't, I was like, "Oh, absolutely."

Everyone kept asking me why I was in there, except my Dad, who was thrilled. I was the problem the whole time. Just as he suspected.

One day, a nurse was watching me shave my legs while I yapped about a trip to Florida. “Where would you like to go on your next trip, honey?"

That was when I remembered the mushrooms.

But before that, I was sitting on my front lawn with an audience waiting for my Dad — cops, paramedics, curious neighbors. I ran inside and came back out. “Hey guys, while we're all here. Let me read you my poetry."

And I did. They were an excellent crowd.

.

I read Joanne Limberg's book, Letters to My Weird Sisters, about the intersection of autism and feminism, last August. It got me thinking about those two things in relation to alcohol, to how much of my drinking & using was intertwined with performing womanhood.

As Joanne writes, "It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it."

I remembered many of those moments in my own life, right before I blacked out from pouring booze on top in an attempt to glue my party girl mask back on.

I met Joanne on Zoom. It's nine am for me in LA and five pm for her in the UK. It's not raining in either place. My cat dozes in the background, and hers routinely walks across the screen. I can see my multiple bookcases to my left and hers behind her.

I know I don't have to tell her that I listen best when I'm looking in the distance and have my ear turned toward the speaker; she feels free to do some deep and thoughtful speaking while looking away as well.

SOTS: Well, first of all, thank you so much for coming. I loved your book. So smart and so necessary.

JL: Well, thank you for having me on. And for reading and liking the book.

SOTS: You said that you aren't a problem drinker, but understand why autistic people drink. In the recovery community, I'm getting so much input from people who, like me, are in recovery but are allistic. So I love the idea of that opposite perspective from somebody who's autistic like me, but not in recovery. Could you talk about that?

JL: Yeah. It's an interesting thought, because I think I said to you that I could perfectly understand why it might be a form of self-medication for autistic people. And I think for the obvious reason that it takes the edge off social anxiety. I mean, we find it very painful to be in rooms with a load of people when we're trying to follow all the cues and there's a lot of noise and other people's presence can be invasive in every way. We've got the anxiety of getting it wrong. And when we feel we have got it wrong, there's that sort of pain that comes from knowing you've got it wrong. Alcohol kind of muffles all of that. It makes it possible for you to engage in the world in a less anxious way. I can see that once someone had, especially if they had, whatever it is people have that made them particularly susceptible to alcoholism, that once they found that they wouldn't want to let it go. It will be a crutch.

SOTS: Why do you think you never ended up in that trap, self-medicating the social stuff away?

JL: I think because my autism sort of interacted with my OCD. I was really scared of putting anything in my body. Also, I don't like the taste of alcohol very much. I judge wines by whether they taste more or less like medicine. So it's a sensory thing. I do occasionally like to have one or two drinks and feel slightly softer. Like I will probably go to my very suburban middle class ladies Book Group later this evening and have one glass of wine and because I'm small and Jewish and female and on SSRIs I'll only be able to sniff it. But I understand why people come to rely on it.

SOTS: That's really interesting, because I know some people think that all autistic people become addicts at a certain level of burnout, but maybe that's not true, you know, because it sounds like you're an autistic person who I'm sure has gone through burnout and has never become addicted.

JL: Not addicted to alcohol, I mean, I've certain coping mechanisms that aren't helpful. I eat far too much sugar because I tend to sort of go to eating sugar or crisps, potato chips, as you call them in America, and shoving those down my throat. I've had a very bad skin-picking problem for a long time. That's a kind of addiction because obviously, whatever endorphins, dopamine, or whatever I get from doing that, I've clearly been dependent on at times. So I wouldn't you know, claimed to have escaped that. I just say different poisons? Also, I'm very compulsive with social media. I'm scrolling. I'm scrolling. I'm scrolling. I'm scrolling. So when I think about Gabor Maté and what he says about addiction, I can see that I've got the structure of it. Just it hasn't taken the form of dependence on alcohol.

SOTS: That's so interesting. When you were saying that you don’t like the taste of alcohol my addict brain was like but what about drugs? Has she heard of drugs?

JL: I was so scared of what they might do to me. And the irony of that because I've been taking SSRIs, Prozac, on and off, mostly on for oh gosh, more than 20 years now. And it isn't that that's not a psychotropic drug. Because I take it all the time I forget I take it and you know, caffeine as well. I'm always having coffee in the morning. My son is very Gen Z – he won't touch coffee. He says, I don't want to be addicted like you two. We are not addicts! Then we thought well actually if we take away the aspect of what the state chooses to criminalize and what it doesn't, I suppose we are.

SOTS: That's such a great point. And so, in your book, Letters to My Weird Sisters, you talk a lot about the pressure of performing gender. That struck me so much, the idea of having to perform womanhood, and how much harder that is as an autistic woman. Then thinking about female drinking culture – the party girl, the substance mom. I'm wondering how you see that as intersecting with this femininity performance.

JL: I mean, now that I'm heading toward menopause and certain things are dying, I wonder how much just the fact that I was a heterosexual cis woman, not just a cis woman, affected my behavior. Women are just the same as men – we want to attract people. That means that we push our behavior and our self presentation in certain directions in order to accomplish that. And I was 20 in 1990. So I don't know if it was the same in the States but in the UK in the 90s there was this so called lad culture? A cool girl was a girl who could basically behave like a man. I mean, you could still get slut shamed for it. But it's like, oh, she's great, she's good for a laugh, you could even have a drink with her. She's not bothered about. She enjoys herself. She enjoys alcohol. She enjoys sex. She's fun. And she's not hung up. And she's not needy, and all of that.

So I was looking at that and thinking in my very literal minded autistic way that's who I have to be in order to be liked. And reacting against it because I also found feminism in my teens, and I responded to that in a very autistic way. Right, I'm not going to do anything men like at all, but

just on principle, so I was cool, between these two, rather black and white, literal-minded autie ways of looking at femininity. I look back now and think, in the loosest possible sense of the word, that was also crazy. Why didn't I feel that I could just be me?

I look now at what my son's generation has and I think wouldn't it have been great to have more than two genders to choose from. It would have been so great.

SOTS: Yeah, I guess there's something called auti gender, even. Which is just yeah, 'I'm autistic and fuck this all’ in terms of gender, as I see it.

JL: It's definitely how I feel. I definitely feel auti gender. People keep ascribing womanhood to me. I speak as a woman, because I share the conditions under which people categorized as women live, not because I feel some deep essential affinity. It's a social fact about my social position. I don't consider it a fact about my personhood. I respect that some people will do; that's not how it is for me.

SOTS: I wanted to talk about the concept of mentorship and mothering as it relates to recovery. I used to take it so literally. I expected my 12 Step sponsor to give me the unconditional love I never had. The way you described finding little bits and pieces along the way was so beautiful. Could you talk about the desire for mentorship as an autistic woman, the desire for other mothers, people who get it who can like be a little bit further down the same path?

JL: I was diagnosed at 41. So by the time I became conscious of myself as autistic, I was already well, not old, but no longer young. I actually got diagnosed not long after I lost my mother. I didn't feel that I could have been diagnosed while she was alive because I don't feel that she could have taken it. I've been fortunate enough to have and to be able to afford decent therapists. I've also looked to other autistic women, to share experience with more as peers than as anything. Ultimately what you want to do is replace that sort of vertical top down asymmetrical love with a more horizontal community of care type of love. That's what I'm of going for. Otherwise, you're always desperately looking for mom, and it might be that in lots of ways that were not in any way her fault, mom was not that great.

When I was a young woman, I was always looking for someone to tell me what to do. And I think when you are young, you do need someone to look to. I'm very aware now, as interesting as it as, you go through life finding yourself having to play those roles. So you're the party girl or you're a nice girl, then you're the mom. Then you get to my age and suddenly because you've got to my age people think you must know something.

I suppose just from hanging around for so long I feel like I do. So I feel like I can help them. The longer you hang around, the longer term perspective you have. I mean, why would you know when you're miserable when you're eighteen that you're not going to feel like this forever? But after you've been through a few cycles, you realize things do change. There is another feeling coming along. You can't predict things. You can embody the knowledge of that a bit even if it does make you feel about one hundred years old.

What's really frustrating is transgenerationally; there really seem to be some things you can only fully understand by living them. So you really want to pass stuff on, but the truth is, you have to sort of live your life and experience what happens. I mean, it'd be amazing if you could just download everything you knew into the next generation. Yeah, that will be real human progress.

SOTS: That's so true. And sometimes when I start to go into an experience, some advice or knowledge from someone who had been through it that I heard long ago, will click in as I'm going through it, like a little partner.

JL: Yeah, and also, I find that actually autistic young people, because they've grown up in a different culture and because they've quite often known their autistic all their lives, they know stuff about how to manage it that I don't and they see things clearly and in a way that I don't. I've got this lifetime of not knowing what it was fitting into and unmasking and internalizing all this stuff, that's muddied the waters that they don't have.

SOTS: I did want to talk a little bit about community and then, you know, scanning interactions after for the rough spots as you discussed in Letters To My Weird Sisters. I'm a pore scanner too, and I never made that connection, how it’s the same. Pore scanning is one of the few times I'm not interaction scanning. How do you figure out the cost benefit analysis of being in community?

JL: I think it's something you have to work out as you go on. I mean, I've learned that if I have a day of interaction the next day, I'm not going to want to speak much at all. So I've learned to pace myself.

It’s difficult because I'm a teacher, that's the work I'm qualified to do. My job involves obviously interacting with students, interacting with other colleagues and so on. And you know, although it's not necessarily horrible, I never find it easy. I'm never on autopilot when I'm dealing with people, particularly if they're allistic. It's a feeling of constant attrition. I don't know how autistic people who work full time manage to do it. That's an awful lot of peopling. Groups are difficult. Even autistic groups can be difficult just because they're groups and because we don't, you know, we can have access clashes.

SOTS: That's been a new and interesting thing. We find out we are neurodivergent. And we're like,yay, I'll go over to the neurodivergent AA club. Then the oh, this is also complicated and difficult.

JL: I can imagine. I've not been to AA or NA but like any group, whether it's, you know, the mothers and babies groups I went to when my son was small, or, or a church group, if that's what you do, or a synagogue group or a Buddhist group. There's always that sense of a culture that you're not quite fitting in with. I think, if you're autistic, if even in this room of people like me, I'm the only person like me? When is this gonna end?

SOTS: Such a mic dropper of a quote.

JL: I once had this wonderful experience. I was at an autistic Arts Festival. I was in a cafe full of other autistic women who are artists and writers. I think I think we all said the same thing. It's like, oh, this is what it feels like to be in a group. Because so often, it's I'm with these people, I'm with these people, and I'm fitting in with these people, but I'm with these people. And suddenly it was we were in the coffee shop. It was such a revelation. You know?

SOTS: I have been trying to find that feeling. I think we are all trying to find that feeling. That’s beautiful.

JL: It was extraordinary. I think for all of us because it happens so rarely.

SOTS: Like when someone's nice to you in New York City, not gonna forget that.

JL: I’ve only visited, I can imagine.

SOTS: I really like that image. I'm gonna hold on to that one– being in a group of autistic artists and writers that are all women. That just sounds so cozy.

JL: It was lovely. We’re kind of spread out. So we stay in touch online.

SOTS: Do you do that too, where you hold onto friends where you find them because true connection is so rare?

JL: You know, and it happens rarely, when you’ve met someone who’s I suppose of your tribe.

SOTS: I was just reading the other day about how for some people, pets are their first secure attachment, and that was certainly true for me.

JL: It was true for me as well.

SOTS: I was wondering. Could you talk to me about the importance of pets in your life?

JL: Yeah. We had a cat when I was growing up called Amber, little black cat that we got. I'm sure my mom wanted her as well, but I had the impression that I'd asked for her and got her because I lived in my own world.

And I remember thinking not in so many words, but I look back and thinking the cat brought me up.

SOTS: I get that.

JL: Like the cat is in charge of me, I report to the cat.

SOTS: I think the cat would agree with that.

You can find more of Joanne Limberg’s work at

http://www.joannelimburg.net/

& follow her on Twitter @JoanneLimberg.

.

The Meltdown

I called the manager over, my anger so thinly veiled I felt like I could shoot Jewish Space Lasers from my eyes. I had received some of the worst service of my life, and it felt intentional. My waitress hadn’t waited on me at all. Someone else brought my drink. He had brought my food. I mentioned that I was supposed to have fries. He mansplained cross-contamination.

“I explicitly told my waitress I don’t have Celiac and cross-contamination is not an issue,” I said, fighting hard to keep the edge from my voice. My mask of caring about things a socially acceptable amount was slipping so far that it was practically around my ankles. When he brought the French fries (cold, undercooked, clearly rushed), that felt like her fault too.

When she stopped putting chairs up around me to ask me how my food was, all I could muster was, “It’s cold.” She was wearing a Covid mask, so her eyes were the only thing I could use to interpret the situation visually, and her eyes seemed to be mocking me. The third time I called the manager over, I was standing on business.

“Look, my waitress is giving me bad service because she thinks I was rude to her when I am literally just autistic and have had a long day. She asked me what I wanted to eat the second I sat down, and it threw me so much I blurted, ‘I literally just sat down.’ Her eyes very clearly said, ‘Fuck you.’ I know this because I was in the industry for over a decade, and I used to give that look. My food is cold. It clearly sat on the line while she swept and put the chairs up. She didn’t even ask what I wanted as a side. I WANTED FRIES. I understand that you’re closing soon but I would have been gone by now if she’d actually waited on me.”

“Let me grab the manager,” he said. I’d convinced myself that this guy was the manager. He wasn’t. That alone should have shattered the mind-bending pile of negative assumptions I’d just pieced together, but I was far too dysregulated by now.

Baby Bangs and Bad Omens

It had been a very long day. I flew to Denver for business that morning, leaving my 18-year-old blind dog and extremely particular cat, which is always difficult. I hadn’t slept well the night before. Because of the restrictive diet I’m on, I hadn’t been able to eat all day. My flight was late, and I’d been in client meetings or transit from the moment I arrived until now.

This was the first time I’ve traveled for this business sober. It was all so much more acceptable through a cloud of smoke. I couldn’t help but notice the breweries and dispensaries on every corner. Did I also mention that I’m on my period?

Hindsight after a meltdown is clear as the Caribbean. My ride to the restaurant was full of omens that were not clocking to me.

The driver had my sister’s name, (hate her), had baby bangs (only women that are mean to me have them), hair dyed Russian waxer red (grating), was bumping EDM (or techno, I can’t tell the difference because they both feel like a garbage truck running through my soul), had strung up green globe lights in the car (cringe), and was selling homemade pumpkin cranberry bread via a basket on her center console (this simultaneously made me sad because she had to, angry because she was trying to sell me extra things, and livid because I was starving and I couldn’t eat it).

On a typical day, I would have thought she was adorable. Not my style, but I would have respected her commitment to herself and her hustle.

Hannah

When I walked into the restaurant at 8:22, I asked the hostess if they were still seating, as I saw that they closed at nine. She said absolutely. As we walked toward the back, I saw several patrons still eating, even a couple that was just about to order.

She spotted the book in my hand and seated me at a well-lit booth, explaining that she also liked to take herself out to restaurants and read. Her name was Hannah, and she’s the one who brought me my soda water.

She was actually the manager. She came over, sliding into the booth across from me so that she didn’t loom over me.

I told her I had never not tipped in my entire life, but that I was considering it tonight and wanted to discuss it with her first.

She said that the waitress thought she had upset me at the beginning of the interaction. The food didn’t sit and must have been a grill issue. That I am absolutely welcome there and not unwanted (how did she know this core fear). She told me that my server asked her to discount my meal 50% when I said it was cold. That they are allowed to do their side work and put the chairs up after nine pm. It was just a miscommunication from the beginning, both ways.

As she talked, I began to breathe again, and tears threatened to spill over my lower lashes. It suddenly hit me. The waitress wasn’t out to get me. She wasn’t my mother. As dysregulated as I still was, even I could see that it wasn’t her fault that my fries were undercooked.

Sure, I would never put chairs up while people were eating. But it wasn’t my restaurant.

I asked for the check and paid it, leaving a 25% tip on top of the original subtotal. When I got back to the hotel I made chamomile tea, and watched Seinfeld, feeling okay.

The Morning After

I woke up this morning in a Rocky Mountain of shame. I was being too hard on myself. I wasn’t entirely wrong – the waitress did react when I said I had just sat down, and the service was objectively poor (cold and undercooked food, ignored requests, sweeping and chairs up while I was eating).

I picked up real tension; I just misinterpreted the motivation behind it.

I had an abusive mother who targeted me, then grew up conventionally attractive, hyperverbal, and autistic. Of course that created hypervigilance about hostile behavior from other women. My nervous system learned to scan for danger to survive. The fact that I asked to speak to the manager wasn’t me being “a Karen,” it showed I’m learning to advocate for myself rather than absorbing poor treatment (and then drinking and using over it). That’s progress, not a reason to feel ashamed. I handled the resolution well, too.

This was one misinterpretation when I was already exhausted and overstimulated from travel, hunger, and draining clients. I was nearly catastrophizing one social mistake into evidence that I can’t trust my judgment at all.

Sometimes people are stressed about their job rather than targeting me personally. That’s just the complexity of human behavior, not a failure of my perception. Sometimes, like last night, I’m both people in that scenario. The waitress was experiencing this from the opposite perspective. I can recall how horrifying that can be! When it feels like a table doesn’t like you, and you have to keep going back and smiling at them anyway, it’s so shameful.

The truth is, I have always felt ashamed because of how I was raised to think of myself, and as I grew up, this feeling persisted. I always found new stories to tell myself about how I felt.

That’s the downside to having the twin rivers of high IQ and high ACES score. I can convince myself of anything, and it’s usually that I am bad and wrong for having feelings.

Of course, my theory of mind is going to go out the window at the end of a day like this, when the one thing I desperately needed to go right, the thing I was doing to care for myself, exploded in my face like a potato with no hole in it on a metal plate in the microwave.

The Magic I Almost Missed

Today’s schedule was much more manageable. I met up with a sober Instagram friend, took myself to eat early in the day to avoid another hunger-induced meltdown, and I’m going to read poetry for the first time in Denver. Scheduling no clients gave me space to recover from yesterday’s stimulation and emotional marathon.

The Beats have been a long-held special interest of mine, and Alan Ginsberg used to hang out and read there. Performing at a venue with that kind of literary history will be energizing rather than draining.

I’m navigating multiple significant life changes while building two businesses and maintaining early sobriety. One social misinterpretation doesn’t negate all that progress. When I was smoking pot all the time, I wasn’t as attractive to people, and I didn’t want to do much at all. Now I’m more motivated to engage with life, but I’m still learning how much I can realistically handle before getting overwhelmed.

The venue the mic was held in was bought last spring and turned into a lesbian bar. My poems got applause breaks–that’s never happened to me before. The next morning I woke up early and found a meeting–in an old Victorian mansion that was turned into an AA clubhouse in 1948. Both venues were full of magic beyond my wildest dreams.

I’m so grateful I didn’t let a soggy vegan Philly, lackluster fries, and upside down chairs ruin my trip. If I’d gotten high on Thursday night, I would have missed all the beauty of Friday and Saturday.

"Oh no," said the man on the bench out front. Bright yellow egg salad decorated my right arm from hand to elbow and my blouse from boob to upper thigh.

"That's unnecessary!" I sharply replied.

Somebody had a case of the Fridays.

I woke up this morning to a date bailing on me. I went to the new matcha shop anyway, planning to write. It was loud, hot, crowded, small, and didn't have wiFi. I stayed for three hours.

This week I worked more than I have in over a month. I emptied out my kitchen for exterminators with an hour's notice, and then singlehandedly cleared my bedroom of dust mites. I wrote, shot, and scheduled months of content. I created an LLC. I redesigned my website. I planned a photo shoot and a seven-city East Coast tour. I had a third tummy tuck consult. I got filler in my temples (my jaw is still in agony.) I got trolled by an ex via website booking form. I went to pole dancing class for the first time. I never, ever, even in my sleep, stopped checking my notifications.

What happened after I left the new Japanese matcha shop Kettl (is that redundant?) was like when you're watching a movie and get surprised by an action that was foreshadowed all along.

It was a Chekhov's egg salad explosion.

I parked in a street sweeping spot because the matcha, overstimulation, burnout, state of the world, eclipse season, early sobriety, and adderall weren't stressing me out enough. There’s only three hours a week you can get a ticket for parking there? That’s the exact thrill I needed. I strode toward Bestie's Vegan Paradise, determined to take control back over my world by purchasing perishables.

I bought two containers of vegan egg salad, clutching them with one hand; my keys, phone, and wallet were in the other. As I climbed into my Jeep, I tripped on the step. My hand clenched around the plastic. The salads simultaneously imploded and exploded; down the vintage shirt that had existed for fifty years before meeting me without a stain, onto the driver's seat, the inside of my door, and the grass below.

My neck, my back, my pussy, AND my crack.

I stood there with turmeric-tinted vegan mayo dripping down my arm, wondering which one was the most expensive. Is it the ADHD? Autism? The Ehlers-Danlos? The addiction? C-PTSD?

I've rolled into every weekend since I stopped smoking weed to some version of this. Now that my motivation is back and my brain is (kind of) working again, I am desperate to make up for the lost three years.

I've had too many early sobrieties to make early sobriety my whole deal right now. I could tile a kitchen backsplash with my 24 hour chips.

My body and nervous system, however, keep saying otherwise.

When I asked for a new container, I heard myself say, "And a bag this time," as if it were the cashier's fault I spilled.

On the way out I had to force myself not to confront the bench man. "Don't even look at him," I told myself.

I drove home with yellow tofu smashing into my butt, the one place it hadn't landed yet, in my newly purchased car that will forever smell like farts from the sulphuric black salt, kala namek, that makes tofu taste like eggs.

There were moments this week when I knew I was skiing downhill way faster than I could handle. That I was going to hit a patch of ice soon and lose control, but I couldn't stop.

Do I even have MCAS? Or am I just allergic to dust mites? Will the hair on my cat's stomach grow back and cover up the marking that looks like a huge cock and balls once she stops being itchy?

These all seem like things I need to figure out now, at the same time, with egg on my shirt while climbing a stripper pole.

But they aren't. Eventually, even this adderall /matcha/adrenaline combination will wear off.

I took steps to get through this week without making things worse. Not those steps, my own. I made mistakes, but I don't feel ashamed. A therapist once told me that shame was my primary emotion. She was correct.

That's not my story today. This week, I was able to stay centered enough to make choices that kept the spirals quick and the rebounds quicker.

The following seven strategies made all the difference between a week that was challenging but worth it and one I'd need a week to recover from. Here's what I did to surf the swells of another week of being neurodivergent in early sobriety:

1. I refuse to be surprised by the fact that I am continuing this pattern. Early sobriety has always been instant burnout, whether I had the language or not. There's the jarring nature of losing all your coping mechanisms, combined with the drama of whatever led you back.

2. I try not to second arrow myself. In Buddhist thought, the second arrow refers to the way we make ourselves bad or wrong for the way we are experiencing the thing that injured us, aka the first arrow. When we get mad at ourselves for things we've already done, that's second arrowing. The first arrow hurts enough. And hey, we were younger then.

3. I can catch myself in the moment. I don't have to wallow in the regret of energy already spent and brutal truths already spewed. When I find myself once more throwing my body against the door of the jail cell of reality & the wardens I make strangers into, I stop.

4. I apologize when I find myself being unnecessarily argumentative, as I did with an Etsy seller who had a no-refunds policy that I hadn't read. I also don't have to feel bad that learning to stand up for myself with delayed processing and C-PTSD is messy. It's challenging to find the line between autistic directness and acting like a good old-fashioned dickwad. Especially when the neurotypical world treats the former like the latter.

5. I make space for the paradox of knowing I need to walk away from things and people, while also allowing myself to be sad about it. I don't need to villainize anything or anyone to convince myself into self-protection. I don't need to invalidate the period of my life where it was working for me. I just need to know that it's time to walk away now. And that it's perfectly acceptable to be bummed out about it.

6. I write out what I accomplished. I suck at big picture thinking, I'm hard on myself, and Monday feels like five years ago. To-do lists are helpful so that I use my time better than yesterday. I did lists are necessary so that I can see that progress, and feel good about how I am spending my fiftieth wild and precious early sobriety.

7. I write out what I don't need to figure out today so that I don't neglect what needs to get done this week. Today's list:

• Who is going to tuck my tummy?

• What gym am I going to join?

• Who will do my Botox mid-December?

These seven steps gave me the freedom to tackle today's tasks, including figuring out how to kill dust mites in my weighted blanket (the dryer), writing this blog post before I lost interest in the idea, and putting gas in my car (the light was on.)

I know I did a good job because sitting here in my own space, with delicious, farty egg salad filling my imperfect-looking tummy, I can finally feel the exhaustion.

I didn't, unlike the previous six sober Fridays, have to think about smoking weed to scare myself into acknowledging how overstimulated I am. I can slow down myself. There’s no need to fantasize about doing something I don’t want to in order to turn it all off and make this bigger life I'm scrambling to build go away. The egg salad explosion and a few pointed words were enough. I don't care if Monday's new, Tuesday's paid, and Wednesday too. Thursday, I had shit to do. It's Friday, and I'm in burnout.

I navigated a hell of a week. When my best friend texted asking if I wanted to go see The Roses tomorrow afternoon, I was able to say, "Yes! Can we go to Crossroads Kitchen for dinner again?" instead of "I couldn't possibly leave my dark apartment."

I even stopped for an egg salad sandwich halfway through writing this draft.

Next week, I hope to accomplish less.