Hello? Anybody Out There? (cricket chirps)

I won’t be surprised if there isn’t. – Anybody there that is.

In fact, given my sparse readership back in the ‘normal’ days prior to 2023, I wouldn’t be surprised if this post did nothing more than just fall unnoticed into the black depths of the already overly full digital trash can.

For 9 years I published one or sometimes two posts a week with few lapses, then, a little over two years ago now, I abruptly stopped, no warning, no explanation, no nothing, just disappeared. And yes, that was a pretty shitty thing to do.

But shitty or not, I had my reasons. Maybe not good reasons, but mine nonetheless.

You see, one day in April two years ago, (Shit! It seems so much longer than that – yet somehow so much shorter.) I was on the second day of a 10 day wait for lab results when I got the phone call informing me that I had been diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer.

I dropped out of the world after that phone call, not out of meanness or spite, but because I was only doing what I had to in order to protect what little ‘sanity’ lurked in the corners of my apparently - and now officially - atypical brain.

You see, as an introvert (at least that’s what I thought I was at the time, but more on that in a moment) the stability of my world relies on a careful blend of being in control, having routines, structure, and plenty of quiet and alone-time. But that was all taken away from me that day.

Now having cancer is not ideal, but within days I found out that what was even worse was being dumped, kicking and screaming, into the horrifying, grinding, black maw of a major university cancer hospital system.

Don’t get me wrong. Virtually every one of the hundreds of healthcare workers I’ve come in contact with over the past two years has been pleasant, many have been downright kind, and others, mostly doctors and PA’s, refreshingly direct and focused. (But if you ever have the chance to choose between a physician assistant, or a nurse practitioner, pick the nurse practitioner. They are both trained to about the same level, but PA’s, like doctors, are trained in the medical model, NP’s, like nurses, are trained in the holistic model. The first focuses on treating the condition or disease, the second focuses on treating the patient. A subtle but noticeable difference.)

But once you get shoved over that healthcare-institute threshold and violently sucked up like a bit of stray fluff caught in the vortex of an industrial vacuum cleaner, they take over your life, dictating your calendar, destroying your structured existence, fucking with your schedule, screwing with your activities, constantly shunting you, along with hundreds of other sickies, along numerous, twisting hallways in a hodge-podge collection of aging,  but interconnected, building as you bewilderedly trudge from endless tests, to countless procedures, to a mind-numbing array of doctor’s visits, and even more follow-ups; each in a strange place teaming with (shudder) people, and punctuated with a frequent progression of insufferably crowded and noisy waiting rooms.

When I was a kid, pre-toddler right up to elementary school, I was considered shy. This was often accompanied by a patronizing pat on the head. For my school years, you know, the mean-kid years after all the cuteness has worn off, and then all the way through most of my professional career (Some big kids never grow up and are still mean kids), I was considered weird. (My poor parents. According Mom I was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid until around age 5 when I suddenly got all serious, brooding, and standoffish, and they could never figure out what they did wrong. Never putting together the fact that that was around the age when I was suddenly jerked out of my safe little world of siblings and cousins, and thrust into the social chaos of school.)

And I pretty much agreed – about being weird that is.

Back then I didn’t know exactly why or how, but I knew from an early age that I was different than most of the people around me, OK, all the people around me in white-bread, suburban 60’s, June and Ward America, and I spent a huge chunk of my life trying to mimic what I saw those people doing, not because I wanted to, but because I instinctually knew that I had to “blend in”, at least a little bit, to survive. I had to constantly work at pretending to be the “normal” I wasn’t.

It wasn’t until much later that I was able to start getting a handle on who I really was and what was “wrong” with me, and introvertizm started becoming a part of my vocabulary.

In fact I came to the conclusion that I am not just introverted but classically introverted. Ticking off most the boxes at the far end of that spectrum, with strong sensitivities to all three of the classic S’s. Situational, social, and sensory.

As you might imagine, treatment rooms, medical testing environments, prep-rooms, operating rooms, recovery rooms, and especially waiting rooms, are all great at triggering all three of these sensitivities in a big way. (If I am going to have a meltdown it will likely occur in one of these waiting rooms where I have to put up with crowded conditions, the constant drone of useless nattering of the people around me, the insufferable indignity of waiting on often over-worked and late medical staff, and those three people that apparently don’t know how to turn the volume off when playing games on their phones.)

So my defense (Regarding disappearing from the blogerverse), is that my strategy to preserve some semblance of me in the midst of all this was, whenever possible, to completely retreat into my own private world and recharge. To climb into my familiar little hole and pull the lid shut over me in order to make the most of those gaps between hospital crap while I waited for the clawed hands of appointments and procedures to rip me back into their world.

The net result of which caused me to appear to drop out.  – OK, actually drop out.

Friend wise, no big deal. Turns out I – we – don’t really have any in the first place, not in the classical sense anyway. No dinners to be invited to. No game-nights. No backyard BBQs. Not even meetups for coffee once in a while.

But, in order to block out as much of the outside world as possible not only meant closing the property-gate behind me but also:

• Walking away from the blog, both writing it and reading the posts of the people on my Reading List, many of whom I’d followed for years and built up a (pseudo, but very real to me) relationship with.
• Abandoning YouTube, because even though I never engaged in commenting on YouTube, even the act of watching little snippets of the life of someone familiar implied some sort of social contract.
• Ignoring the dedicated email account associated with these few bits of social media I had in my life-before-cancer.

Yes, I can imagine how ridiculous all that may sound to the “socially normal”. (The proper term for that is NT, or neural-typical, and is also now part of my vocabulary, as is neural-atypical. Hey! That's me!) And I can see how what I did might be considered selfish, or even downright rude, and frankly I agree, but, well – too fucking bad. I’m the one that has to live inside my head and I just did what I had to in order to survive.

By the way, in a massive medical system such as the one that has their claws into me, specialization is the norm, which means that as a patient, who prior to this didn’t even have a primary-care physician, just the rotating staff at a local small-town clinic for annually renewing blood pressure meds (to combat the elevated BP I have when around people – you know, like when getting my BP checked at the clinic), I now have a dizzying array of doctors in my portfolio, each dealing with a single aspect of – well – me. And, along the way, with this much exposure, my high level of agitation, and elevated blood pressure in their presence was noted by most of them.

Even though I kept trying to explain it was just the result of being around people and I’d be fine once I was able to leave and go home, they insisted on shoving me in front of yet even more people, and more friggin waiting rooms, over in the mental health & social services department.

There, they pretty much told me things I already knew. Except that the result of these excruciating sessions that had nothing to do with dealing with my cancer (when you have a major medical condition, no matter how macho and independent you think you are, you do NOT want to fuck up your insurance coverage by refusing care that has been determined by several medical professionals to be justified and necessary!), is that my chart now lists me, not as introvert, but as autistic. High functioning, according to them, but definitely autistic.

That seems a bit extreme to me, (Although I don’t mind, where possible, being put in out-of-the-way rooms with views to the outside, and low noise and light levels because of that designation.) but I can’t really argue with my sister’s response which was “That explains so many things!”

So why am I back here now? What gives me the right to come crawling back through the bloggerverse portal again?

Well, I’m not at all sure about that second question, but as to the first; the very people that have dissected my head, talked me down off the ledge a time or two, and have now given my social issues an official name (No social-modification drugs though, even though a few were tentatively offered. So far I’ve stuck to the horrible green candy that is so sour it will knock you off your chair, but also does a good job of derailing a meltdown when walking away into a quiet space isn’t possible.), along with an explanation for why socializing is painful for me, are the ones on my back about socializing more. – Go figure!

“It’ll help keep you centered”, they say.

“It’ll be good for your physical as well as mental health” they say.

And when they get exasperated with me; “Because we told you to” they say.

Well now that other things, the cancer things, have started to settle down a little (on the good side), that particular yammering has risen up the priority list. Also, there’s a part of me, independent from the militantly self-sufficient and comfortably solitary me, that wonders if they might be right about the benefits of (shudder) socializing.

I’m sure the bloggerverse isn’t what they had in mind when they said “socialize”, but it’s pretty much the only tool I’ve got in my toolbox.

I never killed off my accounts, the blog, YouTube, or the dedicated email account used for them. I just walked away, so they, somewhat surprisingly, are still sitting there – didn’t even ask me to verify who I was after all this time!. So from a technical standpoint it was easy to start dipping back into YouTube a month or so ago. Just the anonymous (yet somehow compellingly addictive), shorts at first. But recently I’ve even tried a few excursions out to the longer vids of some of the artists, campers, farmers, narrowboaters, I used to have on my Subscribers list.

And it wasn’t horrible. I guess somewhere in the back of my head I worried that I might be bitter that their lives had just carried on while mine was ripped to shreds around me. But I’m not    – at least I don’t think I am –

So now I’ve begun to entertain the idea of trying out the more personal boggisphere. More personal assuming I start commenting and posting again that is. Which isn’t a given because, to be honest, though I’ve missed keeping up with people, missed my window to the world, it was sort of freeing not to be grinding out posts of my own every week. But somehow lurking around the edges, coming back and catching up with those on my blogger Reading List on the sly, seems even more shitty than when I just walked away. Hence this “explanation” post.

But, only tool or not, after two years of as much isolation as I could get, sending this post out is still pretty scary and I wasn’t sure I would actually do it, right up to the point where I clicked “post

So, not sure where this is going, or not going, but, well, here it is.

(Click “post” now)

(Come on, click that “post” button)

(What are you waiting for?! Damnit! Click the fuc- - - )