It’s supposed to be a good thing, because it will give me an audience.

I’m probably opening myself up to flaming and nasty remarks, as I’m writing a *public* blog, but… I’m not looking for a huge audience. I’d prefer to just be slowly discovered by people searching for topics that I’ve posted on. I’m not looking for a crowd – being watched by a large number of people tends to make me *anxious,* not happy!

Psychologist who leads that is now in a position of possible power over my life, and I’m afraid to use aforementioned blog  because she knows where it is and might think I said something “crazy” and use it against me.

She’s a decent person, but she’s still a psychologist. And I have a longstanding fear of psychologists.

*clings tightly to this account*

US citizens, vote for the lesser of the two evils. America, don’t fuck up the world. Please.

This is one of those times where it seems like I’d be better off going to a different *planet.* Different country isn’t all that useful when your world superpower seems like it’s going to start wrecking things.

I want Obama to win because just the *idea* of Sarah Palin in power makes me freeze with terror. But even if he does, I fear it’s going to be a case of “too little, too late.”

Bah. Wake me up when the world’s not a complete and utter disaster?

But anyway, I’ve been reading parents’ concerns about their children’s future questions. They are concerned about being asked, “What is CF?”; “Will I die?”; “Why me?”; “Does it go away?” They want to know what the right answers are.

I never asked those questions. I was a hyperlexic kid with delayed communicative speech who read the words “median age of death is thirty” in preschool and dealt with it all silently. I picked up what CF meant, how it affected me, how it came about, everything through reading and listening at appointments.

If I had the option to relive my life with the communicative capacity to talk about it, I wouldn’t. I’m hyper-empathetic. I automatically mirror whatever I perceive my conversation partner(s) as feeling. I can’t discuss a painful topic without feeling the pain myself. Books and computers were safe. The content was painful and sometimes terrifying, but I could wade through it myself and come to conclusions in ways I never would have with another person because I would have been too busy being the Echo.

And I’m afraid to write this post because I’m afraid someone who knew me will look at it and say: “That wasn’t you! You were so scared at CF appointments! There’s no way this could have been you!”

And yes, it was. Asking “Am I okay? Will I be okay?” over and over and over again at appointments doesn’t negate anything I’ve written above. I hate that I said it, hate that I sometimes still say it, because it gets a lot of assumptions made about me that aren’t true. To set the record straight, that phrase is an automatic compulsive spoken response to tense situations centered around me. It has very little communicative intent.

No, I wasn’t stoic. I fought hard against having the sputum-gag-stick-thing put in my throat as a young child, and I fought and screamed at blood draws until an administering nurse told me that if I didn’t cooperate she’d carry me back up to the doctor’s office, bang my head against the floor until I was unconscious, tie me down, and then draw my blood. I started cooperating after that, though I don’t recommend that approach in the slightest.

And despite having been exposed to all the “depressing information” without guidance as a preschooler, my outlook is pretty optimistic. I don’t believe we’ll get a genetic cure that means none of us will ever have to take any pills, but I think that medical advances will increase life expectancy to “normal” at some point in the not-too-distant future. And honestly, that’s all I care about. I don’t give a damn about taking pills or doing treatments.

1. I just in general dislike the first week of classes. Too much social bullshittery, too little academics.

2. I already finished my Stats coursework for next week.

3. Environmental Horticulture is a class primarily taken by people who want to grow better pot.

4. A disturbing number of people in the aforementioned class describe Cannabis sativa as their favorite plant. A disturbing number are all too eager to describe themselves as “super stoners.”

5. Trying to decipher which plant products are in my household products is difficult-to-impossible when all the manufacturers refuse to give away their secret formula.

This means I might be around here quite a bit, not that I have any audience yet. I seem to be being around everywhere in general.

I have classes starting tomorrow. This might change then as my language-energy gets spent on those.

In contrast, I’m particularly quiet speech-wise right now.

I would have started two days ago.

I’m following along with the bulletins at the moment, reading the school website, and somehow internally living my alternate-universe-self’s life.

In the background, I still live in the would-have and could-have, exploring multivarious permutations upon my life. In one of those universes, I came back after a year away, and now use text-to-speech there. In another, I never left. That one splits off into the possibilities in which I crashed and in which I didn’t.

Part of my mind says that I’d be applying to the UC system. Another part, the part firmly grounded in this-reality, says I’d be ending up at the junior college anyway, and with a lot less remaining functionality than I had at the point that I went there in this-reality. I wonder whether I’d have any communicative speech left, and wonder whether losing it all would be a bad thing. As a kid, I panicked about losing speech and would repeat phrases to make sure no one had taken my voice away. As an older-adolescent, I’m all-too-aware of how tenuous my grasp on speech has remained, and I’ve spent the past few years fantasizing about finally losing it all, so that I wouldn’t have to continue the painful scramble. That hasn’t come to fruition, but some people around me have become more accepting of my using text-to-speech part of the time.

So anyway, no, there is no rhyme or reason that my lofty dreams for the future that I had when leaving junior high school would have panned out by the end of this year.

And anyway, even if they would have, that hasn’t happened in this-reality. And this-reality is the reality in which I have to live.

Not that the others aren’t worth playing in for a while.

I’m elsewhere, and if you think you recognize me, you probably do, especially if I still seem recognizable after I’ve made some more revealing posts. I’m the only person I know of who overlaps between certain specific boxes of developmental disability and chronic illness and fandom and such.

Thanks to Ursula K. LeGuin for the username. It comes from Always Coming Home (why does WordPress not provide an “underline” feature?). It’s the Kesh word for “feral cat.”

Blog title is subject to change. As usual, I fail at all things title-related.