Falling Out of My Fingers

Last updated on January 29, 2025

One of the weird things about autism is that we don’t always experience the appropriate emotion in the exact moment that we’re supposed to. If we grow up in a certain type of environment where strong shows of emotion were frowned upon, we might even have a non-reaction to major events until long after the fact. Occasionally, this manifests as alexithymia (not really being able to identify our feelings) or as a flat affect (showing no emotion at all).

I lost someone last week. It feels unreal, and it’s invoking fits of rage and sadness and grief, but my body was programmed from a young age to not show Those Feelings. When Those Feelings come up, I have nowhere to put them until they build up to the point of explosion, and then Dumb Things Happen.

I have done an excellent job of not letting Dumb Things Happen in many years, but the pain of this loss has become almost overwhelming a few times in the last week. I’ve had to bleed it off, let it dribble out, to make myself feel something besides the hurt.

Making Myself Cry

A normal person would watch a sad movie or a dumb show or read something cheesy to get the tears flowing, but the one comic that I would have used for that purpose makes me sick to my stomach now.

No, I have to go and write something to invoke those feelings.

He loved reading, loved stories, loved fantasy and sci-fi…

I finished a fresh story from the Petrichor series on Monday and submitted it to a contest, but while it’s really good, it wasn’t emotional. So, I kept going, and I wrote a whole new story in a whole new universe, and I sobbed my goddamned eyes out the whole time re-re-re-reading it.

Then I sent it to Craig and to the rest of my test-reading team, and everyone said, “Cool, where’s the rest of it?”

Y’all, come on…

The last time that happened, Middle of Nowhere popped out in about three weeks, the original version clocking in at 125K words or so. (Much of that got trimmed in edits, and the whole story is getting an overhaul to work with the sequels.) It was just supposed to be a short story, started with a picture of a woman holding up some money, and the question was, “What would you do with the last twenty-dollar bill?” I took it literal – the very last one in existence – but I accidentally did so much world-building in that little 7K blurb that a whole universe popped out.

Thing is, I’ve also got the Petrichor series building up steam right now. That short that I wrote for the contest ended up just at 7900 words (barely under the word limit, you know how I am), and the main body of Lost Ground is sitting at just over 51K words with several more plot points to go. I really want to have most of the series done before I click the “publish” button – and a great deal of it is penned already – but…

Now this other story keeps happening.

Okay, get a grip, you’re the boss of you. Edit something, submit somewhere, and get back to the main story…

Nope.

Skin and Thatches is the only thing willing to come out of my fingers now. I’m not convinced the title means anything, it’s just what came to mind when I realized that the original title, Mercy, is a chapter heading and that there’s going to be a lot more world to come.

Hey, Look! A Distraction!

I am a little worried that I’m just distracting myself and not tapping the real pain. If the real pain doesn’t come out, it’ll fester and boil up at the worst time, and because I’m not so great at identifying feelings in the first place, that’s a real danger.

Ironically, my life-long inability to identify feelings in real-time is what makes this loss so much worse than “just” losing a friend, even though we hadn’t seen each other in person in years. And we hadn’t seen each other in years (though we were in passive contact) because all my emotional intelligence has been very hard-earned much later that I’d’ve liked.

I am reminded, yet again, that the depth of our sorrow in loss reflects the depth of love that we feel. As I age and the inevitability of losing my closest people looms closer, I dread the impending frequency of these events. I seem to be doing a lot of writing when this happens, though, and now in my head, I have an image of each of my stories acting as a headstone, a memorial written from the pain of losing someone precious to me.

I’m going to keep this short today because I really do need to figure out these stories, and I’m not going to talk about my friend here – at least, not yet, and I might never – because this is my grief. This is my sorrow, and I am not willing to let it go or share it with anyone like this.