It’s a timeworn and tired tradition that bloggers love to blog about blogging. So much so that if any particular blogger has done an especially large amount of it, there’s probably some degree of repetition involved—even more especially if they’ve also been blogging for an extraordinarily long time. I’ve alluded to this in the past, but blogging for me is a self-regulatory activity, and I wanted to dig a little more into that.
What prompted this hopefully at least somewhat deeper revisit was something Peige said on the subject of blogging.
I continue to customize my blog to my heart's content. I spend a lot of time poking around my site and enjoy creating moments of delight for myself. I used to write twice a month on Substack, but here, I write almost every day, and if it's not a blog post, I'm doing something else, like editing the theme or adding a new page to my About section.
Self-gratuitous? Probably. But as someone who's struggled to love themselves, I see this as an act of self-care. I've created a space where my words, my thoughts, and my ideas matter. They might not matter to you, but they matter to ME. And that's more than enough reason to write about it.
Here’s where I want to turn, even if it seems suddenly so, to some previous discussions of autistic burnout, specifically that paper about resources and demands from four years ago.
For example, depleted energy (resource) may prevent an autistic individual engaging with their special interests (resource) which could, in turn, reduce their mental wellbeing (resource). Additionally, the effort associated with acquiring and maintaining some resources can outweigh their protective, buffering effect.
My example at the time about how this is true for me were my trips to Oregon Zoo, because “such a trip isn’t always some sort of balm for burnout due to the accumulated stressors (demands) of taking public transit across town, the effort of walking around the zoo and being among so many other people, and taking public transit across town again”. The problem with autistic burnout is that it’s often the case that even your self-regulatory behaviors can’t save you from it, and in some cases can make it even worse.
While it’s true that I did blog during my months-long autistic burnout which finally only let up after I insisted upon a three-week break from any demands beyond my own daily maintenance, very little of it was particularly high-effort writing, whereas come January my cognitive effort was more pronounced and my output skyrocketed.
Much of my blogging plays a role similar to how my therapy sessions are structured, in that methodically having to lay out what’s happening and what I think about what’s happening is a way of externalizing the internal in order better to examine and understand it. It’s innately a self-regulating behavior. One that becomes at least somewhat destabilized and pronouncedly unavailable to me when in autistic burnout, because if the burnout is deep enough it literally hurts to think, in a way that’s impossible for me to describe but if you know, you know.
(It’s unclear to me whether or not writing would be considered self-regulatory in precisely such a way so as to qualify it as stimming, defined on Wikipedia as “the repetition of physical movements, sounds, words, moving objects, or other behaviors”. There’s a line somewhere between self-regulation and self-stimulation, wherein the latter is a form of the former but the former doesn’t necessarily mean the latter.)
I’ve said before that I write when I can’t not write, which is why needing to write but being unable to do so because of autistic burnout is such an intensely unpleasant aspect to the whole thing. That certainly seems to mark my writing as self-care. Not being able to truly, properly exert the energy needed to engage in an activity that under more usual circumstances is restorative in the long-haul even if it’s using up resources in the near-term moment is frustrating to say the least.
Winnie speaks of learning to take care of oneself in ways that highlight what Peige, is addressing, arguing that this includes “the way we interact with our selves internally”.
It may seem narcissistic to write so extensively on my self, but I have learnt that until we learn to manage our own internal environment we will always be unconsciously harming others. We are like an instrument, we will keep playing broken music to other people if we are broken. That said I think every one is broken in their own way, and I think the point is not to have a mindset that we have to be fixed, but rather we have to understand our own qualities and quirks – just like Keith Jarrett leveraging on the qualities of a broken piano – so that we can carry more aliveness and live more thoroughly. Without that self-awareness we are unknowingly being discordant to our selves, and without internal harmony it is difficult to engage with the world meaningfully.
It’s just that for many of us, “the way we interact with our selves internally” is something we perform publicly where other people can see it. In a way somewhat similar to how the weeknotes we use to structure my therapy sessions would not have the impact they do without talking through them out loud in-session, I don’t think I would make as much sense of the “internal environment that surrounds [my] psyche” (in Winnie’s words) were I just to keep all of these words to myself.
Whatever the case for my selves of the past—as we slowly will see over the course of the blog restoration project—this present me can’t even conceive of how to navigate the inner and the outer worlds absent writing to myself, and thinking out loud, in public. I’m thinking now, as I wrap up, of what I discovered about ego as a result of hosting IndieWeb Carnvial last October: that it is a mediator between and amongst out instinctual needs, our internalized norms, our external reality.
If ego is the drive to balance these things, than it is ego in that sense which makes me write, no matter whether anyone else directly gets anything out of it, because they do get something out of it indirectly. Winnie says it: “without internal harmony it is difficult to engage with the world meaningfully”.
So, to Winnie I’d say that none of this is narcissistic, and to Peige that none of it is self-gratuitous. It simply is all of us writing toward self-belief.
Reply by email • Tip $1/month • Thank you for using RSS
