It's Bridget's Word  

I am tired. Bone tired. Soul tired.

When I started this blog, I was in the best health of my life. I don’t mean that in some colloquial sense. I mean, as a person multiply disabled from birth, I was experiencing, for the first time in my life, health. Minimal pain, increased mobility, fewer seizures, and blood counts on the low end of normal, but still normal.

It was amazing. I felt like a super hero in middle of my own origin story.

I wanted to do all the things. “No” and “I can’t” left my vocabulary. The world was big and bad, and I wanted to do everything I could to make it a tiny bit better.

Of course, I am no superhero, and this is no origin story. Middle aged autistic grannies don’t have origin stories.
(And I wonder; why the hell don’t we? Really. We are an interesting and diverse bunch of bad asses.)

But I have to admit, it was fun while it lasted.

I can’t separate out the autistic me from the brain injured me from the chronically ill me from the immune suppressed me.
I am one human; all these things commingle in my one human self.

Self care has become self preservation.
My physical resources are limited, and I must shepherd them even in the face of wrongdoing. Doing what I can, does not mean doing until I collapse. It means doing what I can up to the point where I can still lead a life that is, by my own standards, worth living.
The gratitude I have for being taught that is immeasurable. I haven’t perfected putting this into practice, but each day, I’m a little closer.

Also, I do things outside this blog; some of these projects I will share in the fullness of time.
But first, I will probably take a nap, or have a nice cup of coffee, or see if I can fit in a pedicure, because I need those things.

Post Script: In the disjointed writing of this, I got to read this #AutismPositivity15 post from Renee Salas. It was lovely and filled with so many parallels to my current circumstances, it was hard not to just post a link and go “hey, what she said!” You should go read that.