books, taxes, and rewarding yourself

[flamingsword]

Today I drove a friend out to the big Half Price Books in Dallas, and they found a bunch of kids books, a family-friendly game, and a couple of regular fiction books, so that's a yay. I sold $17 of books! And only spent $12 on a book and a couple of Van Gogh bookmarks! I walked away from a bookstore with more money than I walked in, and this has literally never happened to me in my life.

Spring cleaning is going well. I am making pants/bloomers, and they should be done by Sunday. I'm doing taxes for last year in another pane, and it looks like Ghost's boss slightly overpaid his taxes so that we would not owe very much, despite the fact that I did not pay my self-employment taxes last year like I was supposed to. (oops) I am about to have some peach wine and sugar free chocolate for dinner, as a reward for all of the above and for keeping on track with all of the various nonsense that life is made up of.

I should probably do some more meditation tonight on the whole "resignation is not patience" thing. Do you ever have that feeling like someone is standing in your blind spot? Like there's something there you're just not seeing? Yeah. That.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Re: resignation is not patience, resignation is not acceptance...

The key to that for me was recognizing that my expectations of what I wanted or thought SHOULD happen or WAS GOING to happen in a given situation was what fed my disappointment or resentment when things didnt' go the way I thought they should.

For me a big part of it was not being so quick to pre-expect or pre-assume what should happen or how things are supposed to happen. Just being aware of and kind of ready for anything that might happen was very freeing. Less expectations = less disappointment and resentment, less of a feeling "putting up with" or "bearing with". Because I wasn't in a frame of mind where I could be disappointed any more.

A big place that I was able to put this in action when when one of my kids went through a stage where ANYTHING I said to them, at the level of "do you want butter on your toast" or "do you have practice after school" was met with some kind of joke or smart remark. It stabbed me, jolted me every time and made me annoyed and sometimes even angry, until I got the advice to normalize it. To expect the smart remark and to have a comeback ready. I couldn't change how the kid was talking (he wasn't being outright disrespectful; just changing the rules of the conversation in a way that grated on me.) but I could let go of thinking or expecting that I could ever get some kind of simple yes or no answer and just roll with it.

Best wishes to you.

I keep running into a problem.

[flamingsword]

I have this problem with the Taoist/ Buddhist approach to patience, the virtue of non-expectation. If I’m not expecting that people might be assholes to me, I either don’t see it til later when I can’t do anything about it, or I see the assholery and it hurts me so much that in the past I have wound up unable to engage with the bad behavior because I’m busy trying not to stress-cry, go nonverbal, or get violent at someone. I have to be able to play the neurotypical game at all times in public, which means talking about the problem, not crying because people don’t take you seriously if you do, and not shaking people who are trying to deserve it.

I’m not sure how I reconcile the non-attachment to expectations with the autistic masking that I basically have to do to not wind up in jail for assault.

Re: I keep running into a problem.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, now we are way above my pay grade. I can only try to imagine how difficult the autistic masking is and what energy it takes every day "blend in".

I don't think I had absorbed from your posts going forward that autism was in play for you and I apologize for that.

But I do enjoy thinking about the ideas you grapple with in your posts. I wish you every success in figuring out an approach that suits you and makes your life easier.

Re: I keep running into a problem.

[flamingsword]

Thanks. Yeah, I think my journey to good mental health would have been a lot shorter if I had been able to use the standard approaches, but neurodivergence makes some things simpler, and some things way more complex. It's a problem. :/

And don't worry about not knowing I am autistic. I'm hyperlexical, so most people can't tell in written formats. Actually, at this point, most people can't tell in public either. I've worked hard for almost thirty years at studying how humans interact and my ability to blend in is well-honed.

Maybe I'm doing deep masking when I write, where the ways I trained myself to communicate are deeply engrained and take less conscious effort? But I have no way to tell, really. Hmm. Maybe if I put samples of my old writing style on here and a sample of the new stuf through one of those writing style analyzers, it can yield me some data.

[tuzemi]

I know that HPB well! It was always fun to go through the clearance sections (plural!) and see which treasures awaited for $1-2.

[flamingsword]

Sometimes you do find neat stuff over there; I passed up getting a $2 loaner copy of The Zombie Survival Guide, which is really a book that teaches beginners how to think about disaster preparedness. Secondhand bookstores are truly a land of dreams.