I’m still knitting the big black sweater.

Progress.

Now for content. So I read this blog post that this introvert wrote. It’s an author with 2 blogs and a twitter account. She was writing about how much she SUCKS at responding to comments. Sounds pretty funny huh? But when I was reading it, I totally totally got where she was coming from. I know what it feels like to not click with lots of people and to not know what to say even when you do click. I know what its like to find going to the grocery store exhausting. Not because you can’t walk around a store, but because there’s PEOPLE. That SAY things to you. That you have to make EYE contact with. It’s just. so….I want to say tiring, but it’s like you’ve got this place in your gut that starts to hurt when you hit your limit and the more you keep interacting the more it hurts until you want to cry and curl up in bed. And sometimes you push yourself so much your whole body hurts from holding itself tense and you get a migraine.

The days where I have three of my family members warring and all three call me to bitch about the others, I feel like taking the phone off the hook after talking to two of them. I doubt they’ll ever realize this, but when I actually start shit, it is NEVER lightly. I like arguments, but it’s hard to deal with a bunch of them at once, even removed over the phone.

I finally realized that most people don’t find going out in public and talking to friends, coworkers and family members in any way difficult. It drove me crazy growing up because I didn’t get how everyone else did it. My mom had a lot of reason when I hit the teen years to think she was raising a raging bitch. I would get these waves of uncontrollable anger and discomfort. It’s easy now to relate some of it to the days when I’d come home from high school exhausted and there’d be five people home and she’d want …something. To go shopping or to hang out. God. Even now thinking about it I can feel how trapped and panicky I used to feel on days like that and we were so good at hanging out and being friends back then. Now I just gots me and Bear in the house and if I can’t deal then I just let the phone ring. Knitting helps too.

Well, except that I’m pretty sure I screwed up the armholes on that sweater back up there.

(Brain. Don’t take any of this personally. I mean it! You give more than you take, even when you think you are just taking. I was just thinking after reading that blog post. Hell, you know when I’m exhausted and go into hiding and I tell you why. Title is from Do Better by Say Anything.)