Sleep — Iris

Sleep

Sleeping escapes stimulation, that’s why I don’t like to wake up. Waking up is physically painful. My mind has to come to terms with all my senses flipping switches all together.

Thats why I’m always mad when I wake up.

I Prefer dreams to life. I see old friends, make love with secret crushes and do all the things I can’t do awake, like fly or surf big waves and breath underwater in beautiful places. I speak a thousand languages and everyone hears me. I’m not invisible to myself in my interior worlds.

Right now life is so overwhelming and confusing, I’d rather sleep.

BUT

I don’t want to sleep my life away. I’m not suicidal.

My dreams are blurrier than my wake life, so I make my life pass faster with too much sleep. I am also not improving my life to a life worth living if I waste it sleeping.

Once I felt this way in Florida and had to choose to be awake. I made my life as it was in dreams. I surfed and scuba’d and danced and made art and jumped out of planes with beautiful friends and lovers. I have to find a way to do that again.

I don’t know if that is possible here in Maine on this island of stagnation.

To start, I ask for quiet mornings in exchange for opening my eyes just a bit earlier.

Tojisha Kenkyu

Deer Isle, Maine, Today, 2022

There’s a method developed by researchers in Japan called “Tojisha Kenkyu” in which an autistic person is to learn themselves through journaling. Like any kind of journaling, the process empowers one to understand more directly their strengths and weaknesses and how to cope with them. I’ve been doing this since 2021, when I was informally diagnosed, and figuring out a lot of funny things. It’s like wandering through caves of my mind with a candle, illuminating places that were always dark before. It’s uplifting but also extremely sad sometimes. I guess it kind of draws you out in a way, which makes sense, considering that the term “Autism” was originally coined from the Greek word “Autos” which means “being inside”, or, as Oxford puts it, “with reference to a condition in which fantasy dominates over reality.”

I would say that the Oxford definition resonates pretty closely with my experience of life. Nothing inside ever matched up with the outside, and most of the time, I like what’s happening in my mind a lot better than anything else. The journaling has definitely helped me to align things a bit more, and to understand myself enough to attempt to fit in more naturally to my surroundings, especially with people. It’s also helped me to make better decisions for myself and calibrate an “inner compass” which relies less on what others want, more on what I do, think, feel. So, here it is. This is the journal side, with some tentative imagery, however please note that I intend to develop the imagery into a more multimedia practice when I find the space, money and time I need to take on such elaborations.