Share Our Lives (May 2025): How I Celebrate My Birthday

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all! It’s the second Monday of the month and this means the Share Our Lives linky goes live. This month, the theme is how we usually spend or celebrate our birthdays.

My birthday is at the end of June, so the weather’s usually pretty good. That is, my parents used to joke that my sister, whose birthday is tomorrow, always got better weather on her birthday than I got. It isn’t true and, quite frankly, now that I have more insight into our family dynamics, it feels like one of their endless comparison games rather than a joke. But I digress.

My birthday and the time around it usually are quite stressful, since it’s the only time a year I ever see my parents and that’s with good reason. Over the past few years, my parents, my best friend and I have often been going out for dinner. It’s always awkward but was more so last year. I haven’t made plans with my parents this year yet.

My sister and her family will also visit me. Last year, this was a bit hard, as my oldest niece was tired and, being four at the time, easily bored. This led to her being cranky and me being cranky from being overloaded as a result. For my birthday this year, we’ve planned a relatively short visit.

All this being said, I do like to have somewhat of a birthday party at the care home. Even at the intensive support home, I treated the entire group to fries and a snack. Last year, I made a cheesecake and also treated the home to home-cooked burgers and salad.

I think gift-receiving is also a fun part of my birthday. The best gift I ever received was my music pillow, which my best friend gave me last year. My parents usually buy me a small gift plus some thrift store items. It may seem stupid, but I do like not knowing what I’ll get even though chances are I won’t be using it much. Besides, I haven’t bought my parents gifts in years.

Now that I look over this post, I realize I honestly don’t know why I usually say I like my birthday, as now that I’m an adult I could easily be buying my own gifts and I don’t like most of the company I get. I think part of it is childlike excitement.

To Speak Out or Not to Speak Out

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today’s Sunday Poser is an intriguing one. Sadje asks whether I’m the one who will speak up when I see a wrong being done or whether I’ll keep quiet. I’m going to interpret this more broadly and share how I tend to react to injustice in the world in general.

And the truth is, shameful as it is, I no longer speak up. This didn’t use to be the case. When I first started out blogging on WordPress in 2007 and especially between 2009 and 2011, I frequently wrote about injustices to groups I didn’t even belong to, like trans people. Now though, I struggle to speak up and I’m not even certain this is out of fear of speaking over marginalized groups. Well, that is, I’m quite certain that it isn’t that. It’s fear of being targeted myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I still speak out in real life against injustices being done to other people, especially those I love.

I struggle with this when it’s microaggressions like “jokes” and I actually regularly catch myself making hurtful comments towards people in minority groups I’m not part of.

This is, actually, more problematic than it might seem. I mean, I could say I’m not trans, not an immigrant, not [insert the latest scapegoat of fascism], but in reality everyone has privilege and almost everyone is marginalized in some way. Besides, like my best friend recently said, fascism’s goal is to destroy society.

I am, however, often too scared of being the next target to speak out openly. This is why I’m more gentle than I’d wish I were when pointing out transphobic or racist or otherwise oppressive comments in real life and especially why I’m no longer as vocal as I used to be on my blog. The world just isn’t as safe anymore.

This does also mean I can no longer be fully myself online. It’s just too easy to track me (and my loved ones) down from my blog. It was even easier back in the early days of my being on the Internet, when I’d almost always use my full name everywhere. However, either I was the lucky one back then for not having been attacked in real life, or the world’s become a harsher place. Probably a little of both.

Like a Rolling Stone… #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “favorite place”. I am not a fan of traveling, so I have absolutely no idea what my favorite place to go on vacation would be. I did go on a postponed honeymoon in 2012 to the Swiss town of Zug and it was beautiful. That is, walking through the mountains was quite an experience. The town itself was full of top-notch expensive cars.

We haven’t been on vacation since 2014 and, though my best friend and I (my best friend currently still being my spouse, for those who don’t know) have discussed vacation plans, neither of us is keen on going anywhere, honestly.

I would probably be considered a homebody. Except, what is my home? My staff often refer to the care home as “home” when talking to me, but it still feels off. And though I have no plans of traveling to any exotic locations anytime soon (or ever, considering most truly exotic locations are not easy to get to for someone who hates flying), I wouldn’t consider my room in the care home to be anything close to a favorite place. Or maybe it’s my least hated place out of all. After all, I’ve never truly felt home anywhere. Not with my parents, not in independent living or with my spouse nor in any of the places in the care system I’ve resided in.

I guess I’m like a rolling stone. After all, I’ve never truly connected to any particular place. This feels sad.

School Reunions

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. One of this week’s Writer’s Workshop prompts is to write a post based on the word reunion. This reminded me of two reunions, one I actually attended and one I didn’t.

The reunion I did attend was for the school for the blind I had been a student at for my last three years of elementary school in the late 1990s. The reunion took place in 2008 and it was on school grounds. The reason the reunion was held, was the fact that many buildings would be reconstructed in the next couple of years, so as to give former students and staff one last chance to see school grounds in the form they’d remembered them.

The school included buildings for both elementary and secondary school, as well as homes for the residential students and a place for leisure activities where the non-residential students had lunch too. I was a non-residential student and only attended elementary school, like I said.

There were two reasons why I wanted to attend the reunion. One was to meet former fellow students and staff. That was a success. I met my best friend from school, with whom I hadn’t been in contact since leaving this school in 1998. I also briefly talked to my fourth grade teacher. That was awkward, as I didn’t feel comfortable disclosing to him that I resided in a psychiatric hospital at the time.

The other reason I wanted to attend the reunion, was to see the school in the form I remembered. That, unfortunately, wasn’t a success, because part of the elementary school, including the classrooms, had been destroyed in a fire in 2006. Part of the building was still standing, but it was no longer useable.

I was on grounds a few more times attending smartphone use training in 2017. On May 24, I believe, there’s going to be another reunion for this school, but it isn’t on grounds and I know no-one who will be attending, so I won’t either.

This brings me to my other reunion story. IN 2013, my high school celebrated 100 years of existence. I for a while considered attending, but was still in the psych hospital at the time and besides, my entire high school experience had been quite bad. So I didn’t go.

A few years later, I got an E-mail from a former teacher there. She had been my Dutch teacher and tutor for the first year and part of the second year of my attending this school, until she went on sick leave and finally found another job. She had been at the reunion and had wondered about me. Having read part of my website, she now understood why I hadn’t been at the reunion.

This, as it turned out, would also have been my last chance of meeting the teacher who’d become my tutor after the Dutch teacher left. He got cancer about a year after I’d graduated high school in 2005 and died in 2016. I am pretty sure it was for the better that he didn’t know that I was still in the psych hospital then.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (May 4, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m once again joining #WeekendCoffeeShare on Sunday, as yesterday, I had a busy day and was too tired to write.

Today’s the day we commemorate Dutch people who died in World War II (and in every war, conflict and maybe they now count terrorist attacks too since). Only 5% of Dutch people currently were alive during our liberation on May 5, 1945. I never was all that much of a May 4 and 5 follower, but I have over the past few years learned to be more mindful of the freedom and rights I and those I love have, since they are more and more being threatened. For this reason, I think I’m going to do the two minutes of silence at 8PM this year. I hope I’ll have finished my post by then. I’ve just had dinner, so no coffee for me, but I’d love to offer you a drink.

If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. On Wednesday, we had our first day when, at the national weather institute in De Bilt, the temperature climbed to above 25°C. On Thursday, here it even got to 28°C. I read that the first day of temps above 25°C usually doesn’t happen until mid-May. I appreciated it though. Today, the daytime temp didn’t get above 13°C.

If we were having coffee, then I’d tell you I’ve done a lot of walking again, as well as riding the side-by-side bike. My May challenge on my Apple Watch is to double my movement goal twice. I already did it once so far, so that should be ridiculously easy.

If we were having coffee, then I’d share that one of the sick staff whom I’d made the polymer clay frog for last week, let me know via her colleague that she was really happy with it. I had originally asked another staff to pass the frog for the other sick staff on to her. Then, on Tuesday, that staff said it may be nice for the two of us to pop by the sick staff’s house on Wednesday so that I could personally give the frog to her. I did ask the staff whose idea this was to text her colleague to ask her permission for us to stop by, since some care workers with good reason don’t want clients to know where they live. Now I for one never even look up my staff online and would certainly not violate their living space. The sick staff gave her permission so one of the side-by-side bike rides was to there. The staff’s kids were home too and one of them asked me where I live. I, being awkward with young kids that I am, originally mentioned the institution town and then said I lived at [staff’s name]’s work, only to realize that [staff’s name] is “Mommy” to the kid.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that the other side-by-side bike ride was to a market once again. I resisted the urge to buy something, as I’d already been to the supermarket on Monday and I reasoned even just strolling the market is a nice experience. Besides, we did have lunch at a fish diner.

If we were having coffee, then I’d share I’m still struggling with the temp worker situation and how much energy goes into explaining everything to them. Sometimes, I think staff get me, while at other times, it seems as though they’re absolutely clueless.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d tell you that, yesterday, I went to Nijmegen for a cerebral palsy meeting again. It wasn’t the nationwide CP day. That had been in early April but was held in a city that’s a two-hour journey from here, so I hadn’t gone there. Nijmegen is about a 45-minute drive in good traffic. This meeting lasted three hours total and there was no theme. Rather, we gathered in a restaurant and had lunch and some drinks and just chatted. I have met many of the participants a few times before, but there were a few newcomers too. With one of them, I chatted almost the entire time, because we had so much in common. She recommended a few resources to me too.

After the meeting, I had decided to go to my best friend’s parents’ house (ack, “in-laws” is a lot shorter 😉). My best friend picked me up in Nijmegen and drove us there. My best friend’s sister was there for a bit too with her one-year-old son. I really don’t do well with kids, although this one is a lot less loud than my nieces.

I didn’t get back to the institution until 8PM yesterday and went to bed shortly after 10PM. I’m honestly still quite tired.

Neurospicy Burnout

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. A few days ago, I listened to a podcast episode on autistic burnout. It’s the most recent episode of Beyond Chronic Burnout, a podcast for autistic women (and other marginalized genders, I hope) and their helping professionals. It discussed the Spicy Pepper burnout questionnaire, which apparently is a questionnaire to determine your level of burnout. I got overloaded trying to find the actual questionnaire amid all the ads etc. and it looks like the website it was published on, isn’t particularly screen reader friendly, so I wasn’t able to take the test. However, from the descriptions discussed on the podcast, I believe I’m in quite a significant burnout and have been for, well, years.

What is autistic burnout, you might ask? Autistic burnout is like regular burnout from being overworked, but it is really more like being overworked living life in a world not designed for autistics. As I have said for many, many years, just living in a neurotypical world is hard work for me.

I want to clarify that autistic burnout is often amplified by co-occuring conditions such as ADHD. In fact, writing this just reminds me of something I read several years ago that said that having fibromyalgia, which is often agravated by stress, is often correlated to ADHD. This is why I refer to neurospicy burnout.

The podcaster claimed that the first signs of burnout in autistics usually appear between the ages of four and six and many autistics experience their first actual burnout between the ages of six and ten. This was hugely validating. I, at age five, fell ill with what my parents claim was the flu, but it did lead them to get me into special ed quicker than originally intended. Age seven is always when my parents claim I changed from a cheerful, happy child to angry and depressed. This correlates with my having to start learning Braille, so according to my parents I then became aware of my declining vision. This is probably correct, but it doesn’t mean that my difficulty accepting my blindness was the only or main problem.

The first warning sign of autistic burnout, the podcaster says, is suicidal ideation. Oh my, can I relate! I honestly always thought that the first sign of burnout, whether neurospicy or work-related, was exhaustion. That with the fact that I react to overload with overactivity and irritability, always made me believe I’ve never had “real” burnout symptoms. Now I realize that I may not have fully collapsed (yet), but I do certainly experience burnout. And have for, well, my entire life since I was seven, I guess.

Kymber’s Get to Know You (May 1, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. How is it May already? Time flies and the #AtoZChallenge certainly was a fun thing that made time fly. I really do hope I’ll be able to continue in the flow of blogging, but I won’t promise anything even to myself.

Today, I’m joining Kymber for her Get to Know You prompt. This week, it’s a This or That. Here goes.

1. Shopping online or shopping in-store?
For fun, I prefer shopping online, honestly. It allows me the ability to browse what’s available, whereas in-store I’m dependent on someone to tell me what they see. Because of this, if I could really do all my shopping online and package delivery here to the institution wasn’t as complicated as it is, I’d do all my shopping online. Yes, I do realize that town centers would be empty without stores, as they already are much emptier than they used to be. We’ll find a solution to that though.

Currently, I do go shopping in-store once a week with my best friend and I do love going to the supermarket with my staff. However, the latter is probably because the supermarket doesn’t deliver to the institution and I can’t access the website of the one that does.

2. Science fiction or mystery?
Mystery, although in all honesty I’m not that much of a fiction reader. I do read the occasional sci-fi novel but think mysteries are more my thing out of these two.

3. Movie adaptations or books?
Books. I don’t watch movies, because without audio description I can’t follow them because of missing the visual aspect and with audio description, I can’t follow them because I get overloaded. Then again, like I said above, I am not that much of a fiction lover in general.