October 2025 In My Kitchen

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. This past month has been quite stressful. I have been struggling to get some meaningful activities in, of which cooking is one. I had hoped that cooking would be a more regularly-returning activity, but then again I’ve been hoping this for a year already… I doubt it’s ever going to happen…

I cooked two meals during October. The first, a chicken stew, I cooked for myself as well as my fellow clients. I followed the recipe, which instructed me to let the stew simmer for 10-15 minutes. That, my wife said, is not nearly long enough for a stew. She was in fact surprised that I’d included zucchini, as, if that’s simmered as long as a stew should simmer, would be pretty soggy. I do agree with her: the veg was too crunchy for a stew and too soggy for a stir-fry. My fellow residents liked it though.

The other meal, I cooked for just myself and my staff. I, after all, wanted to make a gnocchi dish. Gnocchi can be both cooked and fried, but my wife said it tastes better when fried yet then it’s pretty hard to do in large amounts without burning some gnocchi. Since the staff carelessly canceled meal delivery for five days starting yesterday because the freezer was full of meals, but I did not have enough meals in the freezer to get me through, I decided to prepare the gnocchi yesterday just for myself and my staff. The recipe was vegetarian and included lentils. I don’t care for those so decided to leave those out and use minced meat instead. The recipe included lots of vegetables, including bell pepper, zucchini, eggplant and onions. I’m not a huge fan of eggplant, but included it anyway and it turned out to be quite tasty.

When I ran this picture through Be My Eyes, it recognized the gnocchi as such. I hadn’t expected this.

In addition to cooking these two meals, I did bake a cake once. It was a pretty spontaneous decision to bake the cake. Unfortunately, we didn’t have eggs at the time, so we had to go to another home to get one. This and some other things led to me experiencing mild distress. Unfortunately, the staff who baked the cake with me interpreted this as the activity not having been a success. This made me feel rather off, as it gave me the impression that I’m only allowed to do activities in which I don’t experience distress. The cake was from a store-bought mixture and it wasn’t as good as the Biscoff blondies I’d baked last month, but it was still delicious.

Finally, I made a few smoothies and a bowl of overnight oats. No pictures of these, but to the oats, I added apple, cinnamon, cardamom and clove. That was really good!

Linking this post up with Sherry’s In My Kitchen.

No Reason for Alarm, Apparently #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m pretty frustrated right now. This is in part related to the usual struggles with my day schedule, ie. the fact that the only thing that’s clear about it is when I have support and when I’m supposed to be by myself. I’ve explained a zillion times that I need my activities to be more structured but the staff keep saying I can’t do any meaningful activities when I’m in distress. This may be partly true, in that polymer clay, baking and cooking are harder for me to do when I’m in distress, but when there’s no clarity about which activities I’ll do, the sheer magnitude of the list I have to choose from, overwhelms me before I can even decide whether I’m in good enough a mental state to do such an activity.

Another thing that’s been bothering me, are my physical symptoms. I’ve had horrible tremors for a few years already, but over the past year or so they’ve steadily gotten worse. My institution’s physician tells me to distract myself when it happens because it’s probably in part stress-related. However, I can barely operate my phone or computer when my hands are trembling and all the activities that I can do on my own that would at least in theory distract me, involve my iPhone or computer.

Yessterday, the tremors were so distressing and also my leg was in a constant state of tension. The tremors mainly affect my right side, while the muscle tension was on my left side. I have mild cerebral palsy affecting mainly my left side, so it’s kind of understandable that I’d experience spasming in that leg. However, there’s no known explanation for the tremors. Yes, they could be psychosomatic, but they could also be due to medication (one of my various psychiatric medications), some kind of long-term effect of my cerebral palsy, or any combination of these.

Knowing that my doctor doesn’t see a reason for alarm, is somewhat comforting. At least there’s no reason for me to believe I have a neurodegenerative disease. That doesn’t mean the thought doesn’t creep up on me at times though. However, even when I am able to realize that I’m not suffering from Parkinson’s (not that my tremors are at all similar to those someone with that disease would suffer from), the tremors are still debilitating.

On Monday, the staff are going to ask my GP’s nurse practitioner about the symptoms yet again. My intellectual disability physician tells me to distract myself, apparently believing my symptoms are psychosomatic. I’m pretty sure the nurse practitioner is going to say the same. However, if only those telling me my symptoms are all in my head and due to stress, could help me lessen that stress!

This post was written for #SoCS, for which the prompt today is “alarm”.

Disabled Ace Day

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I once again haven’t been active on the blog much. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, mostly true crime. Today though, I decided to check out the podcast The Ace Couple. In their most recent episode, which came out today and which I’m currently listening to, the podcast hosts said that it’s disabled ace day today. Ace, for those not aware, is short for “asexual”.

Like I shared when writing my post for coming out day, I’m for the most part asexual. I’m still figuring out where exactly I fit on the asexual spectrum. For those who don’t know, since sexuality isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, asexuality is a spectrum describing anyone who experiences significantly less sexual attraction to other people compared to the general population. People who are not asexual, are commonly called allosexual (“allo” being Greek for “other”). This also clarifies that people on the asexual spectrum, even people who are altogether ace, may experience sexual desire and pleasure.

I do not claim to be an authority on asexuality. Had I been able to be open about my queerness all this time, I might’ve been able to gather more information without feeling guilty. Like I said, I’m still figuring things out.

This is also where disability comes in. Commonly, it’s thought that disabled people, particularly those with intellectual or developmental disabilities, don’t experience the same sexual feelings as non-disabled people do. This is simply not true, although disabled people are more often taught to suppress our sexual feelings. After all, particularly those with intellectual and developmental disabilities are too often seen as “children in adult bodies”. I myself have used these analogies when describing emotional development. Because it finally enabled me to get sort of okay care, this analogy appeals to me even though it’s inherently ableist.

When a disabled person identifies as asexual or somewhere on the ace spectrum, it is then too easily thought that this is because of the way the person was raised or educated. This is the counterstereotype I so often used to talk about in my early days on WordPress (oh my, I need to bring some of those old posts back): if we want to defeat the idea that disabled people can’t have sex, asexual disabled people could be seen as harming the cause, similarly to how I’m seen as harming the cause for community-based support by living in an institution. In reality though, prejudice and oppression are systemic, not individual. Besides, it’s not our job as marginalized people to fit ourselves into society’s neat boxes, whether these are stereotypes or counterstereotypes or other ways of telling us who we are and how we should live our lives.

This doesn’t mean I’m not influenced by prejudice. Regularly, I think I’m too disabled for a relationship and that’s why I’m ace. I’m pretty sure that’s not true, as I do have many years of being in a relationship with my wife before either of us clarified our authentic needs and wants to the other. I remember writing a post back in 2008, which I’m not going to bring back here (don’t worry, wife!), in which I described not knowing whether I was actually attracted to her and thinking I certainly wasn’t interested in sex. If that doesn’t tell me I’m ace, what does?

The more I write, the more memories confirming that I’m indeed asexual, come to mind. I was quite repulsed as a teen, purposefully skipping the biology chapter on reproduction and refusing to read the sex ed material that my parents brought me at around age nine. Then again, I’m pretty sure my refusing to read it was because I hated reading Braille at the time and my parents made quite a big deal of me reading this book.

However, what if my asexuality is in fact related to my being multiply-disabled, including autistic? Does that mean I’m doing the disabled or autistic communities a disservice? I don’t think so, because like I said before there’s no value in dictating who I am. Besides, as someone who lived for twenty years not knowing she’s autistic and yet who was autistic all along, chances are we’ll never know for sure.

I’m joining in with #WWWhimsy.

Care Needs

Posted on by Astrid

Last year, when I was first feeling like I was falling apart at my current care home, I wrote a list of my “needs” and E-mailed it to my assigned staff and support coordinator. I heavily watered down my wishes, thinking a need isn’t the same as a want and whatever comes out of a discussion of my needs, should be working for everybody involved, not just me. For example, I asked for more clarity on what activities I’d be doing each day and offered to use my whiteboard, but also said staff could just ask me what I thought I’d be doing and help me find a suitable activity; this last one was then put into my day schedule, ie. “Staff upon leaving asks Astrid what she’s going to do next”. Needless to say, this didn’t work for me, being autistic, at all, as it leaves the same amount of unstructured chaos as the old wording, which was simply that I had “alone time”, did.

Now, more than a year later and with the Center for Consultation and Expertise involved to help me and my staff improve my quality of life, I’ve written another list, but this time, it doesn’t offer solutions for my unmet needs; rather, it’s simply a list of problems I encounter at this home. In a way, I feel that being solution-focused should be more constructive, but then again this time I have the consultant to think up possible solutions to come closer to meeting my needs.

This post was written for the Six Sentence Story linky, for which the prompt this week is “need”.

Am I a Monster?

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’ve been struggling really badly once again. Nearly three weeks ago, I had an outburst that caused the second staff so far at this home to request to the team manager that she not be required to support me for a while. This staff used to be one of my three assigned staff. Another was a student and has since left this home to continue her education at the intensive support home I used to live at. The third one is still my assigned staff, but she only works a day or two a week.

With the staff who previously requested to not support me for a while, I’ve since talked things over, though she still refuses to be honest about the thing that got me to be angry with her, ie. her using literally every opportunity to assign me a temp worker. Because of this, I’ve felt like I had to apologize for my anger (which I see is necessary) but she wouldn’t have to apologize for or explain her behavior that upset me. With the current staff, I don’t have this issue, but I do mistrust her for having pretended to have talked it over then decided she couldn’t handle it anymore a few days later.

I realize part of the problem is my attachment anxiety. As a result of this, I mistrust people who try to come close and be there for me, because I know that if they truly knew me, they’d reject me. Which is, of course, true in theory at least: no-one in life is there for anyone else unconditionally. And, given that I sometimes don’t know who I truly am, I worry that I’ll be worse than even I can imagine if I let my guard down.

Of course, it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you can see from the fact that two staff in the past year have already rejected me. The current one even claimed she wouldn’t.

Even if I’m in the midst of severe self-doubt, I am (almost) certain that I won’t become physically violent if I let my guard down. The problem is that words hurt too, and I can unfortunately say quite nasty things even without meaning them. I mean, there’s been one instance, back at the intensive support home, when I hurt someone’s feelings with a literal personal attack: I said that it was her fault that she got hurt during a fellow client’s outburst. This staff never requested to not support me anymore. With the two who so far did here, my comments weren’t intended as they came across and, while they could literally be seen as hurtful, I didn’t mean them personally and had no bad intentions whatsoever.

I struggle intensely with this knowledge, that I don’t intend to hurt people but that I do it nonetheless. I also struggle to figure out a way to stop this. After all, they are not insults that caused these staff to reject me (though I called them both bad names too). If they were the insults, it’d be doable to erase these from my vocabulary, as I’ve mostly successfully done with certain other words. However, like I said, they were their interpretations of my comments about how they don’t know me that hurt their feelings. This is harder for me to process, as it means being aware of every possible interpretation of something I literally say. This is quite hard for me as an autistic person with virtually no cognitive empathy.

Besides, as I now realize, I probably have low emotional empathy too, as I wasn’t able to predict that the staff was just going through the motions when I thought we’d talked things over. She in fact supported me through an intense movement therapy session and I didn’t pick on her struggling at all. This makes me feel even worse than the fact that I didn’t realize at the time that my words were hurtful.

This low emotional empathy realization makes me feel like I’m a monster. Aren’t autistics supposed to have high emotional empathy? Aren’t psychopaths and narcissists the ones with low emotional empahty? I mentioned possibly being a narcissist to my wife and she denied I am. Then again, aren’t narcissists masters at making their loved ones believe they are the victim? Is all this my attachment anxiety talking, or is there some truth to the idea that I don’t deserve to be supported?

Coming Out Day 2025

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s once again been more than a week since I last touched the blog. I keep telling myself that I should write only to be distracted by other things once I feel able to write. I’m struggling badly, but I know my blog helps me feel connected to the world too. I originally intended to look at today’s prompt for #SoCS or to write a post for #WeekendCoffeeShare. Then my best friend pointed out that it’s coming out day today.

Though I was open about being queer when I first started writing online in 2002 and I was advocating for trans rights on my first blog on WP, I haven’t been very clear about my identity over the past fifteen years or so. Part of the reason is the fact that I’m still figuring things out even now that I’m 39. Is that even possible? Part of the reason though is also fear. I know some of my regular readers are Christians and I don’t want to elicit negativity from them. Then again, is having to deny part of myself in order to please others, actually a wise choice? I remember first starting this blog with the intention of writing from the heart and now I’m not doing that.

So, let’s get into it. With respect to sexuality, I’m mostly asexual but have experienced attraction to women. When I was a teen, I met a girl and felt the butterflies in my stomach, but I never met her again and honestly am to this day clueless as to whether my attraction to her was sexual. I’ve had other fleeting crushes but nothing that indicated I felt like I wanted to be intimate with anyone.

My partner and I are more best friends than lovers and neither of us ever felt any attraction to the other one. In fact, I remember letting her wait for four months when she disclosed she had a crush on me. A lot of our earlier “love” was based on societal expectations. Now that we’re clear about our queer identities, we’ve also decided we will no longer do anything we don’t feel comfortable with. That’s one reason we considered divorcing.

I knew I was asexual for many years, but felt like hiding it because of societal expectations too. Who cares about labels, I sometimes thought. Who’s going to check whether my partner and I have sex? Obviously, no-one is, but it often did feel like I was denying part of myself when I was pretending to be in a sexual relationship. In truth, I’m probably never going to be in a sexual relationship and that’s fine by me. Being emotionally very vulnerable, I sometimes even feel that I can’t maintain the expectations of a friendship. That’s probably why my wife is my only friend. I sometimes try to expand my circle of connections, but it’s really hard.

I do consider myself to be on the aromantic spectrum too, though that’s more complicated than the asexual part. I, after all, did and to an extent still do enjoy giving my wife heart-shaped polymer clay creations. It makes her feel uncomfortable, so I don’t do it anymore.

I still sometimes consider myself a lesbian based on the attraction I can experience. Because one of my fleeting crushes in high school was on a boy, I have considered that I might be bisexual or pansexual, but I’m heavily lesbian-leaning if that’s the case.

With respect to gender identity, I’m cis but somewhat gender non-conforming. I strongly identify with being a woman, which is clear from the fact that most of my online nicknames were/are gendered. I however don’t know how much of this is societal expectations once again and I do find my gender expression isn’t all that feminine. Honestly, in this case, I’ve stopped caring about labels, but then again I realize that’s a privilege too as I’ve learned to deal with the dysphoria I do experience. For example, I don’t have to worry whether my discomfort with my cycle is due to sensory issues, feeling too vulnerable or is actually related to my gender, as I take the birth control shot so no longer menstruate.

All this being said, being queer isn’t a strong part of my identity, but it is a part of it. I am glad I’m able to be open about it now, if for no other reason, then because it felt like I was constantly jumping through hoops trying to avoid being too open about the realities of my marriage.