Undercover Agnostic (Update 27): A Sensory Overload Christmas

Sheldon's note: This will be a bit of a long rant, bear with me. ;)

I had been planning Christmas party with mom and dad at my house for the Sunday School class, and anyone else from the church I am "undercover" in (at least until next month, I'm planning to come out then, I've already come out to my sister). Mom had told me that she was going to help set up most everything Friday during the day, while I was work on a 12 hour shift, and then she would either be gone by the time I got home about 5:30, or shortly after.

She had said that she was going to take my 85 pound dog, "Happy Horse", a Black Lab/hound mix with her when she left. Imagine my surprise when I come home and not only is everything set up, but Happy Horse is still there, barking at me when I come in the back door, and she's still there with my dad. I hadn't suggested the idea of her leaving before the party started, that was her idea, but I was rather annoyed that she wasn't keeping her word about that

The party was due to start at 7, and they are both still there while people are showing up. Oh, and did the people show up. Everyone I invited came, along with some of their friends.

In all, it was around 18 people at it's highest point in a house that's only 763 square feet upstairs, bigger than my mom and dad's house, but still too small for that many people, especially considering that you can't go outside

(It was around 30 degrees and sleet/snow coming down). The living room and kitchen where every one was gathered is only about half of that space, and for some reason, people didn't want to spend time down in the basement, where I have essentially a second living room, and a kitchen style table set up.

It was really getting to my issues with sensory overload, the mass of people gathered, too many people having too many different conversations at once, which in me, leads to it all blending into an overwhelming cacophony of intelligible noise. I stayed to the edges of the crowd, talking to a few people, letting the crowd do it's thing, generally staying to the room where I felt the least suffocated.

My mom, however, didn't find that acceptable, she denies that I have depression, forced me off of medication when I came back home after my nervous breakdown, so the idea that I could possibly be autistic is beyond her limited comprehension.

 She starts working the crowd herself, her massive ego kicks in, and she starts overriding her normal aversion to crowds showing every the house, and acting like she owns the place so much that a few people who didn't know me (the friends of friends), actually asked her if we all lived there together.

Undercover Agnostic (Update 18): A Foggy Mind, a Wedding Ring, and Bittersweet Memories.

Sheldon's note: This post is somewhat of a continuation of update 16 in my Undercover Agnostic series, A Long Talk with Rose. If you are not familiar with that post, please read it now before proceeding to read this post, otherwise it will not make sense to you.

This past Sunday, the normal after church conversations were going on, and Rose's father "Jim", said for Rose to show me a picture on her phone. I saw what it was, a wedding band, on what was most definitely her hand. I had so many different emotions then, ranging from confusion, fatigue, bewilderment, happiness, to somewhat of heartbreaking disappointment.

I was already in a fog, and this picture didn't help my confusion any. Not only was I having some bad fatigue from my depression that put me in a mental fog, but I was starting to have the lottery ball effect at the same time, and I have never had both at the same time. I don't know why, because I have been taking my Cymbalta regularly, but sometimes I still have my bad mental health days, where I feel lost and like absolute crap, tired, confused, and like absolute crap. I haven't had days that bad since the Cymbalta, but I guess life happens that way.

I suppose I should start from the beginning on why this caused so many different emotions for me all at once. I have been good friends with both Rose and her now fiance, Sam, since between they ever started their relationship. I have known both of them for at least 10 years. When we were teens, and shortly after high school, I was very close to Rose, and we had a odd and unique friendship.

She kind of startled me at first, with her happy personality, and her insistence in the first few years that I knew her of always wanting to hug me. I did get used to that, and after some time came to enjoy it, which is odd, because I have talked before on the blog about my resistance and discomfort about people touching me in my post, Personal Space Invaders. I can only tolerate anything more than a handshake if it's coming from a close female friend, like Rose, or if I am in a relationship. Not even family can get too close.

Rose liked being affectionate with me, and we spent a lot of time together in those years. When I was about 19, she brought up the idea of us dating. That's when I made one of the worst mistakes of my life, and one I still regret to this day: I shot down the idea. It's not that I didn't care about her (I did), it wasn't that I wasn't attracted to her (I was, and I still find her to be cute), quite frankly it all boiled down to the fact that quite simply, I was a coward.

There, I said it, it's the truth, and it was a very pretty truth to confront about myself. I was too sacred to take that leap. I was scared of what would happen if we would break up, I wondered if we would still be friends, I was afraid to lose her that way, I was afraid of my abusive mother, who  didn't approve of her, since there was not much I could do to break free of her then (this was very shortly after the nervous breakdown that so greatly changed my life in many ways), I was just scared all around.

Though we remained friends, we have never been as close as we were at that time since. She went on to date Sam, and about a year into their relationship, I confessed the way I felt to Rose, just laid it all out. I felt so guilty, like I had betrayed her, since she cared about me so much. She was surprised that I was carrying so much guilt about it, and I believed her when she said that she had forgiven me, but what was done was done, there's not much I could do about it.

Undercover Agnostic (Update 16): A Long Talk with Rose

Last Sunday, I’m in the sanctuary of the church I am undercover in, the service has been dismissed, and the crowds are thinning down quite a bit. I had just been a part of a conversation with Sam and Rose, and another couple about some issues in their relationship.

I have known Sam and Rose for many years, since I was about 14 years old, and they are two of only 5 people in the church I am undercover in that knows about my loss of faith over the last few years. Last year, I wrote a guest post on Laughing in Purgatory about coming out to them, they were both surprised, but both of them have still accepted me, and put up with my odd personality (believe me, that’s not easy to do).

Sam and Rose were talking to a young married couple (the wife is only a year older than me), I’ll call for the sake of this post, Mr and Mrs. Jones. Sam and Rose have been together for nearly 4 years now, and Rose has been pushing the idea of getting married.

There’s many reasons involved in this, I have wrote before about the evangelical obsession with pressuring people to marry young, and the way the culture there tends to alienate single people, and I know that Rose really loves him, and sees this as the next logical step in life and their relationship. However, there’s a lot of issues standing in the way, some I already knew, and were brought up in this conversation, and others, I was told shortly after this conversation (more about that later in the post).

I just sat back and listened for the most part to the conversation between the two couples, and joined in only occasionally. I’ve found through experience that most neurotypicals prefer to take the lead in conversations, especially in groups, and that fact, once I realized that, actually makes my life easier, because sitting back and listening and watching gives me time to prepare for what I am going to say, making sure that I understand not only what they are saying, but what they aren’t saying, the hidden context, tone of voice, body language, etc.

I think it’s more that Sam can’t get married right now, I don’t think the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He kept bringing up that he is supporting his family, his father, who is sincerely as lazy as he can be, and his mother, who has mental health issues (kind of a hoarder type personality, I found out shortly after that she was 15 yappy little dogs in the house that they all live in).

Both Mrs. Jones and I were trying to steer Sam in the right direction, I had suggested that he should try to convince his mom and dad to move into a HUD apartment complex in our town that is designed for the elderly and disabled in our town, instead of living in the house they can’t really afford to live in (and Sam is pouring money into it to keep them from losing it).