Storms
2026-04-29
I had a bit of a rocky morning, but this afternoon is turning out better. I had to take my mom to a doctor's appointment, and while I was waiting for her to finish up in the parking lot, it started to rain heavily. That's pretty normal this time of year, but I really didn't anticipate it happening as early in the day as it did. I didn't have an umbrella in my car, and there was a Walgreens in the same lot, so I went over there to buy one. Can you believe they weren't selling any? Of course you can—Walgreens is trash. But anyway, I started crashing out a little bit in my car. I had a nice little fit of rocking, vocal stimming, and hitting myself as the rain began to pour down hard onto my car's windshield. I didn't have my music on and didn't want to expose my mom to my esoteric music taste (she hates it), so I had some shitty corporate radio station on instead. They started playing even shittier ads, and I had to turn the audio system off because commercials are the worst things for my paranoia. Then I got a call from my mom telling me she was finished.
The rain was still pouring.
I could barely keep my composure. I started having those self-hating thoughts again. Classic stuff, you know? I was thinking that I can't handle even simple stressors anymore and that I am a failure to society and deserve nothing because I contribute nothing. You know, that kind of stuff. Texas, like me, is quite temperamental; my mom told me that we should just wait a few minutes until the rain stopped pouring. Lo and behold, exactly six minutes later, that's exactly what happened. She walked to the car, I got her situated, and we drove home in a light drizzle. But of course, I was still ruminating over my crashout, and felt like there was no way I could handle anything stressful ever again—that if I deal with even a modicum of it, I will simply just keel over and die. While I was crashing out, I resorted to a usual vocal stim of mine where I say "I don't know" or "I don't know what to do" over and over again, because my neural programming is just too glitched to process anything remotely useful. In those moments of total internal collapse, the only thing there is to do is wait until it's over. There's no negotiating with it, no calming down; it's just a storm of its own, I suppose.
But yeah, I got home and was, needless to say, pretty bummed. I get worried when I feel too bummed because it might make me spiral again, but there was a comforting thought I was able to give myself that got me through that small tempest: "Man, I really need to stop trusting my own judgment." Most milquetoast life advice boils down to something along those lines. "Trust your gut," they say. "Your intuition is a lot smarter than you think," they'll say in a soft voice as they subvocally crack the whip at you. No, I don't want to rely on my own understanding for literally anything anymore. Listen, I'm kind of retarded, okay? I need to be given constant guidance and reassurance, or else I will simply just keel over and die. People always tell me that I'm a smart guy or whatever, and some might assume a certain air of arrogance in me because I'm perceptive and know things, but seriously:
I'm kind of retarded.
But you know, there's comfort in that—there really is. I have grown to love the opportunity when I can just tell someone "I don't know" so that I can bask in my own ignorance. It's awesome—why be smart when you can just not do that? Whenever someone calls me smart, it's usually a soft rebuke anyway. Expertise is unfortunately conflated with authority, and people don't like feeling dumber than you. I don't want to be any kind of leader or authority because I can't handle the responsibility the way people might assume I can after their first few conversations with me. I can tell you what's going on, but what to do about it? Ask someone else, man. Authority is tough because the hard decisions that come with it make me want to throw up. If I ever have to fire somebody, I will simply just keel over and die. Running away from responsibility is a tiresome thing, but facing it might be even more tiring. How can I go about my day being as tired as I am all the time? I can't rot away in bed, but facing anything that isn't in my bubble is so excruciating that I give up every time.
So many jobs I've just run away from, people I've let down—it's something that really eats at you after a while, but I don't feel like I even have the bootstraps to pull myself up by. I think this is the part where I try to turn it around into something positive, usually make it something about God and all that. There are many days where I go to pray and I just feel nothing. I know that's a totally normal and fine thing, and I'm reminded of that first Beatitude. You know, the poor in Spirit one. A little bit of theology for you: it's Spirit with a capital S. It's a reference to the Holy Spirit, that mystical third part of the Trinity. It's our direct means of access to God, and a lack of it is actually a good thing. When you pray and feel nothing, that actually means it's working better than if you felt that effervescent feeling a lot of lukewarm Christians love telling people about. A poverty in Spirit is a wonderful thing because poverty forces you to take stock of what you actually have, and when I look around and see all of the loving people and feel the cool breeze after a storm on a humid day—it makes me remember that outside of all my clouded judgment, the light still shines.
Take its brightness to those dim corners if you can.
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