silveradept | Sunshine Revival/Challenge 2025 #2: Love

sunshine_revival has posted their second prompt. Let's see what they're up to.

The sun is just starting to disappear behind the horizon and crickets can almost be heard over the music and the laughter echoing through the carnival night. You can't see any stars yet, but the twinkling lights of an amusement ride are highlighting the graceful curves of a swan boat and the high arching hearts of the entrance. Grab the hand of a sweetheart or a sweet friend and embark on a journey through the…

Challenge #2:

Tunnel of Love

Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like.

Sentiment and love are…weird for me. Heart pumping is much easier, but that's usually related to fear and anxiety than happiness.

So, one of the effects of my particular brain weirdness is the ability to hyperfocus, and to hyperfocus when I'm doing things I enjoy doing. That's reading, playing games, some of the more interesting rabbit holes to dive into, either to add functions or fix breaks or otherwise make my computers run better (or start running smoothly again). It's also the kind of thing that when someone tells me something, or even texts me something, I might look at it and file it away for later, and then go back to the thing that has my hyperfocus and not necessarily get things done in a timely manner, or respond particularly well. In my household, since we all have our own forms of neurodivergence, it's a little easier to at least understand why something didn't go according to plan, and that I might need some additional reminders of something so that I can break from the focus and take care of things. In previous times, it was mostly controlled from the idea of making sure that everything else that needed doing was done before I started anything that might suck up my focus, or use certain kinds of interruptions, like commercial breaks or harsh buzzers from laundry devices and the like to ensure that even if I started hitting hyperfocus, I would have things regularly interrupting me and demanding that I deal with them, to at least keep things going until they were done, or at least done enough for that day. Even with the additional reminders and technology that we have to help try and keep me on task, the system has its faults, and most of those faults are "if I didn't write down that I needed to do it, I won't necessarily remember unless prompted again." Sometimes the hyperfocus still wins.

All this backstory is important because these kinds of issues and compensatory systems have generally meant that the things that I've enjoyed doing have come with consequences, usually after the enjoyment that has happened, and it's been a magnified sort of unhappiness that follows from the happiness that came, so it's been hard to both make sure that I take time for myself and to do things that I like doing regularly that aren't fully and easily interruptible and to feel good about myself and the things that I do for enjoyment. (Or even the things that I do well in life, because I'm used to either being made fun of for them or having them dismissed as things that aren't useful or cool to anyone else around. It's better in my current situation, because at least some of those things can be appreciated, and because there's a regular habit of both thanking people for doing things and for pitching in to do things when there's ability, so it's not a situation where there are clearly-defined (and gendered) roles and only one person's responsibility to do them, so if they don't do them, it doesn't get done. My current situation also means that there isn't someone who basically demands that I always be within earshot so that I can assist her whenever she wants my help. So I've been slowly able to do enjoyable things and have them get hyperfocus, but also have people who will help me break it to do things, or who understand the "can you find a stopping point and then do this?" as a useful thing, instead of "do this now, regardless of what you're doing."

Then things get a little more complicated, because I have a lot of baggage to unpack with regard to romance, to the point of "I understand it, but I don't necessarily experience it." As best as I can tell, I'm pretty clueless about other people flirting with me, which doesn't help me much, but even then, I haven't experienced the things that other people seem to when it comes to knowing someone is a person they want to be involved with romantically. Other aspects of people being together that often go along with romance, sure. But the thing itself? Not as much. Which makes it a slightly boggling experience that there are people in my life who like me, even romantically, and are willing to deal with all of the above everything all the same. I guess there are other ways that I express my appreciation, affection, and other such things for the people who are willing to stay with me and the people who are still friends with me.

It's still weird to think that there are people who want to be friends with me, or other such things, because I've spent so much of my life either being someone who isn't in the social hierarchy of the school (and then finding out that at least some of the people there who I respected as having a better sense of themselves thought I was okay), then seeing myself mostly as a compilation of my faults without all that many benefits (and having someone in my life who benefited from me seeing myself as mostly faults and few good things). That things are better, and there are people in my life who are insistent that there are good things about me to like, and enjoy my company, and all of those things (in person, even, without the distance and time that the Internet and text-based media can provide to make someone seem better than they might be when they're off-line) is still something that is wondrous and great, when the opportunity arises to have it proven to me again.

I suppose that qualifies as something that I love, the re-affirmation that I'm not a broken being or primarily defined by the things that aren't the best about me, but instead by the things that are actually good about me. That probably sounds a touch sad to people who haven't taken the pathways in life that I have, but it's a good sign of progress that I can think about these kinds of things and come to the conclusion that there are things in my life that are excellent, and that there are people in my life who I cherish, and that I have achieved many things in my life that I would not have otherwise believed were possible in my younger years. As was pointed out to me through the magic of social media feeds,

If you're struggling with self compassion, something I've found helpful is to realise that you have to earn your own trust before self compassion can be helpful.

You've probably spent an entire lifetime not taking your own needs seriously, and motivating yourself through anxiety and threats, telling yourself "why can't you just" or "nothing's wrong, why are you so messed up?" and it's going to take a bit of time before you can feel safe with yourself, and trust that you're not just going to go back to the old, harsh ways when things get tough. Do what it takes to earn your trust.

Compassionate realism works better than false positivity.

The going is slow, because it's easier, more familiar, and has produced better results in the past if I do what's in that second paragraph in the quoted post. But each time that I do things a better way and things don't explode, it gets a little easier to trust myself. And I love that, too.