Think
. . . and into my life
by
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From the Forward:
This book is all notes to me, about me, explaining me. The entries are excerpts from years of my e-mails, from my morning writes and from wee-tiny notebooks I carry with me wherever I go.
In 2008, I was all set, me, to join the blogging world. I was rereading this book and I was bored with me, all of me. A friend who knew I had no TV had been kind enough to check some movies out of the library for me. One of those movies was “Mozart and the Whale”. I stared at it for days thinking I had no reason to watch any minute of any Aspergers support group. Then, all of my else failed, and watch it I did.
Truth is sometimes not just surprisingly evident, it's glaringly apparent. Fifteen minutes into that movie I knew the truth, fifteen more minutes on the Internet told me what I knew was right. The truth was that my accurate diagnosis is Aspergers. And yes, I've had that diagnosis professionally confirmed, it is now official.
Imagine yourself me, you've just finished your diary files, you're to the point of proof-reading for typos, your indigo's rising, and your everything changes. Bombs burst, literally and figuratively, into my air. My world filled itself with a gut-wrenching, an ego-blasting, shamanic death. I went down for the count.
Screaming through my mind flew all of the “possible” diagnoses I'd heard, all the ones bestowed on me, all the pills I'd swallowed, all of the thoughts I'd written in explanation of me . . . the Truth of my life whirled my mind into a feeding frenzy.
Denial is so much more than something you can sit in, it's something you can recognize real. I had never considered, not even as a remote possibility, that my brain's capacity to understand might, in and of itself, be limited. Flash . . . BOOM, I experienced my own big bang.
The truth is, the only diagnosis I have ever believed real was bestowed on me by a very, very smart man. He explained to me that I was “Heyoka, Walking the Visionary Path.” That was heady stuff for a 30 year-old, especially a “seeker”, more especially when you know, you know, it's true beyond any shadow of any doubt.
Bear was Lakota, I am obviously not, so our translation of “Heyoka”, for my world, became “Muse”. I'm a writer, and I explained that a “muse” is what I know I will be in the end, “a thought in the mind of that which created me”. Lofty words those, a bit of the “airy fairy”, still true.
He smiled when he agreed with my perception, my explanation, and he answered me with a nod I can still see. It was a “real” I didn't know, I recognized. It was the nod of a Walker between Worlds, I know that nod now.
An Aspergers diagnosis was not an exhilarating understanding of my walk here. It wasn't really a mood booster for me. Science has such a wonderful way of bursting bubbles. I wasn't quirky anymore, I was inappropriate. I’m not eccentric, I’m irresponsible. I'm not a writer, it's just my compulsion, my obsession. It became apparent that I had hidden myself so far in plain sight I couldn't even see me. It took days, then more than a year for my Aspergers to make sense, for me to be able to reconcile who I am with what I am . . .
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About the Book
I woke up one day a Muse, a Visionary. That very same night I went to sleep on the Autism Spectrum. Thirty years of misdiagnoses, nine years of my writing, a decade of my defying, of my redefining "normal" . . . in one life-changing moment I knew, beyond any shadow of any doubt, my accurate diagnosis was Aspergers.
Suddenly finding yourself on any Autism Spectrum will slam you right into any wall of wisdom you've imagined real. I stood in front of the mirror, not literally of course because I just don't, and I tried to breathe. Words screamed through me exploding my mind. Hearing the echoes of every single human being who had ever spoken anything "wrong" with me . . . I experienced my own Big Bang.
During the next year, I reread, rethought everything I'd ever written. The good news is I meant the words then, I mean them now. I mean them still, even as they prove my Aspergers diagnosis real. I didn't change a word.
About the Author
Janet DeLong, PhD, is a philosophical writer. We call her a spiritual teacher. Janet was in the final stages of readying this book for publication in 2008, when she was diagnosed with Aspergers. Needless to say, that shed new a whole new light on her “work”. It was a light Janet wasn't sure she wanted to share.
THINK is personal for Janet. Her whole book is “About the Author”. Janet explains in the Forward: “This book is all notes to me, about me, explaining me. The entries are excerpts from years of my e-mails, from my morning writes and from wee-tiny notebooks I carry with me wherever I go.” THINK is comprised of her “diary files” from 2005 through 2008.
She really does write every morning of her life, we know because we've all been recipients of hundreds of pages of e-mails. All of us have personally witnessed those tiny notebooks come flyin' out of her pocket. Part of Janet's charm is that she has the ability to laugh with herself, at herself, around herself, even through herself. Her work gives you more than pause to think, she hands you reason to know. She doesn't think that your knowing and her knowing will be the same things, that's never been her goal. Her hope is that you will recognize, you will understand what it is that you know.
We've been waiting six years for this book, we welcome it, and we invite you to enjoy her mind as much as we have, as we do.