Cold

I really, really cannot stand cold.

Yesterday i got back from an activist gathering i went to for the weekend to find the boiler in my house had stopped working. It is the coldest this house has ever been. Right now i am sitting at my computer wearing 3 jumpers and 2 pairs of socks, sipping very slowly at a hot cup of tea while alternating holding my hands against the cup until i have to stop because of the pain, with holding my hands in the cold air until i have to put them back on the hot cup because of the pain.

Cold makes my entire body feel stiff - so stiff that right now i can walk either like a Cyberman or like someone with spastic CP. My shoulders feel like there are a couple of bricks on each of them. My face hurts because my muscles are scrunching it up into a frown uncontrollably. I'm getting constipated because the cold shock of the toilet seat makes my anal sphincter tense shut. It feels kind of like being completely covered in something that i have a reflex to flinch away from - so i'm trying to flinch away from the whole of my own surface area at once...

I don't know if this is purely an autistic sensory-intolerance thing or if i have some sort of physical intolerance to cold as well. While the latter thought is scary, i actually kind of hope it's true because (like a couple of other things, such as the extreme levels of hunger i feel and my complete inability to put on weight no matter how much i eat) if it's physical it's potentially treatable, whereas if it's sensory/neurological then it's a basic part of who i am, and there's nothing that can be done about it except to accept it.

Also, my concentration is pretty much zero. I had a list of about 10 things to do today, and i've done one of them (and i only managed to remember to do that one because i sent an email to someone saying i'd already done it). Even my vision doesn't feel right (difficulty focusing and noticing things).

I have incredible difficulty in explaining to people just how badly i'm affected by cold. It's probably the primary component of my SAD (although light levels probably play some role, but i think that's more indirectly through effectively denying me the use of half my available day). In every single house i've ever lived in, there has been more or less major conflict over me needing to put the heating on and others turning it off - it has even led to me becoming the recipient of physical violence (from someone who wasn't even paying rent in the house). Last night, i went into full-on flashback panic paranoia PTSD mode because i tried to turn the heating on, it seemed to be turned off again, and this repeated several times before the boiler became totally unresponsive to anything at all - i was utterly convinced that someone else in the house was turning it off, or even had sabotaged it to prevent me turning it on.

(The rational part of my mind replies that no one would be crazy or vindictive enough to deny themselves as well as everyone else in the house all heating and hot water, just because they felt one person in the house keeps the heating on too much, but the paranoia/PTSD part of my mind is fuelled by all my lifelong experience of living in a world where everyone's opinions and feelings are regarded as reasonable except mine, and even things that are held to be reasonable when coming from anyone else somehow automatically become unreasonable if they come from me...)

I don't actually know what to do about the boiler. It doesn't have an instruction manual, i have no knowledge at all of how such things work (although i'm capable of effortlessly memorising the most obscure facts and theories, practical stuff like how to fix things never seems to sink in, no matter how many times i try to memorise it... this might be dyspraxia-related), i know the landlord would be no use because he doesn't speak English and has never fixed anything we have asked him to fix (and in any case i have no credit on my phone to call him), and i have absolutely no money to pay someone to look at and/or fix it.

I suppose i have to hope that a) someone else in the house is bothered enough to want the boiler fixed and thus phones the landlord, and b) he actually calls in someone competent enough to fix it and is willing to pay for it. In the meantime, i am going to have to work out where other than my house i can find excuses to be...

And this almost certainly isn't even anywhere near the coldest part of the year... why the hell do i live in England?

All the blog posts i had been planning to write over the current couple of days will have to wait until i am capable of sustained concentration...