Brain Junk, Et Al
With apologies to sovay, who's seen a lot of this in our recent email conversations, some thoughts about potential neuroatypicality and the coping mechanisms developed to deal with life inside it:
One thing I've learned, being-whatever it is that I am-is that people really don't like it when you set limits, ie when you explain the parameters of what feels comfortable for you and why you're not going to go outside of those parameters because, hey-oh, it feels uncomfortable to do so. They particularly don't like this when you want to set limits for social interaction, because touchy-feely-share-y-etcetera. When I was a kid, my parents bought me a book called Free To Be You And Me (look it up), but I guess that was a loooooong time ago, man. Now the generally received wisdom appears to be Free To Act How We Want You To, Or Free To Stay Home And Cry.
That said, as I told sovay earlier today, what baffles me particularly whenever I think about this stuff is that delicate balance between me saying "this is how I negotiate the world, it changes but it changes very, very slowly, and it's a process that seems to have no end" and me inevitably being perceived to be saying "this is how I am so you should make excuses for me, because me saying 'this is how I am' is me making excuses for myself." I seriously don't believe the latter is accurate--if you say a cat's not a dog, are you making excuses for it not being a dog? Are you expecting people to feel sympathetic towards it? Sympathy's not something I'm interested in; empathy, that's better. Not pity, so much, as compassion, because I truly believe we are all part of the same spectrum of human behaviour. Nothing I do or think should be alien to anyone, if they're doing their due diligence.
This standardized rubric of accepted vs. unacceptable response isn't really anything new (it's a rock I've been slamming my head against for at least thirty years now, by my count), but very interesting when I attempt to put it in a purely generational context. I expect people my age and my Mom's age to incessantly claim that the Web, email, texting and/or IM technology are separating us from each other and curtailing the development of social skills, while I see them as necessary intermediate steps, much like any other form of communication assistance. You wouldn't take his text-to-speech system away from Stephen Hawking (hopefully, in that I stupidly continue to proceed from the baseline assumption that nobody really WANTS to be an asshole), so why would you take my computer away from me?
When email first appeared on my horizon as an option, I was ecstatic; I remember explaining to a friend of mine that I finally felt I had complete control over the way I presented myself, that I could reduce myself fully to words alone and make sure I'd never be misinterpreted again. Naturally, as that friend gently pointed out, this soon turned out to not be true; people could still challenge you, and did. People still made wrong assumptions, started shit, stirred it high and set it on fire. Yet the idea of negotiating my way through the world from monologue to monologue, absent the influence of sporadic eye contact and with no resting bitchface attached is still a lure, and that's about nine tenths of what keeps me coming back.
So what I do these days is set limits, because I'm old enough to feel like that's my right: if you want to interact with me, online or off-, here are the rules. Online, I'm usually really not interested in having a “discussion” with people I don't know, especially if said “discussion” basically amounts to trolling or the other person seizing my space to use as a soap-box for their own bullshit. “Not a conversation” is one mantra, as is “This is over, blocking you now.” This is because I no longer feel as though I owe anybody my time or energy just for shits and giggles, given that I have real things to do with my life I need to save that time and energy for. I also tend to make up my own mind about things after doing my own research, so the plain fact is, you're not going to persuade me of much just by hammering at me; dogpiles don't work, nor do call-outs. I've had people call me a coward for ruthlessly policing my own space, and to those people I say a hearty “fuck ya,” because a large part of my own maturation process has been getting to a place where I truly do not care what people I've never met before think of me as a person, given that they have no actual experience of me as a person.
Things are different offline, though I have rules there too-I just keep them to myself, in the main. Because of the way my brain functions, I need to interact with somebody multiple times in order to link their face and/or behaviour with their name, so I tend to cut people I meet IRL far more slack than I do those I “meet” online. I also tend to save discussion of my more specialized interests for online interaction, restricting my conversation offline to more universal topics with broad emotional appeal: family, work, school, global events, health, interpersonal shit. I observe the people I talk with as we talk, attempting to map their parameters, so I can avoid the things which make them uncomfortable. This seems like basic human politeness to me, though I've been given to understand it maybe isn't. One way or another, however, it allows me to alleviate my near-constant anxiety about the received wisdom-something I've internalized over many years of similar interactions, at great emotional cost-that my social instincts are broken at the root, and that whatever impulse I have which seems most “natural" will always be, in fact, the exact opposite.
So I make myself laugh, and I make jokes, and I make eye contact; I listen and I learn, volunteering opinions about what I presume to be the most potentially inoffensive topics. And none of these behaviours are “natural” to me, at this point in time; they're all entirely practical, strategic, self-protective. Which doesn't mean that they're total bullshit either, because the human animal is complex and we all literally can't help wanting to connect somehow, just that I've been hurt before-many, many times, often by things people don't even know they're doing, which is why I try to pay such scrupulous attention to the things I apparently do which hurt other people in the same ways, or so they say. I can't reckon whether they're lying/exaggerating/performing or not, most of the time, so I give them the benefit of the doubt, and hope they do the same with me. If they do, great; maybe we can build on that. If they don't, then bye-bye, because we're all going to die one day, probably sooner than we think. I don't have any time to give to people who jerk me around anymore, socially-there's no return in it, not for me. Life's too fucking short.
Ever since I saw a list of Asperger's Syndrome symptoms and went: "Holy shit, that sounds exactly like me as a kid," I've been wondering exactly what I'd get out of pursuing a firm diagnosis; I know I test probably a few points out on either side these days, but I'm also fairly sure that's just because I've internalized thirty years' worth of socialization lessons and routinely second-guess my own first responses to things so much that I barely see them anymore, aside from sometimes reminding myself that I've talked "enough" about what I'm talking about and should shut up for a while now or risk kick-back from the person I'm talking "with," or bemusing my Mom by once more pointing out that my baseline feeling about other people's opinions (at least in meatspace) is "I truly don't give a fuck, but sure, tell me about that; I'll try to find something in it that makes it worth my time."
It definitely seems unlikely it'd connect me with a bunch of people who suddenly understand and welcome me, but that's more because those people would be so generationally different from me to begin with; the experience of being somewhere on the spectrum often seems to be so individually different for almost all of us that we can rarely evaluate each other except in an almost theoretical way. The conversation is always: "Yeah, got that; no; um, NO; that sounds sort of familiar; WHAT?!" Which is, grantedly, how I feel about most NT people too, so maybe the bigger lesson is that this is the way everybody can expect to connect with everybody, and we all just have to learn to deal with it.
One way or the other, I'm an adult and I've already developed a bunch of coping mechanisms, so re-learning those would take time, which might seem utterly antithetical and impractical, even if I did manage to replace them with "better" ones. So maybe what I can take away from this is that although I've now firmly mapped the limitations to my ability to cope with various things, to the point where I get why it happens and can try to explain it to others, actually negotiating those limitations is a whole 'nother thing. That's something I'll have to do on my own, always, just like I'm already doing and already have been doing, all this time.
For example: Every once in a while I still get this thing where friends suddenly say: "No, I actually don't know about [x], and when you question it like that, it sounds like you're trying to make me feel stupid." It's the worst feeling in the world when that happens, because I am literally NEVER trying to do that, and never would. Yet apparently it just keeps on happening, maybe because I don't forget much of what I've seen and I love to compare and contrast so my frame of reference is just ridiculously large, but I can't do much about that. The most recent iteration was when a longtime friend accused me of trying to make them feel stupid for not knowing who French-Canadian fabulist Anne Hebert was, when I was legitimately simply surprised; I thought our shared knowledge sets would have interacted in such a way that Hebert would be in there somewhere, but no, so okay, file that away. Still, it stung; it's something I keep expecting not to happen anymore, and I keep on being disappointed. Who can I possibly blame for that but myself?
I was talking to a person my Mom knows who I'd never met before last night, at a performance of Kate Hennig's The Last Wife (a brilliant play about Katherine Parr and her influence on both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor); she's got Capgras Syndrome, PTSD and is probably on the spectrum, and she's recently started doing stand-up comedy about a lot of this stuff. I told her the anecdote about finally meeting a person-a woman, actually-with a diagnosis when I was in my twenties; she turned up at a Serial Diners meeting one week, awkward as fuck, and announced: "Listen, I have Asperger's Syndrome, so if I say something offensive I'm sorry, but I can't read social cues very well." After she left I turned to Steve and observed: "Man, I wish I'd known that was an option, because for my whole life I've been under the impression I just had asshole syndrome, in that almost everyone I've ever met has at least started out thinking I was an asshole."
She thought that was hilarious, and we chatted a bit more. I ended up saying that in a weird way I'm just as happy to have not had that particular option dangled in front of me, partly because I think labels allow us to very easily pathologize our own symptoms, but also because being forced to live up to standards that will never be natural to me has been a very useful lesson, once which NT people don't seem to get enough of, considering the way they sometimes crumble when confronted by evidence that no, you are not "normal," because there IS no "normal." Normal is bullshit, "a setting on a washing machine," as Harley Quinn says. When you come into things routinely knowing you will fuck up in some way unless you watch yourself very, very closely, you quickly realize that the truth of life is that you really aren't owed anything, and you never were; there's no such thing as a social contract, except for politeness and a semblance of mutual respect, a stance which eventually may--hopefully will--become "real." That we need to at least agree to treat each other like human beings from the get-go, if only to keep from murdering each other.
But if you can handle yourself, eventually you mature enough to realize you can get to dictate the terms on which you will allow yourself to be taken-you don't have to be "loved," nor do you have to give much of a shit what people you don't know think about you in general, you just need to be able to get along. True friendship and affection are gravy, so long as you Do As You Would Be Done By and cut the people who won't meet you halfway on that the fuck out of your life, if you can. I've had to get along with people I will never have anything in common with and would never interact with on my own hook just to keep jobs or graduate courses, and I'll do that, because it's practical. But there's nothing in the fine print of socialization that says I necessarily "have" to accept that sort of bullshit from people I interact with socially, most especially if they purport to want to get into my pants.
We all want to be "loved," of course, because everybody does; like the single-cell creatures in Andrew Bird's "Imitosis," we're driven to cluster together no matter the cost, even knowing we can be cut from the herd for pretty much any incredibly minor infraction, any oddity. And this isn't weakness, it's just biology--an impossible challenge, because we're all different people and will never understand each other perfectly all the time without even trying, no matter how in tune we can sometimes seem to be. But most of us really can live without those oh-so-performative/heteronormative interactions that conform only to the very narrow socially-accepted definition of "love," and I have to say, from my own experience, most of us are likelier to be far happier that way. The one and only person in my whole life I've never had cause to regret loving (thus far) is the one I gave birth to.
Anyhow, anyhow. TL;DR: Gemma Files, what a hopeless fucking misanthrope you are, when it comes down to it! But I am very grateful to have friends who'll let me rave on like this every once in a while, and (probably) not judge me too harshly for it.;) Thanks in advance.
Amended to add: Okay, now it's off friends-lock. We'll see, I guess.
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/571124.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.
One thing I've learned, being-whatever it is that I am-is that people really don't like it when you set limits, ie when you explain the parameters of what feels comfortable for you and why you're not going to go outside of those parameters because, hey-oh, it feels uncomfortable to do so. They particularly don't like this when you want to set limits for social interaction, because touchy-feely-share-y-etcetera. When I was a kid, my parents bought me a book called Free To Be You And Me (look it up), but I guess that was a loooooong time ago, man. Now the generally received wisdom appears to be Free To Act How We Want You To, Or Free To Stay Home And Cry.
That said, as I told sovay earlier today, what baffles me particularly whenever I think about this stuff is that delicate balance between me saying "this is how I negotiate the world, it changes but it changes very, very slowly, and it's a process that seems to have no end" and me inevitably being perceived to be saying "this is how I am so you should make excuses for me, because me saying 'this is how I am' is me making excuses for myself." I seriously don't believe the latter is accurate--if you say a cat's not a dog, are you making excuses for it not being a dog? Are you expecting people to feel sympathetic towards it? Sympathy's not something I'm interested in; empathy, that's better. Not pity, so much, as compassion, because I truly believe we are all part of the same spectrum of human behaviour. Nothing I do or think should be alien to anyone, if they're doing their due diligence.
This standardized rubric of accepted vs. unacceptable response isn't really anything new (it's a rock I've been slamming my head against for at least thirty years now, by my count), but very interesting when I attempt to put it in a purely generational context. I expect people my age and my Mom's age to incessantly claim that the Web, email, texting and/or IM technology are separating us from each other and curtailing the development of social skills, while I see them as necessary intermediate steps, much like any other form of communication assistance. You wouldn't take his text-to-speech system away from Stephen Hawking (hopefully, in that I stupidly continue to proceed from the baseline assumption that nobody really WANTS to be an asshole), so why would you take my computer away from me?
When email first appeared on my horizon as an option, I was ecstatic; I remember explaining to a friend of mine that I finally felt I had complete control over the way I presented myself, that I could reduce myself fully to words alone and make sure I'd never be misinterpreted again. Naturally, as that friend gently pointed out, this soon turned out to not be true; people could still challenge you, and did. People still made wrong assumptions, started shit, stirred it high and set it on fire. Yet the idea of negotiating my way through the world from monologue to monologue, absent the influence of sporadic eye contact and with no resting bitchface attached is still a lure, and that's about nine tenths of what keeps me coming back.
So what I do these days is set limits, because I'm old enough to feel like that's my right: if you want to interact with me, online or off-, here are the rules. Online, I'm usually really not interested in having a “discussion” with people I don't know, especially if said “discussion” basically amounts to trolling or the other person seizing my space to use as a soap-box for their own bullshit. “Not a conversation” is one mantra, as is “This is over, blocking you now.” This is because I no longer feel as though I owe anybody my time or energy just for shits and giggles, given that I have real things to do with my life I need to save that time and energy for. I also tend to make up my own mind about things after doing my own research, so the plain fact is, you're not going to persuade me of much just by hammering at me; dogpiles don't work, nor do call-outs. I've had people call me a coward for ruthlessly policing my own space, and to those people I say a hearty “fuck ya,” because a large part of my own maturation process has been getting to a place where I truly do not care what people I've never met before think of me as a person, given that they have no actual experience of me as a person.
Things are different offline, though I have rules there too-I just keep them to myself, in the main. Because of the way my brain functions, I need to interact with somebody multiple times in order to link their face and/or behaviour with their name, so I tend to cut people I meet IRL far more slack than I do those I “meet” online. I also tend to save discussion of my more specialized interests for online interaction, restricting my conversation offline to more universal topics with broad emotional appeal: family, work, school, global events, health, interpersonal shit. I observe the people I talk with as we talk, attempting to map their parameters, so I can avoid the things which make them uncomfortable. This seems like basic human politeness to me, though I've been given to understand it maybe isn't. One way or another, however, it allows me to alleviate my near-constant anxiety about the received wisdom-something I've internalized over many years of similar interactions, at great emotional cost-that my social instincts are broken at the root, and that whatever impulse I have which seems most “natural" will always be, in fact, the exact opposite.
So I make myself laugh, and I make jokes, and I make eye contact; I listen and I learn, volunteering opinions about what I presume to be the most potentially inoffensive topics. And none of these behaviours are “natural” to me, at this point in time; they're all entirely practical, strategic, self-protective. Which doesn't mean that they're total bullshit either, because the human animal is complex and we all literally can't help wanting to connect somehow, just that I've been hurt before-many, many times, often by things people don't even know they're doing, which is why I try to pay such scrupulous attention to the things I apparently do which hurt other people in the same ways, or so they say. I can't reckon whether they're lying/exaggerating/performing or not, most of the time, so I give them the benefit of the doubt, and hope they do the same with me. If they do, great; maybe we can build on that. If they don't, then bye-bye, because we're all going to die one day, probably sooner than we think. I don't have any time to give to people who jerk me around anymore, socially-there's no return in it, not for me. Life's too fucking short.
Ever since I saw a list of Asperger's Syndrome symptoms and went: "Holy shit, that sounds exactly like me as a kid," I've been wondering exactly what I'd get out of pursuing a firm diagnosis; I know I test probably a few points out on either side these days, but I'm also fairly sure that's just because I've internalized thirty years' worth of socialization lessons and routinely second-guess my own first responses to things so much that I barely see them anymore, aside from sometimes reminding myself that I've talked "enough" about what I'm talking about and should shut up for a while now or risk kick-back from the person I'm talking "with," or bemusing my Mom by once more pointing out that my baseline feeling about other people's opinions (at least in meatspace) is "I truly don't give a fuck, but sure, tell me about that; I'll try to find something in it that makes it worth my time."
It definitely seems unlikely it'd connect me with a bunch of people who suddenly understand and welcome me, but that's more because those people would be so generationally different from me to begin with; the experience of being somewhere on the spectrum often seems to be so individually different for almost all of us that we can rarely evaluate each other except in an almost theoretical way. The conversation is always: "Yeah, got that; no; um, NO; that sounds sort of familiar; WHAT?!" Which is, grantedly, how I feel about most NT people too, so maybe the bigger lesson is that this is the way everybody can expect to connect with everybody, and we all just have to learn to deal with it.
One way or the other, I'm an adult and I've already developed a bunch of coping mechanisms, so re-learning those would take time, which might seem utterly antithetical and impractical, even if I did manage to replace them with "better" ones. So maybe what I can take away from this is that although I've now firmly mapped the limitations to my ability to cope with various things, to the point where I get why it happens and can try to explain it to others, actually negotiating those limitations is a whole 'nother thing. That's something I'll have to do on my own, always, just like I'm already doing and already have been doing, all this time.
For example: Every once in a while I still get this thing where friends suddenly say: "No, I actually don't know about [x], and when you question it like that, it sounds like you're trying to make me feel stupid." It's the worst feeling in the world when that happens, because I am literally NEVER trying to do that, and never would. Yet apparently it just keeps on happening, maybe because I don't forget much of what I've seen and I love to compare and contrast so my frame of reference is just ridiculously large, but I can't do much about that. The most recent iteration was when a longtime friend accused me of trying to make them feel stupid for not knowing who French-Canadian fabulist Anne Hebert was, when I was legitimately simply surprised; I thought our shared knowledge sets would have interacted in such a way that Hebert would be in there somewhere, but no, so okay, file that away. Still, it stung; it's something I keep expecting not to happen anymore, and I keep on being disappointed. Who can I possibly blame for that but myself?
I was talking to a person my Mom knows who I'd never met before last night, at a performance of Kate Hennig's The Last Wife (a brilliant play about Katherine Parr and her influence on both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor); she's got Capgras Syndrome, PTSD and is probably on the spectrum, and she's recently started doing stand-up comedy about a lot of this stuff. I told her the anecdote about finally meeting a person-a woman, actually-with a diagnosis when I was in my twenties; she turned up at a Serial Diners meeting one week, awkward as fuck, and announced: "Listen, I have Asperger's Syndrome, so if I say something offensive I'm sorry, but I can't read social cues very well." After she left I turned to Steve and observed: "Man, I wish I'd known that was an option, because for my whole life I've been under the impression I just had asshole syndrome, in that almost everyone I've ever met has at least started out thinking I was an asshole."
She thought that was hilarious, and we chatted a bit more. I ended up saying that in a weird way I'm just as happy to have not had that particular option dangled in front of me, partly because I think labels allow us to very easily pathologize our own symptoms, but also because being forced to live up to standards that will never be natural to me has been a very useful lesson, once which NT people don't seem to get enough of, considering the way they sometimes crumble when confronted by evidence that no, you are not "normal," because there IS no "normal." Normal is bullshit, "a setting on a washing machine," as Harley Quinn says. When you come into things routinely knowing you will fuck up in some way unless you watch yourself very, very closely, you quickly realize that the truth of life is that you really aren't owed anything, and you never were; there's no such thing as a social contract, except for politeness and a semblance of mutual respect, a stance which eventually may--hopefully will--become "real." That we need to at least agree to treat each other like human beings from the get-go, if only to keep from murdering each other.
But if you can handle yourself, eventually you mature enough to realize you can get to dictate the terms on which you will allow yourself to be taken-you don't have to be "loved," nor do you have to give much of a shit what people you don't know think about you in general, you just need to be able to get along. True friendship and affection are gravy, so long as you Do As You Would Be Done By and cut the people who won't meet you halfway on that the fuck out of your life, if you can. I've had to get along with people I will never have anything in common with and would never interact with on my own hook just to keep jobs or graduate courses, and I'll do that, because it's practical. But there's nothing in the fine print of socialization that says I necessarily "have" to accept that sort of bullshit from people I interact with socially, most especially if they purport to want to get into my pants.
We all want to be "loved," of course, because everybody does; like the single-cell creatures in Andrew Bird's "Imitosis," we're driven to cluster together no matter the cost, even knowing we can be cut from the herd for pretty much any incredibly minor infraction, any oddity. And this isn't weakness, it's just biology--an impossible challenge, because we're all different people and will never understand each other perfectly all the time without even trying, no matter how in tune we can sometimes seem to be. But most of us really can live without those oh-so-performative/heteronormative interactions that conform only to the very narrow socially-accepted definition of "love," and I have to say, from my own experience, most of us are likelier to be far happier that way. The one and only person in my whole life I've never had cause to regret loving (thus far) is the one I gave birth to.
Anyhow, anyhow. TL;DR: Gemma Files, what a hopeless fucking misanthrope you are, when it comes down to it! But I am very grateful to have friends who'll let me rave on like this every once in a while, and (probably) not judge me too harshly for it.;) Thanks in advance.
Amended to add: Okay, now it's off friends-lock. We'll see, I guess.
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/571124.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.