To pretty much anyone I know, if you were to make the above statement to them in relation to me, the automatic answer would be, “Well, DUH!” Of course I have a remarkably unusual emotional landscape, but every now and again, I’m reminded in a quantifiable way of just how.
See, that’s the odd thing about it: we all know I’m weird, but could you tell me how I’m weird? And is my weird unacceptable? (A lot of people seem to think that it is.) Why is it unacceptable? If you try to tell that it’s not unacceptable, aren’t you really just trying to avoid hurting my feelings or starting a fight? (These are the things that I cannot perceive and do not immediately understand.)
It’s a bit strange for me to think about these things right now because I know that my diet has been fabulous and that my supplements have been spot-on, and yet I’m feeling very much in touch with my Asperger’s.
Maybe I should give a little background story here…
This train of thought started when I was doing my weekly Reading of the Blogs. Some of these blogs are by people I know personally, some are by writers I admire, and some are on topics that are important to me. A massive collision happened when I read through a writer’s blog about his current adventures (details being unimportant, lest they skew the point), a friend’s blog about a shared event, and an autism blog.
The first emotional response left the train station heading east, achieving a steady speed of 65 mph after ten minutes. This response was made up of an abstract and strange jealousy, a weird little beast that I rarely encounter in my internal world. Someone got paired up recently, and I do not like their partner at all – but I have no reason to not like their partner, I have no reason to think there’s anything amiss – and yet I am deeply protective and defensive, expecting that there’s going to be a great deal of trouble in the near future. I couldn’t possibly have this original person to myself – that kind of relationship is alien to me in the first place – but that this other person was messing with my…
Well, there’s the problem. This someone has no relationship to me at all. We’ve never even met. Why am I having this strange, irrational response? I don’t like irrational responses. They’re irrational.
The second emotional response left another train station heading north, achieving a steady speed of 85 mph after 6 minutes. My dear friend reported a shared experience, as I said, but the representation of it was so far outside of my perception that I had to look back and check the date to make sure that it was even the same thing. And then the ending comment about how things would be after that experience was past was… almost as bad as the thing we’d shared in the first place, if not worse.
Now, to understand this confusion, remember two things about me: first, no matter how absurd or ridiculous, I will always believe what you say first. Unless you have a long history of lying to me, I will assume the truth, no matter what, until proven otherwise. So, I had to sit and look at this thing and ask myself, “Did it happen that way? I was there… and I don’t really thing that’s… quite what… Is that what other people were responding to? They thought that this was what I meant? And what about this part here? Is that really how I am…?” It was possibly the shittiest feeling ever, to think that someone assumed enforced ignorance and possible malice on my part.
Or was that just dramatic pause? Artistic license? Is that really what is seen?
The third emotional response didn’t slow down as it passed the station doing 90 mph, leaving any passengers far behind. It’s been running for a long time, and it’s fueled by sheer annoyance, defensiveness, anger, resentment, and indignation. This one was tied in to the autism blog and a reiteration of the suspicion that I’ve had for a very long time that the onus is on the Autists to understand everyone else, but no one really tries to understand the Autists.
Yes, I know there are countless studies and reports and what-have-yous that try to describe it, and maybe there’s a shift in the understand, but I dare you to take a few links back in Rachel’s blog and not feel rage rising in you, either as an Autist, a relative of an Autist, or merely as a human being. Empathy as the description of humanity? The fuck…!?
But then that led me back to the second train (which was approaching the collision site very quickly), and I had to think about whether or not the friend could take into account my condition or their condition, or was still in denial over it, or maybe just didn’t see things the way I did, despite our commonalities… and then the third train barreled down even harder to press into my head that maybe the whole damn thing was just a stupid excuse to not be responsible, which is ridiculous because I’m probably more responsible for feelings than is necessarily healthy, but because it doesn’t look like everyone else’s version of …
And then the first train ran a hitch, jumped a track, jettisoned across the countryside, hit the third train just behind the engine, sending it clear over the mountain in a fiery ball of metal into the second train…
…
All I really wanted was an application of differential equations so that I could understand gear ratios.
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