Far Removed

My mother-in-law died Wednesday.  Thursday, there was a viewing.  The funeral was today, Friday.  The viewing lasted 9 hours, and my wife and I were there the whole time.  I met many people I may never see again and almost certainly won't remember.  I was able to spend some time with my niece and nephew.  I took a Klonopin, and I think it might have helped me with my anxiety.  With the exception of my Trazodone, I'm not very good at telling whether or not my meds are working. I have no feelings about the experience.  I wasn't close to my mother-in-law.  I'm not sad about her death.  I know that other people are, and I'm sensitive to that.  I find that the best way to be the most helpful is just to stay out of the way of peoples' sorrow.  It rolls along no matter what.  I express sympathy by agreeing with people and saying that I understand.  I do.  It's not pretense.  I have sympathy.  I genuinely care...

I can't let myself forget to blog!  Ugh.  OK.  Here goes another entry. I almost never ask rhetorical questions.  I don't think to ask them.  When others ask them, I get upset.  I can usually tell when a question is rhetorical, but I can't usually see exactly what I'm supposed to infer from it.  I'm not very good at making those kinds of inferences.  I also don't see the point of rhetorical questions most of the time.  Or I feel that they are asked pointlessly by people who don't have a firm grasp on what rhetoric is. It's a much better idea to be direct when speaking with me.  I will understand you better if you get right to what you're trying to say.   If you try to make me infer what you mean, I will probably make the wrong inference, and I will get upset that you don't just say it.  I assume, by default, that people avoid directness for a reason.  I further assume that reason is nefarious.  They're trying...

I am dissociating today.  This post is not about that. "Hi.  I'm Ryan and I've been diagnosed with Asperger's." I want to say this to every new person I encounter.  I want them to know right away so there's no mystery or confusion.  "This is why I'm acting this way.  This is I'm moving my hands and avoiding eye contact.  This is why I don't understand." You can't be vague with me.  I will often fail to infer what you want me to infer, and sometimes I will make the wrong inference.  I also need specific instructions.  If you want me to do something, tell me exactly what you want me to do and nothing else.  If you want me to get somewhere, try to talk like Google Maps.  Ambiguity paralyzes me.  I can't act on incomplete information. I may be well within my rights to tell people that I'm autistic.  But some people won't understand, some people won't believe me, some will think I'm using my disability as a crutch...

From what I've read, it's common for people who are on the autism spectrum to express the feeling that they were born on the wrong planet.  I can say that I experience that feeling.  When I was young, I joked that I was literally an alien, saying that I arrived on Earth six centuries ago from the planet Tylius.  This was my jocular way of expressing something I didn't understand.  I wasn't diagnosed with autism until my late thirties.  As a child, I knew I was different, but I didn't know why.  Most of the people around me insisted that I wasn't different.  They thought my problems were all behavioral.  Some of the few people who noticed that there was something different about me assumed I was gay.  They were kids, and that was the only kind of different they'd ever heard of. I still feel like an alien.  As I get older, the feeling gets worse.  I pretend to be normal.   The longer I pretend, the more obvious it is to me...