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Dog and Space Man

I walk past another person.  I feel anxious.  I don't know where to look, what to do.  Speak or no?  Smile or stare straight ahead?  There are lots of options.  I don't think about all of them.  I don't know what to expect or what they expect of me.  I feel my facial expression like a mask that's too tight.  I try to look unaffected, like I belong where I am.  I fight the feeling that I'm necessarily an imposition.

Look at the interloper.  I can't guess what people are thinking but I know that they probably are so I imagine their critiques of me.  Here comes an outsider.  He is out of place.  His being in my vicinity calls for my consideration of his appearance, his character, his intention, his station.  He invites negative assessment.

Intrusive thoughts.  Grasping for shadows trying for some kind of purchase anywhere.  Mentally stammering.  Freezing, choking.  Remembering in a flood the bad past and feeling my limitations.  My dysfunction.  I'm overwhelmed.  Even if nothing happens, the experience was stressful.  There is no good outcome with this anxiety.

Imagine a hit dog.  You have to take it away from the abuse.  If it still lives where the blows come it can't begin to think that there's not another blow coming.  Every social interaction is a boot to the ribs.  Walking unaccompanied among humans, a dog draws attention.  A stray will run even from the nicest humans if it's learned that humans mean pain.  And it can't work out why.  It doesn't have those cognitive powers.  The dog can't tell you why people hit it or why it thinks all other people are going to hit it.  It isn't capable of thinking about itself in that way.  Make two maps: a dog's mind and a human's.  You may see similar topography, but they will always be separate animals.

I am like a dog.  I see people seeing me and I know something might happen but I don't know what.  And I can't intuit their expectations or intentions.  My mind doesn't lie straight over their minds.  I'm missing a lot of detail that would make us fit together.  And I've been hit, so I avoid.  I have so much anxiety about socializing that even benign interactions are ordeals.  My anxiety is related to my inability to interface well with others - to being different in my constitution.  The map of my personhood is a map of another world.

Imagine another world.  The inhabitants breathing air that is toxic to me.  I am there with my breathing apparatus and they are asking why I don't take the apparatus off and breathe like they do.  It's so easy. They don't even have to think about it.  But I need something between myself and their air enabling me to be with them, and my apparatus has to be charged and it doesn't allow me to go everywhere and do everything.  I do breathe like them, I have the same respiratory system but I need my own air supply.

So I am like a dog and I am like an alien with a rebreather.  Maybe those aren't good metaphors.  What I am really is an autistic person with social anxiety disorder and I see the subtle ways I can't integrate and it feels like there are a million of them.  Because socializing is complex behavior and I'm not stupid but I lack that necessary complexity.  I can seem to be integrating, like a dog that can be taught to make a noise that sounds almost like "I love you" or a space man who can do mostly what you can do but always has a plastic thing feeding his lungs.  But there are real, significant differences.

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