Far Removed

Friendship looks good on paper.  People appear to enjoy their friendships and to want, or at least to expect, to have friends.  I don't have this experience.  I don't want friends. It took me a long time to understand that I have no desire for friendship.  As a child I thought I had to seek friendships because everyone around me wanted them.  It was part of trying to pass; I know that now but I didn't then.  I wasn't aware that other people didn't have to try to be like each other.  How could I have been?  I had no basis for comparison besides myself so I assumed everyone was like me.  I thought I was neurotypical and this was conducive to my feelings of inferiority.  I didn't know why I was so bad at being like everyone else.  It was because they were being themselves and I wasn't.  But I wouldn't realize that until long after my formative years were over. I was a very confused child.  I had few friendships and I wasn...

I want autonomy but I'm not inclined to do very much with it.  If I had perfect freedom to design my life I would design it so that it was small and quiet and so that I would need only to sit still and think in order to enjoy it.  I don't need to be in a stream of new stimuli.  I just want to look at things.  The world is a gallery I am obliged to pass through on my way to nothingness.   But there is pressure to seek excitement.  Or to live more, to engage, lest life pass one by.  I am perfectly happy to let life pass me by and I don't see why such would be a bad thing.  I don't collect experiences, perhaps because the emotions that are associated with experiences are for me very limited.  I am in general happier when I am not part of things.   Emotions aren't attractive to me.  I don't seek them any more avidly than I seek brief flashes of dim light.  This is not to say that I don't want to feel happy.  I...

It can be hard to understand asociality.  When I tell people that I have no impulse to socialize, some of them think I am misdescribing the experience of being reluctant or afraid to socialize.  I want to find a way to make it easy to understand what asociality is and what it's like for me. Here is the simplest explanation I can think of: the impulse to socialize is caused by an event that happens in the brain.  Some people never experience that event.  I am one of those people. I had trouble with this when I was young.  I didn't know that asociality was something that could happen.  I tried to make myself be social because I believed I had to.  The people around me were social and they seemed happy.  I wanted to be happy, so I tried to be social.  But that made me unhappy because I was forcing myself to do something that was not normal for me.  I became very confused.  The world seems hostile when you feel like you can't be you...