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Talking in the Dark

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 to mislead me, manipulate me.  This is a sign of disrespect.  They would be direct if they saw me as an equal.  This is just how I think.  These are the wrong inferences that I make.

The way in which I misunderstand people and misinterpret their motives is colored by bad trauma.  I have been around very manipulative people.  Abuse has taught me to expect abuse.  It upsets me when I think someone is trying to put an idea that is theirs into my head inside a kind of Trojan horse, intending to make me believe that the idea is my own.  Using movie vernacular, you could call this inception.  I see this as naught but insidious.  I have been victimized by some bad people, and that has impacted the way I listen to and interpret others.  It's made me suspicious and hypervigilant for manipulation.

A certain amount of manipulation is normal, apparently.  Conveying an idea through speech isn't as simple as tranaparently explaining it in full detail.  There are always politics involved.  Emotional politics.  Said politics are beyond my ability to grasp, let alone play, most of the time.  I know about them though, and that's like walking through pitch darkness knowing there's a staircase somewhere.  You proceed carefully with the staircase constantly on your mind, searching for it with your foot, expecting everything to be that first step's perilous dropoff.  Staircases are helpful and normal, but they become scary when you're blind and you don't know the room.  This is what trying to communicate through Asperger's is like - at least for me.  Every conversation is an unfamiliar room full of invisible dangers that I can't stop looking for, and I'm often wrong when I think I've found one.

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