Skip to main content

The Deep People

The complexity of the human experience is exhausting.  I have to memorize reactions, motivators; it's an endless task made more arduous by my complete inability to relate to it.

Conversation engages suites of behaviors.  Many of mine are dysfunctional.  If I need to I can pretend they work in the usual way but it makes me uncomfortable.  Even when I seem to be doing fine in a conversation, I'm holding on for dear life.  Maintaining the pretense of higher functionality is a Herculean labor.  I've been doing it for a long time and I'm tired.

When I thought I was neurotypical I wondered why certain things were so difficult.  I tried to imagine what other people experienced but I couldn't and I still can't.  Sometimes I would ask directly but some people have no insight into themselves.  Asking for that is like asking a person walking on a beach to describe in detail the separate experiences of stepping on each individual grain of sand.  

And conversations are like beaches.  There are a billion billion sand grains to think about, at least for me.  Most people don't have to think about them.  They don't know they're doing anything complex.  But I need comprehensive help and clear instructions.  I need understanding or I can't act.  My ability to force myself to proceed from vagaries is deteriorating because doing so takes so much effort.  I have to think about what people might mean by any reply that isn't laser-direct, to draw in detail their motives from subtle shadow.  I flail for their expectations, their miniscule politics.  I misjudged my ability to guess about people.  I had to believe my own lies a little bit but I'm trying to make a better assessment.  In pursuit of that, I've discovered this tiredness.  And bitterness as well.  I feel like it's not fair that a therapist has to give me lessons in fitting in with NT people while they don't get lessons on interacting with me.  I have to live up to their example.  The burden of passing is entirely mine because I'm the anomaly.  But this is a niggle.  I don't expect life to be fair.  The most frustrating problem in this arena of problems is not being able to get the clarification I need.  The person on the beach generally doesn't want to think deep thoughts about sand grains or talk at length with me about sand.  Asking people to dissect their thoughts and motives is at best a good way to get even more confused.  At worst, you risk starting a forlon argument with someone who is trying to interpret what you're saying in the way you're incapable of interpreting what they're saying, having neither the skill set not the desire to reduce their grand cognitive experience to a simple recipe.

Now I have some independent verification that I'm different.  I don't understand any of it.  I'm still weighing the implications.  At the moment I feel like a novice again.  Being honest across the board means observing and admitting what I can't do.  Now I can start to see autism affecting me the real way it always has.  I want to be good at it, but I also want to sit still and be quiet and have the simplest, safest human experience possible.  Being myself should be easy but it isn't because part of being myself is trying to be other people.  And people are complicated, and the more I look the more complexity I see and the more baffled I am that it just keeps going.  I can't imagine having such depths inside me.  But then many of the deep people can't either because their own depths are all they know.  They can't ponder something they can't even conceive of, even when it's all around them.  So we're both confused.  Am I really so different then?  Yes I am.  I still can't connect.  This is because of my neurobiology and not because I haven't spent long enough considering comparisons.  No analogy will correct the aberrant microörganization of my association cortex or mitigate much my disorder's broad perturbation of my intracortical connectivity.  Autism impacts my cognitive and neurologic functioning.  While I have some ability to learn to pretend in simple interactions that I'm not confused, pretending demands efforts that I can't sustain for long anymore.  And the older I get the more the effort overwhelms me and the less willing I am to ignore the moral problems of faking to pass.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Human Protocol

Humanity is a spectrum. Some people move through human society without ever belonging in it. I'm such a person. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, everything your internal organs do, your balance, your muscle tone, your proprioception, every experience you have, from the big ones to the little ones, corresponds to something that happens in your brain: a neural event. Most neural events are beyond our direct control. Every neural event has a trigger. Someone says your name and you turn. You like a song, so you turn it up. What triggers neural events is determined by things like your genes, your upbringing, your culture, and your values. Many neural events are reserved for human-to-human interactions. If you encountered a mosquito that spoke English, you'd recategorize it, and you might change the way you went about trying to keep it from biting you. It would qualify for a kind of consideration that we don't usually offer mosquitoes. It would be more than just an ...
Post a Comment
Read more