Far Removed

Recently I announced to both sides of my family that I would not be visiting on holidays anymore.  There was little response.  I made this decision for a few reasons. First: because I have a particular neurodevelopmental disorder, and because of the way it is expressed in me, I can't experience any motivation to socialize.  This may be difficult to understand.  Most people don't even know it's possible to have a persistent defecit, or even a lack, of desire to interact with others.  You can't see the problem, and you've never experienced it, so how do you know that it's real?  There is available plenty of clinical research about asociality, but instead of talking about that let's talk about phobias.  If someone says they have a phobia of balloons, there are two main kinds of response they might get.  The first is understanding.  The second is harassment.  An understanding person will believe someone when they say in all honesty that...

I need help in every aspect of my life.  It took my a very long time to realize just how much help I need.  Left to my own devices I have very little independent agency.  Outside of my creative endeavors I am not naturally inclined toward action.  I am absentminded to a fault, though I do remember to take care of myself.  I forget about chores, dates, and rent.  I cannot support others. On my own, I'm capable of trying to do things.  But I usually opt not to.  I can't see ways forward in the world.  When it's not clear what I should do, and when I can find no clarification of such, I do nothing.  I'm comfortable doing nothing.  Trying to act with no guidance causes me severe anxiety.  When pressed or judged I retreat.  I am comfortable retreating.  Being that the world is hopelessly confusing to me I rely heavily on the safety of inaction - the only safety I know.  Forced to leave my zones of safety I experienc...

When I was a child I broke my wrist.  Another child who was there when it happened said to me that a broken wrist was no big deal.  That when he broke his wrist at football practice he just shook it off.  With this he grabbed my arm and shook it, causing, predictably, extreme pain.  Why did he do this?  He was wrong about some things.  He was wrong about what was happening at football practice.  It could be that he interpreted any wrist pain of certain intensity as being indicative of a broken wrist and therefore believed without thinking that he was capable of repairing a broken bone by shaking it.  He had apparently misdiagnosed me, but he had done so in a very specific way.  He looked at what had happened to him and imagined that the same thing must be happening to me, but where did he get the certainty of this that allowed him to grab my broken wrist and cause me agony? He was young and inexperienced, yes.  But I have seen adults m...

I need repetition.  I don't seek excitement.  My small, quiet life might seem boring.  Boredom is predictable.  When I go out, I go into a world I can't interpret. I have no handhold anywhere there. So I need predictability to make me feel safe.  I keep routines I devise because I can know them. The World of Other People is crowded with signals.  There's pressure to be part of everything.  Gatekeepers to acceptance fold their arms and wait for me to impress them with my social acumen.  I know some signs but none well.  I have to think hard about every aspect of every interaction; I can't improvise.  Being outside my safe zone, forced to follow social rituals' mystifying protocol, I feel like I'm somewhere I don't belong.  It's a desperate, drowning feeling.  A squeezing, crushing.  I overload trying to process posture, context, facial expression, tone of voice, hints and intimations, trying to guess what I'm expected t...

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...

What is my passion?  I'm an author, a musician, and a cartoonist.  I greatly enjoy thinking about linguistics and philosophy.  I like analyzing ideas, disassembling them, and trying to find ways in which they might be repurposed.  These are all for me intellectual pursuits and I enjoy them as tasks I can analyze.  I like best the parts I have to think the most about.  But I don't know whether these interests are passions or not. It seems to me that the word "passion" involves emotional investment and that it implies catharsis.  I don't experience catharsis.  I do the things I like best to do because they are gratifying as cognitive exercises.  Must one's passions be emotionally gratifying?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps a passion is any nonessential thing one voluntarily does repetitively, seeking pleasure of any kind.  That is a generous definition and by it I can say that I have just as many passions as the next person.  I am ...

I used to care very much what people thought of me.  As a teenager I was desperate to integrate.  I didn't fit in and it drove me crazy.  The world seemed made to reject me, but I didn't see that society is not the world.  I invested in what people thought because I believed winning acceptance was the only path to happiness.  I couldn't have known then what I know now because I had barely been alive.  I hadn't existed long enough to see the world beyond society. I know now that people's opinions are ephemeral.  Good or bad, the thoughts anyone has had about me have been drops in the oceans of their lives.  I remember being made fun of, and when it was happening it was like an apocalypse.  From grade school to high school I was tormented by ridicule and rejection.  But that's over.  There's no resolution to seek now, no balm for the past.  Whether or not I should have been treated in any particular way is an infertile discussi...

I use social media.  I don't like it, but I use it for work. I share my art, writing, music, and conlanging.  I try to limit my exposure to what other people are saying but I do see.  I see posts from others.  Sometimes they're entertaining so I browse.  It's like lingering in an irradiated zone to look for something pretty. There are simply too many people on social media.  It's baffling, dangerous territory.  I see a lot of news and I ignore it as much as I can.  Signs of what's happening in the world I don't want to live in.  The news is invariably accompanied by commentary.  Whether I agree or disagree with any particular opinion is irrelevant.  Opinions flash and then vanish.  Incidents fade, even tragedy.  Even horror.  But there is a great implicit pressure that I invest in outrage.  I don't have the necessary energy. Many are alarmed, angry, and so passionate.  I can't identify with their passion...