I'm not particularly good at boundaries. I struggle with the nuance between 'acquaintance' and 'friend'; even using the German Bekannte never really helped me define these shades of grey. Hence, I've been badly burned many times by opening myself up completely and unreservedly to people I thought were Friends, who didn't have quite the same affinity for me. Wearing my heart on my sleeve has won me some true blue friends, but it has also left me open to derision and stabs in the back. I now realise this challenge is strongly tied to my inability to correctly read people and social situations.
I've been contemplating this issue in the context of Dunbar's number, which quantifies the number of meaningful relationship a person can maintain. (See: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-greatest-number-of-friends-a-person-can-have ) Listening to Dr. Dunbar explain his theory and the evidence to support it, I found myself both baffled and intrigued. The first time I heard an interview with him, it was prior to identifying myself as an Aspien and I thought it was simply outrageous to claim this to be a universal limiting truth as it felt so far removed from my own experience. Re-listening to the interview post Aspie-awakening, I had a completely different take on his ideas through the Autistic lens.
Dunbar posits (with a good deal of historical and social data to back him up) that humans have always been limited to about 150 people in their social network. This requires more specific defining in today's world of vast online social networks: these are people with whom one can maintain "stable interpersonal relationships" and is limited by the size of the neocortex. Now, I'm not a cognitive scientist, but it seems logical to draw the conclusion that if the neocortex is directly involved in one's ability to maintain stable interpersonal relationships, then this is somewhere we might look to find significant differences between NT and ND individuals.
In his interview with Dr Dunbar on the NPR Podcast, TED Radio Hour, Guy Raz describes this network of ~150 people as a series of widening circles with ever diminishing intensity. Each wider circle contains more people with whom we (ostensibly) are able to maintain a certain level of friendship. At the outer reaches of this circle, we reach a thinning edge where we pass from people we truly know and can trust in the present to all the others who are known to us in a lesser capacity or too far in the past to still be worthwhile. Dunbar explains that this limit exists because of the space those in the inner-most circles occupy in our brains.
I contemplated this "brain space" paradigm in light of my own experience. My first reaction was that I most certainly have more than 150 people within what I would consider to be a "stable interpersonal relationship", with whom I could pick up wherever we left off however many months/years/decades ago. I placed that number far closer to 400 and wondered why this might be so. Then it slowly dawned on me that maybe this is where my Autistic brain starts to get things "wrong" socially.
I believe that I most likely have a very skewed notion of what constitutes a close relationship and I must admit that I find it nearly impossible to contemplate that people I have not seen in many years may have moved on and changed. I started to recognise that the somewhat shocked/maybe irked, "um, hi, what do you want?" response of "close friends" I hadn't seen or been in contact with for many years might well be a function of the lack of reciprocity in holding others in my head and heart. I have never really been able to understand how someone I felt so close to in the past could just move on when there had been no falling out of any sort.
I discussed this all with my husband and his take was that I indeed have very few people within those first few realms of "close friends". He suggested that what I interpret as a strong friendship really just boils down to people putting up with my quirks and allowing me to bounce back into their life whenever I have a mind to do so. So, perhaps I simply spread out my neocortex space very thinly to an enormous network of people because I have absolutely no idea how to actually form strong, resilient friendships. This is both sad and kind of a special skill (in a weird, slightly antisocial way) because I often think of myself as a "node" connecting many different people I know only tangentially with other people they deeply connect with.
Another blurry boundary for me is the surface between other's emotional bubbles and my own. If people's emotions were objects in a painting, my world would look like Monet's Water Lilies. I tend to experience other's emotions as my own, which is odd at best and horribly confusing and upsetting at worst. The notion that Aspies don't have feelings or lack empathy is patently false. If anything, we may have unbuffered receptors of the emotional world around us, which can be completely overwhelming if not kept in check or blocked out completely. Walking around like the emotional equivalent of an open gaping wound often leads to an involuntary emotional system shut-down (hello, appearing emotionless!) or a meltdown (cue looking mentally unstable!) when it's all just too much.
This unfortunate combination of poor boundary conditions is the basis for the most painful series of human interactions in my life, the ramifications of which continually reverberate through both my conscious and unconscious mind. It creates a situation that makes it almost impossible for me to maintain my Self when I feel genuinely close to someone. I slide rapidly into the character they need/want me to be. I dissociate like salt in water, my atoms forgetting the crucial bonds within my whole.
My pattern is to lurch along in this disassociated state for a while before some crisis alerts me that I'm at risk of irrevocable loss. In a panicked act of self-preservation, I dump the baby out with the bath water and flee. I shut down all feelings of love, friendship, kinship, closeness, togetherness, etc. that were shared between us and steel myself with the hardened belief that it was a one-way farce all along and that the other person will be better off/happier without me. Some time later, I discover that I caused the other person immense pain and I feel confused and ashamed. I want to mend the friendship and apologise deeply and sincerely, but I'm convinced that all trust is obliterated, that there is no redemption for me in their eyes.
My dreams are haunted by endless echos of apologies to those I've hurt with my perceived callousness. I chase old loves and friends through abandoned hallways, across oceans, down ski slopes and unfathomable other worlds calling out pleas for forgiveness, assuring them I still love them, always will, because loss of love isn't why I left. I left because I felt too much. I couldn't handle so much feeling. I didn't know what to do with it all. It stole my tongue and left me deaf and dumb. My dreams are the only place the words will ever come out because my rational mind knows that by now time has pushed me beyond the edge of their neocortex into a footnote of friendships past.
Some might say I just want closure or to apologise to make myself feel better, but I truly wish I could go back and wipe away the hurt I inflicted, explain that none of it was intentional, put that little piece of my heart in a box and give it back to the person to whom it belongs and ask that they carry me as I do them. As I come into accepting my authentic autistic self, there's an overwhelming urge to go back to those old lost loves and friends and offer up my "disability" as an explanation for the pain I caused, but I think that would just do more damage than good. The only way is forward.
