Poem: Ancient Wounds

Protected Pangolin: Art by Debora Ewing https://www.debnation.com

Careless shift carapace rifts

A sacred space exposed

Plates of armour torn asunder

Exposing the never whole

Curling 'round her pangolin heart

She tends to these intrusions

In seclusion she seeks inclusion

Within a tribe she cannot know

Warrior head high in a toxic sky

Sucking sulphurous bile from her throat

She ascends from the ashes

Writing footprints of grief in the sand

Disjointed Heart

I really struggle with the disconnect between how I feel, how I think I feel, and how I think I should feel. This is especially true for nebulous feelings of affection and love, which I'm beginning to realise I experience quite differently than the average bear. 

People often ask me how I can stand to be away from my children and husband so much, but the truth is, it doesn't really bother me. When I'm away, my thoughts aren't with them; there's no pining, no longing, no wishing I were home. When the question is put to me, I mumble awkwardly and try to shift the conversation to how much I love my work and the deep satisfaction it provides. I choke down the guilty feelings and try to scrub away the self-slapped labels of bad mother and bad wife.

The fact is, I sometimes forget all about dearly beloved friends and family for weeks or months, only to have a sudden pang of yearning for them hit me from out of nowhere. My mind can get so caught up in the fantasy worlds in my head or those on the printed page, the real world all but ceases to exist, and along with it, the flesh and blood people I should be loving. I would, more often than not, prefer to be left alone to deeply explore the worlds and relationships of my own design rather than try to navigate the treacherous waters of the ones I inhabit.

This whirlpool of thoughts coalesced into a few verses as I tried to will myself to sleep last night. I was suffocating as my husband's unspoken question, "did you miss me while I was gone?" sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so I sketched out my silent response. However, it's broader than just that one interaction, it can apply to many. Some about which I've written previously, others I haven't. I didn't think it was particularly good, but some writer friends thought differently. So I will preserve it here.

I SO LATE

You leave
But I don't miss you
Although I know I should

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Although you wish I would

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

I breathe when you are gone

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

I fear you’ve cast me wrong

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Always begging me to hold

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Shadowed secrets never told

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

I know that I should try

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

After years I wonder why

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

It always ends this way

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Now the only choice is stay 

Saying I'm Sorry (*Again*): Part III (Ant)

Cover of: I love you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I love you, by Kevin Farran

I love you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I love you. It's a beautiful book title and an apt summary of all my more intimate relationships. If we remove the second comma, my entire love life suddenly falls neatly into one of these two categories. Either I'm apologising to those I love because my love is simply never enough or I'm deeply sorry to someone for ever loving them in the first place. I suppose many of us are often sorry for loving someone when it goes wrong and wish with all our souls we could go back to intercede at some fateful moment past, but for me, the guilt comes for the havoc my loving seems to wreak on others. I feel I'm a tornado in a trailer park: unleashing calamities upon the most vulnerable, innocent and unsuspecting victims of all.

In Part I & II of this series, I explored two formative relationships gone awry because their unresolved questions refuse to release my mind from purgatory. I classify these two intersections under the "I'm sorry I love you" heading. I believe my affections were more burdensome to the recipients than they were worth and generated chaos where there was calm. But now I want to explore a relationship of the "I love you, I'm sorry" variety.

Before I do, however, I need to lapse into a brief interlude to discuss the twined beauty and beast of neurodiverse relationships. As always, I must emphasise that my experience is certainly not universal, but these paired traits I am about to discuss are incredibly common among those on the Autism spectrum. We seem to be given to express most things in extremes, in this case oscillating wildly from unwavering loyalty to suddenly and unapologetically severing ties. It certainly sounds paradoxical and I imagine is the emotional equivalent of a swift kick to the head. 

Loyalty is an oft cited positive Autistic trait. It is a wonderful thing not to be fickle, to be willing to lay down your life or sanity for a cause, an institution, or a friend, but it can also be extraordinarily costly, personally, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Autistics are very vulnerable to manipulative people who learn to use this trait (often conveniently coupled with naïvety) to their advantage. While I haven't discussed this particular topic with many Autistic men, the female identifying portion of the population would resoundingly prefer support and coaching on safety skills in this arena over being "trained" to conform to NT social norms. However, when that loyalty is appropriately bestowed upon a deserving recipient, it is a grand and noble thing.

The flip side of this coin is as insidious on its face and protective in the long run as loyalty is the other way around. While not a diagnostic criteria for ASD, a tendency to abruptly sever ties with little or no explanation is a common question on Autism screening tests. It is often chalked up to black and white thinking, and this is the only explanation that makes it make any sense to me. Otherwise, I have no idea why a switch suddenly flips in my head, telling me to walk away from someone I had deep affections for a moment before and never look back. Even when it hurts so unbearably much I'd rather be hit by a train, only forced proximity and outside intervention can unfurl the clenched fist of rejection once I've made up my mind. It's a pattern I've repeated far more times than I care to remember. I feel deeply sorry in retrospect for every time I've done it, but I had my reasons, they were logical, and I had to stick to them regardless of the consequences. I know this doesn't mean shit to the people I hurt.

I can only see in hindsight that I mattered enough to someone for my hasty departure to cause them suffering. It was only ever after I made up my mind to tarry no longer that their affections became clear enough to register. This has been a brutal source of confusion and misery throughout my life, but I now finally understand from whence this idiosyncrasy springs. I suppose this is why I now feel an ever more intense impulse to go out and say I'm sorry to everyone I ever did this to. Now I can explain it. Now that I understand the thing, I feel like my apology has more weight, is more sincere free from entanglement within my own self confusion. But I'm almost certain no one else gives a flying leap at a rolling donut.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this unrelenting need to apologise for these transgressions haunts my dreams. While I find myself occasionally wending through my unwaking world to seek forgiveness from some of the minor players in my life, there is one refrain that dominates: seeking absolution from Ant. I beg for it in my dreams because I cannot grant it to myself in the light of day.

My dreams are always intense. Wild and fantastical worlds, complete with colour, sound, and even smells light up my nights and sometimes leave me feeling exhausted when I awake. I don't know whether it's sad, ironic, or just an early red flag I missed that one of the first presents Ant gave me was a dream journal. I thought it was a wonderful present initially, but when he added that I no longer needed to regale him with my nightly adventures as I could enter them in it instead, I was deflated. He was the first and last person to whom I ever tried to fully describe the magical realms of my dream world. So, it is certainly with more than a hint of irony that I now chase him through the hallways of my mind, endlessly trying to explain my actions and beg to resume our friendship.

I want to explain why I couldn't stand having face-to-face conversations to talk about our relationship problems, especially not when he insisted I make so much eye contact. I want to explain why I was so "embarrassingly" over the top at parties and incapable of making respectable small talk. I want to explain why I would invariably blow up and become a raging mess after every social occasion, why I just wanted to stay in bed sometimes even when the sun was shining, why I wanted to be alone with him and not out interacting with others so much of the time it drove him crazy.

I wish I could tell him that I didn't know I was worthy of love and therefore I didn't think I really mattered to him at all. I wish I could tell him that his insistence we share a tightly coupled schedule that allowed me no breathing room when I was completely overwhelmed by people and responsibilities fuelled the deepest burning resentment I'd ever experienced. I wish I could tell him that my suicidal ideation and adulterous fantasies were born out of an overwhelming and very real need for solitude. 

Through the lens of Autism, I can see all these stumbling blocks, inconsequential things to most people, but insurmountable obstacles to me. I am now able to look back and see how the mask I was forced to wear, a mask I'd only just started to don in the year before we met and welded into place with the guidance, tutelage and admonishments of those who "loved me most" during those years we were together, was slowly, silently strangling me. I had to get out to save my life.

I didn't leave because I stopped loving. I didn't leave because I wanted to be with someone else. I didn't leave because I needed something more convenient. I only left a little because I really wanted a cat… I left because I didn't know what I needed and even if I had, I sure as hell didn't know how to ask for it.

So, even though I've said I'm sorry before, and you've professed to forgive me even though it seemed disingenuous, here it is again, flung out into the ether because I don't want to disrupt your life again. As much as it would buoy my heart to count you among my friends in the world again, I sense that is not your wish at all. To you, the past is the past, what's done is done. I wish my brain could work that way too.

Echoes of love left behind through blurred boundaries

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.