Midway through our life’s journey… I found myself in a dark wood.
~Dante, the Inferno
I have seen more than a single dark wood over the years. Bad choices, poor social navigation, trying to fit my life’s peg in society’s differently forged holes. The only times that I have managed to find peace were times when I was alone, and not without irony, in a literal dark wood.
I’ve gone through much of life feeling invisible, misunderstood, pressured to comply, unheard, underestimated, doubted, exploited, etc. But I don’t think people are bad, and I seldom attribute this to meanness. Most people are equipped with a well developed set of expectations when it comes to others. This set of expectations is as much a part of our evolutionary origins as it is our culture’s specific hues and values. When someone fails to nestle easily into those expectations, the safest and most natural thing to do is shut the person out. I think that frequently people do this, unawares.
And in my life, it happens all. the. time. So many friendships have ended without words, but with my former friend just unapologetically stepping away. They remain polite if I reach out, but there is no reaching back, but maybe to borrow a tool. No willingness, ability, impulse, to connect. The feeling I have gotten from people who have gotten to know me well for 6 months or so over and over since I was a child was that I was not friend material. One can grow fond of a spoon and associate it with nourishment and good flavor, but never try to eat it. I think that I must be a utensil-like person. Something worth associating with friendship-type activities, but not of the friend stuff itself. My most explicit experience of this kind of aborted friendship was with a group of half a dozen bright, nerdy guys when I was a sophomore in college. They sat me down and demanded that I speak more. I didn’t know what to say to this (my usual state). They said unless I could talk more frequently, they just couldn’t hang out with me any more. It was a painful exchange because I adored this group of guys. That was it. We were no longer friends.
I have high functioning autism, or HFA (If you’ve read much of this blog, you probably guessed something was up neurologically.). Folks on this spectrum tend to come at life from a somewhat different angle and so they have a different set of navigational tools to accommodate their novel perspective.
The root cause of this is probably complicated and diverse. There may be several different flavors in the manifestation of Autism, but there are some common differences among Autistic individuals. Scientists have indeed found physical differences in the brains of autistic people; not only do the brains vary in the relative proportions, configuration, and function of different parts (amygdala, cortex geometry, prefrontal cortex, frontal lobes e.g. ), but also the configuration of the neurons in parts of the brain. Pardon the analogy, but the neurons are curdled in the Autistic brain- in concentrated well-connected clumps, that are themselves, poorly associated. Within the clumps, the neurons are closer packed and have less insular material between them, which might explain sustained and localized neural plasticity with a contrary dependence upon larger scale habit and sameness, hyper focus and ‘special interests,’ occasional savant-like brilliance, and cascade failure meltdowns that Autistic people can have more frequently than other folk.
And so, this is part of the reason why I am best off by myself, alone except for my zoo. I’m glad I am finally accepting this instead of forcing myself into social environments where I am doomed to fail. This is not meant to be a complaint, more an explanation. Self acceptance gives freedom, and I seem to have finally found that.