Self-Protection

A commercial for an anti-depressant shows a woman who is depressed, and she has a wind up doll which has a sad face and keeps running down, no matter how much she winds it again. Then she starts taking the anti-depressant, she is happy again, and her doll is smiling too, and running along like clockwork. Is that what we are, dolls that need to run smoothly so that we can accomplish what we need to do every day? I'm not saying that i think that we shouldn't do what we need to do to keep from being overwhelmed by our chemical imbalances. I'm just thinking that this image is... disturbing, somehow... this clockwork image of functionality. But then, i think of how sometimes i just want to rip my consciousness out of my neuro-physiological being, want to get out and just feel my consciousness unaffected by the neuro-physiological parameters that have been imposed on it by the "accident" of my birth. I sometimes think "If i weren't Aspergian, perhaps i wouldn't be so depressed all the time, and i might be able to 'just know' how to relate to everyone, and i wouldn't be feeling so depressed all the time about not being able to get close with anyone very much".

Being in relationship is tortuous for me; there is such ambivalence about being close, being emotionally intimate with someone, even if it's someone you feel close and care about very much... A friend, a gay man i've known about a year now wanted to be close and experience touching, yet that was simply too threatening for me for a long time, we had started out meditating together, and then progressed to holding each other, but then i had told him i didn't want to be that close. It frightened me, because i felt that energetic connection we were having, the feeling of an overlapping of boundaries, was just too threatening to me. This despite the fact that he's gay, and at the time i somehow thought it was a concern that sexual feelings might begin to emerge, because i don't handle those very well. However, now i'm not sure that was the issue. His particular variety of Aspieness, which seems to somehow emotionally interlock with something in me, triggered a response in me which was frightening, and i can't put my finger on why... I just wanted to run. Maybe it's because i was really having a hard time with the way he expressed his feelings about that outwardly, showing that he was moved by what was developing between us, and his way of expressing being moved, seemed like arousal to me, and so it made me feel uneasy... I have been so turned off by sexuality in my life since ever sincemy last relationship, because my last partner had an emotional detachment from sexuality, felt that it was not connected to his feelings for a woman. His feelings were only expressed by buying things for his partner, but that came with strings attached... Particularly he seemed to feel that certain sexual expressions were somehow impersonal, and should not be taken as meaning anything emotional, yet he wanted those "detached" kinds of expression from me all the time, so i felt that i was getting the message was that he was only interested in "detached" expressions of sexuality, and i felt that he really wanted, in fact expected, me to just "just be compliant" in the moments that i felt should be the most intimate. He would become angry at me when he felt i wasn't giving me what he wanted.

Yesterday i was with my gay Aspergian friend, and i was speaking of some of those experiences which had been painful for me. He gasped and expressed an emotional reaction of pain to my suffering, and he moved his hand toward mine, but yet he stopped; he remembered and respected my boundaries. I hesitated, but then i was able to allow myself to reach out my hand, and take his, and we sat and held each other's hands. When he left, we held each other for a long time, and with my eyes closed i could see the shapes of our energies, and see how they interacted with each other, and yet remained discreet. He said as he left, "I can feel how our connection is growing". I was able to say, "Yes", and not feel like i wanted to run and hide in response to that acknowledgement of what is happening.

Then tonight, i was watching "The Graduate" with another friend, and it revolted me so much i physically felt like vomiting, because it reminded me of some people who were close to our family when i was a child, who were way too much like Benjamin's family, and how when they would reach out to touch me, they always seemed to want to pinch my cheeks, pull my ears or engulf me into their bodies with their too tight smothering hugs; i would just cringe, and i always felt like i wanted to vomit, at those times. I couldn't understand the social cues and nuances, it's true, but still my sense was that these people were not really relating on a real level, and that some of them were often not really loving in the way they related to others. Besides that, their expression of "love" toward children seemed to me not respectful or interested in what the individual child's parameters were. Children were objects to them.

Unfortunately, as i got older, i met too many people who were not real in the way they related, but i had started to become confused about my responses to people's energetic presence, (or whatever you wish to call it), and so i would mix up what i was feeling and give it another name, saying it was just "social butterflies". I didn't want to call it what it was, nor did i allow myself to realise (on that kind of visceral level) that some people who seemed exciting to me might not be good for me. Sometimes my unfortunately all-too-active adolescent hormones had a lot to do with that, especially when it came to men, and sometimes in social situations: that would cause a confusion regarding the old revulsion and a reaction to the social phobia i always tended to feel around a new group of people. I would blame the butterflies on the latter, as i got older, and ignore my own signals in my desparate desire to fit in, to have a group i could belong to. It was too bad about that confusion, and the suppression, because i think that made me vulnerable to getting mixed up sometimes with people who didn't have my best interests at heart. As i got older, i did become more aware of the importance of those visceral signals, and that awareness actually saved my life quite possibly at one point (and maybe more than one, thinking back on sometimes threatening situations during my periods of urban living). This one was when i was in college, and one afternoon i was in front of my building, working on my bicycle. A nice-looking man walked up to me, and said "Well, hello there! I just moved into the building next door, and i thought i'd come over and introduce myself". I looked up, and when i looked at his eyes, it seemed like i was looking into a whirling black vortex. All the hair on back of my neck and my arms stood up, and i was prickling all over. My stomach clinched up. I said "Hello", and i don't even remember what i said after that, because i was only focused on locking up my bike, gathering up my tools, and running into my building as fast as possible. From that point onward i avoided him, and started using a different exit from my building so as not to run into him. I moved out of the buidling two months later, and a month after that, he invited a woman to his apartment for dinner and then murdered her there. I think of this visceral sense as a kind of feral awareness, and in fact that contributes strongly to my feeling at times that i'm a feral being. The social cues may be incomprehensible to me, but that doesn't negate all awareness of people's intentions. There's this sense in me that can protect my life: however, people whose intentions are not life-threatening seem to just just fly right under my radar.

So now, on the flip side, i just can't seem to get past an automatic reserve i've developed over time, which i have toward all people initially, but maybe it's a good thing, because maybe that reserve serves to protect me, and it keeps me aloof from people for a long time, until i actually know them well enough to be pretty sure i can trust them - or not.