Enemies of the Species

Strange eventuality to find at age 54 that i'm just almost as baffled by the ways that people interact as i was at 14, only i do think it's with a little more understanding of human nature in a kind of aggregate sense. I have seen a lot, often more than i would have liked. So, "TMI" often applies. There are times i feel like i've been strapped to a chair with my eyes wired open and forced to watch, and sometimes the situations have actually been nearly that extreme...
I have been horrified and appalled by what i've seen, at the ways that humans seem to inventively come up with to be unkind to each other for fun and profit. I have gone through long periods where i didn't want to live anymore, because of what i've seen. It's only because i do meet people who are good that i keep on. That, and because i have family who need me, and because i somehow hold onto faith that i can be of some purpose yet in my life. I've had a lot of reflection, though, about what drives human behaviour, and a friend posted something about "normal social behaviour" yesterday, so i began to think about that again. Thus it seems like the time is ripe to post what i've been writing on this to date.
As i'm seeing it, at this point, "Normal Social Behaviour" is largely little more than an extension of "Primate Social Interaction", with a thin layer of mannerly veneer added to preserve the illusion of "Civilization". Now mind, this isn't a new idea for me; it's one which i was introduced to back in the early 90s by an old friend in San Francisco. It's an idea which he and i would spend hours talking about in cafe's with the regular crowd we hung out with, and when others were appalled and would change the subject - or flee - i would sit and listen, fascinated, and watch when he noted examples which were taking place right before our eyes there in that same cafe. He explained the basics of primate behaviour to me, and then he would point out examples in the people around us. In the long run, in the years after i had moved away from SF and many miles and life changes separated me from this friend, i read, and observed. I found over time, with seasoning and observation, it only became all the more chillingly clear how little humans have evolved, behaviourally. Now, no less than it was, probably, a million years ago, little thought goes into the underlying nature of our interactions. By and large, the "Rules of the Game" are taken as given, not to be challenged or questioned. Those who do possess the ability to question these suppositions are treated like the enemies of the species - excoriated, villified and bullied. As many people who are deemed to be deviant from the norm for calling out what they see will tell you, we are unfortunately the targets of this all too often. Xenophobia is hard-wired into our species, many evolutionary biologists would tell you, because this is how a species made sure that "inferior" members would not breed. In some species of lower primates, death is the result of that culling. More often the result is marginalisation. The reason for that may be nothing more than that there is safety in numbers, and too much culling could result in a vulnerable group.

"We should not be allowed to breed". Today that concept is still implicitly present behind ideas of identification of an "Autism gene", so that possible Autistics can be aborted. It hasn't been that long since Eugenics was considered a viable idea, and it's precepts practised unchallenged in orphanages throughout our country. Our culture, and others which colonised continents inhabited by aboriginal people practised all manner of genetic suppression unabashedly. It's sad to see human intellect put to the use of camouflaging, or justifying the drive of species to prevent the breeding of variant members. When will we be more than merely the vehicle for genetic material to grow and perpetuate itself? And what of evolution? Does that fit into the picture at all? Can our species evolve? Some people would have us believe that the human's (as currently realised) are the zenith of evolution, that nothing higher could possibly occur after us. So what would it look like if our species did start to evolve?

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.

More on the Child Self

This is a letter i wrote in response to a letter someone wrote to me in a group, about the inner feeling of still being in a child's perceptual framework, vs. the public perception that we remain childlike:
...I appreciate the way that you articulated the factors that come into play for you with why YOU feel like a child sometimes, and i feel that a lot of that resonated strongly for me... At 54 i'm still struggling to find a sense of myself as an adult at any time, and yet, as you so importantly brought up, it would not be right for anyone to treat me liked a child because i'm autistic, or even because i feel like a child! (I don't even think children should be treated like children, at least not in the way that children are treated in our society!) I am acutely aware of this especially because i live in a HUD subsidized building, and there always seems to be the tendency for a kind of creeping condescension to seep into the tone of many of the officials of the company that owns the property: i think it's a way for them to avoid feeling a sense of responsibility (or guilt) for at times being ordered to strong-arm us by the heads of the company. One thing that i like about living here, though, is that most of the residents are elderly, and quite a few elder folk get to where they don't care much about labels anymore. I moved in here a year ago, and as i finally came out of my apartment some and started to meet people (after two months hibernating), i would just tell them, "i have Asperger's", and they were like "Oh, ok", and then said, so to speak "let's get on with talking about who we are", and didn't treat me any differently after they knew, other than to ask me more about it, so that they could understand when they needed to. That was so amazing to me! Kids, of course, can be like that too, i think. Of my two little cousins, the older one, age 10, was totally unfazed by my diagnosis: she hasn't learned the kind of prejudice that adults in our society use as the filter through which they see. That filter, i think, has a tendency to take away the humanness of a person. Filter notwithstanding, my little cousin still doesn't "get" me most of the time, anyway.
I think that what you mentioned about paying attention to "the right things", feels to me in part like my lack of "perspective in differentiating the relative significance, or 'importance' of stimuli". In addition to that, the lack of a definite sense of time feels very child-like to me (although how could i be sure about that: after all, when i was a child, i was an autistic-spectrum child ;~> ), but another thing that for me is not like the NT adults i meet, is that i don't have a sense of a role in life that i'm identified with. I have never had anything near like a stable career.
Despite the fact that being Autistic-spectrum has certainly been a disability for me, and this persistent sense of still being a child, i'm realizing there is a lot that i've learned from my experiences, and my therapist tells me that i have my own wisdom, which i don't need to judge by the standards of our society at large. He has a very non-typical orientation toward life, and people, however - that we all have value, our lives all have value, which is outside of whether conventional views see value in them or not. That has really helped me a lot, because i don't think i really completely believed that until he started telling me that (or maybe i just wasn't ready to believe it until recently - i think perhaps my diagnosis helped me with that) He has ADHD, so he is Neurodivergent himself.
I remember you mentioned a while back about how stress can make an Autistic person move into a deeper level of Autistic response, become more reactive to overstimulus, more prone to meltdowns, more negative toward change in environment etc. That has definitely been a seriously debilitating factor in my life, and yet people in my family, and other people i've met, don't seem to understand that, if they haven't seen me enter that state repeatedly throughout my adult life whenever things changed, causing me to be stressed (i've lost a lot of jobs that way...). My therapist says that i do have some characteristics which are more deeply Autistic, but then i think that it's likely that for many people on the spectrum we can contain a whole spectrum of characteristics within ourselves...
Thank you for writing and responding to my thoughts about the internal child perception (don't know quite what to call that), and i appreciate your thoughts very much! I will look forward to hearing more of your perspectives.