And it's not a lack of effort. It's not that I don't devote time and energy to understanding people on a regular basis. I just simply don't understand the way other people, normal people, know what to and what not to say. After I say the wrong thing and someone tells me I've said the wrong thing, I file it away and try to relate it to other things I might say, creating a database of known hurtful things and things which are probably related and therefore also hurtful.
I still don't really understand, I just collate data and try and make an effort to function like a real, normal, human. I do my best to create a "social cognition" out of whole cloth and it has holes in it! It will always have holes in it, because I don't understand.
I don't have that gut "instinct" other people have. I can see it. They look at other people and social situations and they just have a general feel for how everything is supposed to go. No one gave me the fucking script. No one told me what the little faces people make mean. I have to work it out, all of it, and I am always missing something.
And it's not that I don't want to understand.
Asking me to "just be more aware of how people want me to talk and act" is like asking a one-handed man to play a ten-note chord on a piano. Impossible? No. However, that man is going to need meticulous planning and notice ahead of time to make that chord happen. It's not going to be the same as a person with two hands playing that chord. It never will be. I will never be the same as people who just simply understand how to be socially acceptable.
I'm forty-three and I still don't understand.
None of you makes sense to me, to be frank. I'm sure I'm just as confusing to all of you. You only have a few aliens like me to deal with, I have a world full of mind-reading aliens that I can only try to generally get along with. I think you got the better deal but maybe I'm more infuriating because you're not used to dealing with someone like me. I don't know.
I'm too old to be seriously diagnosed as "on the spectrum" but I am clearly not normal. Things that bother other people often don't even make it into my sphere of notice. Things that drive me mad, are often completely ignored by everyone else.
I'm average height. I'm average weight. I'm average looks.
I'm wired up in ways that no one can diagram and I can't figure out the diagrams of the normal mind either.
"Why can't you just be normal?"
That's a question people have asked me quietly and shouted at me. It's a question that skirts across the edge of my waking mind and wakes me from nightmares at night.
I can't be normal because I am not normal. I can't fit in because I am not part of this puzzle. Somebody put me in the wrong box.
I am socially unacceptable by default. My brain is not a human brain. I speak the language but the words have divergent nuance.
People think my lack of sensitivity is a choice because they assume I do "just get" what's going on in other people. I don't. That's all a cloudy mystery I've spent a long time staring into.
I won't understand any of it in the same way other people do. I'll just have to keep working on understanding it all in the way I do. I will make my notes, I will do my best to chain things to related themes and ideas, and I will work on cultivating my "social self" which may never be full or right or normal in any way.
I'll just have to continue to be here without belonging.
I should be used to it by now.
I get to feeling that I have it down, that I know, that I've figured out the code, and then two minutes happen and I am reminded that none of this will ever be an instinctual part of myself.
I'm going to hurt feelings and people are going to keep assuming my apologies aren't real because they can only conceptualize that someone would knowingly say "something like that." And no amount of me trying to explain the situation will reach them because they have already decided I should "just know" what I don't know.
"Are you on the spectrum?" At least two of my psychologist friends have asked me that seemingly out of nowhere. I assume it's something I say or do that I'm unaware is even odd. Probably a few things.
Today, I'm just tired of trying to get into the heads of people around me. They are very convoluted and inefficient and their ways are tangled. They seem to choose esoteric and confusing methods for just about every interaction. It's very tiring. Being social is an active, strategic event for me. It's exhausting.
I might be able to get diagnosed but the reality is that's not what I want.
I don't want to be diagnosed. I want to mask better. I want to mask so damn well that no one knows I don't know.
Paraphrasing some people: "You should just be better at this."
Yeah... thanks for the tip. I'll get right on just being better at a thing I've been working at for decades. Clearly, I have just failed to grasp the power of just being better at it. Thanks for clearing up my whole issue here. Awesome.
This rant has been all over the place because it's basically random thoughts I've been having pouring out while I sit in a cafe-bookstore. These are thoughts I've had before and that I'll have again. These are the regular paths of my sparking brain.
I'm a good person. I'm just bad at being a human.
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