as small as a world and as large as alone

5:56am October 22, 2014

Schorl/black tourmaline, labradorite/spectrolite, tiger eye, lapis lazuli, fire agate, amethyst. In short, all of my main rock friends at the moment. Except this big hunk of granite that I can’t seem to find anywhere (which is quite distressing – it’s California granite, which looks different than the granite that is easiest to get online, it seems… my friend bought it for me when I was hospitalized after my stomach emptying speed test for gastroparesis).

Why do I make friends with rocks? When I was nineteen I moved out on my own for the first time. All of my social experiences at the time were bad ones.

I felt lonely a lot, not necessarily for human companionship though: I’ve found that loneliness is not about whether I’m with people, or whether I have friends, or whether I’m around people who care about me. For me, loneliness is about disconnection, a feeling that I have no place in the world and that the world doesn’t want me.

Sometimes I felt like I’d disappeared. I talked to people online and their idea of what my life was like, was so different than what my real life was like, that it was actually quite a serious mindfuck. These people, even autistic people, couldn’t believe how bad it had gotten, couldn’t believe that a person who could type and – at that time – talk about 20% of the time, could possibly have the degree of sensory and motor issues I had, that prevented me from functioning much at all. I don’t like functioning labels but at the time I sometimes described myself as “LFA, except verbal” because that’s exactly what it was like. I could’ve been the poster child for “Why we should institutionalize these people rather than letting them run around loose” if I’d gotten into the wrong hands. Fortunately, I didn’t.

But I was starving, my living space was filthy, I was urinating on the floor and in the front yard sometimes, and I spent most of my day either frozen in one place, lying down too exhausted to move, or being carried around the house by involuntary “stimming”.

Oh yes and being so disoriented that I had to post signs everywhere showing how to get around the (tiny) apartment, and sometimes I’d fall, and get confused about which way was up, and get confused about why I couldn’t stand on the wall.

I survived because of two people who were able to prompt me to move.. One was over the phone, she would laboriously prompt my body to move. Like “Can you move your eyes? Good, then let’s see if you can move your other facial muscles. Good, let’s try for the neck. Elbow. Hand. Now use your fingers to do this, and use your arm to do that, and…” Except I’d get stuck again many times on the route around my body and have to start over. And sometimes getting unstuck just meant that instead of my default “can’t move” state being immobility, it became extreme mobility, racing in circles around the apartment until I was short of breath, only stopping when I collapsed. Or I’d do a much gentler version, where i simply walked in circles with my arms waving all over the place, or stood and rocked back and forth…. but the key element missing was control of my body.

And nobody believed, back in the year 2000, that a person could be verbal (even though I was only verbal about 5-20% of the time throughout that time period – I got less and less verbal every month), or could type independently at over 100 words per minute (sometimes way over 100 wpm, but I can actually type faster than I can think, which slows my typing down when I’m not doing a typing test – so my tested typing tends to be much faster than my everyday typing speed). Anyway people online couldn’t believe a person could be verbal, or type fast and independently, and have the degree of sensory, motor, and cognitive deficits that I had.

And I wasn’t even capable of communicating everything that was going on. Because of two things. One, at this time in my life, I was still getting the hang of putting words to my thoughts and experiences consistently. I could do it some of the time, but not all of the time, and some of my typing and a lot of my speech wasa noncomunicative delayed echolalia. Two, both back then and to this day, it could take me years to put words to experiences I’d never put words to before. And I was having all kinds of problems that I’d never encountered and did not know the words for. So even though I could convey to people that things were going very wrong, that I couldn’t function, that I needed services, that I was “like a verbal LFA”, etc – I couldn’t tell them everything that was going on. Which might be good. Maybe if enough people had found out, they’d have put me in a level 3 group home like a case manager later threatened me with. But at the time it was hugely frustrating.

At the time, I had one line to sum things up – “I walk inside and I disappear, I walk outside and I have a place in the world again.” And that’s where the rocks came in. Indoors was where I socialized with people through my computer. Every online social experience, even with other autistic people, made me feel like I had no place in the world, like the world of human beings was closed off to me.

My driveway was full of rocks. I’d go outside and sit down and stack them on top of my knees. I’d carry them around in my hands or pockets. I’d arrange them in different patterns. And somehow, the rocks, and the forest, made me feel like I had a place in the world. It wasn’t a place in human society, but most of the world is not, in fact, human society. (I now believe I have a very specific place in human society, but it’s just not one that other humans always acknowledge or appreciate.) And the rocks told me this, just by being what they were, by interacting with me, they told me the world had a place I belonged.

These days, my rocks mean so many different things to me. Each one is different. I hold different ones in diffferent ways for diffferent reasons. Each way I arrange them when I set them down, has a particular meaning Certain combinations of rocks have a particular meaning. I hold them, I stack them, I arrange them, only now they’re “pretty rocks” – semi-precious gems and the like. I never understand why some of the coolest rocks are dirt cheap and something as frequently boring as a diamond is super-epensive. But it works out for me because most of the rocks I think are coolest, are the inexpensive types.

TL;DR: My rocks are almost like friends to me. They are friends, they’re just not animate by most people’s standards and people get confused how you can have a relationship with an object.. But anyway, I had a long history where my life was falling apart, I seemed to have no place at all in the human social world, and yet when I went outside and interacted with rocks, it was like they were telling me “The world does have a place for you, it just might not be a place in the human social world, but there is a place for you.” I’ve had a close relationship with rocks ever since. And these are the main rocks I carry everywhere in my shirt pocket..

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