9:31pm May 13, 2015

I’m Looking Through You (The Beatles)

There’s two main parts of this song I’ve used for communication purposes. I love the whole song, mind you, but these are the two parts I’ve been using as echolalic communication since I was about twelve.
I’m looking through you
Where did you go?
I thought I knew you
What did I know?
You don’t look different
But you have changed
I’m looking through you
You’re not the same!
So this one takes a bit of explanation. When I was first sent away to an academic summer camp (basically summer camp with classes, but I enjoyed it a lot despite being just as ostracized and bullied there as anywhere else and never having the “you’re in with ‘gifted’ kids now so you should feel a wonderful sense of belonging” experience everyone told me I was having)… the change was difficult. Being across the country, on my own, with poor self-care skills, knowing nobody, in a totally new visual environment, was not easy by a longshot.
So the way I dealt with the visual overload was to find a blank wall with one spot of peeling paint I could focus my gaze on, and watch all the glittery colors move around. Sometimes I drew things based loosely on what I saw, and i also found I could control what I saw to some degree, like looking for patterns in clouds.
People did not take well to this.
In fact, people did everything from shouting in my face two inches from theirs, to standing in a way as to block my view of the wall. Sometimes waving their private parts in my face for good measure.
So I would sing the above and pretend to be able to see through them. With varying degrees of success in getting them to leave me alone.
And then there’s this part:
Your lips are moving
I cannot hear
Your voice is soothing
But the words aren’t clear
That one’s a little more straightforward. I used it during receptive language shutdowns. Which were happening every day, so this got a lot of use.
Looking at the song today, there are so many more situations I could apply parts of it to. But this is how I actually used it.