4:24pm December 14, 2011

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Passivity and naivete aren't virtues.

youneedacat:

All names have been changed. I have a lot to say and none of it will be pretty.

I have always been very naive and very passive.

So naive that much of the time if someone said they were my friends I would believe them no matter how much they hurt me.

So passive that the vast majority of the…

Thank you for writing this. I fit the Lorna Wing “passivity” description more than I do the other two as well (“aloof,” “active but odd”)* and it has really caused problems. Not nearly as awful as yours, but I have also had “friends” who took advantage of my passivity. And whenever I would try to assert myself I ended up doing it wrong, and I would be treated as though I were “the bad one.” And the friend would then act like it was some major act of goodwill to continue being friends with me after my “bad behavior,” and continued to get away with bossing me around, trying to dictate my beliefs, make sure I knew that I was inferior, etc.

I have somewhat complex feelings about this because I often engaged in a similarly problematic relationship dynamic with my younger sister, which was not okay. At all. But at the same time, I didn’t quite know how to have a healthy friendly relationship between equals.

*What I don’t like about this taxonomy is that it obscures the ways in which autistic people can fit more than one category, depending on a bunch of things. Most often I have been passive, but sometimes aloof and occasionally “active but odd.”

OMG you just made me remember another friend I forgot to write about.

Her big thing was dictating my own motivations to me. All the time. With audible glee in her voice every time she made a pronouncement about me.

Like “You hang earrings in your hair for at-TENNNN-tion.”

Or when I got my hair in my face and brushed it to the side without even thinking. She got this weird singsong tone and said “You parted it innnnnnn the miiiiiiddle, liiiiiiike a hiiiiiiiiippie!”

Her brother was into it too. One time I managed to communicate about a visual fogging effect I got from what’s now thought to be a constant migraine aura. He got the same superior tone and said “You know that in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest when he talks about the fog machine he’s really talking about electroshock, right?” Which angered me on two levels: One his presumption to know why I “really” did something, the other because he thought I was outright lying. I am betting the two had all kinds of conversations about their pet theories on why I did strange things.

I only realized I didn’t need to put up with it during my last conversation with her. It was a few years ago. She kept demanding to know precisely when and why I stopped talking. I tried to explain to her how gradual it was. How she had seen the initial signs when we were kids, when my movement slowed or stopped and I became mute and/or unresponsive. How those times just got more and more frequent as I got older. I told her about the research into the causes of this and that it’s thought to be a movement disorder related to autism, or else even one particular expression of autistic development. I explained it could be about lots of abilities shifting around. I talked about the communication problems I had even when I could speak. I gave her the best and most thorough answer I possibly could.

She hadn’t listened to a word I said.

She got that smug, superior tone to her voice again.

“Well Iiiiiiiiii think it was traaaauma.”

“WHAT?”

“I know they abused you in institutions. I think you quit talking because of how traumatized you were. I would have quit talking too if I’d been through half of what you have.”

“EXCUSE me?”

But explaining did no good. She had her own explanations and was only too happy to tell me about myself and my motivations.

It was only at that point that I realized I had the option to never talk to her again. So I haven’t and my life is so much better.

Somehow something you said reminded me of that. The part about dictating your beliefs. I know it’s not quite the same thing, but it reminded me of the way she would dictate my motivations as if she always had the power to discern what they were over and above my objections and explanations. And one part that really bugged me was the smug, self-satisfied tone, like she knew me better than I did and was only too happy to tell me all about it. Yet I never had even the tiniest inkling that I could do even the slightest thing to stop it, go away, get outwardly mad, anything but sit there and take it.

She was far from the worst of my friends but she still lacked the basic respect that friends ought to have for each other. Mind you – my friends do call me on stuff, including stuff I’m not aware of doing. But there’s two big differences:

1. They call me on stuff I’m really and truly doing. Not stuff they pull out of their asses.

2. Even when they’re mad at me or something when they’re doing it. They still respect me. They don’t act like they’re absurdly happy to be telling me inside knowledge about who I “really” am.

Anyway, I always found people like her really invasive. As if they had some right to step into my head and try to give me false explanations for why I did things. I don’t really know how to describe the invasiveness other than it was crossing a boundary that ought not be crossed.

Notes: