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8:08am December 19, 2011
[A photo from roughly the time period I knew the guy in the post. I was 16ish. The photo is of me, a thin white girl with long brown hair, a white t shirt and a purple long wispy skirt. I’m sitting cross legged on a lawn with a puppy in front of a white fence. One arm is on my lap and the other is held up near my face which is pointed downward.] The photo’s just a memory anchor point for the time period in question and the general way I felt back then. I used to know a guy when I was a teenager. I’ll call him Bill, not his real name. We were… I don’t know what to call our relationship, especially given the mirages involved. Nothing even close to romantic or sexual. Not best friends, not acquaintances, something that veered through various parts of the middle ground I guess. Anyway he’s contacted me again. We’ve talked a fair bit. And nothing about him has changed. I don’t mean those parts of a person that normally stay the same. The ones that let me recognize some of the most essential parts of a person over time and space. I mean nothing. No apparent growth. Nothing. Nothing. It would be easier to name an area that did change than to list all that didn’t. Except I haven’t found any yet. Have I ever met a person before who has changed this little over this long? I don’t know. He’s like a time capsule from 1998. It feels like he’s stepped through a time machine without knowing it. And I’m left confused that he’s the same, and he’s left confused that I’ve changed. I’m not saying all this to put him down. It’s not a good thing that this is going on (especially because some of the unchanging things are quite bad – not like evil bad, more like mundane destructiveness with no insight into the destruction he leaves in his wake, both to other people and to his own self). But I’m not laughing at him. In fact the two emotions that come to mind are frightened and sad. The brief time I knew him, I was lost. Terribly, frighteningly, painfully lost. The world was big, scary and confusing. I had no control over my life – hadn’t yet learned to take control in ways that three-year-old nondisabled children have already figured out. In fact I had so many holes in my awareness that every time I find out how early nondisabled (and even most disabled) people learn a lot of “basic” things I’m shocked in that I didn’t know them by the time I’m talking about. I’ve long since come to view that time in my life as having been lived underwater. Without any means of propelling myself or making sense of the murk around me. Just doing what I thought I had to, no ability to even see beyond that let alone all the freedom other people had. Mind you, these are words, and generalities, and particulars have more nuance, but the general trend was passivity and confusion. I don’t understand why people romanticize the image of the type of person I was then. Even back then I saw a lot of teen girls trying to adopt the physical and behavioral trappings of what I was like. I also don’t know what connects the image of a confused and somewhat out of it (from typical perspectives) girl who drifts through life like a leaf in the wind, and a girl with long stringy brown hair and odd mannerisms. River Tam has not helped matters. Anyway actually living that life was not at all cool or romantic and the genuine pain involved is a kind impossible to romanticized-warpage-thingy into anything that these girls, now or then, would appreciate. Just no. And during this time, I’d find other people who were lost in various ways. Or they would find me. No, definitely, they found me. I wasn’t good with finding (but so many people would come up to me back then). And we’d drift along together. Or huddle together like scared kittens. And then we’d part. And never meet again. That’s what happened with Bill. And all this time went by. Past a certain point before we’d even parted ways, even two months of change could render me unrecognizable to people looking at most levels beyond the deepest. Because I was so miserable and desperate that by the time I was pointed in the direction of true help (and I’m not talking about psychological stuff, it goes deeper than that), all that energy I’d poured into “doing what I’m supposed to be doing” was now poured in a new direction if never known existed. And now? My life isn’t perfect, but I know myself and my place in the world more than I’ve ever known in my life. I’m reasonably happy. I have connected much more clearly with the sort of values that have always driven the changes I’ve tried to make in the world. I may not have anything like what most people call success – and frankly don’t want it – but I think I have the exact right life for who I am. So in steps this guy through his time machine and wants me to be someone I’m not. Someone I wasn’t even then: just a surface level appearance I had at the time. And he wants me to be that person – no that phantom other people floated in front of me, that nobody could see behind. And I can’t. Even if I wanted to there’s no way I could make time run backwards and become that person now. And it scares me because even then even lost I was changing I couldn’t help it so why isn’t he changing. Even all the autistic people I have known between then and now have changed a lot, especially on the surface, and we supposedly hate change. Have I never met a person who stayed the same like this or have I not been paying attention. It scares me because he is miserable and I don’t want him to be that way forever. It scares me because I don’t know how to interact with him anymore. I’ve lost that ability along with the ability to drift along making endless sculptures out of other people’s words and thoughts and desires – some of them coherent, some of them incoherent, none of them touching who I was. I can’t do those things anymore and that is how we related to each other. Or how he related to my surface mirages. How do you tell someone, “I’ve stepped out from behind the mirage now. I’ve clawed my way up to real, consistent communication. I don’t drift so much anymore. You knew mirages. You never knew me. The person you want to relate to now doesn’t exist. The person I really am doesn’t know how to relate to you, never did know how, has no desire to return to hell just to do it how you want and become again somebody I never was.” Gah it was scary when I started moving into myself. Started slowly but surely gaining a kind of agency, incarnation, something like that. I was already rather terrified of disapproval, of doing something “bad” or “wrong”. In an OMGpleasedon'tkillme sort of way, aren’t institutions fun. And then I started truly doing things. In a way that if I’d ever had it before it’d been lost in one if the let’s-forget-we-ever-knew-this involuntary brain purges. And then I had to find out that not only didn’t some people like me. They liked me better when I was ultra-passive and drifting along like a feather, able to show little of who I was. Mind you, I wasn’t suddenly fully in my body and facing them with total ownership of my actions and communication. No. It was slow and it was a battle every step of the way. And I’m still not there yet. So here I was barely poking my head out to say “hi there!” and suddenly started getting people literally telling me “I liked you better before.” Oh… before like as in when I was lucky if I could get a word in edgewise between the mirages people handed me? Thanks a fucking lot. But I really did find that a lot of people – for all kinds of reasons from sinister to innocent – had attached themselves to me because what they saw on the surface appealed to them in some way. And many of those people did not welcome the time when I began to show opinions, thoughts, feelings, and actions of my own. That hurt like hell, I’d always dreamed that when I did all this people would be as happy for me as I was. But they weren’t and I got on with life. Bill… I think he was one of the ones who wasn’t all that happy with the few changes that showed up before we parted ways. He wasn’t one of the predatory types. A combination of other things. He did things most people wouldn’t put up with, not with malice but definitely with the capacity to hurt people anyway. And he liked being in a “big brother” (family, not 1984) role to me, and I passively accepted this without real want involved. If he wasn’t happy then he’ll be real unhappy now: I’m not his little sister anymore. I actually disapprove of a lot of his actions. These two things would never have happened back then. If we were meeting on a deeper level, these things would fade to insignificance. Or less significance. But he can’t see me – or himself – on that level. So these things matter. Really, really matter. It feels a lot like I’m meeting that other guy again. The one I met at my shrink’s office where we interacted solely at the intersection of our fantasy worlds. I don’t have that fantasy world anymore – I have the essence of its good parts but lack all the specific forms that would allow me to interact with him. And that’s what I feel like with Bill. The things that enabled what passed for our interaction are long gone, or else transformed into what for me are better things to fit my current life. And as it stands, I can’t see what I can give him or he can give me. At all.

[A photo from roughly the time period I knew the guy in the post. I was 16ish. The photo is of me, a thin white girl with long brown hair, a white t shirt and a purple long wispy skirt. I’m sitting cross legged on a lawn with a puppy in front of a white fence. One arm is on my lap and the other is held up near my face which is pointed downward.]

The photo’s just a memory anchor point for the time period in question and the general way I felt back then.

I used to know a guy when I was a teenager. I’ll call him Bill, not his real name. We were… I don’t know what to call our relationship, especially given the mirages involved. Nothing even close to romantic or sexual. Not best friends, not acquaintances, something that veered through various parts of the middle ground I guess.

Anyway he’s contacted me again. We’ve talked a fair bit.

And nothing about him has changed.

I don’t mean those parts of a person that normally stay the same. The ones that let me recognize some of the most essential parts of a person over time and space.

I mean nothing.

No apparent growth. Nothing. Nothing. It would be easier to name an area that did change than to list all that didn’t. Except I haven’t found any yet. Have I ever met a person before who has changed this little over this long? I don’t know.

He’s like a time capsule from 1998. It feels like he’s stepped through a time machine without knowing it. And I’m left confused that he’s the same, and he’s left confused that I’ve changed.

I’m not saying all this to put him down. It’s not a good thing that this is going on (especially because some of the unchanging things are quite bad – not like evil bad, more like mundane destructiveness with no insight into the destruction he leaves in his wake, both to other people and to his own self). But I’m not laughing at him.

In fact the two emotions that come to mind are frightened and sad.

The brief time I knew him, I was lost. Terribly, frighteningly, painfully lost. The world was big, scary and confusing. I had no control over my life – hadn’t yet learned to take control in ways that three-year-old nondisabled children have already figured out. In fact I had so many holes in my awareness that every time I find out how early nondisabled (and even most disabled) people learn a lot of “basic” things I’m shocked in that I didn’t know them by the time I’m talking about.

I’ve long since come to view that time in my life as having been lived underwater. Without any means of propelling myself or making sense of the murk around me. Just doing what I thought I had to, no ability to even see beyond that let alone all the freedom other people had. Mind you, these are words, and generalities, and particulars have more nuance, but the general trend was passivity and confusion.

I don’t understand why people romanticize the image of the type of person I was then. Even back then I saw a lot of teen girls trying to adopt the physical and behavioral trappings of what I was like. I also don’t know what connects the image of a confused and somewhat out of it (from typical perspectives) girl who drifts through life like a leaf in the wind, and a girl with long stringy brown hair and odd mannerisms. River Tam has not helped matters. Anyway actually living that life was not at all cool or romantic and the genuine pain involved is a kind impossible to romanticized-warpage-thingy into anything that these girls, now or then, would appreciate. Just no.

And during this time, I’d find other people who were lost in various ways. Or they would find me. No, definitely, they found me. I wasn’t good with finding (but so many people would come up to me back then). And we’d drift along together. Or huddle together like scared kittens. And then we’d part. And never meet again. That’s what happened with Bill.

And all this time went by. Past a certain point before we’d even parted ways, even two months of change could render me unrecognizable to people looking at most levels beyond the deepest. Because I was so miserable and desperate that by the time I was pointed in the direction of true help (and I’m not talking about psychological stuff, it goes deeper than that), all that energy I’d poured into “doing what I’m supposed to be doing” was now poured in a new direction if never known existed.

And now? My life isn’t perfect, but I know myself and my place in the world more than I’ve ever known in my life. I’m reasonably happy. I have connected much more clearly with the sort of values that have always driven the changes I’ve tried to make in the world. I may not have anything like what most people call success – and frankly don’t want it – but I think I have the exact right life for who I am.

So in steps this guy through his time machine and wants me to be someone I’m not. Someone I wasn’t even then: just a surface level appearance I had at the time. And he wants me to be that person – no that phantom other people floated in front of me, that nobody could see behind. And I can’t. Even if I wanted to there’s no way I could make time run backwards and become that person now.

And it scares me because even then even lost I was changing I couldn’t help it so why isn’t he changing. Even all the autistic people I have known between then and now have changed a lot, especially on the surface, and we supposedly hate change. Have I never met a person who stayed the same like this or have I not been paying attention.

It scares me because he is miserable and I don’t want him to be that way forever.

It scares me because I don’t know how to interact with him anymore. I’ve lost that ability along with the ability to drift along making endless sculptures out of other people’s words and thoughts and desires – some of them coherent, some of them incoherent, none of them touching who I was. I can’t do those things anymore and that is how we related to each other. Or how he related to my surface mirages.

How do you tell someone, “I’ve stepped out from behind the mirage now. I’ve clawed my way up to real, consistent communication. I don’t drift so much anymore. You knew mirages. You never knew me. The person you want to relate to now doesn’t exist. The person I really am doesn’t know how to relate to you, never did know how, has no desire to return to hell just to do it how you want and become again somebody I never was.”

Gah it was scary when I started moving into myself. Started slowly but surely gaining a kind of agency, incarnation, something like that. I was already rather terrified of disapproval, of doing something “bad” or “wrong”. In an OMGpleasedon'tkillme sort of way, aren’t institutions fun. And then I started truly doing things. In a way that if I’d ever had it before it’d been lost in one if the let’s-forget-we-ever-knew-this involuntary brain purges.

And then I had to find out that not only didn’t some people like me. They liked me better when I was ultra-passive and drifting along like a feather, able to show little of who I was. Mind you, I wasn’t suddenly fully in my body and facing them with total ownership of my actions and communication. No. It was slow and it was a battle every step of the way. And I’m still not there yet.

So here I was barely poking my head out to say “hi there!” and suddenly started getting people literally telling me “I liked you better before.” Oh… before like as in when I was lucky if I could get a word in edgewise between the mirages people handed me? Thanks a fucking lot.

But I really did find that a lot of people – for all kinds of reasons from sinister to innocent – had attached themselves to me because what they saw on the surface appealed to them in some way. And many of those people did not welcome the time when I began to show opinions, thoughts, feelings, and actions of my own. That hurt like hell, I’d always dreamed that when I did all this people would be as happy for me as I was. But they weren’t and I got on with life.

Bill… I think he was one of the ones who wasn’t all that happy with the few changes that showed up before we parted ways. He wasn’t one of the predatory types. A combination of other things. He did things most people wouldn’t put up with, not with malice but definitely with the capacity to hurt people anyway. And he liked being in a “big brother” (family, not 1984) role to me, and I passively accepted this without real want involved.

If he wasn’t happy then he’ll be real unhappy now: I’m not his little sister anymore. I actually disapprove of a lot of his actions. These two things would never have happened back then. If we were meeting on a deeper level, these things would fade to insignificance. Or less significance. But he can’t see me – or himself – on that level. So these things matter. Really, really matter.

It feels a lot like I’m meeting that other guy again. The one I met at my shrink’s office where we interacted solely at the intersection of our fantasy worlds. I don’t have that fantasy world anymore – I have the essence of its good parts but lack all the specific forms that would allow me to interact with him.

And that’s what I feel like with Bill. The things that enabled what passed for our interaction are long gone, or else transformed into what for me are better things to fit my current life. And as it stands, I can’t see what I can give him or he can give me. At all.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this