6:32pm December 21, 2011

When language things scare me to death

(Note: This is all stuff brought up by something that happened yesterday but it’s my stuff. I don’t hold anyone from yesterday responsible for my wigging out about this.)

It frustrates me sometimes that so much of communication for me requires the goodwill of the other person.

Like with the misunderstanding yesterday. I was practically shaking and completely freaking out most of the evening. Not just because of the effect my words had on people. But actually, mostly, because so many such interactions have gone extremely bad. Extremely fast. And I can’t predict which way things will go.

I wasn’t comfortable talking about it before now because I didn’t want anyone to think I was saying they had to go easy on me or something. (That in itself is an artifact of way too much experience in heated situations. I get upset and people think I want sympathy when it’s just me freaking out for my own reasons.)

Anyway. So the reason that communication requires actual goodwill, or at least presuming good faith, by the other person, is that somehow when I’m least expecting it I’ll write something where I think the meaning is obvious but someone thinks I meant something entirely different. Which is okay, misunderstandings happen. They just happen more frequently for me. It’s what happens afterwards that sets me off.

I think more often than most nondisabled people, my words end up doing that to people. It’s a combination of trouble with language (of the type described in The Fireworks Are Interesting) and being abysmal with respect to understanding what my readers are and are not aware of. So when someone inevitably misunderstands, I have to – have to – be able to clarify my meaning if necessary. Because otherwise it’s not communication anymore – the taking of ideas from one mind and conveying them to another.

This takes work. I’m okay with work. If I wasn’t okay with work I wouldn’t have busted my ass most of my life learning to write and, later, to convey information by writing, and to turn a weak area into one that passes for a strength most of the time. People who think I come by it naturally don’t realize everything I’ve sacrificed to get decent at it.(*)

Anyway.

So one of the things that easily happens is my words convey the wrong meaning. This can happen any of several ways:

* I use a particular set of words as a tool. This set of words evokes a mental widget most people connect with those words. So people see the words and the whole widget pops up in their minds.

* Similarly, I use words most people associate with a “side” of an issue. So they assume I’ve taken that side even when I haven’t. (Example: Trying to talk about selective abortion of disabled fetuses in any way that even close to deals with the complexity. I’ve in that context had simultaneously pro lifers calling me pro choice and pro choicers calling me pro life and both deciding to argue with me on that basis. When my opinion on that issue isn’t that much about the “side” I’m on in the broader abortion debate.)

* My phrase bank(**) spits out the wrong words. The absolute worst of when this happens is when the phrase bank knows how to make it blend in with everything else I’m saying. That’s camouflage learned in order to pass for communicating and comprehending, but it’s worse than useless when trying to, oh, communicate for real.

* Some of the words I use, the way I use them, etc. have strong emotional connotations I’m unaware of.

* I explain things to people that they already understand. Giving the appearance of condescension.

* I fail to explain things to people that they don’t understand, because I assume they understand them already. Which completely confuses them.

* I try to approach a topic that’s intrinsically difficult to talk about, or that I find personally difficult to find words around. I borrow various ways of talking around it. Each one contributes something different. But to many people, taken as real rather than as pointers the various viewpoints I borrow contradict each other and that puzzles people.

In none of these situations can I blame other people for the misunderstanding, unless they’re only pretending to misunderstand (which is a trolling/bullying thing, not a communication thing). I can’t blame myself either. It’s unavoidable. Both sides can become more careful but the interface between differing sets of skills(***) makes miscommunication inevitable. And since my own set of skills is rare, it’s inevitable around me in particular. And I haven’t even got into how I can misunderstand others in unusual ways, which is a whole topic in its own right.

Another thing is, what my goals are in communicating with other people. Those goals are, in no particular order:

* To express my experiences thoughts and feelings. Especially with all the catching up I have to do now that I’m not simply borrowing others’ words and concepts without meaning anymore. I spent a lot of time buried and that has an impact.

* To “pay forward” the help I’ve gotten from other people’s words in understanding myself. I really want to be able to write stuff where other people with similar experiences can get help understanding or explaining their experiences. Because I’ve gotten so much help from others there and it means a lot to me to do this for still others.

* To exchange ideas and information back and forth with other people.

* To make the world better for lots of kinds of people.

All of these things involve putting information out there that other people interpret, and them putting information out there for me to interpret. And for things to work right, the other person has to get what I’m saying. Given the level of misunderstanding that happens, that means that getting to the part where information is actually conveyed requires the cooperation of both people involved in the process. To a degree more than most communication, because there’s more work involved.

But what happens sometimes instead… it breaks my heart, and terrifies me, and pisses me off, and demoralizes me. All rolled into one messy package.

It’s like a Jim Sinclair poem, “I Built A Bridge”:

I built a bridge
out of nowhere, across nothingness
and wondered if there would be something on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of fog, across darkness
and hoped that there would be light on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of despair, across oblivion
and knew that there would be hope on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of helplessness, across chaos
and trusted that there would be strength on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of hell, across terror

and it was a good bridge, a strong bridge,
a beautiful bridge.
It was a bridge I built myself,
with only my hands for tools, my obstinacy for supports,
my faith for spans, and my blood for rivets.

I built a bridge, and crossed it,

but there was no one there to meet me on the other side.

It’s not disinterest. It’s… a lot of things, really. It’s when a person simultaneously insists on communicating with me but also refuses to take seriously my attempts to allay miscommunication. In the very best cases they’re frustrated and not in a state of mind to be careful. In the worst cases they’re malicious and taking a twisted joy in what’s happening. In most cases there’s some degree of the worst parts of ego involved and my end of the experience is like a verbal form of violence – pinning me to a wall and tying my hands.

And I never. Never. Know when a miscommunication happens, whether it will go down this road. Too often I invest a lot of energy explaining things and find that all the person wants to do is rip me to shreds. Even when it’s someone I never expected it from.

So I find the first hint of misunderstanding to be triggering as fuck, even though it’s a truly blameless situation at that point. I end up crying my eyes out, wanting to beg the person to please, please listen. And yet not wanting to show vulnerability in case the person turns cruel. And not wanting to show how scared I am, because I don’t want the person to feel obligated to take care of me or to back down on genuine disagreements. And often the situation is so emotionally charged on both ends that I don’t want to add to what the other person is experiencing by forcing them to listen to my emotional torment.

And yet it’s so damn scary to know that whether I get to communicate the simplest thing rests more on the goodwill of the other person than it does for most people. It’s not just the misunderstandings. It’s that often what I have to communicate is so strange to most people. And what people find strange, they often don’t accept.

Yet in many cases my life has depended on people accepting that my strangeness is real and not made up to manipulate people (for reasons I can’t imagine, being so far from manipulative that I can’t understand the motivations involved). It’s not just self-expression at stake when organ failure or lung infections are the topic of the day. Every time I hear the results of an X-ray or CT scan of my lungs I get a reminder of the literal physical scars it can leave when people forcibly deny you communication.

It’s not just that, though. It’s also the emotional toll of experiences that range from bullies setting me up for the lulz, to innocent misunderstandings that turn ugly when I try to explain myself.

It often goes like this:

I say something. Someone misunderstands it. So far, so normal. Then I try to explain that I really meant something else.

And the other person refuses to believe me. They insist that anyone who says this has to mean something particular by it. That it’s impossible that I really meant what I say I did. It goes downhill from there.

One guy revealed to me a lot about people’s hostility when he got really angry with me about something I said. This is a description from memory about something that happened ages ago that I refuse to find or reread, so it’s not exact but this is the gist.

I’d been in a mode I get into where I’m having language difficulty that’s serious but not quite serious enough to prevent communication. I was trying to remember and convey a lot of information about a complex topic. I suck at summarizing, really suck at it, and it was part of what I was trying to do. So I cobbled some words together from sheer force of will and left them there. I don’t know how to explain the state I was in to people who don’t experience it.

But for those who do – it was that state where it takes almost a certain level of aggression to successfully put words together, and it’s easy for the wrong words to come out if you lose concentration even a little. It’s almost physically painful. But you can hold it together enough to sound coherent. Even if you feel like a clumsy bulldozer and can barely read your own words and can’t choose tone or choose which of several possible phrases that fit come out of the phrase bank.

So this guy comes along and replies. And he’s somewhat in agreement but doesn’t have the same “contempt” I have towards our topic.

Contempt? Where did that come from. So within my reply I say I didn’t actually feel contempt, figuring that will be the end of it, and that we will then get on to discussing the important stuff.

But no. He replies to me to explain exactly why I do have contempt, quoting several passages from my post and explaining this in detail.

I think I see the problem. It’s a combination of things. Part of it is the tense style caused by language problems that day. Another part is that my phrase bank chose emotionally loaded phrasing, and could literally find no other possible choice of words at that moment. And a third part is the amount of words and explanation I was forced to leave out, leaving only a partial explanation. And that partial explanation was one that, without further explanation, would look sort of slanted towards a particular point of view.

I can now see exactly what’s going wrong on several levels with my writing. But I don’t have the words to explain all those different levels either. So I say something like, “No actually that’s not how I meant any of that. It’s a language problem. I’m absolutely certain I felt no contempt though.”

He really blew a gasket. He told me that I always say I have language problems to get out of having a proper argument. Or something like that. And that I really just didn’t want anyone to know what I really meant by things because then they might disagree with me.

I told him that actually it really was a language issue. I said that only I can know what I really meant and that I can’t have genuine communication with people who assume bad faith on my part and won’t let me explain my true meaning for things when they misunderstand. I told him I only have so much energy for communication and can’t waste it in these ways or it affects my functioning so as far as I was concerned the conversation was over unless he was willing to believe what I said about my own thoughts and feelings. Things that he couldn’t possibly just know from reading words on a screen.

He told me he didn’t assume bad faith. That I just had a defense mechanism where I’d claim I had language problems to get out of having to face disagreement or admit I was wrong. That I just didn’t want to do the real work involved in defending my views. That I was lazy and didn’t want to say what I really meant and couldn’t possibly have any real negative effects from putting things into words. That if I really meant what I said I did I would have said it. Etc.

He also said – and this was the revealing part so I wish I remembered his words better so that I could convey the feel of it. He said that if anyone could just say they had language problems when people disagreed with them then they could just get out of a fight whenever they wanted. Those weren’t his words. I don’t remember his words. I just know that behind the words was a view of communication that involved power games. Like combat or chess. Competitiveness. And he saw my attempts to clarify my meaning as cheating – as winning a competition through pretense and manipulation.

And that suddenly made a lot of people’s reactions make sense. Plenty of people do seem to see communication as a contest or competition. And even those who don’t can come to view it as such when emotions are inflamed.

And such people become unable or at least unwilling to perceive that for me communication is cooperative. It’s two or more people working together to explain things and understand things. And while for them the “real” (competitive) point of communication becomes impossible if I’m able to say “That whole thing you just said isn’t really about what I meant because I didn’t mean what you think I did because I have language problems, so here’s what I did mean”… for me it’s the opposite. For me the real point of communication (seeking meaning) is impossible if I can’t clarify what I did and don’t mean, if I can’t say “Hey, language problems are interfering with saying what I mean.”

The conversation that guy was having turned ultra-hostile, eventually. People were defending me, explaining the nature of my language problems (usually because they had them too), pointing to stuff I’d written about how shutdown for me can be more than an inconvenience, etc. Once he found out who I was, he became outright cruel. I won’t rehash the whole thing here but it was incredibly ugly. He even implied that people defending me did so as mindless followers rather than – as they’d explicitly said – people with the same communication problems. Everything I’d ever said became garbage in his eyes and so did I and anyone who agreed with me.

So I basically had something start with what looked like an innocent misunderstanding. Which quickly devolved into having my every motive torn apart when I tried to explain myself. Usually it doesn’t end in someone outright calling me a fraud, but sometimes it does. Because of my personality, I showed the conversation to a bunch of people who knew me well and asked if I really had a defense mechanism of the kind he described.

These are people willing to (justifiably) yell at me if my ego gets too far out of line. They are not yes-men. They told me the only way my ego was out of line here was in taking what this guy said to heart instead of blowing him off as an obvious asshole. People also private messaged me to tell me this guy always misunderstands people in this way and didn’t like that I wasn’t accepting the misunderstanding as real.

But after dozens of encounters that run along these basic lines, I can’t seem to help but freak out when that first misunderstanding happens. I mean there’s times like with him – where I don’t even notice the misunderstanding and offhandedly correct it and it blows up in my face. But when I see the misunderstanding I go through the entire play of freaked out emotions I described.

And often in the midst of it I feel like vowing never to use language ever again and fuck the world and all that. I know how irrational and stupid such a desire is. I know it’s in the terror of the moment. When my judgement is bad enough I’ll actually say it.

And of course it looks like a snit, taking my ball and going home. But it’s more just an intense desire to never ever have to go through this again. Because Jim is right – every time I say something, every time I explain what I really meant by it, it’s a bridge built with my blood and bones. And when there’s nobody on the other side? Or worse, somebody on the other side who uses violence to chase me back across and burn the bridge down? It makes all that effort feel so much not worth it that it’s not even funny. (I’m talking specifically about incidents where people refuse to take my word for it about language issues. Misunderstanding is inevitable. Refusing to understand isn’t.)

And I end up feeling absurdly, absurdly relieved and grateful when, as yesterday, things go as they should all of the time. Where I don’t have to get in a fight about what I meant. Even situations where a person figures out what I really meant and vehemently disagrees with it feel like a godsend compared to some of the crap that’s happened. I know my problem isn’t about hating disagreement when I am flooded with relief and joy when someone disagrees with what I actually meant.

What’s even worse than some of the above is when people have set up the entire situation. Just to watch the gyrations I go through trying to explain myself. Then they laugh in my face and ask if I really thought they believed me this whole time. (And there’s a nonautistic parent who pulled some similar things on me, and I’ve been seriously freaked out watching people around here praising him for being enlightened or something. He treated me like the worst stereotypes of a cat with a mouse and he enjoyed every minute of it. He’s definitely similar to a type of abusive person I read about on tumblr the other day. The kind who try to make a really good impression on certain members of oppressed groups while hurting others. Specifically picking on people who won’t be believed if we go public and then being on their best behavior around others so those ones will vouch for them. It turns my stomach and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to talk about it in full. And if I do I don’t know who’ll believe me.)

So there’s also that more sinister kind of encounter where a person will tell me what I’m thinking in increasingly intrusive ways and if I try to explain my real meaning they’ll do a “how dare you try to make me stop invading you” kind of thing. And they do it in a twisted way where each layer of explanation becomes a new lever for invasion. And they have no desire to understand at all, just to attack.

It takes me a long time to catch on when it’s deliberate. I never quite want to believe people would be as sadistic as to do this on purpose after watching my responses when it happens by accident. But there are people who do it and who – sometimes in front of me, others when they think I can’t hear – say so outright at some point. I can’t imagine what makes them enjoy it. But my inability to imagine it makes me vulnerable to explaining instead of walking away.

So this whole intense collection of experiences is what makes me really, really lose it the moment I detect a misunderstanding. It’s like it could turn out to be nothing. But when it’s not nothing it’s awful.

And it reminds me that my entire ability to communicate and be heard and understood the same way most people are, can depend on the other person. I know things like this happen to other people. But they happen to people like me so regularly that we can end up with phobia-like reactions to what look like simple misunderstandings.

This is also a really good example of the ways that being around other autistic people isn’t always so welcoming. Because when I’ve spent time on message boards, the people who frequently ran into this problem because of language issues have largely been a minority. And the people whose language issues were either milder or just plain different, would often have a really low tolerance for us “using language as an excuse”.

During the travesty of a conversation I mentioned above, someone actually said “You couldn’t possibly have picked the wrong words because what you wrote looks coherent. People with real language problems don’t write things that look coherent.” Any of us with this exact problem know otherwise but she wouldn’t believe us, because who were we but people who claimed to have the problem to begin with. We couldn’t be trusted.

(And I think some of the problem does come in because people are taught to believe that disabled people get special privileges and therefore they must always be on the lookout for people lying to get those same supposedly special privileges. It creates an atmosphere where you can’t have unusual or fluctuating problems without arousing suspicion.)

This sort of misunderstanding is also an excellent example of the limits of trigger warnings that I’ve talked about before. Even if I wanted warnings it’d be impossible to give them. Because for most people if they understood this was happening they wouldn’t do it in the first place. And for those who would do it deliberately in order to upset the person they wouldn’t want any warning. A lot of my triggers (I don’t normally use the word but it’s there so I’m using it) work in similar ways.

Anyway if I ever seem to completely overreact to what looks like a simple misunderstanding, this is likely the reason why: I can’t predict if it will stay simple and I’ve had some really awful experiences when it doesn’t. And it also reminds me just how fragile and dependent on others communication can be.

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(*) This isn’t modesty. I’ve had people think that I secretly think myself am excellent writer. Actually I secretly think myself an atrocious writer and calling myself decent is a compromise between that and the overblown praise I sometimes get. One of my biggest problems as a writer is the inability to make significant alterations to the way the words come out. So if they come out with ridiculous amounts of repetition, detail, etc., I can’t necessarily do much to alter that. My other big problem is getting the words to evoke in the reader’s mind similar things to what’s going on in mine. It’s infuriating to try to write about specific concrete experiences and have general abstract words come out or vice versa. Another thing that happens is getting the wrong words out altogether – but they look right so people can’t possibly know unless they’re coming from the same place I’m coming from. And if they are, they don’t need my writing to tell them what’s happening.

(**) An artifact of how I learned language. This is a sophisticated “machine” in my head. It collects everything I’ve ever heard or read and recombines it into plausible sentences, paragraphs, etc. By a certain point in my life it even learned how to make stuff sound absolutely internally consistent to ward off pesky people. It learned all these things before I learned what language truly was. I wrested control away from it in order to truly communicate instead of merely passing for communicating. But I still have to use its mechanisms in order to use language at all. The moment I stop paying attention, it will start doing what it’s always done, spitting out plausible but disconnected-from-self crap rather than communicate my thoughts for real. Like Donna Williams has said, it’s the difference between slowly learning to ride a horse (typical speech delay), and learning to get a bucking bronco to take you where you’re trying to go (having to “tame disordered language”). My language system is absolutely the bronco, and left to its own devices it will confuse the fuck out of everyone including me. That’s what happens when a person compensates for severe receptive language problems – it affects literally everything about language and communication.

(***) The differing skills aren’t exactly diagnosis dependent. Most online autistic people have very different language issues than mine, although I’m told that my pattern of receptive/expressive language is common in autistic people as a whole. (I bet many of us just never get Internet access or the ability to use language on the net.) And there are people without autism who understand me fine, although they’re most often neuro-atypical as well, usually learning disabilities, intellectual disability, brain injury, stroke, dementia, or severe epilepsy. It’s more to do with language patterns than diagnosis.

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