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6:10am November 13, 2012

Sometimes it scares me.

josiahd:

youneedacat:

How much of the world I don’t see because I’m in my own head.

How many people I hurt because I don’t see that I have an impact on them, and even when I do, I can’t figure out how to get my ego out of the way.

Maybe, but…

…When I’ve said things like this, it’s almost always because someone is gaslighting me.

Not just the words. The shape.

So seeing you say something like this makes me wonder if you’re interacting with someone dangerous.

No. No gas lighting. This is as real as it gets. Nearly everyone is pretty much stuck inside their head in ways most people can’t imagine. Nearly everyone does bad stuff to other people as a consequence. I’m talking about pretty much universal phenomena playing out in my own person.

But it being universal doesn’t make it better. This isn’t “low self-esteem” or “unreasonable fear” or “putting myself down”. This is realizing things that ring true down to my bones. Don’t try to save me from it, because without knowing and feeling bad I can’t do anything to change it.

The event that triggered this post was a book where a very realistic teenage child character knew more about her effect on others in particular ways than I did into my twenties and thirties. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, more even than many autistic people.

(When I first entered the autistic community people were clamoring to ban me from one of the first autistic chat rooms I went. Not for doing anything malicious. But for repetitively typing long strings of gibberish to the point that it blanked out other people’s screens and made conversation impossible. Every autistic person there, my age or otherwise, knew that doing this did harm to other people. I didn’t know. Not even after everyone sat down and explained to me in detail the effect I was having. I literally could not comprehend it, but they did get me to stop somehow.)

Anyway introspection is not always comfortable and it shouldn’t always be comfortable. Anyone who looks hard enough and knows what they’re looking at will see things like this within their ego. Maybe not the same thing, but some pattern of repetitive harm done to others, both large and small. It’s not wrong to be distressed by this. It’s not right to justify it by the sheer number of people who do it too.

Anyway, please don’t try to talk me out of noticing things about myself that are real. This has nothing to do with gas lighting. I’ve confirmed with close friends that this is real, and that they’ve known about this aspect of my character for a long time because it’s really only invisible to yourself when you do these things repetitively.

As for being stuck in my own head. Everyone tells themselves stories all the time. I have had small glimpses outside of those stories. Enough such glimpses will give anyone the horrifying realization that they’ve been stuck inside themselves, on one level anyway, for a long time, at the expense of noticing what’s outside them.

Anyway, this goes for anyone – these things are not things you need to interfere with or pull me away from on the grounds that I’m being hurt by someone. I’m not being hurt by anyone and there’s nothing in the slightest wrong with finding your own character flaws scary.