7:58pm May 14, 2013

I didn’t like The Hunger Games, but…

I don’t usually read dystopian novels, but I read The Hunger Games anyway. And I hated it. I can’t judge whether a novel is good, literarily. I can just judge whether I like it or not. And I couldn’t stand it. Something about it made me feel terrible the entire time. And not in a useful way, or a way that taught me enough to be worth the time it took to read the three books.

Except one thing.

Katniss was a character who was always the last to know what she was doing or why. She did all kinds of things, and had no idea of their reasons or their effects on people. She always seemed to find out after everyone else in the world found it all really obvious. And often only after a lot of mess and conflict that could have been avoided if she’d just understood from earlier.

And I totally related to that.

There have been so many times in my life when everyone but me knew the consequences of my actions. I can’t even count them.

And what I hate. Is that everyone expects me to have known. Everyone treats me like it’s all so obvious that there’s no way I couldn’t have known.

Except I didn’t. My understanding of a lot of things is seriously behind 99.99 percent of the population. And they’re usually things that everyone else finds obvious. Even a lot of other autistic people, who aren’t the same as me, find them obvious. And then they say horrible shit like “I’m autistic and even I understood that, so how could you possibly not understand?” They act like I’m a liar when I describe my level of awareness at the time things happened.

Oh and just because I’m autistic and I know it will come up, I’m not talking about alexithymia. Not understanding elements of your own emotions doesn’t have to be alexithymia, and I don’t think I have alexithymia at all.

I can’t give perfect examples, especially of the most important times this happened.

But one I can give, that isn’t perfect. Because the person who said all this to me was deliberately trying to fuck with my head and wind me up. It’s about abuse.

Supposedly, everyone knows that when an abuser is going to be loud and scary and violent, you can hide. You don’t keep coming back to that situation, totally unaware that it’s possible to leave it. And I don’t mean as in staying with an abusive boyfriend, although I’ve done that too. I mean as in trying to get out of the way when your abusive boyfriend is angry at you. Learning to hide when he’s angry or at least try to run away during those times.

I never did.

I didn’t run. I didn’t hide. I didn’t fight. Not him or any abuser that I know of. Well I did start fighting later, and a little running. But I learned that late. Much later than most people do.

And it wasn’t even learned helplessness. It was not even having the capacity to understand in the first place. Learned helplessness happens when you learn that escape is impossible, and then that carries over to even when escape is possible. I never started with the assumption that escape is possible. So I went away in my head, rather than with my body. And that goes for any abuse I ever experienced until I was maybe fifteen or sixteen. It’s even written up in my psych records as a highly unusual and pathological level of passivity or something like that. And I didn’t even understand how passive it was until recently.

Normally people at least try to escape, and then possibly learn that it’s impossible. I never even tried. And again I’m talking about abuse in the moment, not leaving a relationship with an abuser.

That’s not the best example. But it’s a good example of the way I had no idea I could affect my environment, or myself, at all. It never entered my mind.

The real examples I wish I could talk about are from the complicated and messed up times in my life in which I was under the thumb of psychiatry, and tried to alter myself to fit whatever diagnosis I was given, both officially by psychiatrist and unofficially by so called friends. That’s a period in my life that most people completely misunderstand what I was doing. Because their heads are full of a huge number of assumptions about what I did and didn’t know about the world at the time, and what my motivations were and were not, and what my awareness was and was not about how my actions affected my own life and that of others.

But it’s such a complicated topic I’d have to write an entire book to even delve into it.

But despite her and I having entirely different personalities, at that point in my life I remind myself of Katniss. Because Katniss had the same total lack of understanding of her own motivations and the way her actions affected people. I would not say that most other people understand my motivations from that time period either. In fact, most people who make a big deal of it can’t even imagine my motivations. Because they can’t imagine the level of obliviousness that I was living with at the time, so they can’t truly get inside my head. My perception of the world played a huge part in my actions, and most people can’t imagine how I perceived the world, because there were so many huge blank spots in areas where other people would see information.

I see those same blank spots all over Katniss’s understanding of things. She doesn’t understand huge parts of the world, that other people do understand easily. That includes elements of her own motivations and the effect she has on others. It also includes elements of what her options are, her surroundings, what things happening around her in general mean. And most people around her don’t understand what she doesn’t understand, and therefore don’t give her much slack in those areas.

And that, I can relate to.

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