10:16pm July 17, 2013

What I mean about confusing sexuality categories, part 1

That last post makes me think about the confusion I’ve always had in explaining my sexuality, and my history thereof, in words. I honestly think sexuality is very hard to put into words. Lesbian is the closest word I have for it

Words are also hard for me for two more reasons. I’m autistic, growing up with receptive language problems. Also I grew up in a society that assumes you are straight. These twist together, at times I despair of ever being able to explain.

I grew up being told that one day I would “notice boys” and think about body parts and feel certain feelings and that all of this was normal.

At dances, I was expected to dance with boys, and did. Whenever I was friendly with a boy or even watched a tv show with a boy my age in it, my mom dropped “knowing” hints about how cute he was, things like that. My mom was engaged at fifteen and I thought this is how it happens for everyone, and would happen to me.

When a boy asked me out in junior high, I just felt weird. I thought I was simply not old enough, at twelve, to be having these thoughts about anyone. I told him something about not feeling ready to date. He exploded and spent the rest of the year loudly telling anyone who would listen bogus readings I wouldn’t date him. I guess it soothed his ego.

Then I went home every day and sat in my room thinking about Jenny and Rayna. I barely knew either, but I spent much time imagining conversations with them, and feeling a soft kind of bliss.

A year before, I dreamed about living in a dystopian society. I escaped with a girl named Regina, who I had a different kind of relationship with than any kind I was familiar with. It ended with us dancing together in a meadow.

Back then, I didn’t know whether dreams were totally false, or whether they could ever be real. I drew a picture of me dancing with Regina. Memories of that dream became very important, and I imagined that somehow, somewhere, I would meet the real Regina, and that we would have the (romantic) relationship that I didn’t understand at the time but badly wanted. For years I secretly hoped I would find her.

Shortly before my 13th birthday, I attended an academic summer camp. I met a girl whose appearance reminded me of Regina, but her name was Rachel. I loved just to stare at her, and some other girls I saw there, although I didn’t get to know them well.

At that age, I had finally begun to consistently approach people socially, for a time anyway. Before that, I’d almost always fit Lorna Wing’s description of a minority of autistic people (the same ones who most often get my movement disorder) as socially passive. That is, I didn’t usually approach people directly, but would interact when approached. But now I was beginning to approach people sometimes, usually either showing them a book I was interested in, or saying random stuff. Really random stuff. Like a phrase I’d been taught supposedly meant “my hovercraft is full of eels” in Esperanto. And any othe thing I could think up to say in Esperanto. I was beginning to approach the sensory chaos in my life by embracing nonsense. 

One day standing in line. I turned around to a boy and said “Mia sxvabosxipo estas plena je angiloj.” He responded in Russian. I said something else in Esperanto. He said something else in Russian. Esperanto. Russian. It made as much sense to me as most conversations I had at the time.

He introduced himself as Karl Krueger. We talked about his interests and my special interests. People teased us about “liking” each other. He never made me shut up. Never told me “I’m not your therapist, I don’t have to listen to this crazy stuff."  I’d never experienced this before. We didn’t always understand each other, but we respected each other.

My mom told me that when she met my dad, they talked all the time too. She had that knowing tone in her voice.

I had an internet address so I talked to Karl online. He emailed me geeky poetry and political views based on probability waveforms. I didn’t understand it half the time, but that was okay. Life and people never made sense, whether in English, Russian, or Esperanto. I didn’t expect it to. But I was drawn to respect.

In high school the only person I interacted with much was a boy named James Han. Despite him being a then closeted gay and me being a confused lesbian, everyone said we were going out. He later said he couldn’t believe how much bullying I got from both students and teachers. If I had a shutdown teachers would accuse me of being on drugs. If I became so physically rigid that even my eyes became fixed and dilated, instead of contacting my parents or calling an ambulance, they just became hostile. I still don’t understand. James took me to dances because boys take girls to dances. James himself was targeted for bullying because of his association with me. The way he tells it I was like a lightning rod for hate, although I must have been oblivious to some of it.

When I went back to the summer camp, things changed with Karl. One night he kissed me and said "paradigm shift”. Then we kissed a lot. Other girls told me they thought he was “taking advantage of me”. I didn’t know what that phrase meant. Like all words I didn’t know, I disregarded it.

To me, things were happening the way everyone had told me they would happen. I was dating a boy. I could feel the hormones going when we touched. We talked a lot. He said he would love me always. I assumed we would , because I was fourteen, and my marry parents got engaged when my mom was fifteen.

And… I always had this thing where I expected my life to follow certain patterns just because people said they would, or because other people’s lives followed these patterns. 

Sexuality was just that way. I would notice boys, then I would date a boy, then I would marry a boy. That’s all there was to it. Except none of the things that were supposed to happen internally, were happening. My social strategy had always been to follow certain expected pathways. If someone asked me why boy I liked, answer them with a name. Asked a reason, make up a reason. It didn’t feel like lying, because I wasn’t trying to deceive, I was just going along with expectation because I literally thought I had no choices in the matter. This is what you do, just like you do your homework. Couldn’t even imagine another way to live until my brain stayed forcing its way out of these constraints. But that’s a story for another time.

I did feel something for Karl at first. As in, my body responded to his touch, and went through all the emotions of early stages of relationships. At least the physical part?

He said we had a telepathic link, and that if we broke it, one of us might die it go insane. I don’t know his motivations. Maybe, like me, he was playing along as if our lives were science fiction. I often reacted socially the way I’d seen characters in books react. People in books had telepathic links. Why not us? I didn’t feel one, but I played asking, because constraints. And I became terrified that breaking the link would kill us out something equally horrific. He began calling the link the myth, which sounded suspiciously close to breaking it, which caused me terror.

At any rate, I remember distinctly realizing, maybe three months after our relationship started, that I did not love him. It was very clear in my mind. I had no illusions by then. But I still believed I must continue. As if my life was on guide rails I could not jump off of. Our relationship became both sexual and abusive (though the sexual part was not abusive), and I continued playing my part. I also feared being apart from him because I really had no close friends and was otherwise facing some bullies-pretending-to-be-friends alone and confused (including one who maneuvered me into a month long long distance pseudo relationship after college was over, as he did to many girls, at once). I did not break up with him until a few months after my horrible year at college. I think I went out with him for a total of a year and two months. I broke up after a visit to him provoked the temper I so feared and I put two and two together.
The whole year, though, there were girls I could not get out of my head. In ways that had never happened with Karl. I never learned their names. One of them was very slightly plump, with long beautiful arms, an elegant shaved head, and an unusual grace to her movements that most people would never call graceful, and a sense that she didn’t even know anyone could be watching her. Another I met while we were both on drugs. The next day was an awkward scene. Another boy was attracted to her too. And we both found ourselves outside her door, each irritated at the other’s presence, and trying to talk to her with no words coming out. With me embarrassed that she’d seen me in the middle of a shutdown that everyone thought was a bad trip t. She had a pixie cut, and was small and bouncy and light on her feet.

That’s my basic history up to the age of fifteen. Next post will be my discussion of why it was so confusing.

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