8:37am May 28, 2014

I still remember what it was like to have nobody I could communicate with.

I could speak, yes.  But a lot of that speech had nothing to do with what my actual thoughts were.  And when it did, it was almost by accident.  I couldn’t control how communicative my speech was, and same with my typing.  I don’t want to go into great amounts of detail rehashing every detail of my communication situation at the time.  (Suffice to say, if you guess anything stereotypical at all, you’re guessing wrong.)  

All that matters is that I felt trapped.  It felt like at the center of me was this bright light.  And then around it were all these glass walls and mirrors, distorting it into different colors so that nobody could see it as it was.  And I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on.  I also felt like a house where all the doors and windows in the front have been boarded up, and the only way in is through the back, but nobody could get to the back because of all the fences in the way.  These sorts of things were how I conceived myself.  I often drew myself with large eyes but no mouth.

I was beginning to realize the full extent of the communication problems I had.  They were complex communication problems.  Too complex to describe here.  Too complex to fit into most people’s neat tidy boxes of what a severe communication problem looks like.  A few people (including the psychiatrist who diagnosed me) picked up on what was going on, but even they were only guessing as to what to do about it.

My psychiatrist basically insisted on telling me stories over and over again.  One of his favorites was Helen Keller at the water pump.  But he’d also tell stories of his other autistic patients, and the moment that they realized what words were for.  I don’t know what result he expected to achieve, but he didn’t achieve it.

Somewhere very deep inside me, however, I knew the answer.  I knew that I spoke a language all of my own.  And I knew that somewhere out there, there was another person who spoke it so well that I wouldn’t need to translate.  Someone who could get in the back door.  Someone who was already inside the glass walls, who didn’t need to see through them.

Unfortunately, since I wished so badly for such a situation, I was willing to put up with people who picked up what I was looking for and tried to give it to me when it wasn’t there.  That created a lot of bad situations.  It also made me highly distrustful of the whole concept.

On the rare occasions when I was able to tell anyone about this, people gave me the impression that to want to meet someone like myself was both childish and self-centered.  I began to echo the kinds of things they said: “I wouldn’t really want to meet someone like me.  That would be really boring, wouldn’t it?  And what kind of narcissist wants to spend time with someone like themselves?”

And slowly I started giving up on the idea.

Then I started meeting other autistic people, which was scary.  When I was meeting people online, especially, I’d become convinced that the autistic people I met were my old “friends” (read: bullies) playing tricks on me by reciting back bits of knowledge about my life.  Because even when I met an autistic person who was fairly different from me, they had more in common with me than most people did by far.  And some of these people, even being fairly different from me, were still able to “get in the back door” and get to know me as I was, even with the front door pretty well boarded up.  I began to slowly trust that what we had in common was autism, not that my old bullies were being sadistic.  (My old bullies were and remain sadistic, but they had no part in all of this.)

But I still, despite having had more experience with people like me than I ever thought I’d had, hadn’t had the experience of simply not needing to communicate in the usual ways, of just having someone able to read everything really easily.  And given what I’d found, I was okay with that.

Eventually, I met a really horrible bully.  She was autistic, but she got off on bullying other autistic people.  She did find out a huge amount of things about my life, and then she claimed I’d stolen them from her life. Any time I said I had anything in common with her, she’d accuse me of stealing it from her.  Sometimes she’d make up things that she knew she didn’t have in common with me, just so she could accuse me of stealing those things from her.  Given the way in which she operated (in which it was supposedly “triggering” to her for anyone to say they had anything in common with her, whether on purpose or by accident, and yet she’d go to elaborate lengths to make it look like people had said things like that when they hadn’t), I ended up both feeling horribly guilty, and violated, and a lot of other things. I won’t get into everything she did to me, but by the end of it I was constantly stressed out, traumatized, and my health was beginning to collapse.  Which given what the health problems were, and the way adrenal insufficiency responds to severe stress, I can’t believe that what she did wasn’t part of that.

So right at that time, along came someone who had a lot in common with me.  I was afraid of her.  Because at that point, I’d been conditioned that any time I said I had anything in common with someone, then I’d be accused of faking the whole thing, at best.  (With the above bully/stalker, when she wasn’t accusing me of imitating her, she was accusing me of imitating others.)  But with this person, the similarities ran deeper than I’d ever seen before.  In fact, they even ran deeper than the wholly made-up similarities my stalker had used in order to make it seem like we had more in common than we really did.  It was like every detail of our lives from childhood onwards was almost a duplicate of each other, with minor but important differences.

Fortunately, I got over my fears, because it turned out this person was exactly what I’d been thinking of all those years ago when it came to someone who wouldn’t need words to communicate with me, who would be able to understand things that nobody else could understand because they couldn’t be communicated, and that kind of thing.

And I learned that it is not narcissistic to want to meet someone that much like yourself.  If anything, our ability to see past each other’s bullshit has helped us grow as people.  And it’s sort of like meeting someone with the same taste as you in nearly everything, but the person has read different books and listened to different music and you get to swap playlists and booklists and stuff.  

But the most important part is the level of intimacy possible.  We are able to practically climb into each other’s minds.  And we are able to communicate about things that neither of us can tell anyone else.  Not for lack of trying, but because some things don’t translate.  And around each other, we don’t need a translator.

Everything we say to each other seems to carry more meaning than usual.  Even emails, which are all text, have all this information that seems to be encoded on top of the text that we’re able to read.  We like video chats a lot because we can still do text there, but we get to see each other, which affords a far wider range of communication than text does.

Someone posted hoping they could find someone like this.  All I can say is that I found her when I was least trying to do so, least expecting it, and actually was the only time in my life that I was scared shitless by the idea because I’d just been through this awful situation with someone who accused me of lying any time I said I had anything at all in common with her or anyone else.  But somehow we still found each other and have managed to stick together since then.

So I have to believe this can happen to other people.

36 notes