11:08am June 18, 2014

I can never, ever be who she wants me to be.

Sure, she loves me, and she says she loves me the way I am.  But she has these values that put niceness first, almost always.  And it’s a kind of niceness that I will never, ever be capable of, because I’m autistic.  It requires too many things that I can’t do.

It’s not that I’m not a nice person.  Hell, I’m a Hufflepuff for a reason.  But I’m an autistic Hufflepuff.  I’m an introverted Hufflepuff.  And I’m not that stereotype of the person who always knows just what to say, and especially what not to say.

So the other day she says something that really gets on my nerves, because it’s part of a pattern I’ve seen her get into before, and people have gotten very hurt by it.  I sent back what I thought was a decent response, telling her that it wasn’t really necessary to go in that direction right now.

I get back an email saying that I’m being “harsh” and that she came up with the idea to comfort someone and that should be enough.  But it isn’t enough, for me.  It’s not enough to come up with an idea that has probably no actual basis in fact, and then pass it off to someone as even remotely likely.  It’s comforting to know why something happened, but in life we don’t usually get those guarantees, and it’s not comforting to realize you’ve just been told something that they basically pulled out of nowhere.

And it’s even less comforting to me, because I’ve seen these nonsensical explanations dominate people’s lives before (and in one case, leave lifelong scars).  So until I get any scientific evidence otherwise, I’m not going to take that as even a remotely plausible explanation.

But now I basically have to pretend none of this is happening, pretend none of it matters, pretend I haven’t written this post and that she’s not going to read it (she is going to read it, but this is where I go to deal with stuff so if she doesn’t want to read what I’m thinking she shouldn’t come here), all because keeping people comfortable is more important than anything.

And the fact that I’m ‘harsh’ becomes more important than the fact that I was trying, as tactfully as I’m capable of (and I’m not capable of tact, but I at least tried), to avert a bad situation.  Because I can see really bad situations arising out of her explanation for things.  I feel like the reason that I was harsh wasn’t even my tone, as I initially thought.  It’s the fact that I contradicted her at all.  Contradicting something someone says to comfort someone else is 'harsh’, apparently, no matter how good a reason you have for doing it, why you do it, or how polite you try to be.

I’m always going to be autistic.  And that means that, no matter what she says, I’m never going to be good enough.  I know the way she tenses up when I say certain things, ready to jump in and save me from what she sees as my saying something socially inappropriate.  I know the way she does constantly try to save me, or cover for me, or do other things to smooth over the fact that I’m not good enough, socially.  I’m too blunt, too straightforward, too unpredictable, and talk about too wide a range of things.  I’m terrible at remembering and keeping secret the long list of things that she’d rather be secret and unknown to everyone outside a certain group of people.

I love her, and I know she loves me.  But I know I don’t measure up in these areas and never will.  I think she kind of pretends that I do, and that I will, but I know I don’t, because I know the distance between who I am and who she wants me to be (and sometimes imagines me to be, when I don’t clash too much to make that possible), and I can see it in her eyes and the tension in her body and voice when I don’t measure up.

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