as small as a world and as large as alone

2:53pm August 15, 2014

~I’d like to meet you in a timeless, placeless place, somewhere out of context, and beyond all consequences…~ 

~I won’t use words again they don’t mean what I meant they don’t say what I said.  It’s just the crust of the meaning with realms underneath never touched never stirred never even moved through.~

~If language were liquid it would be rushing in.  Instead here we are in a silence more eloquent than any word could ever be…~

Those are all words that were meant for Anne, before I ever met her.  But I knew they were meant for someone, and I kept trying to hand them to people who didn’t understand them.  Or to people who half-understood them and used them to mark me out as a target.  So many words I borrowed from other people and handed to people, hoping that person would be Anne.  By the time I met Anne, I didn’t think Anne existed, anymore.

Anne is, as I have said, the most intimate friendship I have ever had in my life, and not at all romantic or sexual.  And people who can’t understand deep intimacy and love without romance or sexuality can’t understand us at all.  But then people fully or mostly trapped in language can’t understand us at all, and that’s most people.

I just remembered I could use my oxygen, and I feel a lot better, like it’s not so much effort to breathe.  But I’m still super-tired.  And using double steroids.  Might have to go triple depending on how nasty this gets.  Never done triple before.

Sorry I can’t put in a cut, because this is a picture post.  Otherwise I’d put one here, because this is long.

I’m going to Skype with Anne tonight if I remember to do it, and that will be wonderful.  Even though we type words to each other, it’s the video part of the chat that often makes it magical.  Our minds reach for each other and connect – it’s not our minds, though, it’s something deeper than a mind.  I’m learning to do it with my father, too.  It’s like kything in A Wrinkle In Time.  It’s not telepathy, it’s deeper than that.  And I talk to her house, and I talk to her cats, and they talk back.  (One of her cats, Shadow, particularly likes our chats.  He will come up to any chat but is not very interested if it’s not me.  And if Anne forgets to chat with me, he reminds her.  Or tries to get her to chat with me on days when we’ve decided not to.)

This is one way that friendship can look.  This is one way that love can look.  Don’t ever make yourself believe that love has to be romantic or sexual.  Don’t ever make yourself believe that friendship can’t involve depth, intimacy, or love equal to or greater than many romantic or sexual relationships.  Don’t restrict yourself.

I cry sometimes thinking about it.  Because I grew up knowing there was another person like me.  I thought of her as a sibling, maybe a twin (which is interesting because people who know both of us often ask about “separated at birth” scenarios… which would’ve had to involve an accident with a time machine).  But I knew she was out there.  And I kept trying to think that various people were maybe her, and that got me taken advantage of in a lot of really unpleasant ways.  And people who could see what I was thinking, would play along, if they were up to no good.

I didn’t have words like autism when I was a teenager.  I had words like elf though (I’d read enough changeling mythology to know who and what it was pointing at – including children with developmental patterns like mine… besides, it was far more poetic than having a developmental disorder, and I was very interested in the poetic at that age), and was constantly trying to find the other elf.  I wrote a poem that went:

I am reaching out to you
Through the walls of my body
But my arms are not my heart
In the end you must find me

In the center of my soul
Rests a fiercely glowing light
Through the darkness of my mind
Casts a glimpse of burning white

Round that star hang walls of glass
Colors through a prism swirled
Only shadows of that light
Live to reach the outside world

And the one who made that star
Is an elf of ancient lands
In my mind her essence dwells
In the lines upon my hands

I must meet another elf
In the light of the same star
Then I would not be alone
Come to me if elf you are

So if you know how it feels
Reaching for the starlit sky
At the same time pulling back
No one hears your wordless cry

If your soul lies in that light
From a land forgot by man
From the depths of ancient woods
Find me waiting if you can

Honestly I think it’s pretty good for a teen angst poem.  It’s one of the few I’m not totally embarrassed to print.  For people who may be unaware of metaphors (which I know includes a lot of autistic people), what I’m trying to say, stanza by stanza is…

1.  I can’t communicate very well most of the time.  I can’t even get words to mean what my thoughts are, except under rare circumstances, like this.  But the things you can see of me, they aren’t all there is.  So even though I can’t reach out to you in the typical ways, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to.  In the end, you’ll have to reach out to me, because I’m too infrequently able to reach out to you or approach anyone.

2.  There’s a part of me that’s very important to me, it’s the essence of who I am, and I’m conceptualizing it as a bright white star.

3.  But that part of me, even though it’s the most important, has only highly distorted ways of communicating with the outside world.  Like prisms take white light and split it and distort it into different colors, my problems with communication distort my ability to tell anyone who I actually am.

4.  I see myself as different from other humans, to the point I might as well be a different species.  [Understand I hadn’t quite been diagnosed when I wrote this, and it took me years to understand the implications of my diagnosis even after I got it.  The “not human” explanation also provided me a way to conceptualize myself that was completely outside of what psychiatry wanted me to be, which was very appealing.  So appealing that I put up with being called delusional, rather than drop it, for a long time.]  You can see this “nonhuman” nature in my mind, and also in the way I move my hands and body.

5.  I need to find someone else who is “nonhuman” in the same way I am.  Someone who “knows the light of the same star” – someone who lives in the same “world” I do, rather than the “world” everyone else seems to live in.

6 & 7.  So if you understand the experiences I’m talking about.  If you know what it’s like to feel totally alone among a species that doesn’t feel like your own.  If you want to be understood on the most basic level.  Then I’m here, waiting.

Anyway… people tried really hard to talk me out of all this.  Not just the nonhuman part, the thing they tried the hardest to talk me out of was the idea that there was anyone out there who could understand me.  They told me I needed to stop feeling like nobody understood me, because all teenagers feel like that (which is partially true, but I still maintain it’s an order of magnitude different for neurodivergent teens).  And that nobody ever would understand me, for that matter, so it was no use trying.  And that I should just shut up about it and stop pretending that anyone like that could ever exist.

People got downright cruel about it.  They told me it was … something horrible … that I could ever expect to be understood on that level.  People got angry.  I don’t understand, to this day, why they were so angry.

At any rate, they eventually convinced me never to think of it again.

And I gradually started meeting people who understood me.

It started out with just a little understanding.  But even a little understanding – even just meeting other autistic people at all – felt as intense as meeting people who understood me perfectly.  Because it was so much closer to perfect understanding, than anything I’d gotten from nonautistic people (except some other neurodivergent people).  So I started thinking this was what I’d been looking for.  And the more people I met, the closer I got to that level of understanding.

And then I met someone who tried – very hard – to prevent me from ever saying I had anything in common with her, or with anyone else.  And it was a setup, a very deliberate setup, where she would deliberately name things she knew I experienced, and then say I could not say these things because it would ‘trigger’ her into 'feeling she was being imitated’.  And then she started stalking and harassing and threatening to kill me.

And then I met Anne.

And Anne was the real thing, someone as close to 'just like me’ as it’s possible to get.  Which is to say, still quite different from me, but seriously as close to two people being alike as you can get.  But my stalker made me afraid to tell her when I had something in common with her.  It was uncanny, how each time I was about to meet people like me, I would get told by someone not to have anything in common with them, not to express that commonality.  Even the first time I remember meeting someone 'like me’ I’d hear people trying to tell me “you have nothing in common, give it up”.  It’s like, again, people were angry at the idea of me and my friends deciding whether or not we had anything in common, they wanted to be the ones to decide whether we had anything in common.  (And their idea of what we had in common probably came from psychiatric categories, not from human categories.)

Anyway, I met Anne, and eventually I made it past the way my stalker had tied my brain up in knots, and we’ve been amazingly close ever since, and she really is the person I was thinking of when I thought of the other person 'in the light of the same star’.

When we communicate, it’s like I pull back to that star, and then I can see where it branches out in two directions, and I can see her, and I can see me, and I can feel as if her, and feel as if me, and it’s very strange, but also feels as natural as breathing.

If you seriously feel like there is someone out there who understands you, don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t.  There probably is.  You might not ever meet them.  I feel like it’s a miracle that Anne and I met (and it’s interesting to me the many times we almost met and didn’t, and the fact that we may have met and not known it, because our lives were really intertwined in a weird way long before we met online).  But don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s stupid to feel like someone out there understands you.

At the same time – beware of people who will take advantage of you.  People will pretend to be that person.  If a person does things to you that make you uncomfortable, then be wary.  People know that people are looking for a person like that, and they will come in and pretend to be that person.

Also, while it’s wrong to discourage someone from believing such a person could exist… it’s also not good to pine for such a person.  To put your entire life on hold until you meet them.  It’s most likely you’ll only meet them after you’ve given up on meeting them, or moved on to other things.  Things like that just seem to happen that way.  (The same is true of romantic relationships a lot of the time.  In fact most of my advice here applies to romantic and sexual relationships as well as deep non-romantic non-sexual friendships.)

But seriously.

While some people may give you good advice that you shouldn’t be obsessed with finding a person like this… be very wary of anyone who seems angry or annoyed that you even think anyone could ever understand you on this level.  Because there’s something wrong when they have that much emotion invested in not wanting you to experience something that would make you happy.  

And for some reason this whole thing has made people angry at me since I first articulated it.

It makes them less angry now that I’ve found Anne and the world hasn’t exploded or something.  But for a long time it felt like the (social) world didn’t want me to find her at all.  And like any time I got close, people would rage at me about how stupid and childish I was being.

Mind you – we should not have met much earlier than we met.  If we’d met as teenagers, at the time I’d written that poem, we could have destroyed each other’s lives.  We’d have been terrible influences on each other.  And I think we needed a certain level of maturity before we could handle each other.

Anyway, now she’s the person who can most readily understand me without language being involved.  We use words mostly as a carrier wave – the real information is outside of language, and we’re not sure how we do it, but we do it.  And it’s beautiful.  And there’s nothing wrong with it.

~I won’t use words again
They don’t mean what I meant
They don’t say what I said
They’re just the crust of the meaning
With realms underneath
Never touched
Never stirred
Never even moved through~

And that’s the truth.  That song was meant for Anne, whenever I played it.  I just didn’t know her yet.  And now she’s heard it, and she understands it, which is more than most people have done when I’ve played it for them, before now. ^_^

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