Tempted by silence

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The only phone calls I receive now are by someone who wants to sell me something: insurance contracts, books, phones, olive oil. When I told the residual 6 or 7 persons I have known for many years that I am autistic, I didn’t expect that they would all stop having some contact with me after telling me some clumsy answer to what somehow amounted to an appeal for help. What I was saying in a kind of circulating letter was that I couldn’t stand anymore to pretend. Pretend that I could play again the game of normality, whatever that means. Now I know I am alone and that I am talking only to myself. Sometimes I cannot stand the total solipsism where I live and cannot resist doing some phone calls. Two or three in a week, but even that is probably a mistake. Not only I cannot communicate anything (this, after all has happened to me all my life), but I also have the feeling that I am “using” others in these calls. So why not complete silence?

Once I became fully employed I plugged my computer into my phone line and left it there. You can't call me, but you can usually reach me on-line, especially if you're patient. You know I don't care for talking on the phone very much (especially with impatient people). Once in a while I hang up the computer when I leave for work. Once in a while there's a message on my answering machine, but it's always UnsolicitedCommercialPhoneCall. Everybody knows I can't be reached at home. Don't even try. I might call you to find out if I can come talk to you in person, but never just to talk.

I have experienced something similar. It started with my Chronic Fatigue, an illness that is frankly misunderstood by many. One by one, my so called "friends" dropped away, until I had next to no one to talk to. Add to that, the Asperger's, and I am totally alone, unless you want to include health care professionals, who only care because they are paid to.

i hate the phone. when the phones for me i just wanna tell then to fack off.
why should i limit myself to 1 thing, 1 person? i always do lots of things on the comp, w/ msn in the bg.

Some of us would prefer to function in life without having to speak, with the exception of with loved ones if any. Why not, if modern technology can permit us to? Modern life has made it harder for us to find common ground in interaction, so why not adapt by clamming up?

well dont worry about talking to much, if i worry about what im going to say the words get caught in my mouth and stop completely, then i just try to force it out wich is no good at all

In my vow of silence I am facilitated by answering machine and busy lines. I have never left messages in answering machines. I never kept an answering machine, I hate answering machines and I don’t use cell phones. E-mail is different and more acceptable.

I feel like a complete idiot when I'm talking to someone's answering machine. I prefer talking to a real person on the phone or face to face interaction.

I really dislike talking on the phone. I feel 'trapped' sometimes, by the person with whom I'm talking, especially if I don't know them very well. It gets to the stage where I've even lied to get off the phone, (which I am ashamed of doing) but I have resorted to the 'must go, there's someone at the door' excuse.

I love emails, they are perfect for someone like me. When I'm feeling very AS (it does vary) I can leave them until I'm feeling more communicative, until I 'find my words' again and am back to feeling chatty.

To answer you question Paolo - why not complete silence - silence I feel imposes itself upon me at times, the very AS days when I hardly speak, even to my husband, but once that feeling has passed, I am again drawn into connecting with people. I couldn't stand having no kind of human contact at all, although I know such contact is often very difficult for those of us on the spectrum.

If I examine all my relationships in my life I can say I never said an outright lie to anybody. Is it a merit? Sometimes you have to lie. It’s better you have this capability to lie. That's what Ronald Laing said somewhere. Particularly with your parents, you have to defend yourself, maintain you area of privacy against a rule that has been established by them (your parents) at their convenience, to be able to control your life. But not to lie does mean to be sincere. And when I talk with someone, I am always split: the one who talks is never the one who really exists in that moment. There is a constant disjunction between the two, a constant fatigue, a constant dissatisfaction. That’s why I am tempted to adopt silence as a unbreakable rule. It’s not something that happens now. I may date it back to the attraction that I felt for Bergman movie “Persona” that I have seen in 1966 when it appeared.

Why they don’t have italics here. Sometimes they are necessary.

i don't like phones either, it takes always so long before you can say what you have to say, it's like a labyrinth.

If you tell nt-people that 'you can't pretend anymore' they take it as some kind of insult, instead of asking "what's up, why do you feel this way?" They feel some sort of unpleasant guilt.
They also see it as a sign that you don't want to communicate with them anymore cause they never understand things literaly. They have social rituals and one of them says that you can never tell someone anything that could be interpreted in a pejorative way, you have to use euphemisms, and pretending is a must.

If you refuse to apply this social rules (or try and show your efforts in doing so) then life might be a lot more difficult for you, but maybe you're able to find some balance anyway (that's the art, finding enough people you can trust and like, and enough being alone to feel fine)

In fact I'm always a little jalous at people who have a quite silent life, cause mine is far too noisy for me, having a family(+its interaction) is a noisy business.

I don't see it as true in the city. I'm always evoking smiles. Of course, I look really different most of the time - singing to myself, wearing odd styles ect.

yeah, i can evoke smiles in the city now, but i learned it at the countryside