Counter-cultures and aspergers

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I agree with anti-authoritarianism but I never did anything social about it. I thought about F-not-B but can't handle political correctness and pretending to be perfect, or people pushing their food diets onto me personally, and it seemed I'd feel like a group might attempt to make become as they wanted me to be. It makes me think of religious control which I have experienced. Plus, I am not good at social interactions/conversations and knowing what to say.

bee, you said it.

i also went to art school briefly (i dropped out of college four times ) and i didn't make any friends there at all.

i tried one group of misfits after another, always failing to gel with them (although sometimes being obtuse was acceptable ..)
there was that thing wrong that i couldn't put a name to that no one else seemed to be experiencing ..

Ideas, values and views contrary to what a majority of the people in the culture hold.

Aspies tend to be contrarian.

ruveyn

I met my former boyfriend at art school and we were together for 14 years. We're still close friends but the lives 2000 miles away and now has a wife and kids. My pattern has always been either not having any friends or having one friend who served as a sort of conduit to the outside world. I think I've been lucky in that respect, during the times when it lasted.

After I transferred to a university that was right next to the art school, I did not make a single friend there.

Yes! I didn't know I had AS and couldn't figure out why everyone else seemed to be friendly and chatty and even though I tried to do the same it never somehow worked for me. But now knowing that it's AS it only feels even more hopeless.

Food Not Bombs was a very mixed bag. In some ways it was very easygoing, but most of the volunteers were much younger than me, so it would have been difficult to make friends even if I were capable of it. The people who ended up bullying me were not primarily FNB people.

I also found out I could get along pretty well with the homeless people that we served food to in the park.

I generally don't fit into any type of group; I tend to resist labels. (In fact, I said I didn't have Asperger's because it felt more like a label than a disorder.)

Tell me what a 'hippieish aspie' looks like, and I'll tell you if I am one.

I think I have always been a hippie on the inside. Most people don't see it, because I don't wear the cloth uniform and when unpartnered I tend to wander solo rather than in packs (the partner is a bit necessary as enabler for the group-functioning I love but am not so good at). They seem able to ignore the travelling ways, the 'free love' phase, the musician's lifestyle, the dedication to earning no more than was needed because any more was greedy and immoral (don't you just bet I regret that now!), the choice to rear a child alone rather than not at all, the attempt at many careers, the many promising talents (mostly unrealised), the lack of stability in anything ... and they ignore all these signs because people see what they want to see.

What people wilfully see is someone else who is coping; otherwise, they are burdened with the responsibility of helping out, and in this era people would rather live their own shutdown lives than take a chance on opening out to risk disappointment again.

Even I, these days, quite ofen fail to see, hear or honour my inner hippie. I have only just worked out about being an Aspie and it's both liberating and frightening. Do I have time to remake my life? Will I find the help I need? With family dead or out of reach and a relatively 'stable' (deadly to me) lifestyle willingly adopted while I was responsible for my now-grown son, I have lost momentum. I no longer look like myself. It's a long way back and my spaces have closed.

I haven't given up, but I do need friends and advice. I am really delighted to find this site; I think my new friends are here.

Last edited by HighPlateau on 20 Oct 2011, 10:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not a hippie, but I don't fall in the mainstream. I answered "it's complicated", because I'm transgender, and I hang around the LGBT communities a lot, but I don't really consider that counter culture. I'm not trans so I can stick it to the man. Really, I'm just a guy trying to live as a guy in peace.

But once I complained to my therapist that society didn't approve of something I had done, and her answer was "Since when have you followed what society wanted you to do?" I had to laugh and give her that point.

Bee, ! !!YES!! ! Me too!! (It just connected.)



Oh, Bee, I am so sorry to read that. To me (another newbie) it seems like the greatest lightening of the load I have ever experienced. All that blame and guilt I don't have to wear anymore!! ! It's the best possible chance to own your future. I hope you have cheered up by now, because the news is surely good. Best of luck.

I think with the first batch of hippie dropouts I met, I had the advantage that I'd already convinced myself that they were the true Great and Good. My parents and peers kept me away from such things for a few years, and I didn't quite know where to find hippies anyway, so naturally their absence made my heart grow fonder.......so many mainstreamers seemed to hate them but they couldn't explain why.....they just got into stereotyped rat-race activities, chasing money and nuclear family life, getting suits and haircuts to go work in a bank, and (it seemed to me) selling out on their ideals. So they came over as mercenary, heartless and backward-thinking. This was back in the 1970s when there was still a sniff of left-wing revolution in the air, still some hope that the whole system might be about to give way to a better, gentler way of life where men didn't have to pretend to be as hard as nails and women didn't have to pretend to be fluffy, brainless sex kittens.

So I guess my great admiration for the alternativists must have opened a lot of doors for me......I just automatically trusted them, I told them when I liked what they were doing, and I made no secret of how much I valued them. If somebody really digs you, as long as they're not too gushy about it, it's hard not to take a shine to them. So the whole positive vibe fed back, and those people never seriously let me down. Every time some grey suited mainstream bastard shunned me or made life hard for me, it reinforced how much better off I was with the hippies.

So where has that left you, Tough Diamond of Phoenix? Alone? Grouped? A hippie? Alternativist? You've been doing this a while, so do tell. Give us the 'after' as well as the 'before' shot.

Good question.....if they were so cosmic, where are they now?

They had an ethic of almost total social inclusion, which was brilliant for me while I was lonely and partnerless, but I stumbled into a relationship with a woman who wasn't all that sold on alternativism, and we wanted to have kids, and I felt that I needed a more stable, private environment for that. Frankly I'd got so used to having a supply of instant friends and company that I was complacent, and thought I'd grown out of my social inadequacies. I didn't even know I had AS back then, and those hippies had been so good to me that my social problems were no longer apparent.

So my return to the nuclear family was a lot more of a strain than I'd expected. I sorely missed my old community, and the strain of my job, the marriage and child-rearing began to get to me. After a few years I looked at some commmunal projects around the UK and we agreed to join one that offered work in a co-operative, income pooling, shared housing and communal living. But I eventually saw that they were all deferring to a leader figure who was rather cruel and had a punitive work ethic, so I was still under a lot of strain. Then my wife very abruptly ditched me for another guy in the group (see what I mean about needing privacy to raise a family?), which caused me and my 5-year-old son years of anguish.

Then the rest of the group began to have fights with their leader. The co-op I was in and the cruel leader went our separate ways, and for a year or two life was a lot more bearable. Eventually our co-op ran out of funding. At that point my girlfriend asked me to think about getting a "proper" job, and so I returned to the world of ordinary waged work. The housing deal fell through, and we moved out....the cruel leader still owned it, and I squatted for a year or two while he tried to evict me, while my ex-wife sided with him and also tried to move down south with my son, so I was facing attack from all sides. Ultimately I won. I had enough time to buy a house of my own (I was the only member of our co-op that didn't get knocked out of the housing market), and my ex-wife relinquished her plans to move away with my son.

After that little lot, naturally I rather went into my shell, and I haven't risked jumping into a communal lifestyle since. That group was nothing like the anti-capitalist group of earlier times. Joining it was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I talked with many people who believed that its leader was a crook whose main aim was to get his hands on other members' capital.

I still feel that some kind of alternative lifestyle has got to be better than mainstream, but I wouldn't make myself financially dependent on any such group, unless I'd known and lived among them for years. I guess I only coped so well with the first situation because I still had a straight job and a simple arrangement with the landlord, although at the time the job was giving me so much stress that I thought it was the bane of my life. I still have that straight job, and sure enough it has given me a lot of stress, but now at last I'm getting near to retirement and I have enough savings to cover me even if they kicked me out tomorrow, so I shouldn't need to be financially dependent on anybody ever again, and so I won't need to swap precarious dependency on a capitalist bastard for precairous dependency on something that might not be any less cruel or reliable.

You still with the wise girlfriend that promoted the 'proper job' ideal? Realising this sounds like a flirt, I don't think that's what it is. But I like the hedged, nuanced quality of your storytelling and will take wisdom if it is founded on actual experience. I am struggling to make it on my own, do love to be partnered, and have curiosity about whether that is the clincher that decides, deep down, whether someone makes it or not. Alone is a country I don't like to be and am not good at. Looking for guidance, is all, just now. Not wanting to put a heavy weight on anyone, but please do share stories. Every experience has value. Namaste.

It's not a question of how one looks like. It is a question of how one thinks like and behaves like.
Through your writing, you do come across as a hippiesh aspie.

No. Paradoxically, she was the least mainstream partner I was ever with. I left her because with her I kept getting sucked into weird, hurtful mind games. Quite what was going on is still unclear.....she seemed to get some kind of enjoyment out of making it look as if she were in some kind of physical or sexual danger, and although I was usually very stoical about it, I found it very painful and scary, and so after a couple of unheeded warnings I very reluctantly abandoned her. Previously she had been married to a guy with multiple psycho-sexual problems, including sado-masochism, so maybe it was something to do with that.


I still have trouble knowing what flirting is anyway, but I didn't take it that way, and even if it was I don't see the harm it could do, given that we probably occupy opposite sides of the planet. Thanks for the compliment about my storytelling.


There is a school of thought that says people should wait until they feel completely at ease with themselves as partnerless individuals before taking on a serious partner....I suppose the idea is that anybody who can't get to that level is going to be too insecure to cope with the realities of a relationship. But for me, being partnerless is like a jail sentence.....I just can't fully embrace it, and never have been able to since puberty. All I can do is try very hard to stay mindful that however lonely it gets, I need to be just as selective as I would if I weren't lonely.

I subscribe to that school of thought and am seldom shy in dishing it out to others. Hard-won (albeit slightly lopsided) equilibrium is something no-one in their right mind should willingly squander on a long shot. But I think it is possible to 'try out' with people without investing everything from day one. Otherwise, how the hell do we ever find out enough to justify the leap? Last time I partnered, it took four hours from first meeting to make a connection that lasted seven and a half years at close quarters and which, after a very sad and protracted severance process, now looks set to deliver a lifelong friendship. We are both undeniably the richer for having been together. I am still sorry we didn't make it. Of course I now wonder whether, had we understood our mutual aspieness at the time, we might have found ways to head off the crash and accommodate our oddnesses better. Aspie minds and behaviours with NT expectations and interpretations is a recipe that curdles repeatedly - all so obvious now; but without that one essential insight our many efforts to improve the blend all failed.

Self-knowledge is the first key: if you know what you are on the inside, you have a better chance of making an honest offer. I'm still working on the bit about how to make a good reading of what the other person is putting out there ...

So let me modify my subscription: People should wait until they feel completely at ease with themselves as partnerable individuals before taking on a serious partner.

Finally, some non-Aspie, common-sense observations for the pot:

• If someone announces they are bisexual, believe them.
• If you discern they have always chosen a non-same-sex public partnership, expect trouble ahead when the unresolved same-sex sexuality reasserts itself.
• If they are 'honest' about the fact that they have lied in the past about sexual adventures, assume
  1. the adventures will resume; and
  2. shriving does not cure a liar.

Jaded, moi? Well, actually, no. I anticipated the infidelity; it was just the lying I couldn't handle. As for the rest, I learn from experience. Next time - and I'm pretty sure there will be a next time - I will be very careful to communicate early about my boundaries and barriers that, in the past, have been misunderstood by both partners and myself, forming nuclei for blame and self-recrimination. Now I recognise them for what they are, as far as I'm concerned they are completely explainable, knowable and surmountable. A bloke worth his salt may have to take a few things on trust, but will not be fazed by any of this. So there.