Sorry about the crazy post, and thanks for such thoughtfulness, Morningstar.
(The short and sweet that I should have written somewhere is that I've gotten the sense that my family almost likes the disease. Maybe it's that they were so desperate for an answer years ago, and the idea of a new one is scary even if it had potential to turn out better. I think that what I'm asking is whether anyone else notices family or social dysfunctions as a cause for some of their difficulty integrating, and how to best break away from things that really are toxic.)
What you descried about guys just wanting to get into a woman's pants sure wouldn't feel complimentary.
I think that from from a guy's perspective, it's felt only oddly-complimentary to be liked because of not being like other guys, rather than what's nice about me. I remember a beautiful young singer that I had a spent a lot of time with commenting that guys don't ever clean the sides of toilets, but then she turned to me, smiled, and said, "But [my name]'s not like most guys." (She'd been to my apartment.) It felt sort of nice, but it didn't make me feel that it would be OK to let go of my guard around her. I should admit that it's my fault if I keep so much to myself that nobody would know anything more than what outward flaws I don't have, and I do see a change when I learn to highlight the parts that I want to be defined by.
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes a guy can feel like a combination dildo, sperm-bank and cash machine in a relationship. That's really a crude way to put it, and I try to not think of it that way, but the approach sometimes feels like that.
That's not the main reason that I wrote, but it's something that probably isn't bridged enough.
The thing that concerns me more acutely is that people who I think could get better don't. Aside form what I'm working to move away from, I have two friends that I was thinking of. The withdrawal was general - savant isolation, on the part of people who seem to like need connection.
One is a less informative example because he's only a little younger than I, but I remember how stressed his parents were, and that they had trouble responding coolly when things went poorly (which happens in every family). I don't remember his being any more than odd. I can imagine how that could be congenital, I don't see why that decision was made so firmly.
That brings me to the more-informative example. I met his mother first. I was an EBD student while she was starting out as a social worker. (There weren't ASD classes here then) I really think highly of her, and a lot of what I valued in people for the years was modeled after her thoughtfulness. As her son has grown up, they've started having trouble. She became an autism specialist after working with me, and I remember her starting to wonder whether he had it about four years ago. I told her to stop worrying so much. More recently, she admitted to me that it was hard to be around her mother when she had her son with her. And feeling judged has been a theme. Over time, she stopped wanting to talk about the family aspect. My own mother has a painful relationship with her extended family that she endures passively, and my father is also defers to her on that.
Basically, their pacifism feels like passivism.
It's been hard to watch the first friend. I see a lot of signs of physical hardship - his face is long, and the area under his eyes is slightly darkened. I noticed when he ate that he never drank water, and seemed as though he had trouble swallowing it or keeping it down. I had the something similar starting when I was in high school, and I've wondered whether it was caused drugs. Anyway, he's in a group home now, and he's so bright, motivated and good-hearted that it doesn't make much sense to me. He doesn't say much, but he listens, remembers and follows through without prodding. That seems to me more like the pattern of someone who's held back by something else - like impossibly-conflicting demands from different people, or some other situation that's out of his control - than of somebody who really couldn't' figure it out, or who doesn't want to.
His mother seems to love him, but she can't relate, gets hurt, and while she won't lash out directly, she does things that will hurt him deeply and for a long time. My mother would do that. I don't think that he's hard to relate to. He seems simple and genuine to me, if only a bit afraid to put himself out there where he could get hurt.
The closest that I've come to making sense of it has been by factoring in the other players. All of the problems that I remember (or in my own case, have heard about) seem pretty soluble, so it might make sense that something else is holding up the show.
If I think about my parents' marriage, they seemed to have a spec-sheet of requirements handed down by their family culture. My mother isn't very religious, but I think that she had to marry a good Christian boy to please her own mother. I know less about my father's requirements, but he needed both my sister and myself to get a college degree to be in good standing in the academic culture that he drew all of his friends from (not that I hate college, but that's not a success-producing way of looking at it). A lot of the people that I can think of have families put outside demands ahead of immediate family.
So am I the only one who thinks that it's as much about culture and medical (mis)treatment as our genes? My parents' generation seems to dislike the idea that actions have consequences, so maybe part of the appeal of a genetic answer is "it's not my fault."
This is still disjointed, since I have to move out today. I'm really sorry.
22 Sep 2012, 2:52 pm
