I forgot that another thing that can happen, is a question that seems innocent to the asker, can legitimately be seen as not so innocent to the person being asked.
For example, I've at times encountered a form of (genuine) harassment where people who are up to no good will ask me questions about my life, that are actually attempts to get me to reveal more and more private information. The routine goes something like:
They ask me a question in a hostile manner. (By hostile I mean, they are prepared not to believe my response, no matter what, but they want to get my response.)
I answer the question in a literal manner.
They ask two or three more hostile (see previous definition) questions for every answer I give.
I answer those in a literal manner.
They continue the exact same process, which becomes recursive. Each layer of questions is asked in a manner that calls my previous answer into doubt, no matter how carefully I try to be accurate in my answer. Some of the questions are also asked in a manner that, in addition to being hostile in the ways described, is also hostile as in just plain nasty in the tone.
After several layers of this process, there are simply too many questions for me to answer completely. I know that I will get called on an incomplete answer (and they will respond in a manner that acts as if I'm deliberately hiding something -- and if ever I answer the same question in two incomplete ways that touch on two different aspects of the answer, they'll accuse me of being inconsistent). I know that I have no time or energy for the complexity required to fully answer the questions. I also often don't even have the ability. But in this scenario, "unable" will always be described as "unwilling" (and deceptive, no less, because there's no way a person could truly be unable to answer a question). And if I answer only some of them, I'll be accused of selective answering and laughed at and they won't even acknowledge my answers except to grow several more questions, including "why did you answer these and not others?"
Additionally, every layer of questions ends up designed to get me to reveal something more and more private about my life. Private as in, most people would not answer the question. However, the people asking this sort of question will often say things like "Real autistic people have no sense of privacy" to attempt to goad me into answering questions that nobody should have to answer.
Then if i do give answers, they will often use these answers to attempt to pry into my private life in various other ways. (Including, but not limited to, attempting to find and interrogate my family about these things. Not joking, it's happened. My family, too, are presented with a catch-22, where if they refuse to answer it's because we're hiding something, but if they do seem to back me up, it's because they're lying to cover for me.)
Anyway, I've been informed by people who ought to know, that this is a technique for getting private information out of me and I should not play the game.
Of course what happens then, is even when the person would obviously go down the course I described above, and has before, if I refuse to answer from the outset, they'll say 'innocently', "But it was just a simple question, why would someone not want to answer such an innocent question?" (In the same tone as school bullies will say similar things if cornered.) Or "Guess I hit a nerve, what innocent person would avoid answering this?" (Of course, sometimes "hitting a nerve" means that a person has been poked there too many times, not that a person is inherently sensitive there because they're hiding something or doing something wrong.)
Also, sometimes I will answer such people to the best of my ability, only to have every piece of my answer picked over and treated with total contempt and derision, or deliberately misinterpreted or pulled out of context in ways that make me sound like a horrible person.
And since I'm the self-doubting type in general, I've run the above past a number of people I trust, and all of them say not to answer is the best policy, some even informed me of the fact (which I didn't know) that the whole thing was designed to get private information out of me, not just to bully and mock and so forth in more straightforward ways. So I am on pretty good authority that I'm not being paranoid there.
Anyway, so of course I won't want to answer these questions from hostile people. But at the same time, if someone really does innocently ask one of the questions that normally start off this process, I might be really unwilling to answer it. And this won't make sense to them, because they haven't seen the whole process I've been subjected to in other contexts. It's not that I believe such people are actually attempting to harm me the way the bullies I describe above are, but that I have become so sensitized to it, and the questions remind me of that whole psychological-bullying process I outlined above, that I just can't bring myself to answer. And of course if I don't know the person well enough, I might have no way of knowing whether they are going to start the above-mentioned process with me or not.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
28 Jul 2008, 8:56 am
Just kidding. Yeah. It bugs me a little too.
