Patterns

There are some patterns that most autistic people share. 

Extreme focus on a subject of interest (my playing a certain game for an entire day, or reading a book in one long session, fixing an object that is broken until complete, ignoring sleep and food.) 

A level of detachment from emotional matters, though the degree varies. I still possess empathy and emotions, they are just very VERY subdued by comparison to normal folks. Many people have remarked that i seem "Robotic." and at times that is probably true. I Seek to solve problems in a pragmatic, rational, and unemotional way so, yes it is, clinical or perhaps robotic. 

Traits like this, when you lay them out line by line, don't seem on paper as if they would be so crippling, so alienating and limiting, but in the real world even little differences matter. Even the little variations get you noticed. The guy with the mole on his lip will always be that to some people, forever and ever. That will color their interactions, perhaps it's subtle affect will radically alter his ability to progress upward in his chosen career path. 

It could be that simple, and my condition is quite a bit more pervasive then one little physical deformity.

It would be if not perfect, at least ideal, if difference was praised more in common encounters, less in tiny off shoot artist communes. If my brain could be recognized as a different operating system, a program designed for different tasks, and not uniformly compared to the existing archetypes and found lacking. 

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

It is attributed to to Albert Einstein but a disputed quote. The message should still resonate loud and clear. 

Were so many PEOPLE not standing in front of so many doors, i could open them all with my mind. 

But there is no ruthlessness in me. No desire to hurt or reduce for malice. I can only make a cold logical presentation of why you should, 

But you are not obligated to ever, 

Move.

Day in the life, uh.

Living with me, or knowing me closely, is not unlike living with any other disabled person. 

I may not require the direct sort of care some on the spectrum do, but what i require takes resources just the same, and can foster frustration in those that would attempt to give it, no matter how well intentioned. 



Every single day requires a concerted effort on my part to feel normal, to feel, if not happy, something approaching it. 

It requires hours of concentration just to achieve something akin to not feeling entirely destroyed and hollowed out, each and every day.

If that sounds exhausting to endure, that's because it is. I assure you.  

It's no picnic to be around either. People take their normal friends and relationships for granted often, and it's not until that normality is juxtaposed against some disparity struggle that the value is crystallized. So who in there right mind has the metaphorical "Time" for that?  We are all so deeply individualistic, that i can't begin to imagine this idealized person because it's absurdity in the concept phase alone of consideration stops me abruptly, as if walking face first into a wall. 

Sure. Sympathetic right?  That happens. It's close to pity, often crosses over, but it's not your burden to bear and i respect that. I never wanted pity, and i'm past needing sympathy. Parity is all i strive for. And an "X" in the win column once in a while, to go beside my collection of check marks on spent calendar pages, gathering dust in yellowing boxes in my mind. 

I used to aim higher, but one to many trips down this flight of stairs from extending my hand enough to skew my balance has made me coarse and cynical, even if i'm still not especially cautious.  There was never a body capable enough nor willing enough to help drag me out of myself past my limitations,  it's just too much hard labor, too much work, and no one can be bothered.  

I do what i can with my skillset, but i and not the sort of brain, the sort of man, that can do everything myself.  I wish i was. I wanted to be. I can write the words and stack them up together, but i can't turn them into a book, into a working relationship, into a job.  I can sing the songs well, practice of years has lead to mastery, but i can't market myself for shit, so only the neighbors and my apartment know.  I can pack my own bags damnit, but the gatekeepers out there are all normal, all powerful, all excluding, and my own personal rat race for years has been trying to sneak in the back way. 

Nothing's changing beyond my age, and the depth of entropy, the intensity of my gravity. At the end of the day the world still operates in a way that i cannot penetrate. I am the powder, i am the lead, I am the hammer and the tensed spring, but absence the casing i am,

wasted. 

So i tell my story walking, late at night to people who keep on talking, while i'm out there being awkward, wishing that just this once i would fall forward. 
 

Problem solving via LASER GONIOMETER

My writing tends to be organic, and comes it waves. My feelings, when i can grasp them are fleeting and too difficult to fully express in plain language.  I am, as we all are, trying to decipher the ineffable after all.  I never expected it to be easy.

I have years of writing under my belt, and that leaves me with endless pages filled with subverted angst and a paper trail of my efforts to try to understand the self, the neurotypical world. and my place in it.  The following is a journal entry about the feeling, the struggle, in a little bite size piece.  No. It never gets any easier. 

I've read a lot. Not in terms of easy to name drop recognizably great works, but of information in general.

Data. facts. Figures. Concepts. Theories. Hypothesis. Inquires. Conflicts. Debates. Fallacies. Phallus-es,  and all the varying methodologies and dogma's therein. 

And my head hurts. Sure. All of that information is straining inside this shell, pushing against an impermeable membrane, threatening to crack the casing and the matter inside pulsates and throbs.   I still always find myself going back for more.

More knowledge. More information. More truths and immutable facts about reality. I guess my brain decided a long time ago how i was to operate in this world, and i was absent that day.  MORE.  If i fill up the space, perhaps i will be able to construct a uniform understanding of all the hypocrisies, aspirations, objectives, inclinations and inspirations.

Nothing seems to satisfy/sedate/satiate this urge to know it all.  I think of it in my head, as a tremendous flat landscape, the floor clear acrylic with bits of information like a massive puzzle hidden under endless piles of earth.   I wander this endless land, with nothing but a broom and my tenacious obsession, uncovering numbers, letters, images and clues. Forever methodically sweeping away the dirt that obscures my understanding. The final picture.

I'm not happy with speculation.  It's fun to attempt, to imagine,  to employ creative problem solving to attempt to reason out the world, but without all the pieces, the thing never coalesces.  It is pressure, and carbon, and time, but never, a diamond.

I want to understand why we hate ourselves. Why we hurt others. Why most of what we say as a species, are lies. Why we belief in fairy tales, why we defer to our lizard brains so often. What consciousness is and how more people can obtain it. What is the self and can those born without awareness of it EVER have it revealed to them?

I want to chew you up and pulverize everything that you are. Crunch your bones and suck out all the marrow.  Lick the blood of your thoughts and use all that matter to feed strength to my exhausted arms. To keep sweeping. Keep swinging. Keep digging. Keep holding my brains in my head with my hands, and crawling ever closing to the black abyss of truth.

Maybe there, i can finally learn, why humans are the way they are. 

Digging in the dirt.

This is from a piece i wrote several months ago, and while reading back over it, i recognized it's placement made far more sense here, then in my general purpose journal.  It is written in a more informal style, without an audience in mind, providing a more intimate window into what it might sound like if you could hear someone talking to themselves, trying to convince themselves of something, or talk themselves out of something else.

More headlines, more information but nothing stirring. So much pap, so little substance.

It occurred to me today, another piece of the self awareness puzzle,  my general interest in shopping malls.  I've always tried to put it into words, and have managed to understand a bit, this strange effect of being around people but completely invisible amongst them. It has always provided an odd comfort, as if i can draw energy from them via proximity, but do so in stealth, without the burdensome interactions that invariably end with me alienating everyone i meet. There seems to be another factor as well however.  People on the spectrum are being studied intensely right now, trying to understand autism via brain maps is what i'm most interested in personally.  As i understand it, and as i often stated in my life and writing long before i had a diagnosis, i tended to describe myself as  "An alien that learned human speech" (temple grandin coined the phrase "I was like an anthropologist on mars.") Similar yes?  I also made multiple references to feeling as if i had "crosses wires"  and the only way i could envision handling my life was an act of controlled demolition. Going in and tearing out everything, laying it back down in the way i saw fit would be the only way i could see surviving in a life and body that made me intensely depressed, lonely and nearly suicidal on several occasions.    Turns out, as it's been said by some researchers in the field one of the oddities of Asperger's, is that  "If you think you have it, you probably do." People on the spectrum have been observed as "thinking in pictures." Which is something i'd said of myself before too. I specifically remember telling brady among a few others this when i was a teenager, when trying to describe how i write.  I think that other dimension that i enjoy so much about the biggest and most robust shopping malls is for that reason, it's an added dimension of stimulation.   I can derive great pleasure from looking at things in that context. From studying people, and exploring this urban museum.   Picking things up in stores, reading labels and figuring out what things are made of. Where the materials came from, how it was constructed, how it is used or the science behind an item's creation.  I never feel strongly compelled to purchase or acquire, and often just wander, looking at everything in every store, looking for the story, enjoying the stimulation far more then the acquisition of of the thing.  I keep learning. and by doing so, i keep myself interested in a world that feels so small to me.  So small as each increasing bit of knowledge explodes the earth, and exposes it's secrets, condenses it's truth.  

How odd. An illness that bestows some kind of inexplicable self awareness?  What the hell is that? How can that really be possible, be a "thing" that occurs in the natural world?  The mystical third eye has become manifest? A unique expression of the human genome.  That's how i try to think of myself now, trying to gradually lighten the weights in my backpack, admittedly i put them there myself. I could blame the eyes, the people, the weakness projected onto me, but ultimately i decided the hurt i felt was a defect in my manufacturing, and i needed to rectify this problem immediately. So, i did literally put lifting weights in my pack on my walks to school and college. I braced myself and focused my mind, putting up layers of iron, nickel, aluminum, like paint on a plywood, gradually hardening, thickening, growing more and more dense until i could carry their weaknesses.  Until my strength was overwhelming any attempts to put me down or injure me with words or fists.   I took what i felt was this huge flaw that i was in my mind, personally responsible for, and buried it under my uncontrollably perseverate behavior.  I didn't think of it as perseveration then, i thought if it as the Nietzchian WILL, as integrity, and the honor and stoutness of the samurai code was to be integrated into my sloppy, weak, undisciplined life.

Turns out it was just one of my of the side effects of asperger's syndrome. An uncompromising nature, a drive to DO what i say i will do and  BE as i say i am.  I still carry that forward to this day, i have no other choice, but knowing now, i wouldn't change that about myself anyhow.  I  stand head and shoulders above the arrows and insults of a vicious unhappy world. I may be unhappy too,  but i am strong and honest, and i will NOT reduce myself to be a part of a society that is cruel, entitled, egocentric,  and functionally blind.  I have not been able to blind that third eye even with the most self abusive and rigorous attempts in the past, and i'm through with trying.  I was hard and unswerving then, i did NOT hesitate, and i will embrace that self once more with knowing arms, wrapping up that phantom and pulling it back into my self where in belongs.

You will rise up to my level, i will not waste anymore of myself trying to reduce myself to yours.

I do not know if one can nourish a soul enough, to cultivate this kind of awareness in the self. I do not know if i am special, so special, that i cannot ever be a part of this world, but i was born with this. Gift, or, curse, it is equally both, and i cannot relate to what it must be like to have that barely-functional vision, two eyes that are just good enough.     Can self awareness be hammered into the soul, a spike that splits the brain stem, separates the many parts and forces new tissue to grow, new electric wires to sprout like saproling's stitching the now open mind back together?

I can't waste myself on that either. I tried, with so many people. I joked to myself, or tried to tell myself i was joking when i said "there are no friends for me.  I have to build one from scratch."  And god did i try.  But it was not to be.

One can not lie as a Man in a field of cows and expect to wake up in a field of Man.

I understand that now.  Part of me will always pull myself in that direction, for me, i can't characterize it in my head in any other way then "helping."  But help is relative i guess.   The Hagakure says:

"Offer advice, like a glass of water, to a man dying of thirst. "

but i had never been able to understand when people are lying to me all that well, and so much of what a person says to everyone, everywhere, everyday, is a lie.    When a person complaints at length about a specific topic, "I'm fat. I'm boring, i'm unhappy, i'm weak-willed, i shop to much."  Whatever it may be, i don't understand that they are in fact just talking to fill space, to make noise, to facilitate the passing of time.   It is illogical to me that when i would offer solutions to these problems, even with considerable education, intellect and tact, that i would draw such ire, such a fiery counterattack in response.

"At what point did we start fighting?" I would wonder to myself. I made mental notes, and noted this occurrence and how often it seems to repeat it's course, but i was powerless to change the way it played out. I just could not understand patently illogical behaviors and mannerisms, and to this day, i still can't.

So i am trying to not do that, to divest myself from caring about people, without becoming completely cold. I already sway between emotionally detached and unmitigated intensity when i am engaged on the topic that interests me, such is the nature of the syndrome. No stomach for small talk, no mind for unimportant ritual and pleasantries.  I never compliment someone to garner favor, i only do so if i really believe what i'm saying with complete conviction.   I'm not certain this is a hurdle i can overcome, another gate in my brain physically cut, a flopping wire removed from the circuit that connects everything else. Best to accept that i can't do everything perfectly, certainly not with the dexterity or agility of a neurotypical brain wired for social interaction.

Don't break your back again, loading the backpack up with weights or people, that didn't want your help to begin with.  Let them fall away and fade into the rear view, as so very many have in my life, and as more will surely follow.   It's a lonely life, a dedicated samurai, or cowboy, or enlightened mind in a world of indifference so sharp that to look at it will draw blood.

So don't blame them, but don't capitulate to them either  Don't let them BLAME YOU for their weaknesses that increase in weight the closer they stand to you, your gravity, one of the side effects of that metaphorical third eye, ebbs ever outwards, pumping out an energy that makes rain fall around you like gunfire.  That snaps the skinny bones and unguarded hearts of those that would approach carelessly.  Don't unsheathe your sword against anything but a worthy foe. Let your presence alone rattle the fault lines and break into pieces those who would stab you in the back.

There will always be envy. People who hate the birds for flaunting their ability to fly.   But birds don't concern themselves with those mournful creatures stuck down on the ground.  Neither disdain nor pride is conjured for the bird, they just live in a different world.