Right, so I can’t sleep. My thoughts.

There’s a number of passages in this chapter that hit me really hard. Probably one of the hardest for me to read, looking back, because it brought up a lot of very painful thoughts and feelings and memories.

I can’t related to the POC or LGBT* bits, being a cis white man, but every single thing on the “female autism” list on page 53 are things that 100% have applied to me my entire life. I’m immensely stressed out by social situations, and part of the mask is having to pretend not to be, otherwise I’m “weird,” which is one of the traits that other human beings (real people) recognize marks me as one of the human-shaped things that it is 100% okay to be cruel to. (I do appreciate that Link the slinky twink aided yet another person in realizing and embracing his gender transition though, that’s pretty funny tbh) Other than that, the insights about how so much of gender is a role you perform and are judged against that makes me feel a bit better about not being a traditional manly man, what with the crying and prolonged social isolation and such.

The Highly Verbal and Outgoing section, though… I’m loud. I’m a loud motherfucker. People constantly tell me I’m too loud when I’m speaking. When I get excited I raise my voice and I am almost never cognizant of it. I’m also extremely introverted due to all the times I tried being outgoing as a child and just ended up getting my feelings hurt again. I’ve done an exceptionally good job constructing the mask I use now. Everyone at work “loves me” according to my brother, but I don’t really feel it. Most of the time I hear people talking about their social lives and love lives and just feel a dull pain threading its way through my chest and tears trying to well up, because I feel completely clueless when it comes to actually making real friends. I definitely interrupt too often and get “too enthusiastic,” which is why I reflexively don’t usually allow myself to get excited about anything even when I’m alone. It’s damned hard for me to adjust to different social contexts, so I try to keep consistent behavior. I think it’s slowly killing me:

“While they found it easy to make surface-level friends at the bar where they worked, they say that bonding with someone in a deeper way proved very difficult. They second-guess themselves, and are constantly running an algorithm in the back of their mind about how their actions and words will be received by others. They think a lot about how they’re perceived and rarely feel at home in any community.”

I spent, I’m sure, damn near $1000 on group social skills coaching sessions in 2022. I realize now of course that it helped me develop my mask more than actually teach me the skills I need to form, strengthen, and navigate relationships. I feel like this passage is exactly where I’m at right now. Everyone at work likes me. Most customers I interact with like me. Nobody is mean to me or excludes me or anything like that. Yet I am entirely suffused with the feeling that not a single person in the world cares about my feelings, because every time they slip out under the mask people don’t like it. My anxiety and frustration are disturbing to people around me, and I always feel like my happiness is misplaced, and I’m terrified someone will actually see me crying while I’m silently going over paperwork in a free cubicle. Nobody calls me. Nobody texts me. Nobody invites me to do anything. I feel incredibly alone, and never more so than when I’m surrounded by people. Seas of humanity forcing salt into my wounds.

Dr. Price’s bit about going into his apartment building and being overwhelmed by sounds is something I relate to directly as well. I need to use musician’s earplugs at work to filter out a lot of the noise without cutting down on my ability to understand what people are saying. They’re expensive, hard to maintain, and can get uncomfortable after wearing them all day. They also installed LED lighting in the office and the glare makes me hate having eyeballs.

The comorbidity section? Oh, this is my jam, having known I was ADHD since second grade, but frankly there wasn’t much new insight for me here given how obsessively I’ve researched various aspects of ADHD the past few years. The things about people taking me stating facts as an insult, and the shitty psychological advice accompanying it, felt really familiar. And the really bizarre ways that ADHD and Autism interact leave me relating to damn-near contradictory things in this chapter. Dr. Price says his ADHD friends enlist him to find things in messes. I’m messy too, but I have a weird way of remembering exactly where I put shit based on a vague visual impression of what I remember it looking like the last time I saw it. Not just my keys, but the fold of a blanket nearby, maybe a crumpled post-it note of a particular color. And then I’ll randomly tear through piles in my room for my shoes because I absentmindedly tore them off and tossed them on the ground. My ADHD can make me very time-blind, which makes me pay very close attention to the clock most of the time like an anxious compulsion. Without timepieces I really do get lost as far as sensing the passage of time.

“High-functioning” has so much bullshit packed into it. My “functioning” is very erratic. I can maintain my composure very well when I’m not overwhelmed with stress, I can instantly spot mistakes in paperwork that multiple other people overlooked, I have a vivid imagination and am a very good writer, I have a great sense of humor, a good voice, I can sing, etc. I can’t balance my checkbook or keep all of my expenses in mind. I feel completely clueless in subtle social situations and constantly miss subtext. Stress overwhelms me easily and unravels all of my coping mechanisms so it can be rather alarming for people around me to see me suddenly explode or fall apart when I can’t keep it up. I am at once hypersensitive to other people’s emotions when directed at me and completely oblivious when I am not interacting, so mostly I feel confused and out of the loop on other people’s feelings. And as I said, hearing other people talking about their successful and even unsuccessful relationships is physically painful for me at this point. I really tried putting myself out there last year and I have nothing concrete to show for it, just some very painful lessons and the wisdom I’ll gain from them.

There’s a lot of pain for me in this bit of the chapter; the “gifted kid” experience is one that I’m sure plenty of people here have been through. The passage that hits me hardest though is this:

“I also absorbed the idea, common to many ‘gifted’ children, that a person’s intellectual potential belongs to society, not to themselves, and they owe the world greatness to justify their oddness.”

Despite what people even here have told me, being weird is in fact something that makes people dislike you, sometimes very intensely. It’s incredibly alienating and dehumanizing to realize that the reason a person doesn’t want to be my friend is because they don’t like the way I express my feelings, or that I have an enthusiasm for something they think is odd. If it didn’t happen most of the time I could easily write it off as just a fluke, but the fact of the matter is I usually feel very discouraged when I actually open up to someone and try discussing something in earnest, without tailoring it to be something I think they’d like to hear. People tell me I’m smart. They don’t really tell me I’m weird; the way they disregard my opinion and treat my feelings as an inconvenience and unconsciously exclude me from conversation makes that quite clear. But my family tells me I’m wasting my potential. You’re so smart, you’re so smart. If I’m so damn smart why is my life a mess, why am I miserable, and why do I fail at everything important?

My life’s been mostly pain so far, to be honest. I’ve had few friends in my time, no real accomplishments, and trying to make myself feel good about the little gains I’ve made has a tendency to make me feel pathetic when I compare myself to other 37 year old men, who don’t live with their moms and have real jobs and know how to make friends and date people.

I’m glad that other people are getting something out of this book club. I’m glad that there’s some clarity, some comfort, some solidarity to be found here. I feel pretty awful about the world and about my life most of the time, but this place is a welcome respite. I feel like it’s one of the rare places where I can actually express my thoughts in earnest and not feel like I’m completely fucking insane. I don’t know how to find hope for the future, but something makes me keep going. I don’t really know what that is either. I’m starting to think it doesn’t matter. It’s working, for now.