As Large as Alone

 

It's a mistake to think I have Aspergers. Closer to the truth: Aspergers has me. On a good day I like to think I call the shots in my life, but the reality is different. In one way or another Aspergers runs the game. It always did.

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. 

Things always look slightly odd to me, and Anais Nin was probably on the money.

There are some things I am pretty good at. Not many, but some, at least. Mostly they are useless things, like crosswords, having a terrible memory that can't forget anything, being able to hear more than most people think possible, Latin, music, some amusing maths. Being able to figure out how things work.

How things work. I never could figure out how people work.

Or rather, I don't have a sense of how people work, think, feel. Their motivations are inexplicable to me, so I tend to project onto them my own motivations, and I am not always sure even what they are. A lot of effort goes into trying to figure out what is going on. I can often get there in the end, but it is an exhausting mental effort to analyse even the most trivial situations to reach some kind of understanding.

Larkin, considering the experience of being dead, talks of "nothing to love or link with". For many with Aspergers, that is the experience of being alive. It is a lonely condition, and one is conscious of being always essentially alone, even in a crowd of people.

Aspergers people tend not to have circles of friends, but rather the dot of a friend. (Singular).

We seem to have difficulty with linking, I mean really linking. We might KNOW that we are loved, but we tend not to be able to FEEL it. When I was a kid, a constant question in the house was "Are you friends ?"  Noone was sure. It's a question I still ask at 63, and will keep on asking, just to feel temporarily surer. It is peculiar question, and insane to anyone with normal circuitry. But checking that out has been as compulsive as hitching up my trousers to check that I haven't gained a stone since breakfast.

As for loving and linking, well, for Aspergers people, those are hard to feel. The intellectual constructs seem to make sense, but feeling them is different. Aspergers gives you a burning need to come home, but you always find yourself locked out. It is hard to describe this exactly, but it is somehow being quite unable to feel what people express towards you. You know something is there, but it as if you are trying to feel a texture without any nerve endings in your fingers. You know it is rough, silky, warm, but simply do not have the apparatus to feel that. Love is as large as alone*.

And, of course, without the resilience that comes from feeling loved, self-esteem is at best brittle and uncertain, and small setbacks and large can be devastating, undermining. There is a strong chance that this seems unfathomable to you, reading this. Aspergers separates us with a chasm of mutual emotional incomprehension. (And there is an uncomfortable joke there, too, in the interminable tense symbiosis of thought and feeling.)

Someone said to me recently that Aspergers was like seeing life from behind a glass screen. It made me think a lot. To me it feels more like trying to watch a movie through a keyhole while wearing slightly inefficient earplugs. You know that something is happening beyond the keyhole, but no end of scrabbling about is going to get you through that door. When you understand a few frames of plot you are flushed with a sense of triumph.

Kurt Vonnegut created an alien from the imaginary planet of Tralfamadore. He had an important message to deliver to earth, but his only means of communication was through a combination of tap-dancing and farting. His message was lost in translation (actually before translation) and he was clubbed to death. There is something of Aspergers tucked up in that image.

Yes, Anias Nin was right.

If you want to now how Aspergers feels, look closely at the next heron you see. They look how we feel.

* A simply brilliant simile from maggie and milly and molly and may by e e cummings