I’ve been under a great deal of stress lately. Work, mostly. But also being misunderstood and let down by people, which is pretty much the story of my life, but has become increasingly hard to take the older I get. Trauma tends to accumulate.
When I confessed to someone that I was not okay, and that I needed to make a big change of some kind, and that I was scared, I didn’t get the support I was hoping for. I was informed that a change might be good as it might help me “gain a better understanding of the people around me.” The tone gave me the impression that they thought I just needed to become rational and everything would be fine. In other words, everyone else has been normal, I’ve brought all of this on myself due to my own wrongheadedness, and I’m just not trying hard enough to be… less me.
Needless to say, that was a bit triggering. As an autistic person, society has been trying to force me to conform to a world that was not built for me all my life, and when I’ve failed to do so, despite trying really, really hard, they’ve perceived it as some sort of willful or lazy character flaw that I needed to snap out of. As someone who is rarely listened to, let alone understood, and given that those facts were at the very core of my frustration and anxiety, being told that it was me who needed to gain a better understanding of the people around me kinda left a mark.
First of all, implying that all the shitty things that have been happening lately are somehow my fault, as if I can control what other people do, is absurd. Second, implying that someone is the common denominator in all of their own problems is a gaslighty thing to do, because of course everyone is the common denominator in all their problems. They’re their problems, after all. But not all problems are brought on by the problem-ee. (If so, believe me, I’d solve fascism right this instant. If only.)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that nothing is my fault, or that I couldn’t stand a bit of growth. I get that. That’s why I’ve been in therapy pretty much my whole adult life. (Believe me, if I get on your nerves now, you’d really have found me obnoxious decades ago. You’re welcome.)
And yes, I’d love to get a better understanding of people. Not just those that are around me, but people in general. Because frankly, you guys are just weird.
I feel like an alien from another planet all the time. I always have. That’s the source of much of my exhaustion: desperately attempting to understand what the hell you’re on about. I’m 60, though, so I’m pretty sure that if I haven’t made any headway by now, odds are that I’m not going to gain much ground moving forward. But as much as I would like to, I can’t give up, because what are the alternatives? I seem to have lost the keys to my spaceship, despite an ever-increasing desire to fly far, far away.
One of the things that throws me off the most is how quickly a person can go from being friendly to being a bully. It’s as if there’s this intersection that no one tells you about until you’re there. I seem to be standing on the corner of Friendly Avenue and Bully Way a lot, and it always takes me by surprise.
What follows are a few examples.
One time I made a nice friend through a friend, and we hung out a few times and I enjoyed her company. She seemed to accept me for who I was, which was a welcome change. I was talking about being an introvert, and preferring company one on one, rather than big, loud, noisy crowds, and we discussed books we had read, and how much we love our dogs, and gardening, and crafts, etc. I talked about having low energy, but how doing stuff like this (we were painting rocks) was fun.
She is much more outgoing and enthusiastic and energetic than I am, which is great for her, but she also liked doing the quieter stuff, so I thought that would be our area of connection. We were discussing ideas about what we could do next time, and we both came up with a lot of good ones.
But then she got all excited, and said, “Oh, I know! Let’s do karaoke!”
I laughed, because I thought that surely she must be joking, given what we had just been talking about. I said, “Thanks, but I’d rather have root canal surgery. How about we do one of the other things?”
But she pressed. “No, you are going to karaoke with me! I am going to break you out of your shell! You’ll see. You’ll love it!”
“Uh, no, I’m not, no, you won’t, and no, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes. You are going to go. Live a little! You have to! Believe me. I’m going to make you go.”
At this point it kind of stopped being funny. I looked at her for a moment and I said, “No. Really. Thank you. But no.”
“I won’t take no for an answer.”
I was thinking that even the most enthusiastic salesman won’t usually make you say no seven times before giving up. This was becoming weird and aggressive, and I didn’t like it. That’s when I channeled my mother. She was a quiet woman, but when you pushed her too far, she could silently shoot lightning bolts out of her eyes, and you got the message that you probably didn’t want to f*ck with her at that moment.
I looked my new friend square in the eye and quietly said, “You’re going to have to take no for an answer. I’m not going to karaoke.”
We continued to paint rocks and chat for about another 40 minutes, but you could feel the tension in the air. It was awkward. I didn’t want to lose her friendship, but I knew that I might have to really guard my boundaries sometimes in order to keep it and stay true to myself at the same time. I could live with that. What I won’t live with is being pressured into doing things I absolutely, positively do not want to do. And I’m sick and tired of people trying to turn me into someone I am not rather than appreciating who I am.
As I left. I gave her a hug and said talk to you later, and we did, but things kind of petered out after that. I would have been happy to do one of the other things we talked about, but under the circumstances, I kind of felt like she should be the one to initiate, because if I did, it would be like asking for karaoke/bullying, and I wasn’t up for that. Also, it seems that in all the friendships I have, I’m the one who has to sustain them, or they fall apart. Just once, I’d like to have a friendship that was equally sustained, you know? So I wouldn’t have to wonder if they really wanted to be my friend in the first place. I’m a little tired of begging for love.
Another time I asked a friend of a friend who had a lot of artistic talent to help me paint a mural. He was nice as pie when our mutual friend was present, but then he left. I should have seen the red flags when the guy told me I had painted the sunset wrong. I was doing a gradient of orange to peach with a few streaks here and there.
He said, “You can’t draw a sunset without clouds.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t.”
“You’ve never seen a sunset without clouds?”
He moved forward, brush in hand, attempting to put some clouds in. I said, “No! I like it the way it is.”
After all, it was my vision, I was the one who would be looking at it, and it was of a view I had seen 1,000 times and loved very much. I had even provided a photograph of it for reference, and there were no clouds in the sky. He reluctantly backed off.
The last thing he was going to do for the day was tape off the mountain edges so he could airbrush them the next day. I said, “please put them lower down.”
He said, “But there’s this 1/3rd, 2/3rds rule in art. So the mountains have to be up here or it will look funny.”
I tried to explain to him that I had always viewed those mountains from another mountain ridge and therefore I always looked down at them from above. He thought that was just silly and he kept on taping. As he did, he chattered on about all his art experience (and he was indeed very talented). I kept trying to say, “But, but… I don’t want them up…” and away he’d tape. (Why must your voice be the loudest to be heard? Personally, I try to respect softer voices. They’re often the ones that need it the most.)
I didn’t want to get aggressive with the guy because I really wanted him to like me. It seemed so important to our mutual friend that he like me, and I wanted to make him happy. Back then I still thought I had some control over that.
But this mural was really important to me, and I wasn’t being heard. I genuinely wanted his help with it, but I wanted what I wanted, and I thought that was understood, and he seemed to be okay with it right until our mutual friend disappeared. Then it became this battle of wills and I felt like if I stood my ground I’d piss him off and disappoint mutual friend, but if I caved in, I’d be looking at a mural that made me unhappy for as long as that wall was in my life.
So I let him tape. And after he left I burst into tears, because it felt like a violation. When our mutual friend came back I explained how bullied I had felt. The last thing I expected was that he wouldn’t believe me. But of course the guy never bullied him, and can do no wrong in his eyes, so therefore he couldn’t possibly have bullied me. No way! I must have been “misunderstanding the people around me.” But I’m not an idiot. I’m capable of identifying how I felt.
In the end, though, the mountains were lowered. Unfortunately, he also stopped helping. But I do like how my mural turned out. Even if I look at it sometimes and remember being bullied, not being heard, and then not being believed. Oh well.
And I can hear the comments now. Sometimes people mean well, they just don’t realize how pushy they’re being. I understand that. But in these cases that I’m describing, they pushed and pushed to the point where it became really weird and uncomfortable. Mere blunders don’t usually persist like that. No, Dear Reader, they were disregarding my feelings entirely in a very aggressive way. They were trying to make me do or accept things I didn’t want to do or accept. That’s a form of bullying.
Ask any autistic person about their tolerance for bullying. I guarantee you that they’ve been bullied their entire lives, deliberately or with the best of misguided intentions, by everyone around them, because they’re just not behaving the way society insists that they behave. We’ve had it up to here. (No. Not there. Twice as high. Even higher. That’s right. There.)
There’s also this little side alley off Bully Way that seems like it leads to Friendly Avenue, but it’s a dead end. Those are the situations where the person bullies you from the very start, and then pretends to be nice to you in front of others even though you both know it’s insincere.
Case in point: I was helping a friend to get ready for her wedding. She was a nervous wreck. The phone rang, and she asked me to get it. I picked it up and said hello.
“Who is this?”
“Uh, you called here. You tell me who you are.”
“No. I won’t. Who is this?”
If you don’t know who is calling you, do you identify yourself? (This was before caller ID.) I sure as heck don’t. “Who are you trying to reach?”
“Who is this, dammit?”
That’s when I told my friend, who was trying to put on her make-up for her wedding, that someone was on the phone who refused to identify themselves. She had to stop what she was doing, come down and pick up.
It turned out to be her best friend. (Yay. My first encounter with her. Are you starting to get the sense that I have bad luck with the friends of friends?) I haven’t crossed paths with little miss poster child for aggressive phoning many times since, but she hates my guts. She’s one of those territorial friends. She doesn’t like anyone entering her friendship space. She puts on a good show, though. Still, her pleasantries are nothing but treacle.
Another encounter in that side alley was with someone whom I hadn’t yet met, who disagreed with something I said on my own Facebook page. Apparently she took exception to my criticism of the police in a post I put up in support of George Floyd. She said as much, which is fine, you do you, but heck, it’s my page, so I defended my opinion, and then she said that I was a “HORRIBLE PERSON!!!!”
I ran into her at some event or other a year or two later, and I mentioned to someone (who knew the backstory) that every time she looked my way, she glared at me. That person, trying to be helpful I suppose, asked her about it, and she denied it. So naturally, I must be wrong.
Of course she denied it! In what universe would she have done otherwise? But that doesn’t mean that I am therefore being irrational because I don’t want to be all warm and fuzzy with someone who, if you believe nothing else, called me a horrible person on a public forum.
But let’s get back to the main intersection, shall we?
About 15 years ago, I was visiting a dear friend, and she took me to lunch and introduced me to another friend. This woman was quite a character. She had done some slightly shady things in the past and did not see a problem with that, but hey, it wasn’t like she was confessing to a felony or anything, and she was quite pleasant and welcoming to me, so, you know, live and let live. Now she was selling some sort of skin care products and I imagined she was quite good at it because she was very gregarious.
You know the type. Never met a stranger. Nothing like me, but there’s nothing wrong with that. We all enjoyed our lunch and lingered for hours at our seaside table. Finally, it was time to go, and since my friend had driven me there and was going home, and my hotel room was 20 minutes in the opposite direction, her friend offered to give me a ride since she was going that way.
It sounded like an elegant solution to me. And for the first 5 minutes or so of the journey, we continued with our pleasant conversation, and talked about how much we loved our mutual friend. Then she launched into the sales pitch. For the next 15 minutes I had to keep saying no to various products, explaining that not only was I not a girly girl who did more than your basic grooming, but also that I was dead broke. No. No. No. No. No.
The last thing she said, as we pulled into the hotel parking lot, was that, if nothing else, I should try this one particular product, because it could get rid of “that thing on your face.” No.
I waived as she drove off, and thought, “Wait. What thing on my face? I have a thing on my face?” I immediately went to my room and headed straight for the nearest mirror.
Huh. Well, I’ll be darned. I do have a thing on my face. It was a moderately darker patch of skin that kind of looked like a thumb print on my left cheek. I tried washing it off, but nope, it was there to stay. It felt slightly different, too.
I know this will sound crazy, but I had never noticed it before. And I was in my late 40’s at that time. Had it always been there? When I got home, I looked through some childhood pictures, and, holy crap! It had always been there.
The difference is that now, I couldn’t unsee it. From that day to almost this one, every single time I looked in the mirror, I saw the thing on my face. It was just sitting there, mocking me.
It kind of pissed me off. It was evident I wasn’t going to buy any of her products. Why couldn’t she have left me in blissful ignorance? Granted, I have no way of knowing if this was a parting shot because I didn’t buy her stuff or if she was truly that tactless, and she had no way of knowing that I could have gone to my grave unaware of the thing on my face. But I still maintain that it was pushy AF.
So, the other day I was seeing a dermatologist for something else, and I asked her if anything could be done about the thing on my face. She said absolutely. She could freeze it off right then and there. There’s no guarantee that my insurance will cover it, but if not, it would cost me $250.00. (If I remembered the woman’s name, I’d send her the bill.) At that moment, it seemed like a small price to pay to evict that thing. (Out, out, damned spot!) But ask me again once the claim passes through insurance.
What the doctor failed to mention until afterward was that now I’d have to walk around with a much, much darker spot on my cheek for about a month. She swears that once it’s fully healed, though, I won’t even know it had ever been there. I didn’t bother to tell her that for most of the time it had been there I already hadn’t known it was there. Until I did. But that’s neither here nor there.
But I’ve learned something interesting through this whole process. People must not have noticed the thing on my face, or they must have gotten used to it quickly, because there’s a marked difference in reaction to its much darker absence now. People don’t say anything, of course. This is, after all, the Pacific Northwest, where no one would even mention you were on fire unless you brought it up yourself. But they sure do stare. They’re looking at my healing anti-spot the way men used to look at my perky chest when I was 19. (“Hello! I’m UP HERE.)
While looking forward to my spot-free existence, I have decided that if I ever find myself at that weird intersection of friendliness and bullying again, I’ll close my eyes for a second, and imagine myself standing on that corner, looking over at a karaoke bar called “That Thing on Your Face”, where no sunsets are allowed unless they have clouds, where no one identifies themselves on the phone, and where absolutely nothing I feel is deemed valid (as if validation were required).
Then I’ll say to myself, “Why the f*ck would anyone want to stick around here?” and I’ll walk away, down Friendly Avenue, in search of Acceptance Park. There, I’ll make myself at home in the Library of Peace and Quiet until I run out of books.
Because, I’ll say it again: You guys are just weird.
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