*sigh*

I feel mildly attracted to people, to the point where I’m happy to look appreciatively at them, and want to be around them, but I don’t really want to do anything, more than that. I get crushes, sometimes, but they’re usually not really sexual, at all.

Part of my confusion had come from the fact that I had a misunderstanding about exactly what asexuality is: I’d assumed it was someone who had absolutely no desire or attraction whatsoever, but it turns out that like any orientation, there are shades of grey. The AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) Overview and General FAQ pages are helpful in clarifying this, but what I found most enlightening was a short, educational, entertaining and accessible video on youtube about the kinds of asexuality there are – that is the different ways in which asexuality presents itself. And one of those – that’s me. Mild attraction to people, no desire to actually do anything with them, really, and a sort of general, low-level sexual desire that doesn’t really attach to anything. Romantic non-sexual interest. That’s me.

I’d always sort of hoped, that it was something I could grow into, the whole sex thing – like, eventually I would want it, like my development was slowed or something. I guess… I didn’t really want to face the idea that this was antoher area where I’m weird, that I can’t tick the ‘normal, healthy relationship‘ box on the list of things people are supposed to have and to be. I kept telling myself that maybe I’d just develop it late, you know? But at this point, I don’t think that sex is something I’m ever going to want – I’m 24 years old this year, so if sex were something I actually wanted, at all, I think there would have been a sign.

It’s sort of a relief to finally admit that I don’t really want that, and that a sexual relationship is not  a thing I could ever, realistically, want. I sort of had this anxiety attached to the whole face that I didn’t have that yet, and so admitting to myself that maybe this is just what I am, and I don’t have to freak out about it, is a relief.

It does make me kind of sad, because the relationship thing would have been nice, but deep down it’s not something I ever felt I could achieve – a normal relationship, I mean. Sex. All that. It’s something I’ve always thought about, from time to time, like my lack of it meant I was failing at being a human being, like a kind of secret shame, but not something I really wanted in my day-to-day life. There, I’m pretty comfortable as I am.

I guess part of it is that for most people, the use of the word ‘asexual’ has so many negative connotations – like you’re less than human somehow, or damaged, or incapable of emotion or human relationships on any level. Whereas, I do get crushes and romantic feelings, I just don’t want to do anything about them.  Except, you know, hang around being friendly and helpful, and trying to be a part of someone’s life that they value.

For me, the whole sex thing – okay, this is a terrible analogy, but bear with me, it’s sort of like when you do dissection in high school, alright? Like, you feel interested in the idea and think it could be kind of cool, maybe, but you equally suspect that it could be turn out to be gross and unpleasant. That’s sort of how I feel. Like maybe, if it happened to me, I might find it pleasurable, but I could equally be the recoiling ‘hell no!’ person.

I guess I feel happier, admitting all this – it’s just that I feel like I’m missing out on something, something important, like how in high school I always used to feel suddenly awkward and lacking and kind of ashamed and worried whenever someone asked me about my (non-existent) dating life or interest in boys, or talked about theirs. Like it was something I should have, or be. I can remember sitting with the other girls at lunch, kind of wide-eyed and a little bemused (and sometimes, faintly disturbed) as they cheerfully chatted about cute guys and what they liked doing with their boyfriends, and how sometimes I would think that these things were really weird.

All the other girls were into cute boys (except for the girls into girls, of course, but they usually nodded along with the boy-talk and didn’t proffer their own interests – most didn’t come out until after we’d all graduated) on some level: and there I was, mostly unbothered by all of that aspect of hormonal development, sailing through without it.

Whenever I said I wasn’t really interested in dating or boys, they’d exchange these concerned glances, like they liked me as a person, but they thought I was some kind of freak. And when I went to the senior formal, and said I’d dated (extremely briefly, as it happens, but hey) the guy I’d brougth as my date? They all sort of relaxed and exchanged looks like suddenly I made sense to them and it was reassuring. It wasn’t until I actually began thinking about all of this, that I realised how much my feelings of wrongness and awkwardness (from that time, in response to their behaviour) had stuck with me, even now. They were kind enough to me – no one ever said anything, or was nasty – but I could feel the difference. Between me and them, I mean.

Do you know what I’d honestly, really like? A really close, intimate friendship, like I had with my best friend in primary school (I KNOW THIS IS LAME, I CAN’T HELP THAT IT IS THE TRUTH), only without the dangerously intense vibe and massive level of fail, and with someone who liked me back the same way. Where we could be each others worlds, and deal with each other all the time, but live our own lives and never bring sex or anything into it. That’s what I’d like. It’s what I’ve always wanted. One person who is everything to me, and to whom I am everything

Maybe someday I’ll meet someone I’m attracted to enough, and like enough, to consider having some kind of sex life with, but for now, I guess I’m okay.

I don’t have much experience with any kind of sexual behaviour or relationships at all.  I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve felt strongly attracted to. I’ve been in love once, I think, a long time ago right near the beginning of puberty, and there wasn’t really a sexual element to that at all. I was in one relationship, years ago, that was slow-moving and confused, and never went past kissing, and I eventually worked out that I wasn’t attracted to my boyfriend and we broke up.

The thing is, when I was thirteen I went onto an antidepressant that completely suppressed libido as a side-effect, and it wasn’t until I was seventeen and a half, when I changed medications, that I experienced any kind of desire at all. I got nervy and fluttery around people sometimes, before that, and I occasionally got a crush on someone, but I wasn’t interested that way. I can remember being 17 and watching the 2005 series of Doctor Who, and thinking that the Doctor and Rose had what was my idea of a perfect relationship – they were clearly in love with each other, and their worlds revolved around each other, but the most they ever did was hold hands.

So, after going all through high school without that kind of interest, it was kind of a shock to suddenly have any kind of sexuality at all, especially when it became apparent that it wasn’t limited to the opposite sex. I noticed girls’ cleavage and legs, and sometimes noticed men I found good-looking. It took adjusting to.

I was very confused. I dated a boy for a while, but neither of us had any experience, and it was very awkward and slow-moving. We kissed a bit, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed, and I eventually came to the conclusion that I wasn’t attracted to him at all. To date, this remains my only experience of kissing.

It was very rarely I felt anything at all strong for anyone, though. Five years ago I got a crush on a girl I worked with, and was strongly attracted to her (for me, at least) but as far as I know the desire didn’t really extend to actual sex – although both my emotions and my awareness of physical sensation tend to be scrambled and difficult for me to identify, because of my Asperger Syndrome – being burnt, for example, by something hot, is something I often notice sort of distantly, or don’t notice at all – so I suppose it’s possible that I did feel sexual desire, but it got lost somewhere. 

I still get crushes on people, but when I do, what I want to do is be their friend, and hang around them, and be a part of their lives that they consider valuable. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to kiss them, out of curiosity, but it’s not overwhelming or anything.

For half the year I don’t feel any desire at all, or not much, not until the weather gets to at least 25 degrees celsius, and when I do, it’s not – it’s not especially strong. It’s there, on a low level, with stronger desire for a few days each month, but it usually pales next to anything else more interesting. I do find people attractive, but it’s almost an aesthetic appreciation at times. I think, anyway - I’m often confused about how I’m feeling, especially physically. I fantasise sometimes, and read novels with sex scenes in them, but would that translate to actual interest if I were in a real-life sexual situation? Considering my aversion to touch, I really don’t know.

All I really know is that I’m 23 years old, I experience inconsistent desire, and it’s always been inconsistent, am attracted to men and women but am more likely to crush on women, can feel crushes without any real desire – more an appreciation of a person’s attractiveness – only feel strong desire maybe half a dozen times a year, and have never had enough experience with any kind of sexual behaviour to accurately gauge what my sexual preferences really are. I can’t help thinking, though, that if I really wanted it – if I was particularly interested – that I would have found a way to have it by now. A lot of the time desire is more of a distraction than anything else, and I don’t really understand the desire in other people to shag all the time. I feel wistful when I think about relationships, and I do think it would be nice to kiss people and have sex, if only to find out how I feel. What I do feel of desire tends to be more a free-floating frustration and want that’s not attached to anyone or anything in particular. It’s just there.

Of course, it could be that if I had an actual person, actually touching me, then I would find the whole thing more fulfilling. I’d like to have the chance to find out. But honestly? Not much chance of that. I’m socially awkward, and I know I don’t send out the right signals for any kind of receptivity, and when other people express interest, I usually don’t have any interest in them. And I wouldn’t have sex, even just as an experiment, with someone I didn’t know well and trust, nor with anyone who would have expectations afterwards – because what if it turned out I didn’t like it, or it was one of those things my body likes but I’m not properly connected to?

I guess, when you come down to it, I’m sexually frustrated, a bit, but I don’t feel any kind of overwhelming need to have sex or anything, and I don’t know whether I would actually want it with another person, or if I just have a kind of general desire that’s more comfortable for me than sex would be.

I just wish I knew for certain, about attraction and sexuality and all that, instead of having this vague jumbled-up confusion of questions and curiosity about myself. But I think certainty would only come with sexual experience, and I’m not really in any position to get that.

Sorry for this post. It just helps, sometimes, to put down all my thoughts and put them out there, if something’s bothering me or confusing me. It clarifies the issue for me. I know a lot of other Asperger people have similar confusion, but, yeah. I don’t suppose anyone else out there has been in the same boat and can offer me advice?

Follow up post: Asexuality

When I was eleven or twelve, I was kind of a little in love with my best friend.

Not that I had any idea, of course; I was always really dense about people, and my view of the world was distressingly heteronormative.

So, yeah, I was kind of a bit in love with my best friend, which makes how terrible I was even worse, but I’ll get to that.

Anyway. Like I said, I was always dense when it came to people, and lived totally in the heteronormative zone, so I never had the faintest clue about my feelings until a long time later – not until after I’d graduated school, when I started to realise that no, actually, I was not entirely straight, I liked both sexes (like I said, dense when it comes to people). But with her… I don’t know. We first met when I was not quite four years old, and I don’t remember that, but I do remember being four years old, and the two of us, even then, being best friends and just clicking, being totally on the same wavelength. We were both the sort of people who lead, socially; it didn’t bother us to be the first person to do something, or to do it on our own, but we always  had each other so that was never an issue anyway. If there was a bad idea, we talked the other into it; if there was a good idea, we both plunged into it headfirst, backing each other up like whoah.

I was a weird kid who had trouble with empathy – like, it was there, if you could reach it, but I had trouble with the most basic thing, identifying other people’s feelings with my corresponding feelings. I had this idea that if other people’s feelings were like mine, then I would feel them, like I could feel my own, which was a nice idea but not how things work, and probably stemmed from a slightly confused theory of mind – but even then, when I had trouble connecting with anybody because they were all like aliens to me, I just latched onto her like a kindred spirit in a hostile world. Everyone else was incomprehensible and hostile to me, or so it seemed to me, but she always had my back.

I’ve never been much of a jealous person – possessive yes, about some things, but jealous, no – but I was fanatically jealous about her. When I was seven she used to spend time hanging around with a kid a year below us at school, sometimes, and I hated that kid. Most people my friend didn’t click with, like she did me, but this girl? They were definitely on the same wavelength. I got so jealous that in the end my friend drifted apart from the other girl – which is kind of ironic, because if I’d been more willing to compromise then maybe I could have ended up friends with both of them, but I was so worried about losing my friend to this other girl that unreasoning dislike was all I felt towards someone whom I otherwise probably would have gotten along quite well with. Well, she wasn’t particularly welcoming to me, either, but maybe something could have been worked out anyway. But like all what-ifs, I’ll never know.

All through primary school, we were BFFs. Like, connected at the hip. I had a tendency to circle in around anyone who cut into the time she spent with me, like I was a shark, but she never seemed to mind; most of the other girls she wasn’t that close to anyway. Like, we always knew where each other’s head was, whereas with other people we had to explain things.

She was the only real friend I had, but I didn’t want anyone else; she was kind of my entire world, really. That’s probably what a big part of the problem was.

At the beginning of the year in which I turned eleven, my cat died, which is where the trouble starts. Like I said, I had trouble connecting with people, and I was unfortunate enough to go to school with people who were particularly hard to connect with anyway. Most of the boys were self-entitled, domineering, vicious little thugs; we had at least two sociopaths in my class, I’n not kidding. One of them I once watched shred an insect, limb by limb, without the slightest expression, watching unblinking as it thrashed and made distressed squeaky sounds. Another of them was kicked out of school several years later for relentless bullying; he too was into tormenting animals, although not to the same degree as Expressionless Psychopath.

And the girls – well, there were only nine of us, and the others were all dominated by a manipulative, malicious Queen Bee who used to set everyone against each other for her own amusement and had rigid, unspoken rules about behaviour, dress, and so on; I know of at least three people who changed schools because of her devastating influence. She always had it in for me, because I was oblivious and obstinate to her attempts at social control. As for the other girls – well, away from Queen Bee they could be nice, but they were all into clothes and hair and boys and makeup and romance novels and shit, and that wasn’t me. Not even a little.

So, I was kind of ostracised, except for my best friend, so my cat was an important person in my life, as comical as that sounds. I understood my cat, my cat understood me, and my cat was always there for me when I was upset, and always willing to interact with me. That goes a long way, when you’re as socially isolated as I was. When my cat died, I went into a sort of mad grief, and the only positive kind of interaction I had was with my best friend – my sister was difficult and I was just entering that age where I was always fighting with my parents, and anyway, parental relationships at that age are no substitute for relationships with your peers.

I went back to school, expecting that even though my cat was gone, I would at least have my best friend to support me. It was the only thing that helped me hold on.

The thing is, when girls hit puberty, their relationships change, and over the long summer holidays, my best friend had well and truly entered that phase. She’d hit a developmental spurt, in between the beginning of December and the beginning of January (and of course, I hadn’t, so that didn’t help either), and she’d been re-evaluating our friendship. She’d realised, I guess, that if she was friends with me she was never going to be close friends with anyone else – I was needy and jealous and demanding and obtuse, and my total social ineptitude alienated everybody I came into contact with.

This, I’m all extrapolating. The only thing I actually know is that when I came back from holidays, wanting desperately to die from loneliness, she had at some point made the decision that she no longer wanted to be friends.

I didn’t really know what was going on at first: she was cooler with me, and not as enthused about things, and was spending a lot more time with the other girls than usual. But at the end of her month was her birthday party, and she used that to send an inescabably clear message to me. Even someone as obtuse as I was couldn’t fail to get the gist of it.

She invited me to her party, of course. We were known to all to be best friends, and if she’d just not invited me it would have involved me with a puzzled and hurt expression wanting to know why I wasn’t invited, and all of the other girls wanting to know too, and possibly explaining to me in the most painful way possible. What she wanted was a more gradual, subtle separation; quite possibly, I will readily admit, to spare me the pain of outright rejection as much as anything else, because she was usually never cruel – I think she was only cruel to me because I don’t think she saw any other way to make me let her go. I’d proven again and again how clingy I was.

So, she invited me to her party, and from my perspective things seemed to be going fine for the first hour or so. Then, she decided that we would all play a game.

It was supposed to be a hide and seek type game, right? Everyone would find a hiding spot in the front or back garden, the person who was It would search for them, when everyone found them it would all start over, etc.

I was made It. I’m sure you’re getting an inkling of where this was going.

I did the ‘close your eyes and count’ routine, before  I started searching. My friend had been very clear, the game was taking place outside only.

So I searched. And I searched. I worked my way around the garden half a dozen times, but not a single person could I find. Baffled and confused, and starting to feel that horrible yawning feeling of dread right before it opens up into hurt, I wandered aimlessly, not sure what to do next, and sat down on the swings to try and work out what should happen next while something hard and cold and painful swelled in my chest.

The swingset happened to be facing my best friend’s bedroom window, and I happened to glance up, to see the entire party of little girls, including my friend, pressed gleefully to the window, where they had been watching my bewildered search for the last half-hour.

And I can honestly, truly say, that in that moment my best friend broke my heart.

For the next hour of the party I sat outside in the garden determinedly not crying, until everyone’s parents came to take them home. I think I told my mother; I can’t really remember. I’m pretty sure I told her, because I had to tell someone under the crushing weight of knowing that the sole and single person I could depend on had joined the horde and turned on me.

I remember sitting in the car on the way home, being quiet, and knowing that everything had changed and not knowing when or how – how over the space of a few weeks without contact, my friend had gone from the person who always had my back, who was always kind and trustworthy and the most wonderful person in the world, to doing to me what she had chosen to do that day.  I didn’t know why. I hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, so what could I have done? This wasn’t something I could clumsily apologise for, and hover around unhappily about to convey my sad feelings. I hadn’t done anything, so how could I have suddenly deserved having my heart cut out and stomped on by the one person I was sure would never, ever do that?

That next year was so full of deliberate breaches and painful misunderstandings. I was still kind of nuts from grief, only now it wasn’t just about my cat, it was about my only anchor in this crazy unkind world being torn from me, and my loneliness status being upgraded to ‘completely alone.’ My friend and I still hung around a lot, because it was impossible not to in a class as small as ours, but there was a distance between us that I didn’t understand, and no matter how I tried to bridge it, it never worked.

Sometimes we seemed to be fine – okay, a lot of the time, because there was a reason we were friends in the first place – but the rest of the time I could feel her withdrawing.  I kept trying to reach out her, trying to fix it in my own helpless kind of way, but I didn’t even know what I was trying to fix.

I found out later, that the teachers had a word with her  and told her that I was afraid that I was losing her friendship and needed reassurance; I was always so much more manageable  under her influence, because she was the only one who could ever get through to me, because she was the only one I was willing to change my behaviour for. She was the sane, reasonable voice I didn’t naturally have in my head, and the teachers didn’t want me to go completely off the rails – they could see the state I was already in.

It was kind of hard to fight a teacher tactfully ordering you to be friends with someone, so my friend reluctantly stopped holding me at arms length. But we weren’t the same as we were before, and I knew it.

Later on I found out that one of the other girls, the one other girl who my friend had always really liked, had given her an ultimatium: you’re friends with her, or you’re friends with me. And it was only two years until high school, and I’m sure the thought occurred to her: is this what I really want for the rest of my life? To have only one friend, who takes and takes and never gives back? Who’s embarrassing and stops me being friends with anyone else either because she’s so inappropriate or because she makes people back off? Do I really want to be her babysitter for the rest of my life?

The next year, the one that I turned twelve and our last year of primary school, she was a lot more stand-offish. I was slightly less-broken and more put-together by then, although of course that’s totally relative. And more than ever, the person I’d know since forever was gone, and in her place was a complete stranger that I couldn’t understand, and with whom no matter what I tried I could never get it quite right. Everything I tried was the wrong thing. I would sit in class and stare at her, and wonder what was going so badly wrong, and why neither of us seemed to understand each other any more. She was into the boys and make-up scene by then, with all the Queen Bee clones, all the stuff she’d thought was a little silly or impractical before. And socially, it was like everyone had suddenly ascended to a higher plane of existence, or something, and I was still stuck on the primitive level they’d all graduated from.

And even when we were hanging out together, things still went wrong. I had always borrowed her stuff, and for her birthday that year I spent a giant part of my allowance on some really gorgeous gel-pens, which were the brand new thing everyone had to own, including some of the swirly multi-coloured ones that everyone loved but you could never actually read the ink of. Like everything else, I borrowed them quite a bit, and at one point she teased me that I’d only bought them for her so that I could use them.

“Oh, of course,” I joked back, deadpan. We’d always teased each other back and forth like that, so it never occurred to me that what she was actually looking for, this time, might have been reassurance that this wasn’t the case. In the past, she had always understood when I was just teasing back. It was just how we rolled.

Instead, though, her face flashed with hurt, just for a second, and then she grinned and laughed it off, but it haunted me for ages that she genuinely believed that I’d bought her the pens out of a selfish desire to use them. I’d saved up for weeks to afford a really awesome present she’d like, just because I wanted to see the smile on her face when she saw them, but I didn’t know how to tell her so and in the end I said nothing. There were a thousand instances like that, and I didn’t know how to navigate around them. This newly-sensitive person operated on totally different rules, and there wasn’t that easy camraderie that we’d always had before.

At the same time as I was losing her, I was only just realising how much she meant to me and how much I needed her, like she was part of myself. I’d built my world around her, and when I pictured my future I always imagined the two of us: grown up, married maybe, but I always figured that the two of us would be together. We’d be married and have kids, but our kids would go to the same school and we would see each other every day, and our kids could play over at each other’s houses while we sat and had tea together and talked about our lives, as close as we’d ever been. I never thought much about who I might marry – that person was a blank space I didn’t care about – or our supposed children: the important part of that dream was her. The two of us, together, always, no matter what changed. And then the whole party incident happened and my whole world came tumbling down, and suddenly the comfortable, happy future I’d always envisaged – that I’d always counted on having one day – looked to be replaced by a bleak, lonely one without my favourite person in it.

Instead of letting go graciously, even on the outside, I clung with all the desperate fervour of a heartbroken crazy person.

I started playing ridiculously stupid control games, like playing up in class until the teacher told her to sort me out, and refusing to behave until she sweet-talked or even bribed me into not acting like a total brat – trying to reassure myself (and failing) that she would always be there no matter how difficult I was.

All I wanted was to keep her, and that was the one thing that wasn’t working.

We graduated from primary school that year, and began the next at the same girl’s high school, which all the girls in our class went to. It was the good school that a lot of girls from the local primary schools went to. There were no longer teachers pressuring my friend to stay friends with, and I had a chance at making other friends besides her. So, from the very first day of high school, she cut me completely.

Every time I said hello she ignored me; every time I tried to talk to her she brushed me off.

At this point I had hair that was just long enough to sit on, if I wasn’t careful (it was forever being shut in doors) and which my friend had been trying for years to convince me to have cut shorter. It wasn’t my only reason for doing so, but when I had half my hair cut off, until it sat just below my shoulder blades, it was partly in the hope that this would get her speaking to me again, considering how vehemently she had always pressed me to cut my hair.

Monday morning I approached.

“Hey,” I said, with a bright smile. “Look, I cut my hair.”

She gave it a cursory look.

“Nice,” she said dismissively, and turned back to her friends, instantly continuing the conversation. My smile fell, and I walked away.

I’m ashamed to say, that in one final, wild attempt to have her at least talk to me, or failing that, to make her feel bad like I did, I nicely asked a mutual sort-of-friend to give her a note, asking why she’d been avoiding me and was it because she felt guilty – and if so then she should.

As nasty notes go, it wasn’t exactly right up there on the list; but considering how many years she’d been a good, loyal friend when I was selfish and demanding and kind of terrible sometimes, it makes me very ashamed now. I’m grateful, these days, that she stuck with me as long as she did.

I finally gave up my attempts to win her back, and over time I stopped crying every night, and moved on and tried to make friends with other people. It hurt, knowing that most people didn’t even know that we’d ever been friends. It hurt, knowing that I was so completely cut out of her life that we didn’t even count as acquaintances any more. We were just two people who went to school together – and that was all. It was like all those years of shared history and loyalty and ridiculous adventures – all the times we’d told each other the deepest, most heartfelt secrets we had – had simply never happened. Even if all I’d been able to do was hang around on the edges, maybe getting to talk to her sometimes, that would have been better than where I was now. Every dream I ever had, had held her, and now… I was in a world where we didn’t even speak to one another.

For years, I wished, now and then, that there was a way I could wriggle back into some kind of relationship with her, no matter how slight. I was trying very hard by then to never ever act at all like a crazy stalker; I had finally started to understand why she had behaved as she did, years too late, and after everything I’d put her through I mostly just wanted her to be happy. But there was an empty place in my heart that was never filled, and when I happened to pass her in the hallways, and see her smile, or laugh… I missed her so hard it hurt.

In grade 10, at the end of the year, after basically two years of ignoring each other, I gathered up my nerve to approach her when she was alone, and to thank her for having been my friend for all those years. She laughed, looking utterly surprised, but smiled and thanked me – and I think that she was pleased, to know that I finally appreciated everything that I had for so long taken for granted.

I saw her at the grade 12 formal, the year we graduated, and she looked lovely, but when I looked at her she also looked like an entirely different person. She’d grown up from the twelve year old girl that I’d known so well, once, and it helped, a little, that she didn’t look like that person any more. She was a totally different person, just like I was by now; and looking at her, it was easier to tell myself that she wasn’t the person that I had known and lost so long ago. She was beautiful and gorgeous and charming, and I had no doubt that if we both started over then we would have been moderately good friends – nothing like the intense, strangling friendship we’d had before – but I didn’t know her, not any more, and so maybe it was okay that I lived in a world where we hadn’t been friends for a long time. I was always going to love her, and I was always going to mourn the loss of the most wonderful thing I’d ever known, but… I could tuck her away in my heart and stop wondering, perhaps, what my life would be like now if things had gone differently.

I don’t know what she’s like now; we’re Facebook friends, like everyone who went to school together, but we never talk or anything. Our lives are wildly different, from everything I’ve seen; when I looked at her smile in one of her photos it made something in my heart catch, and made me feel wistful – a faint echo of what might have been – but then I closed the tab and went on with my life, hoping that she was happy, but otherwise, letting her drift from my mind.

I like the holidays, because I feel relatively sane and well-adjusted, as opposed to batshit crazy, or wanting to burrow under a mountain of blankets and never come out, which are, like, my two most common mood settings (I would be bored to death without university, really, and I love what I’m studying, but I’d like to find a happy medium between bored, so bored and stop the world please I wanna get off NOW.

The thing is though, during the holidays I don’t actually go anywhere or do anything, so it’s a little worrying that I feel at my most sane and well-adjusted when I’m living like a hermit.

Yeah.

I feel like the rest of my life is a constant frantic whirl of stuff, and the sad thing is that I don’t even do that much. I do uni part-time, and I don’t have a job or anything, and I either get credits or pass, depending on how well I’ve ogt my shit together that semester. When I have exams or assignments, I like, live them, and other stuff like laundry and housework and eating regular meals tends to get forgotten, and I get so stressed I sometimes don’t eat, and insomnia has been my constant companion since high school (although it’s worse, now.) So, I pour all my efforts and energy into stuff that everyone else just gets done without fuss and usually along with a hundred others things I never get around to because if I do too much I get like delusions of grandeur, or something – and I’m bright and I’m discerning and sometimes my vocabulary frightens people if I’ve been reading a lot lately and yet here I am pretty much unable to do shit. I feel like I fail at life.

Always.

And this gently gets pointed out to be on a fairly regular basis, this fail-at-life thing, because I am the most inconvenient and uncomfortable person to live with, seriously, but if I lived on my own I might actually starve or something. But one day I am actually going to need to do things like pay bills and make deadlines and remember to eat and work a proper job without a nervous breakdown and not wander around the house like a ghost at four in the fucking morning and thereby accidentally waking everyone else because sleep is foreign to me.  This is all stuff that regular, normal people do. I should be able to do this.

And the thing is, I don’t look like I spend half my life as a borderline basket-case – to people who deal with me more casually I am polite and articulate and composed and full of intelligent ideas, so any time I have to actually try to explain my life to someone – which I really hate, because it’s humilating and awkward and there’s almost always this air of gentle bemusement that anyone could be so incompetent at life – it’s really difficult to get across that yes, someone as intelligent and seemingly well put-together as I am really, really isn’t. On top of that, when I try to explain I never seem to have the right words, and forget to mention important points, because I always forget that understanding some point I’ve mentioned doesn’t automatically mean understanding the other five points that connect together with it in my head, because my head is a strange place and other people don’t think like I do. (I sort of mostly get that people don’t know what I do, which is the whole point of explaining things, but sometimes I forget, a little, what things it is that they don’t know, which is a fact that I don’t think that anyone has realised about me.)

I am the kind of person who in the old days they used to just… leave to starve or else stick in institutions and drug up to the eyeballs because they didn’t know what else to do with them. And I am terrified, so fucking terrified that one day everyone will just not have any idea what to try anymore, or be unable to deal with me, or just not want to, and I will end up in a situation like that. And the thing is, if I were not as intelligent as I am, that might not actually bother me that much. But for me, being who I am, that kind of life? Would be worse than death, because it would kill the wonderful, beautiful little spark of something in me that is so rarely expressed, and yet is so fantastic when it actually is – because I live for those fragile, precious moments when everything comes together perfectly and I’m perfectly balanced in my head and I can just do things as thought there is nothing at all to hold me back or drag me down. They are so rare, those moments, but they are what I hold onto, because if I still had all these problems but didn’t have those rare, brilliant shining moments to compensate just the tiniest bit? I don’t know what I’d do. Live a short, reckless life, I suspect.

I know I’m not the only person with Asperger with similar problems; there are other people floating around online whom I occasionally bump into, so to speak, who write about their own despair and helplessness and endless frustration with the enormous gulf between their level of ability and capability (because people as smart – and often, gifted – as we are should be able to do so much more than we can, and it burns that we can’t) but sometimes I just feel so alone, and as though I have a giant burden hanging over my head waiting to drop down onto my shoudlers and cripple me at some vague future point in time.

And I am so alone in my head, sometimes. I don’t – I don’t understand how people think and feel, in ways that are maybe more subtle than some Asperger people have trouble with, but that are stil so fundamental. I’d thought – managed to convince myself, maybe, or perhaps just didn’t comprehend at all what I was missing? – that I’d gotten quite good at understanding people, in at least an intellectual/analytical kind of way, if not an intuitive one. But – somehow, I’ve gotten into the habit of forgetting, to take other people’s feelings and point of view into account, and I know why it is – I’m so stressed a lot of the time that I can’t deal with anything more than what I’m dealing with already, and not even that either – but that doesn’t change the fact that I forget and I shouldn’t. I don’t care if it’s sometimes like playing chess inside your head, it’s something that I need to do even when I am worn out and tired and don’t feel up to rolling through hypothetical emotional-social simulations every time anyone needs to do anything. But I’ve gotten into the holidays, and things are calmer and I finally have the space to take a step outside my own head, and I am – not a good person. I’m not a bad person, but no one with that kind of unthinking walk-all-over-this-and-turn-it-into-what-I-want attitude to everything (including people) can really be a good person, I think. I’ve been taking everyone for granted, I think, and walking around like the things I do have no consequences and don’t affect anybody, and that’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. I try, when I can manage it, to think about these things – but when I’m so frazzled that I can’t even manage basic self-care properly, how am I supposed to go through the complicated mental dance of trying to fit into someone else’s headspace? I can’t, and that’s not fair, either.

I had a sudden, uncomfortable flash of memory the other day, back to when I was about seven years old, and was mercilessly bullied and pushed around because I was so out-there weird and uncontrollably-behaved. I used to – I would feel so angry and humiliated afterwards, I’m not sure that I even felt properly hurt about it because the anger and humilation burned above everything else, and I used to just want to sit there and be quiet and experience quietness and let the raging emotion die down to a sort of eventual weary bruise of feeling. I didn’t want anyone to act like they noticed, I don’t know why. But somehow, if everyone walked around like they didn’t see me, then that was fine, although I simultaneously felt lonely if they did. Sometimes, though, other kids would come over to check on me. They would move into my space, their faces filled with concern, and ask if I was okay…

…and be screamed at and hit and bear the brunt of uncontrollable irrational rage. I could deal with being pushed around and mocked and hurt, but somehow genuine concern was too much for me to bear. For some reason it used to humiliate me so deeply… Looking back now I don’t quite understand it, and yet that raw emotional place is still there, and I can fit myself into that mental maelstrom of unreasoning feeling if I try, like an imprint left in my mind even after all these years – like if something bad enough happened to me, I would be right back there, like that’s a default setting that’s currently overwritten but a system restart would bring it all back.

And the thing is… I never understood why they came over. Why they asked me if I was okay… I could understand unkindness and cruelty in the same deep, visceral way I felt rage and vengefulness and humiliation, even if unkindness and cruelty were never things I was myself (at least, not intentionally; a lack of comprehension of other people sometimes made me so accidentally.) But compassion? The fact that they felt an echo of my distress, and the need to soothe it and to make me feel better… It was… it was somehow alien to me, back then. I genuinely didn’t quite understand why they came over to me. I cared if other people were hurt, or unhappy, but I would… not do that? I would try and cheer them up until they were no longer unhappy, by trying to distract them or by showing them something nice. I felt sympathy, but not compassion. When I was upset, what I wanted was to be left alone until the world no longer felt so sharp and loud and overwhelming, and the idea that to other people, what made it better was other people, or touching – I couldn’t stand to be touched – was not something that I really grasped.

I am sure that you can see why this is an uncomfortable memory. The degree of incomprehension I had for other people, the terrible way I sometimes used to respond to them, how essentially alien my mental processes were: it gives me a hot, shamed feeling. I’m so far away from being that little girl, now… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not still all screwed-up and different and uncomprehending in how I feel about and deal with other people. Just because I’m not as bad as I used to be, doesn’t mean I’m not still awful. And I really, really hope I’m not, but I have a horrible, horrible feeling that I am, and it’s just one more way in which I totally fail at life. And I wish that I could change that.

As a kid, when I was out dealing with strangers, I was very well-mannered. I would wait pateintly in queues. I would say please and thank you. I was the well-behaved, quiet child who tried to follow the manners my parents had instilled in me. I was told that if you  treat others with respect, then they will do the same for you.

The thing was, though, when it comes to kids, adults don’t practice all the virtues they think kids should have. I was pushed out of queues. I had adults push in front of me. Sometimes they would even hover close to me so that the person at the counter thought they were my parent and serve them instead of me. Often sales and service people would serve the adult behind me in a line, or, if I was trying to get a person’s attention for assistance in a store, ignore me entirely. If I was trying to get a seat somewhere, the rule seemed to be that adults had a greater right to sit down – or, indeed, to do pretty much anything. In stores, adults seemed to feel that it was fine to bully children out of the product that they wanted to buy, if the child had it. And it was fine to insult a child, or comment on their clothes, even though they didn’t know them. In other words, the adults around me showed exactly the opposite of the behaviour I was supposed to be following.

Now, adults do this to other adults sometimes. But as a child, this happened to me all the time. It only started to stop when I was about fourteen, and simply got too tall (yay for height!) and too politely-stubborn to ignore or push aside.

I can remember being in McDonalds with my sibling and mother once, and we got my sib to mind a table for us while we went and ordered food. Five minutes later Little Sis came up to us almost in tears. It emerged that some woman had berated my sister viciously – a complete stranger’s child – and forced her to abandon the table. My mother’s wrath was aroused, and she marched over and demanded to know why the woman had made Little Sis leave.

“I didn’t realise that she was keeping it for an adult,” the woman said, flustered in the face of my mother’s formidable attitude, which only made things worse.

My mother proceeded to inform her that the tables are for customers, and as long as someone intends to buy something then they have a right to a table, no matter what age they are. A paying customer has the rights of any other paying customer, even if they are a child.

But this is something that adults frequently forget.

Another incident that sticks in my mind occurred when I was ten  or eleven years olf, and waiting in line at the library. I spent ten minutes patiently waiting, and then when it was my turn an elderly couple swept in front of me to the counter.

I simply sighed, resigned, sadly used to this exact occurence. But this time, I had someone on my side.

“Excuse me,” the person at the counter said politely but firmly, “but that little girl was waiting in front of you.”

“Oh, we’ll only be a minute,” said the elderly woman dismissively, not even looking at me.

But unusually, the counter person stood firm.

“No, I’m afraid I can’t serve you, because there was someone in front of you,” they reiterated. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go to the end of the line.”

The elderly couple spet five minutes carrying on and having a mild temper tantrum, before storming off with venomous glares in my direction.

The thing is, that is the only time I can recall someone actually according me the courtesy of an equal customer when someone else tried to ignore my rights. I spent all my childhood being treated like that, and then I became a teenager. To my bemusement I then spent my teens hearing adults complaining about how people my age always pushed in front of people in queues, didn’t give up their seats on public transport, and showed no respect for their elders.

But we’d spent all our lives being shown again and again that manners and politeness got you absolutely nowhere except walked all over and treated like a second-class citizen, that you had to push in and grab what you wanted. That adults were rude and mannerless and treated you with disrespect, and you needed to be the same if you wanted anything. The adults around us taught us these lessons for our entire lives, and then acted shocked and indignant when we emulated their own (reprehensible) behaviour.

If people want children and teenagers to behave with the politeness and respect due another human being, then they need to follow their own rules. What goes around comes around.

Last time we were a natural disaster area – November 2008, when a gigantic storm hit us – it was very immediate and frightening (I now have a thunderstorm phobia as a result), and although we and our property were fine, evidence of the destruction was all over the place, trees shorn and bits of homes flung about like matchsticks. This time, the damage left will probably be worse, but I’m not sure how much evidence of it we’ll actually see right where I am – storms hit everywhere even if they don’t fling your house about, but flood only damages the bits it floods.

Some people don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the situation – one youg person we’re acquainted with sent a happy text sharing the information that she got to leave work early because of evacuation, but later sent out a text inviting people to go clubbing on the weekend – apparently unaware that the clubbing district will no doubt be underwater by the end of the week, and even if the water has dispersed by then, it will hardly be habitable.

I don’t know. I don’t like the waiting.

The rain has taken its toll.

A photo of the floods hitting Toowoomba, taken from Yahoo News.

Same as above.

Now the floods are set to hit my city  like nothing ever seen before.

Areas are being evacuated, while others have already flooded.  The river is swelling into a behemoth, and it looks like the CBD will go under. The rail network has been shut down in places, and all that’s being shown in TV is a steady stream of disaster images, warnings, and updates from politicians.

We’ve been told that flood levels are likely to exceed those of the legendary 1974 floods, in which vast parts of the city went under and which was one of the worst flooding disasters in Australian history. Some time in the next two days, flooding will likely reach unprecedented levels.

Earlier today my family and I went out to stock up on supplies, in preparation for being cut off from civilisation. Our house shouldn’t flood  – lessons learned from ’74 include buying high land - but it’s probable that the areas around us will. One neighbouring suburb, 15-20 minutes drive away, has apparently already gone under.

So, we’re just sitting here, waiting for the floods to hit, I guess.  Some time in the next two days, Brisbane will be engulfed. After that? We’ll see what happens.

And in the meantime, it’s still raining.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 4,300 times in 2010. That’s about 10 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 9 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 56 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 226kb.

The busiest day of the year was February 1st with 79 views. The most popular post that day was Sociability and Aspergers.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were lastcrazyhorn.wordpress.com, blog.xanthippas.com, embracingchaos.stephanieallencrist.com, scienceblogs.com, and autistscorner.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ain ghazal, awesome sword, puruchuco, difference between ability and capability, and the more people i meet the more i like my cat.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Sociability and Aspergers February 2010
4 comments

Tenth Doctor Crossovering into other comics… October 2008
1 comment

The difference between ability and capability in Aspergers Syndrome July 2008
1 comment

That’s one awesome sword. June 2009

Embarrassment, Self-Consciousness, and Theory of Mind November 2009
3 comments

As a child/young teenager, I had two friends who were natural-born scientists, in the sense that they loved to perform experiments in order to see what would happen.

Of course, this frequently led to immense pain, such as the time one of them leapt from a balcony to the ground below, their only protection a sheet worn as a cape, and damn near broke both their legs.

Such is the price one pays for a determination to push back the boundaries of knowledge.

I have never been quite sure how my favorite of their experiments suggested itself, but one boring day, one of them decided to see what would happen if a CD were placed in the microwave on ‘high’ for thirty seconds.

The result of 30 seconds on 'high.'

The result was an attractively eye-catching, if now useless disk, a broken microwave, and a thundering lecture from angry (and let’s face it, kind of bewildered – how do you come up with such a nuts idea?) parents.

And one more piece of knowledge added to the world…

For about half a second.

Then I choked as the smell hit me.

That kind of stench cannot be generated just from eating a bit of garlic the night before -  did he bathe in it every night or something? Did he fail to bathe every night? This wasn’t mere ‘oh, I ate a lot of garlic’ smell, this was ‘I ate a lot of garlic, and then I thought I’d let the smell mature a little.’  It was so overwhelmingly bad that just breathing was an effort.

Not only the seats around this man, but that entire end of the carriage stank unbearably.

I held my breath, and first stop, moved into the next carriage.

Air was never so fresh, I can tell you.