In writing
this series I’ve challenged myself to have each chapter link to the previous.
This was the novelty I needed to motivate myself into getting back into the writing
mode and there was a key thing in the previous chapter that the student told me
and that was that he felt, “totally alone.”
There’s two sides to feeling alone
as I, myself, do a good percentage of the time enjoy being alone. Most of
everything I’ve written was written between the hours of midnight and 5AM because
that increased my chance of having no outside interference to my work or
thoughts. However, there would be other times that I yearned for interaction.
No, not just interaction but a connection on the personal level and without
understanding we can quickly become cut off from those around us and the harder
we try to make connections the more cut off we become.
Before I got my diagnosis I did see
psychologists or counselors and it was hard for me to ever buy-in to the whole
process but the #1 thing that would set me off, or rather turn me away from
exposing anything remotely resembling an actual emotion, was the line of, “I
know how you feel.” Really, you know how I feel? You know what it feels like to
know that no one has the same thoughts as you? You know what it is like to be
mocked for missing the most obvious of social cues? You know what it is like to
be in room full of people and feel as if you’re on a deserted island in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean? You know what it is like to have been misunderstood
forever and now, all of a sudden, someone understands? Ha!
The problem with saying you know how
I feel is that, and others on the spectrum can be like this, we’ve come to
learn that no one thinks like us. Maybe this is decreasing with the increased
awareness, but when I didn’t have a diagnosis what else was I to think? And on
top of all that, since talking about emotions was difficult, I wouldn’t have
been able to get out how I actually felt although I would be able to tell the
psychologist that they were wrong but I would not be able to describe as to
what was the actual feeling thus furthering my lack of buying-in to the
process.
Another aspect of feeling alone, and
this is on the negative side which I hope to remember to write in more detail
later on the bliss that can be experienced being alone, is that it can become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. The “fail set” can set in which is this, “if I’ve
failed once, and failed again, this means I will always fail” which means that
getting the person to even try may be difficult and if a situation arises where
someone is trying to, say, be a friend we may be very guarded or closed off
because we know the outcome of loneliness is always the same.
The nights I felt most alone I can
describe like this. And mind you, I’m not writing this to be depressing, or to
make you, if you’re a parent, depressed about your child, but rather I feel if
you know how a person may feel it’ll give you a better understanding. Anyway,
after my diagnosis and the hopelessness I felt I felt as if I lived in this
small bubble where life was frozen. I could look out of my bubble and witness
people conversing. I saw it all the time at the bowling alley, or at stores,
and what I saw was what I wanted at almost any cost except the cost of me
trying because I knew I’d fail if I tired. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy,
or a vicious cycle, call it what you will but the longer it went on the more
bitter I became. When I would talk to my dad on how I felt I’d rarely bring up
this point of feeling isolated because it was the deepest of feelings and one I
didn’t want to recognize. I tried to subdue my yearnings of acceptance and
friendship, but even thought I would deny it (many times) they were there.
Time went on and as each month
passed me by I felt the chasm between myself and the world growing. This
eventually was my motivation to write which I know not everyone is going to
become a writer and not everyone is going to find a way to express what they
are feeling, but do know we may have this deep yearning for contact, or
kinship, or just a simple moment of understanding. We often times feel alone in
a crowded room which, despite even if you have felt this before, we may become
agitated if you tell us, “I know how you feel” because, to feel alone the way
we do, we are watching the world from this bubble and as we watch it appears so
easy. Other people make the art of conversation so darn easy and for us it
isn’t. I think I can compare it to this; look up a video on the Internet of a
concerto master performing a great work of music; they make it look easy,
right? For that master it probably is and for us on the spectrum, witnessing
normal encounters that others have, be it a common greeting or two strangers
talking about the weather, that’s what witnessing normal conversations are
like. And from that despair in watching others make the impossible, like having
an open ended conversation with a stranger about random, irrelevant topics,
seem like second nature it creates the deep and wide chasm that creates this
feeling of being alone.
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