[1057] Distance

Today's feeling like it just might pass on by. I thought I might get up fairly early and do some work outside or more advance note prep. Instead I stayed in bed extra long. I got up and started reading some old blogs. I've made some coffee. I'm just in a kind of holding pattern until I hit the comedy club I hate tonight, Helium in Indianapolis.

My latest quasi-obsessive and frequently returned to thought is about getting an official autism diagnosis. In the blogs I was reading, I was searching for the key word "sociopath" and reading what I said about myself over time. I think the first time I ever mentioned it was in the 100s, 2007 or 2008, and pretty much every time I describe it as something learned or peg an example of how "not really" I could be described by it. Being "cold" or shutting down and methodically observing I've come to understand as forms of self-protection and coping. But, also, I suspect part of what felt so natural about doing so was me leaning into my natural pre-existing condition.

There's a universal theme in every piece of writing. Distance. I'm outside looking in and breaking down and try, desperately, to figure out the lesson or course of action or cause of events. I treat everything like there's some literal 1+1=2 going on, and it's an obligatory task and responsibility to input all of the variables. Where "people" or "the world" want to build a story about their relationship to math, I'm trying to do the math. They'll tell me, "Math is hard! I suck at math!" Then they'll stop. That's all they need. That's the important line in the narrative that explains why they will never attempt to do math again. It tells you they suck at math, and if you invite them to do it, you're telling them to feel like they suck or are helpless, confused, overwhelmed, or an infinite list of negative emotions associated with math.

I have a friend who is reflexively dismissive of getting a diagnosis. There's many reasons underlying her position I could extract just from my own observation of her relationship to her own health. She's half-heartedly argued about the greed and incoherence of the medical system which I'm sympathetic to, but I consider diminishingly ancillary points in lieu of my larger goal or the potential utility of the diagnosis. I don't want to be at the mercy of something I can't conceptualize more explicitly. I want to feel the potential and see the utility in ways I can't when I remain in the realm of speculation or strong suspicion. Circumstantial evidence has convicted many an innocent person.

You, apparently, don't know what it's like to be "stuck" in an observer state. Literally every single thing I may say or write is, seemingly by design, going to antagonize, threaten, question, or cause a level of psychological harm in a "normal" person. When you adopt similar attitude affects of trauma, it sends a false signal that we're more alike than we are or understand things in the same way. Being a general odd-ball who has learned how to play along invites hundreds of misreads and false hopes every week. You're hurt and feeling crass, so my jokes or demonstrative way of being register as a way to access your inchoate "realness" as you recover. Your insecurity gets betrayed when the cute-enough whore is effusively complimenting and appreciative of your presence, in all sincerity to be sure, but a robust long-term solidarity or bubbly attraction is incredibly unlikely to be maintained.

In my reading today, I read where I was feeling guilty when I noticed a girl was into me. I knew then, as I know even better today, people don't really recognize or see "me." What they like is what I've learned how to do, and that makes you feel all the more distant and like you have a responsibility to report more than be in the moment or appreciative someone's there with you. Because, are they? No, not really.

I can reliably and predictably do things in ways others can't even describe back to me. They just know they feel a certain way depending on what hat I'm wearing. I'm a really good professional counselor. I fuck up and say things in very messy ways rarely, and know how to account for them after I do. I see the face of "wheels turning" when I describe certain subjects certain ways. I see posture relax. I see smile cracks. I see head nods and notes getting taken. I recognize when the tone has shifted from combative defensiveness to acquiescing awareness. I suspect you won't find a single counselor at my company who would describe what they're doing as even 5% of what I put into a single paragraph. ::nods to Nietzsche::

Why would I say that? They tell me, and you, what they're doing as a form of professional narrative.

They're first and foremost "trying to help." "You don't get into this field unless you wish to help people." "You don't work here unless you're passionate about others or reducing harm." At DCS, "We all care about the children" very regardless of actual outcomes or behavior of our least qualified staff. They want to "provide services" and employ "therapeutic interventions." Every field has its propaganda because, at scale, the human condition requires the narrative, not the truth.

What am I doing as a counselor? I'm staying curious about what's true, or true-enough, for you to change in chosen ways. I'm looking to divorce you from as many cultural narratives as you can get your mind around, and hand back the notion of agency and accountability. That's an incredibly difficult and ridiculous task that takes a lifetime to get even a little good at. Every day, until you can train to occupy every moment, needs the affirmation. Every shade of gray or black in the latest attempt to bleach the scene needs acknowledged. Every poor choice of words that keeps us psychologically trapped needs challenged. A prolonged holistic impression of where and how each of us exists across time needs to be constructed, then deconstructed and reconstructed along metrics and choices that serve your values and needs. Practically, specifically, that looks like self-care, boundary discussions, self-reflective writing, and genuine expression of the depth of your feelings.

The last, maybe week or so, has started to make the nature of "the narrative of people at scale" clearer. I've attempted to analyze and compensate for aspects of my disillusion as well as what I perceive to be an emotional breakdown from my business partner. What's "more true" or "less wrong" about this point in time? Am I missing something important in how I describe people's reticence to actually, you know, do anything constructive about a problem? What forces are at play that make it hard for my partner to relax while I'm rocking out and hitting clubs? What should my approach be, professionally, personally, in this monolith of "basic" and consistent human tendencies if I'm not going to win, will never be in the club, and still desire some sense of accomplishment or belonging in an otherwise hostile or ambivalent space?

I could get a "perfect" team together, and as it grows or we increase caseloads, fundamental trends and truths of the human condition will take over. This is a blindness in people who rage against "systems" or belabor "isms" and "ists" in their human narrative "explanations" I'm tempted to conceive of as pure "placations." Our brains thrive on lazy short-hand in lieu of introspection. Pick any antagonist, you're always off the hook.

I want to spend a little more time on the idea of the space being "hostile." It is to me. Women describe hostile working conditions with unwanted sexual advances or threats to their professional prospects. Abusive households conform to implicit rules around the aggressors. The psychological boringness and pedantry of bureaucracy is intuitively designed to obscure the underlying violence of our under-examined behavior. I feel under attack, constantly. It doesn't seem like it, because your narrative, your culturally imposed and simplified "we all agreed to this" tells you I'm decently employed, own property, white, tall, powerful, straight, a man, etc. If I think I'm "smart" you have to hear "narcissist" or "manipulative." If I think I'm "right" you have to hear "defensive" or "complicit." If I think I'm wrong, you have to hear "guilty" or say to yourself, "I knew it!"

You have to.

That's the survival rule. You have to remain under the protective social and psychological shell or something akin to the whole of the universe starts to unravel.

Aren't I proof enough? Your "friends" will abandon you. You'll look combative. You'll seem angry and, most importantly, unjustifiably so. You'll seem restless and disorganized. You'll be a perpetual target for criticism for all of your "unrealistic" posturing. But mostly, you'll just make people feel uncomfortable, and they don't need anything fancy or more complicated than that to cut you off.

The real and proper psychopaths among us construct narratives more deliberately. They too have a narrative, but depending on just how aberrant an end it must conform to, the self-justified universe constructing just takes that much more reinforcing facts drawn from the depravity or misdirection of the culture writ-large. That's political propaganda. That's religious indoctrination. That's your favorite interview with a serial killer. The Unabomber got a lot of boring factoid prediction things right, and critical, relatively straight-forward, if not timeless, aspects of wisdom and accountability horrendously wrong. They all do.

When the goal is "try to help" or "provide resources" or "save" or make a habit of othering or blaming that "ist" or "ism" with psychopathic efficiency you arrive at the conclusion to an argument you weren't even aware you were making. Your fight or flight amygdala feels better, so, you win, always. You're correct, always. You're doing exactly what you say you're doing, always. Because "evidence" doesn't exist in the narrative. It's ideological possession. It's an existential exercise of bullshit.

As such my, or any, writing, in that it exists at all, is a threat. If you write about yourself, you'll start to discover things you weren't so good at noticing beforehand whether you wished to learn them or not. You'll be killing yourself. You'll be concurrently failing to mourn the parts that are dying. Who's doing that shit? You literally exist as a substate of the collective narrative. You have no conception of yourself or what exists beyond it. The acid trip went horribly or you were too scared to try it in the first place. The moments you tried to be brave and ask a question or stick your head out you were summarily dismissed or whipped. You don't know where to get the tools and those alleged to have them hurt you even more with their narratives. Someone, please, pass the heroin.

I was under a powerful narrative delusion about who my friends were or what they were supposed to mean to me. I'm certain I still am, but not in the way that's going to stay my hand anymore.

I'm lucky that, if I'm technically "disabled," I think that I'm literally unable to experience the addictive identity crisis which makes analysis like this functionally impossible. I'm lucky that if I'm going to be condemned to obsess about anything, at least it won't be trying to hide or accelerate my destruction. My order is your disorder. My literal ordering of my thoughts and deliberate conducting of myself in the world makes you "hate" "me" until something breaks you or you discover some "safe" way to break yourself.

The number one thing I hear feedback wise from my clients is, "You seem like you give a shit." Whatever else they say, it generally summarizes and condenses into that sentiment. In their-narrative-speak there's terms like "seem" and "give" as though what I'm doing is "only" an "impression" or that "shit" is something tangibly handed out. In my world, I ask them deliberate questions. I share the most explicit understanding of my perspective in analogous situations. I write. I go to shows. I build my house. I buy toys that make me happy. I practice skills that keep me from getting "stuck" in stories that make me want to kill myself or others.

I seem like I give a shit? I don't. I don't care what I "seem" like. I don't know what you mean by "shit." I'm not giving you anything but an opportunity to answer a question you haven't asked in your own muddy terms. I wish to live in an environment that isn't trying to kill me for being accountable or doing shit that makes the most sense. I wish to achieve my goals without wasting so much time trying to translate idiot-proof things (to other autistic-types), but act as insurmountable barriers when the cultural narrative can't conceive of what I'm talking about. I don't wish you harm. I'm rooting for you. "You seem" doesn't mean anything to me, just like all of my behavior, example setting, work, or blogs don't mean anything to you. You're not practicing like I'm practicing. I'm not talking like you're talking. In fact, you're not talking at all.