Thanks for the kind interest and response both,
Indeed I'm a blend of qualities that mixes heady engagement with the chilliest remote detachment equating to the maintenance of slim hope for connection. It's almost as though I've created in my person and evidence in my orientation a will to fly, but when the same is pushed out onto the tarmac and pointed towards the wind I can't be troubled to set the flaps into the correct position. It isn't even a habit of mine to allow my hand to brush the controls to ensure that correct procedure and/or correct protocol is followed - disconcerting this. It’s almost as though I rhapsodize about how I’ll so precisely move those controls – and yet the forearm does not stir.
The same goes for gatherings however constituted that I attend. I attend yes, but am I present, and who would dare imagine that I actually participate? In relation to debates afoot regarding the expression of and evolving trends rooted in the understanding of conceptions of community, I read - although as the reader might reasonably surmise I do this in satellite flyby fashion from several miles up in the sky. It’s almost as though I refuse to be touched, speaking into a phone but not bothering to dial a number before speaking into the receiver. I both long to feel and at the same moment feel far too much. Rather too like a museum display allowing inspection of a period domestic scene that in a surfacy sense seemingly equates to intimacy, although the discreet placement of barriers and glass panels nevertheless firmly communicates that one isn’t at home and fears that one might never participate in full.
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As a partial aside, please employ emoticons as you might see fit, while as a general rule to those passing through my wobbly orbit, worry not to mimic the sometimes turgid style I too frequently display. Though I might be on the lookout for one with a six foot long beard – bearded lady or no (!), what vain quality assessment I make will almost surely be based on other things.
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As has been proven, there will be times when I'm revealed to be terribly dense, whereas for so-calling attention to my atrophied understanding of much therein lies the hope that I might be prompted to reconsider much and evolve thereby. Although it takes time to understand many a nuance bearing upon ‘my case’, it is not as though I've fallen so great a distance but rather that I've not risen so far upward to feel one of the interpersonal living.
So true it is that I carry within a shell-shocked presumption that I’ll not be read, let alone understood in detail. In my constricted world I frequently do not interact beyond the rudiments of the exchange of social pleasantries and modest requests to fill needs I might harbor. Consistent with being pleasant and not calling great attention to myself, I take care to breathe in and restrict my use of language to the spoken essential when encountered live. Long disposed to affording some conception of aid or help to others, it is my longstanding habit to silently avail myself of what others dictate is important, as worthy of attention and engagement.
Outside the office of my therapist infrequent it is that anyone might address me by name. It seems I’m forced online, although explorations of the social terrain of a sprawling suburbanscape with universities and matching nodes of creativity and eclectic assertion do exist here and there. Though not a diagnosed Aspy, it does seem that negotiating social space and evolving out a functional understanding of boundaries not simply individual or immediate interpersonal, but by way of larger groups and gathering not stopping short of society and its demands overwhelms in so many ways.
Study of materials relating to socio-emotional isolation commonly focus upon the circumstance of the aged and infirm, whereas abuse and neglect materials rooted in the practice of parenting gone awry are commonly those that emphasize the alarmingly real aspect of sexual and/or physical violence ‘abnormalized’ within specific but also overlapping circumstances that give rise to patterns of abuse transcending the requirement of the seminal circumstance but forming a certain gravitation pull for familiarity of circumstance. It sometimes seems hard if not unfair that material on emotional neglect requires such stamina to identify, isolate, unearth and study. And yet one does not stop for what hope might exist if such temptation isn't strictly resisted?
Another dimension to the workload is the perceptual processing of what are often abuse narratives where a male exercises appalling leverage upon a female so-situated, and even as this is so often the pattern, I almost wish to create a computer algorithm whereby gender roles are ‘swapped’, the age of the players is reduced, hence scenarios and the examples afforded might be afforded greater subjective power. Men are too frequently terrible to each other and terrible to women in particular – this we know.
Some things happened and then repeated in cyclical fashion across time where women were in control and I was not. I wasn’t sodomized by a father/older brother/family friend, although there are times when I voicelessly express consternation as to where ‘my’ literature is. One comes close, one explores, and one tries theories and viewpoints on for size under the presumption that such are the parameters of investment in possible accommodation reached via the embrace of complexity and that not yet formally committed to type.
Even as I hadn’t quite the words and concepts at the ready to express as much at the time, when I worked within the public library in an implicit fashion I really was hoping for an experience of community – something to fill the void within myself. That I deeply underestimated the value of fit, that certain matters couldn't be forced, that for personal history but also intellectual inclinations that I’d in essence undercut the chances that I could find some measure of personal affirmation and actualized identity within an ‘off-the-rack’ community – especially one evangelical Christian rooted, was my painful discovery.
‘They’ were not the problem, whereas for poor choice of context to share select aspects of myself (poorly developed boundaries again, yes – indeed) my experiment miscarried. Though deeply underplayed, in point of fact I’ve known very few environments in detail across a life that otherwise ought to have featured more in the way of risk taking consistent with meeting the challenge of finding an appropriate fit. I’ve passed through and sampled many, whereas I usually just return to my books searching for that next spark or succession of sparks.
Though likely fodder to flesh out other submissions to come, there was a time when I attended school in NYC, within the physical space of Manhattan/Greenwich Village, but the mental and spiritual space of what is termed the American Literary Left. Habits of mind, proclivities that guided me there included study of materials picked up at area used book shops and thrift stores published during times of tumult, whereas in a sense I was alternately emboldened but also deformed in my perceptions of the world based upon the embrace of works that seemed so light, so gay as contrasted to the gray particulars of my actual life. Habituating college towns, attending lectures, melding self into the atmosphere and spirit of protests however manifest too has been tried with aspects of search being blended into a conception of identity. Still, bridging what seems the chasm between my dissociated splendor and an actual lived existence constitutes the maturational hurdle I need to successfully clear.
If one has seen the remake of the Spanish film Open Your Eyes in the form of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, I find myself in circumstances akin to the end of the film whereby I might remain within an extended dissociative slumber, or dare to assert myself come what may to experience an imperfect life that is nevertheless and by sharp contrast real. Do I consciously stop or override the patently inadequate illusion to embrace life – whatever that life holds? Can I step off the ledge of the building to telegraph in no uncertain fashion my uncompromising desire to be present, an actor within my own skin? Thanks for reading, thanks for listening, thanks for constituting my tiny self-selected audience. Kind regards to this community then…
M.
