I get a glimpse of other people sometimes

On rare occasions, I get it into my head that the people in my life have personalities. Then I step back and ask myself why this comes with the clarity of an insight. As if the idea had been foreign to me before. I don't think it is, at an emotional or interpersonal level at least. I don't think I treat people like zombies, or robots or things... I do worry about it some time, but I think they would react differently to me if I did. In fact, from the reactions I get, I seem to do a fairly good job at recognizing the personhood of other people.

Internally, though, there is a feeling of remoteness. Or maybe too much proximity. I interact with people on a now-to-now basis, I respond to their words, and their emotions – when their emotions don't overwhelm me. But I can easily get caught up in the immediacy of it. I respond to one particular facet of a person, and lose sight of all the other facets, lose sight of the whole. Like when I have a heated debate about politics with a friend, I forget, at least consciously, that he's also a fan of beautiful sunsets.

When I suddenly come to think of one of those other facets, that's when I get the clarity of an insight, and the sense that there's something I usually miss. And the sense of remoteness, isolation, existentially so.

There are arrows to be drawn between this analysis and autism, not surprisingly, as knowledge of autism is the clue I use to unravel it. Autism means a more fragmented processing of information, a more immediate experience of the world, a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. That's probably behind some of the seeming contradictions in my life (and from what I gather, many other autistic people experience similar things), like: How some of my senses can be simultaneously hypersensitive and numb. How I can be very strongly affected by other people's emotions, and at the same time have problems with empathy. How I'm good at seeing personhood in people, but at the same time lose sight of their personality. How I can be so open about myself, and still feel so profoundly remote.

Come to think of it, it's really not contradictory at all, the relation between sensitivity and numbness. When you try to look into a too bright light, the reflective response is to close your eyes.

I've spent the last couple of years changing, and the last five or six months even more. It's been a growth in emotional and interpersonal skills, an increase in maturity, a somewhat increase in my tolerance for intimacy. I am becoming more used to both people and sensory impressions. One measurable result comes when I'm writing fiction: I'm getting a grip on the personality of my characters, where before they were more like blurs. A similar thing is probably happening with the characters in my own life.

At the same time, I'm becoming more aware of things I'm missing (meaning both "overlooking the presence of" and "regretting the absence of"). I begin to warm up to the idea of intimacy, and I feel strongly that I'm not quite there yet. Insights of empathy followed by strong feelings of isolation are likely to occur more often in the coming months.

(The poetry challenge, by the way, appears to be abandoned for now. I'm quite satisfied with what I got out of it.)

Poem 20

I once knew a girl

she was older than me

counting back, I suppose she was nine

She was a bit of a crush

if not really my first

I was easily charmed at the time

She liked somebody else

but then he turned her down

so to make her feel better, I said

"Well, I like you at least!"

She turned sharply on me

and my face may have turned a bit red

The contempt in her eyes

has stayed with me for years

I see now that my timing was off

but for years I took care

not to tell anyone

never told anyone
that I liked them that way

Seeing such a look once was enough.

Hirundo tries to understand sex

Let me interrupt this slowed down stream of poetry for a bit to talk about my relationship with sex. It might contain a little too much information for some people's taste… possibly including my own. It won't be very explicit, but I will move into some private parts of, well my mind. Not the other private parts. But anyway, more poetry will be coming up shortly.

My relationship with sex is that I like it a lot. I like it physically, but I also have an aesthetic interest in it – I like it as a thing to watch, to share, and as a craft to practice, the thought of giving shape to someone's pleasure. I also like it as a cultural and artistic theme, so-called high culture or so-called low. I like other people's interest in it. I'm curious about it. I would… also really like to do it again someday…

To be clear, I have done it before. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, I was more or less sexually active. That is, I was in a few relationships, and had a few affairs, and sex took place. Still I did have a hard time finding romantic and/or sexual partners. It was almost impossible to express any interest, I just kept chewing at the words. I wished very badly that someone else would take the initiative, sit me down for a talk, or pick me up in a bar, but on the occasions when they did, I didn't handle it very well.

I was once asked by a woman at an event if I wanted to go home with her, for example, and was so surprised by the question that I answered no and ran away. Then I spent the next five years regretting it, which in itself indicates a not so healthy view of things.

I had always been embarrassed about my feelings around sex. Liking it. Being curious about it. Wanting it. I didn't even want to show myself that I wanted it. My sexual fantasies were almost always about a placeholder with a penis rather than about me, and that placeholder didn't get to make any active moves. He was just happily swept away by events. My erotic writings never really worked, because I couldn't get into the characters' motivations.

I wouldn't allow myself to imagine that a person I identified with could desire or be desired by someone sexually. It didn’t quite fit together with how I saw the rest of myself. I couldn't quite accept that this confused but sometimes charming mind also carried a body along with it. It was as if other people would find it distasteful if they knew, distasteful or even disgusting.

There's that word again, disgust… what I used in the post about being mentally undressed, about people finding out who I really am... It was as if wanting anything, at all, from the world was too much of an imposition on it. And disgust is obviously a keyword that I will be exploring in a future post.

After November, 2006, my period of other-person sexual activity has come to a complete stop. That's when my last act of physical intimacy took place. A lot of just-in-case condoms have met their expiry date since then.

For a long time, I more or less resigned to this. It seemed to be just one more of those things I didn't understand about my life. One of those areas where there was a large missing gap between the things I wanted and the things that occured. I wanted something to happen; it just didn't. It might even be for the best, as the way I handled whatever intimacy that did occur, as mentioned, was not all that healthy anyway.

How to find partners was just one those missing gaps. One among many. One of the most complicated. In 2006 I was just becoming aware of them, and I had started to work on some of them.  It was the beginning of that very protracted turning point in my life that I'm still not quite done with…

Slowly, as I realized I couldn’t become a therapist, went into therapy myself, began to take my writing more seriously, a mental list emerged, of things I wanted to improve in my life. Because finding partners would require a whole lot of more basic, social skills, I put it at the very bottom of the list. Something I would possibly dare to consider at some eventual point in the future. Hypothetically, of course.

When I did get to that point on my list – only a few years ago, I did it through introspective writing. I wrote about all of it on my Norwegian blog, as a sort of extreme exposure therapy. Then I posted a link on Twitter, and felt as if I had told the whole world that I was some sort of slobbering gnarly creature of want. The world didn't see it that way, of course.

The next spring I got braver, went deeper into my fears, frustrations, and longings, trying to figure out things like: What kind of sex did I want? What kind of people was I attracted to? Now fear of showing sexual agency had been tuned down, what were the other missing steps that stood between me and some occasional sex? My embarrassment now became a guide. When stuff became hard to write about, it meant I was onto something extra important.

It meant I was on the trace of a subject that was unclear to me. Things being unclear to me is actually a topic for a future post, the way something can be impossible to grasp, until I suddenly get some insight or other, and then everything becomes obvious and I realize how clear it should have been all along. Like, I keep wondering why no one ever picks me up at bars, and then I realize it's because I never actually go to bars. This is the center of those missing gaps between my intentions and my actions; behaviors I can't begin to change because I don't know that they are there.

Since then, I have been working on and off with things. Sometimes I would have to take breaks because I became overwhelmed by it all. Sometimes I would just lose interest. My libido can vary a lot in strength. I have worked mainly with thinking and writing, writing publically, gotten some good suggestions along the way. And I have figured out that it is not only about sex after all. While sex is there as a long time goal, the social and interpersonal and emotional skills I've had to learn have been good to me in a whole lot of ways. I have been rather immature for the most of my life in all these areas; I have the feeling these days that I am catching up, very fast.

There hasn't been any actual, physical sex with someone else. But as you can deduce from the wording of that statement, there have been a couple non-physical exchanges, some hot IM-ing on dating sites that were nice even if it didn't lead to anything more. This spring, I went out on a date, that also didn't lead to anything more. My erotic writing has improved, as I'm able to understand both agency and desire now. And I do have fairly satisfactory sex with myself. Besides being nice, it makes me need a partner less, and that will make things easier when I do eventually find one.

Thinking out loud on my Norwegian blog, and later at certain discussion forums, has been a large part of the development over the last couple of years… and my frustrations with sex and intimacy has been a large part of the introspective writing voice I have developed. It's something I am likely to write more about, and this post has been posted as an introduction to that, as well as an overview of where I stand today.

Poem 19

The dishwater of language

grows stale from disuse

and overuse, but only overuse

adds smell

those words still stuck

at the edges of books consumed

dislodge, then dissolve themselves

let the drain take them!