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.)