from fet
Oh
man my RSD is on turbo lately. (That’s Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria
if you aren’t familiar with the acronym.) I learned about this facet of
neurodiversity in later years and it was like “Huh. Ok so that’s been
most of my life. I just thought I had low self esteem.” Which is why I
often feel weirdly haunted by the memory of a therapist who laughed so
hard she almost fell off her chair when I said I had low self esteem.
She said I had the highest self esteem of any client she had worked with
in over 20 years.
Right.
What does self esteem mean then? I don’t think I really understand. I
have aspects of my self-hood that I have confidence in: I can giggle
off aspersions about my intellect because I am ridiculously confident in
my intelligence and I laugh about people implying that no one would
ever fuck me because holy hell is that inaccurate.
But I doubt whether I am actually doing enough good in the world to
justify how many resources are needed to keep me functional. I have a
shitty, high maintenance body. I doubt whether people will really accept
me with all of my fierce outbursts and intensity.
So as a result I really like a lot of folks who are publicly derided as “problematic people”. I prefer
assholes because they will tell me off and compliment me in equal
measure and I can lean in and rest my head on their chest and hear the
authenticity of their love in their level heartbeat.
“What’s Wrong With Krissy” is, after all, one of my most frequent games.
This ties in strongly with why I pursue friendships with folks in the
scene with such intensity. There are an awful lot of assholes around
here. YAY!!!!
Hell, even the people I know who have mostly done the right things in
life and followed all the choices they were expected to make are still
people who get in trouble regularly for being overly direct. I think of
them as assholes with extra class. They will still tell you off but they
will do it in a way that no one is allowed to tell them to stop because
it all just sounds so true and reasonable.
It is harder to find assholes around here (physical here not
fetlife-here; I come to fetlife so much these days because I can smile
and watch assholes). A lot more “taking the piss” and a lot less “I am
going to tell you why every single thing you have done in the last 15
years is wrong. I have citations.” One of my old buddies had to leave
the bay because of health issues. Now the trouble is that they are used
to friendships that are super intense where folks act like mutual
coaches to one another. This is a really common dynamic I have had in
many of my friendships in California as everyone is striving super hard
to learn new skills and hobbies and interests all the damn time.
My buddy is really struggling because no one in small town New Mexico
wants to do that with her. People A) don’t want to spend that much time
together and B) are not interested in that dynamic because they aren’t
relentlessly focused on learning new stuff and C) find it more than a
little creepy that my buddy is so intense.
I feel that in my bones.
I feel overwhelmed almost every single minute that I am with folks
that I need to be trying as absolutely hard as I can to hold back and
not be too intense. My entire selfhood is wrong at full strength and I need to be letting it out 3%-5% at a time or I am a monster.
It is additionally challenging that many of the ways I have
traditionally talked people into having more tolerance for me are
prohibited by agreements I have made. Also: I don’t think they would
work so well at this point.
I am a Problematic Person. What do I do that is problematic? Talk too
much. Not moderate eye contact sufficiently (holy shit this is a whole
thing here and I’ve had immigrants bring it up with me and tell me that I
need to knock it off because they get in trouble for staring too). That
one is really hilarious because I had to be taught to make/keep eye
contact and now I’m in trouble for doing too much of it because PEOPLE
ARE NOT CONSISTENT FROM CULTURE TO CULTURE.
So, when you are instructing that autistic person on how to act to
“not be offensive” what culture are you acclimating them to and how did
you develop the fucking audacity to decide that whichever one you are
enforcing is The Right One? Anyway.
How close am I supposed to stand to someone to look friendly but not
be creepy? How do I manage the fact that my fucking tinnitus is so bad
that half the time I am trying to understand people with about 70% of
the words making it through to my brain? It is why I love to type.
How much follow up when they are not responding is persistent and
appropriate friend making behavior but when do I become a stalker? I
have no fucking social credit here. I have not earned forbearance
because of my long usefulness. I am a difficult outsider with a lot of
demands in order to facilitate my entry.
Yeah… basically I don’t see much reason to assume that dealing with
me is worth peoples time so I minimise how much I interact with people
because I do not want to unfairly drain them. I have been told for years
that it is not ok to give any kind of social or energetic labor with
any expectation of getting anything in return. You need to just give
because you have extra and probably nothing will come back to you and
that needs to be ok. I have to be ok if I never get anything from anyone.
And so I sit at home and I make detailed calendars and lists of tasks
for maintaining my body and whatever shred of mental health I clutch to
and I pray that no one asks me for too much because I am running a
surplus… barely. I am after scraping and working and hoarding and conserving and doing without. And there is this knot of worry in my stomach all the time because I am trying to put small amounts of effort into different places and people because I have to be ok if this person/group does not want to know me in three years.
There will always be people who don’t want to know me. No matter how
much of my personality I saw off. They will see the mistakes I so
profligately make in my haphazard pursuit of new understandings and they
will not know about any of the previous history of doing exactly that
before succeeding at very hard things that many people said I was not
going to be able to do.
I am nobody. I am a stranger. I have no value. I have no perceived social status.
I mean, I did pick this on purpose. I made the conscious choice to
pick up and move very far away to be a small fish in a small pond
because I did not enjoy being a small fish in the great big ocean. They
were going to eat me.
I chose to move very far away to a place where I have exactly one
embedded social contact and her world has been fairly limited in her
time here. I have to try and find a new place in the community. I have
to find a way to have people see me as worthy of their time and effort
and accommodation because you would have to fucking lobotomize me to
make me easy to be around.
So mostly I just don’t go. (I am loving the fuck out of the fact that
someone ranted about starting sentences with “so” and I absolutely know
I am doing it extra right now just to be EXTRA.) I am a problematic
person. I am an asshole. I am high effort and what I have to give is
very small so it isn’t worth much. Which ends in feeling like I
am not worth very much. Then I talk to people less and less. I hide and
stay home and keep myself busy trying to add to any surplus of energy I
might have so maybe I can have more to give and be less of a waste.
That cycle rarely goes well. It doesn’t work. The ball of tension in
my stomach eats away at the surplus making it smaller and smaller until I
make myself sick and then spoon deficit is days away.
So yeah. If you are ever wondering if I dislike you and that is why I
don’t initiate more conversations… probably not. I’m too busy
contorting myself into awkward positions around the pain in my belly to
notice enough to dislike. When I dislike someone it is pretty dramatic.
You won’t wonder. It’ll be public. It is part and parcel of a
thing that has been repeated at me for almost 30 years now in a wide
variety of settings: “You know it wouldn’t kill you to try to be
friendly with (person I dislike). “But it might. Best not to try it.”
Mostly I don’t bother to dislike people that much. I have conflicting
feelings about people. Sometimes I detect signs of patterns that freak
me out but it’s usually combined with other random positive traits and I
have no idea if my gut feelings are real or if I’m just a dick. In that
case I will be consistent in public and private. I will tell you how I
feel about you. Often even when you don’t want to know.
Yup. A problematic person. Hard to know. I know how many thousands
of hours I put into my extended community in California. In the next 20
years of my life I will not be able to come close to matching any of
the similar time spans in California. I’m older. I don’t have a job. I
don’t go to school. The social community up here is very different and
my ability to access what exists is almost nil. I don’t drive
here and I drove all the forking time in California maintaining a
network of relationship that spanned thousands of miles on a regular
basis. Now I very seldom get more than 5 miles from my house. I don’t go
farther than 5 miles from my house in every month. I had very few days
in California where I didn’t go farther than 10 miles from my house
throughout my entire 38 years living there. We were car people. That’s
life.
I can’t anymore. My thumbs are jacked. I can’t grip a steering wheel
without overwhelmingly agonising pain. I swear I am not just a pussy. I
can’t do it. I know people are surprised that I can do all of the other
things I do with my hands, but I have no more connective tissue left at
the base of one thumb and very little left in the other hand. It’s bone
on bone. Gripping things in different ways doesn’t use my thumb and the
rest of my hand is fine. When I say I can carry something I’m not
usually doing so at risk of strain to my existing problems. I am strong
in many ways. But I can’t drive. I can’t create a wider social community
by visiting people. The train takes a whole day. It’s hard to take
whole days away on a regular basis. That is not how my life is shaped.
So I am putting drips and drabs and tiny bits of effort towards
trying to exist in the wider water network around me but mostly I am in
my tiny pond swimming around. The little tributaries that occasionally
erupt that might allow me to move around are a little scary.
Being problematic is a complicated thing. Why don’t people just act
right. Why can’t you just give more. Why can’t you just complain less.
Why can’t you just need less. Why can’t you act happier.
Because because because….. because of the wonderful things I does.
(Leave it alone. I did it on purpose. Don’t point it out. Requiring verb
agreement in order to “understand” is elitist. Don’t be a brat.)
It’s all about rhetorical effect, isn’t it? There are times and
places to insist on really precise language and phrasing. It’s taught
when you go to school for that thing. I mean, I did teach English
grammar as an English teacher. I was also correcting the other more
senior teachers on staff because apparently I actually learned what was
drilled into my head at university and when I am writing an MLA standard
paper I will trot that shit right out.
This is not a space governed by the MLA. I am looking to communicate.
I am looking to communicate with the kind of people who like and
appreciate who and what I am and my native language is typing. It is the
only one that taps into what I am really thinking and feeling and I
have never found a way that works in anything like an equivalent manner
with my voice. I feel stupid all the fucking time because I just cannot word.
I am trying to analyse all the time whether or not I am doing something
“right” for the setting I am in and I feel like I am going to
hyperventilate because of course I am fucking wrong and that’s why
people don’t like me and fuck.
Why did I even leave the fucking house.
Because that little do-si-do around the fucking topic of grammar is
exactly the kind of tiny little thing I feel in my head all day long.
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE FUCKING CONFORMING TO SOME STUPID BULLSHIT RULE
THAT I HAVE NEVER FUCKING HEARD OF NOW.
WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE FULL STOPS WITH THAT………???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Phew. I think I have been having some feelings. As stupid and
immature as it sounds I feel strangely better. I didn’t go start a
stupid argument and dump my feelings on someone. I did stand in my
sandbox and I had a stupid feeling. I’m not hurting anyone.
This stupid calculus is involved in everything I say and do all day
long. With my kids. With my spouse. With my neighbors. With people in
the scene. With people on fetlife. With my actual blog I write with a
slightly different “ideal listener” focus in my mind… it’s hard to
explain. Well, not really. On my blog everyone is expected to know what
Noah knows and here I don’t do that. Writing there is joining the stream
full force and I have been feeling incredibly unconfident about doing
that for a while. It’s a much larger thing to walk that deep into my
brain.
Here I do try to keep the word count down. I swear to cheese. I try
to pick a topic. I try to bring it full circle and actually find a
little closure with it. It’s an essay, kinda, not just me thinking and
planning and existing into the ether the way I do in my longer form
writing.
The point of this essay was to demonstrate a fairly small fraction of
just how much can go into being a problematic person. Maybe 5% landed
here? So much censoring and picking careful examples that won’t repel
the target audience by maybe sounding too close to home and thus like a
preconceived dislike thus they should avoid me.
My personal ad was something like 15 pages long and I didn’t respond
unless it was fucking clear you read the whole thing. I think my
standards are getting more reasonable with time…