Social Skills

Social Skills

I always felt like I was missing things, like i had one foot in and one out and not understanding the entire social “dance”. I solved this by seeking out strange people like me so that I didn’t feel so “outside”. It’s getting harder as I get older. People don’t want to make new friends or they are as screwed up by life as I am.

This summer I realized how depressed I really am and for how long, and hiding it or gaslighting myself about it has made me a very reactive, mistrustful, and paranoid person, it’s taken away a bit of openness in me I used to have, it makes it harder than ever to be myself and make what few friends I can. I don’t like this version of myself!

It was as easy to hide from it on the road, distracted by all the sights, successes and challenges of such a long journey. Meetings with new people were brief and fleeting, so it didn’t matter what they thought of me. But being in one place brought out some issues that I can’t get away from. Memories of things I failed at which I wanted so much and the reasons why, people who bullied or shunned me in California and brought up so much childhood pain. Jason’s family’s hatred of me, people who only know me through his brother’s narrative. My own father’s recent rejection of me, the distance I feel between myself and the one person that carried me the most in life. Two old friends dying in far away places.

I felt all those things at once this year surrounded by new people at a new job, again an outsider. I realized how deep my fear of strangers has become. This fear does not serve me.

Tojisha Kenkyu

Deer Isle, Maine, Today, 2022

There’s a method developed by researchers in Japan called “Tojisha Kenkyu” in which an autistic person is to learn themselves through journaling. Like any kind of journaling, the process empowers one to understand more directly their strengths and weaknesses and how to cope with them. I’ve been doing this since 2021, when I was informally diagnosed, and figuring out a lot of funny things. It’s like wandering through caves of my mind with a candle, illuminating places that were always dark before. It’s uplifting but also extremely sad sometimes. I guess it kind of draws you out in a way, which makes sense, considering that the term “Autism” was originally coined from the Greek word “Autos” which means “being inside”, or, as Oxford puts it, “with reference to a condition in which fantasy dominates over reality.”

I would say that the Oxford definition resonates pretty closely with my experience of life. Nothing inside ever matched up with the outside, and most of the time, I like what’s happening in my mind a lot better than anything else. The journaling has definitely helped me to align things a bit more, and to understand myself enough to attempt to fit in more naturally to my surroundings, especially with people. It’s also helped me to make better decisions for myself and calibrate an “inner compass” which relies less on what others want, more on what I do, think, feel. So, here it is.