Oops! I Breathed in the Wrong Direction!

When I was a kid, I experienced far fewer social conflicts online than in real life. That's because real life involves the social nuances of body language and voice tone. Today, my social conflicts are almost exclusively online. Usually, it pans out like this: I meet somebody through Facebook or reunite with somebody I haven't seen since childhood. We chat online once in a while. Sometimes, that person will even say, "I really like talking to you."  Next thing I know, the person has unfriended me or even blocked me. Usually, I just let it go, depending on who that person is and whether or not I had any real past with them, online or off, even if just for one summer at camp (I'm sentimental and nostalgic to a fault). Sometimes, however, I do ask for an explanation (if there is a way to contact that person) and I might even get one if I'm lucky. 

The top reason people have unfriended/blocked me is because I'm an atheist. I don't even have to ask to find out that this is the reason. Once, I was chatting online with someone I met through a mutual acquaintance who died. She wished me a Happy Easter. I told her I was Jewish, a Jewish atheist, to be exact. She asked me what that meant. I told her that I don't believe in God but I still value the Jewish culture in which I grew up. BAM! I was blocked. Other people have unfriended/blocked me because... gasp... I tagged them in photos. That's right, I tagged them in photos in which they are fifteen years old and not professional looking. When I contact them and ask them why, they say things like, "I'm not comfortable with being tagged." Well, gee, how about simply telling me that and NOT unfriending me? 

Probably the must hurtful of these situations happened about four years ago when I reunited with an old friend from camp online. We hit it off immediately and I developed a crush on him. I didn't tell him, of course, but he figured it out. He stopped answering my emails. He blocked me. A few months later, he unblocked me and accepted my friend request... but would not talk to me. He eventually blocked me again. For a whole year I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what the hell was going on. 

Just as hurtful (albeit for different reasons), my best friend from childhood, who I knew since 1992, stopped talking to me in 2008. I packed up and moved to NYC from my hometown in Pennsylvania in 1999, but we still saw each other about once a year. I knew she was going to get married in '08, and she definitely made it clear that I was going to be there. This was in 2007, the last time we spoke. 2008 came and went without an invitation. She rejected my friend request on MySpace. She no longer returned calls or answered emails. To this day I have no idea what happened. I even sent her an email asking her nicely why she did not invite me to the wedding or even talk to me anymore. I made it clear that I was hurt. No response. I still don't know what her rationale was for shutting me out, but I do know that it is not my fault. 

When these things happen, and inevitably hurt, I always hear, "Let it go." Sure. "Let it go." So I guess I should just say to myself, "Oh, fiddlesticks. I breathed in the wrong direction and some ultra sensitive person is shutting me out without explanation. I'll just let it go and make sure not to breathe in the wrong direction next time." I would suspect that this online drama is not unique to those with Asperger's Syndrome, but perhaps it bothers us more because we do not take friendship for granted. Perhaps, too, many are sentimental to a fault, as I am. In any case, I want to tell anybody who's reading this to be more sensitive to the person on the other side during this online nonsense. "Ignoring," is not communication, and "blocking," is little different than saying, "F--- you." Both say, "You are nothing to me." In online communication, you rarely know what happens at the other end, so this is not a case of missing body language or other cues. This is simply being kept in the dark. 

I am sure I speak for a lot of people-- with and without Asperger's Syndrome-- when I say that it is frustrating and irritating. It's like an online meme that I saw the other day: "I'm sorry that I did something that made YOU feel that I have to apologize."

No, I DON'T Regret It

Whoa! It's been four months since my last post. Sorry about that!

Everybody has regrets. I have regrets, too, most of them involving me not standing up for myself because I had reluctantly accepted that I was in the wrong concerning whatever social disaster I found myself in. However, that is not to say that there weren't times in my childhood/early adulthood when I DID stand up for myself and stick to my principles. In fact, I have a perfect example of when I stuck by my principles, to the befuddlement of a particular family member:
Like many girls with Asperger's Syndrome, I was (and AM) a tomboy. This means much more than the stereotypical, "Oh, she plays with trucks and likes sports. She's a tomboy." I always felt like I had a male brain in some ways (this feeling, too, is a common phenomenon among girls with AS). It was only natural, then, that I strongly disliked feminine clothing. I did not ask for clothes in the boys' section, but I did pick out clothes that one would consider gender neutral. When I was in middle school, my parents told me over and over that the bullying I experienced would stop and I would make friends if only I dressed differently. While my parents didn't force me to wear what I call "boob-neckline" shirts, they did bring up my clothing taste whenever I got into a conflict with somebody, be it a simple disagreement or outright bullying. 

No matter what my parents said (and it was painful and constantly resulted in my spending several hours on the phone with my feminist cousin), I stuck to my guns and wore what felt natural and comfortable on me. I refused to put on a costume. Today my parents realize they were wrong to try to force me into girly clothes, but I have talked to a particular family member who continues to be perplexed at my stubbornness (I call it strength!). As an example of a regret he feels about not taking his parents' advice, he talks about how his parents tried to get him to play a musical instrument. He didn't stick with musical lessons and his parents didn't try to make him. He regrets that they did not force him to. This is a classic case of apples and oranges. One involves trying to get their kid a hobby, and another is trying to get the kid to present themselves as something they're not, to lie to themselves and the world.

It is also important to realize that actions that are good for one kid are not good for another. Forcing me into music would have been not only a bad idea but also a pointless one as I developed several hobbies on my own without anybody's prodding. I was drawing and writing from a very early age, and in adolescence I grew interested in languages; I taught myself French I during the last three weeks of 9th grade so I could get into French II the following year. Forcing my relative to take music lessons might have been a good idea because he did not pursue hobbies as readily, let alone as intensely, as I.

Likewise, forcing someone, who feels she has a more masculine brain, to dress girly can be psychologically damaging. Why would that girl want to please the kids who bully her? That's answering to the bullies and affirming their behavior. Also, why would she even want people like that as friends? And no, this is not me as an adult critically dissecting it; I analyzed it intensely by the time I  was fourteen or fifteen. Prior to that, probably by the time I was about ten, I saw the blatant hypocrisy in the way adults would tell kids, "Just be yourself," when there were clearly hundreds of pages of fine print attached to that philosophy. Now, if there is a girl with Asperger's Syndrome who is feminine inside and wants to learn to dress like the other girls, then steering her in that direction is a good idea. 

So what did I tell my relative? No, I don't regret sticking by my principles. Why should I regret being true to myself and not blindly taking advice that hurt? I don't regret it, not in the slightest.

For the record, the bullying stopped when I finally had the guts to stand up to the bullies. 

I'm Honest and Your Baby is Ugly

Lately on Facebook I have seen babies, babies, babies, and more babies. As far as I'm concerned-- and at the risk of, perhaps, alienating half my audience-- newborn babies generally look the same and look ugly (And no, I was not exempt from this rule as an infant). Inevitably, when somebody posts a million pictures of his/her newborn on Facebook, a flurry of "He's so cute," or "She's perfect!" dominates the comments sections of these pictures. I seriously wonder how many people genuinely are honest when they post these comments. Maybe a few, maybe even most, but not all. In fact, it's largely a social grace, a lie-- and presumably the new parents know that they're merely hearing a social grace rather than an honest opinion-- and perhaps a form of reciprocal altruism that is prevalent in social species.


Don't let the title of the blog entry fool you-- I'm not going to write, "Your baby is ugly" when I see pictures of babies posted on Facebook. But I'm not going to tell a boldfaced lie and say that s/he's "perfect" or "cute." If I want to be supportive, I'll say things that I really mean, such as, "I know you'll be a good mom/dad." 


Quite frankly, routine social graces feel phony to me, and I hate small talk. Dr. Jack Kevorkian once commented that he disliked small talk and also said that he hated how people routinely lie to each other in ways that I just described; these complaints are common among people with Asperger's syndrome which is one of many reasons why I think Dr. Kevorkian had AS. Call me cold, but when I go to work and bump into someone I barely know, I don't care how they are. No, that doesn't  mean I wish them ill, but I am really ambivalent to how they're doing, and I think if people were more honest with themselves they would agree. If somebody I barely know asks me how I am, I say, "Hey, what's going on?" That more casual greeting feels less phony to me than, "How are you?" At a job interview, I do say, "How are you?" because, unfortunately, successful job interviews are laced with phoniness. 


Is it cold for me to say that I am ambivalent that a casual acquaintance's mother is in the hospital? Here, I do conform to this social grace by saying, "Is she going to be okay?" because it is a profound situation, but I forget about it two seconds later. Does that sound insensitive?


It occurred to me recently that if I managed to do something to change the world for the better, ultimately my happiness about this would be in sheer pride more than, "I'm glad that other people are doing better," or "I'm glad that they are suffering less." Although I would be glad about these things, ultimately it would be a real boost for my ego. What about that? Does that sound selfish? I'm reminded of another Dr. Kevorkian moment. In 1998, when Dr. Kevorkian was on 60 Minutes after he injected one of his patients directly, he told the host, Mike Wallace, "I'm fighting for me, Mike. Me. This is a right I want. I'm 71... I'll be 71. You don't know what'll happen when you get older. I may end up terribly suffering. I want some colleague to be free to come help me [to die] when I say the time has come. That's why I'm fighting, for me. Now that sounds selfish. And if it helps everybody else, so be it." Mike Wallace, and many other interviewers, also said that when they talked to Kevorkian privately, they found him to be a very compassionate man. So why would he say something brazen like that if he didn't care about his patients? Obviously I can't get inside his mind, but I think in those four sentences he summed up what I'm saying here-- You may care about other people, but in the end you're the person you care about the most. He cared about his patients, but ultimately he wanted the right to die for himself. I think he was just more honest about his motives than most people in his situation would be.


Reciprocal altruism is, I think, why we pretend to be incredibly upset that the mother of somebody who we barely know is in the hospital or that we think somebody's ugly baby is cute. Yes, caring about the person, even to a minimal extent (depending on your relationship with them) may be part of it, but in the end it's about you. If you pretend to be more upset than you are about an acquaintance's mother being in the hospital, that person will like you better and be more likely to help you if you need it. Same thing if you pretend to think somebody's ugly baby is cute. 


And how many of you who cry at funerals really do it because you feel badly for the person rather than that you simply miss them? I think if people were more honest they would admit that they cry at funerals for themselves, not for the deceased. 


I think people with Asperger's are just more honest about their motives and how they really feel and are more aware of it because these social graces were not something that they acquired unconsciously but something that had to be taught to them.


There is no such thing as true altruism.