ouvert - fermer
how amazing it is to be able to open up to someone who wants to know everything that goes on inside your head.
but the reality of my life, that was usually not the case.
being on the spectrum, i have a hard time knowing who is on my team, so to speak. i have made countless of errors due to not being able to understand certain social nuances and gestures. are they really a friend, or they're just looking for something to gossip about behind my back? or getting close to me just to get something transactional out of our friendship? or worse someone to kill time with when their boredom strikes?
my answer: yes to all of the above.
i remembered clearly back in high school i was told straight to my face that i was not a part of their friend group. i thought i was when they needed help with tech stuff or the latest cool computer games; i was wrong.
i was so young and naive, even up to my middle 30's; that these similar types of behavior presented to me in quite a number of occurrences, leading me to believe that i am actually the problematic one. of course, what followed after was a series of self-reflection and me being angry at myself for being such a nerd (or an awkward dork).
thus opening up to friends was hard. close romantic relationship was even harder. oftentimes, i tried opening up to someone whom i thought i can trust, but in the end, i was wrong. one time, i tried opening up about my autism to a former colleague that i thought was a really cool guy, boy i made a huge mistake. he kept repeating i'm not autistic (even though i explained to him that autism is a spectrum), reiterating that he knows how autism looks like while mimicking disabled people with his facial expression and his hand gestures (no, autism and cerebral palsy are two different things). i wanted so much to throw a punch to his face but i can't so i had two bottles of guinness stout instead.
apparently i can't be autistic because i'm a disc jockey and creme de la creme of our capital's nightlife and i know a lot of people (are they my friends though?) and i know how to socialize. the last time i check, being social is just another skill i can learn, like any other skill.
with time, i learn how to enforce boundaries, and i'm glad the ones that's close to me are doing the same thing too. i accept it if they don't have the capacity to understand my predicaments and everything that's going on inside my head because everybody has problems and i know i'm not the easiest person to be friends with.
how i wish it was easy. all of it. friendship. relationship. every fucking thing.
le sigh.
"and that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. they think everyone else does too" -- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner