I’m going to start with a dream I had last night, but it’s not going to be a Dream Post. In fact, I’m going to start with the end of the dream.
I was talking to someone that I’d been hanging out with. I was sitting on the concrete curb by a road, and he was standing facing me. There was something else going on, and I didn’t feel like I had his full attention, but I spoke anyway.
What follows is roughly what I said, with some stuff that I added later as I was waking up and later still as I was organizing it:
“All these years, I’ve been asking the wrong question. It isn’t, ‘Why doesn’t anybody like me?’ People like me just fine. I mean, most people like most people just fine. People hate very few people. It’s not that people don’t like me. It’s that I’m work. I’m challenging. I don’t like small talk very much. When I was a kid, I didn’t get pegged as Autistic because my special interests weren’t things I would go on and on about.
“Math, that’s not the sort of thing people see as a special interest. Star Trek, I was shamed into not sharing. And when I was too ashamed to say I wanted to go see The Motion Picture, that was the end of that anyway: I couldn’t be a completionist, and I needed to be a completionist, so I gave up on that as a special interest. I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever even seen that movie, I don’t remember. But now I’m so far behind on the Star Trek universe that I can’t ever catch up.
“But that aside, I’m not the life of the party, especially with strangers. I’m guarded around strangers because I need to constantly measure how much they’re going to judge me. So I judge them. That’s all about the RSD, the fear of rejection. If I sit silently, I don’t register to them as someone to get to know better; if I talk, I obsess about how every word I say has been evaluated. Every apparent rejection, no matter how minor, no matter how slight, I interpret as a negative evaluation.
“And so I sit quietly and then I get forgotten. I’m not good at parties. I get overwhelmed with my own thoughts, and then I don’t get invited back. So that first question, why don’t people like me, has a false presupposition: That people don’t like me. I’ve been trained to think that people show that they like someone in a specific way, that they invite them to parties, that they have small talk conversations with them in text, and I’m not so great at that. It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I don’t really like it. It’s draining to me. I feel like there’s a dishonesty to asking questions I’m not particularly interested in, and the questions I do want to ask are deeper than most people want to get into in first conversations. If you can’t get past first conversations, you can’t make deeper connections.”
This weekend, I attended a sweat lodge. It was my second sweat, and the first run by an indigenous group. At the beginning of the sweat, before we entered, we were separated by gender. My brother had already said I (specifically, as nonbinary) could sit with whichever group I wanted to, so I chose to sit with the women.
I was worried that someone would at least address me and remind me that I was on the wrong side. And I felt awkward because I’d removed my shirt, which meant that I was the only one on that side that didn’t have a shirt on. But once inside the sweat, it didn’t matter much because most of it was in total darkness. And at any rate nobody said anything at all to me about my choice.
During the sweat, I didn’t think much about it. A little bit, yes, sure. I thought about safe spaces and what keeps me from just identifying as a woman. Because, overall, more often than not, I feel like a woman inside, whatever that even means.
It doesn’t mean an urge to change my body. I’ve convinced myself that my woman self is too different from my male body to make physical transition helpful, but that’s a rationalization. The closer reality is that I don’t personally feel like I should need to modify my body to match my feeling.
But then, what do we have? A woman that looks like a man? What even is the point, then? Why can’t I just be a “feminine man” and leave it at that? What difference does it make?
In Sacred Energy spaces, it makes a huge difference. I’m not comfortable around men. Male energy feels suffocating, aggressive, to me. But my awareness of this makes me then turn it around: How do the women around me feel? Am I bringing in some of that darkness, even if it’s just carried on my skeleton in ways I don’t mean to?
Women who don’t know me have no reason not to fear me, not to suspect that I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing… heck, I look like a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Am I selfishly putting my desire, my need to be in a woman’s space above their need to be free of my cloud of testosterone?
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Some of the most dangerous men are the ones who pretend to be safe. One of the rapists I knew made a habit of being the Soft Cuddly Pagan Man, and then, oops, before the woman even really knew what had happened, they’d had sex she hadn’t wanted to have. Gaslighting ensued: It wasn’t rape, it was miscommunication. Post-coital regret. The sex had happened, no denial: But the claim was that consent had also happened.
So I do think that women (both cis and trans) have a valid concern about men entering women’s spaces. And some of those men will falsely claim to be women in order to gain entrance. For me, the debate is not over whether this happens (it does), but rather about how much that valid anxiety should outweigh the emotional needs of women in male bodies, regardless of how much they’ve modified those bodies.
If none of that were a concern, if cisgender politics were not a major problem, if predatory men were not willing to freely engage in deception, if many cisgender women weren’t so traumatized by sexual violence that the mere presence of a male body can be triggering for them… I would freely identify as a woman.
Those are really big ifs to carry around, though.
After the sweat, there was a feast. My RSD washed over me again. There were new people to interact with; most of the people were new, and my brother (who had invited me) had already ingratiated himself with these strangers. As usual, I didn’t know how to speak to them, and the few things I did say were instantly filed away as having been The Wrong Thing to Say.
In all, I remember speaking to six people. To all of them, I said the wrong thing, because that’s how my mind works. Everything I say to new people is processed, mangled, muddied about, and overanalyzed.
This is so heavy. This is so exhausting.
This is easily my worst disability, this RSD. It is the core of my sadness. It is built into my mask so deeply that it’s hard to tell where its Tholian web stops and the rest of my mask starts.
It keeps me from talking. It keeps me from writing. It tells me what to wear to keep a low profile, and yells at me when I stand out too much. It reminds me of when I say wrong things, even if they’re not actually wrong things.
Autism itself I can manage. For a while, I identified as being Highly Sensitive, which I’ve come to accept in myself as Training Wheels Autism for people with low support needs: A way of celebrating the differences without accepting the stigma that goes with the label.
Sensory Processing Disorder? A major nuisance, but something that could be manageable if I didn’t have to worry about the mockery and anxiety that others have when they learn about it. I either tell people about it and then get judged, or I sit in silent misery (silent myself, misery from the lack of silence of others).
Stimming? Fine. No problem, except I have to worry about other people noticing and commenting.
OCD? Manageable. Special interests? Manageable, even fun. Meltdowns? Problematic, certainly, but made even more so by the reinforcement loop created by RSD.
Oh, that RSD. And people, even other Autists, say, “You just have to learn to not care what other people think.”
That’s fine. That’s your Autism. Maybe it wasn’t that difficult for you, or maybe it was but you overcame it. It’s an albatross for me, informing every choice I make. It’s concrete around my ankles.
And I’m working on it. I’m working to assert myself and damn the fear of consequences that never come anyway. But it isn’t easy.
This isn’t the same as Imposter Syndrome. It’s a hybrid seed from a related graft. I have a fairly clear sense of who I am, I’m just afraid to say it out loud because I don’t want other people to mock me or judge me or suspect that I’m lying for nefarious purposes of some sort.
RSD is even what got in the way of therapy: Too often, I would avoid telling the therapist the truth for fear of judgment, and I would pretend to be being helped so thta they wouldn’t end the therapy. I think if I could unravel the RSD, learn ways to work with it and around it effectively, that would go a long way to being my authentic self.
I have no grand concluding remarks at the moment. I’m basically tired of writing for now, so I’ll stop here.