Alone Again, Naturally
I’ve taken the title from the great Gilbert O’Sullivan song of the same name. Gilbert was a favourite singer from yesteryear. I remember hearing him a lot in my early days at junior school. He struck a chord all those years ago, in 1972.
I recently issued some initial reflections on my recent diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I held back more considered writings to polish and publish at a later date. As a first response, I wanted something that had the rawness and reality of immediacy. The worst part lies in continually reaching out to people, only to meet with the usual miscommunication and disconnection, reconciling yourself to the realisation that you are indeed on your own, having to please yourself as best you can in the cruel isolation that comes with living in a world of your own. Better that than having to suffer the presence of insufferable others.
The piece is entitled Chaotic Thoughts in Exploration of the Strange Beauty of the Inner Landscape. I really should have written Autistic Landscape there, but wimped out with the more neutral term ‘inner,’ in yet another attempt to reach out to uncomprehending others. The work is a collection of observations and seemingly random thoughts, very much as written rather than polished and considered. I wanted something that contained the honesty and rawness, as well as the raggedness, of initial response. I have better writing on this to come. But this is a work without a mask and without a side, plain and unadorned, albeit without expressions of anger, rage, and frustration which the society of uncomprehending others has more than earned. For now, I felt it polite to keep it restrained.
In that work, I cite a quote from Tim Page, for the very reason it resonated so deeply with my own personal experience. It is so unusual to find people who are in some way attuned to your wavelength, so you seize on the merest hints of a shared experience and, even, understanding. Life is spent at cross-purposes with most others. You never really get used to it. You just have to suffer it as best you can or, if you can or dare, just switch it off. It is better to be alone with yourself than alone with others.
In a letter to the New York Times, Tim Page writes:
“‘Social disability’ does not begin to sum up my lifelong history of insomnia anxiety, depression, cluelessness, and isolation … Nor, in all modesty, does it address the singleminded, fiercely exclusive energy I can bring to a project that has captured my attention, the immersion in an otherworldly ecstasy that music, writing and film provide, and the very occasional but no less profound joy in my own strangeness.’
Tim Page, New York Times, Letter, Feb 1, 2012
I don’t know the work of Tim Page, and I don’t know how deep his condition goes. I do know that he has been far more socially, professionally, and financially successful than I have ever been. Tim Page is a professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California. I struggled so much in confrontation with a room of talking heads that I struggled to even deliver a presentation on a course. I found that the mere ten minutes it took to deliver a micro-teaching lesson to earn my ‘Preparing to Teach’ certificate was too difficult and too exhausting. I was overwhelmed by the sight of what I considered to be endless rows of people, I stopped hearing the voices and just let the class get on with the exercise I had set them as best they could. I turned my back on the class and went looking at my computer screen instead. There was never remotely a possibility that I could have been a teacher at any level, let alone a professor. In his letter, Page concedes that he is ‘high functioning’ and ‘not necessarily typical.’ So I am going to guess that Tim Page is afflicted in a much milder sense than I am. But even he testifies to the life lived at extremes which is the normal state of this condition. That said, the term ‘high functioning’ can tend to discount or dismiss a person’s struggles and needs whilst the term ‘low-functioning’ can tend to discount or dismiss a person’s strengths and capabilities (Tom Iland, The Fallacy of High and Low Functioning Autism). With respect to the former, a person’s deficits can tend to be ignored, with respect to the latter a person’s assets can tend to be ignored.
I have no idea how Tim Page’s ‘functioning’ compares with mine. He seems far more socially successful than I have ever been. I do know that I would have no trouble in re-writing this passage to sum up my own life history, with only a little alteration to account for my own personal details. I have lived a life at a remove from people and society, suffering miscommunication and disconnection along the way. And chronic underemployment, too, which not only imposes a severe psychological strain through the waste of surplus talents and energies but imposes severe financial penalties. I have been massively underpaid for a life of constant striving, training, and working.
It has been a life of such cruel isolation that terms such as insomnia, anxiety, and depression don’t come remotely close to describing the experience. They are much too familiar, too commonplace, and too ordinary to encapsulate the feeling of always being outside of social life and alien to others. They are terms anyone can use, and do. I say little or nothing on this in a public arena that involves social exchanges. I learned immediately that to offer a view here is to invite the kind of sympathy that merely reinforces one’s sense of isolation. In making my first statement I was met with people who felt they were being supportive by claiming that they, too, were ‘different’ and that ‘we are all on the spectrum.’ To tell an Autistic person that ‘we are all a little bit autistic’ is the same as telling a person who suffers with depression that we all get a little bit depressed from time to time. It is not acceptable, merely a continuation of the incomprehension of others that Autistic people have to suffer on a daily basis. Tim Page uses the word ‘cluelessness’ to describe his condition. I will admit to having been clueless in many areas of life and at many times. But that term, too, doesn’t quite do it for me. In being so clueless for so long, you earn a degree of self-knowledge in relation to others and society that is well beyond the normal ken. And I have learned that I am far from being the only clueless person in the world. I see the world differently, I do things differently, and thereby frequently fall foul of people who don’t have the first idea of how different the world can be. Such people insist on pressing things and people down the same old grooves, as rigidly inflexible as AS folk are supposed to be. Imagine how galling it is, then, to be told by such people how ‘different’ they are too, how ‘non-conformist’ they are, how they too are somewhere on the spectrum. I don’t wish to go down the road of asserting an identity and a condition so irreducible as to be beyond comprehension. That’s a cul-de-sac. That way destines us to be forever at cross-purposes with one another. But I have to say, at the same time, I have found an awful lot of people to be clueless. It was explained to me this way: whilst many people with tick many of the ASD boxes, they won’t tick them with anything like the same intensity as those with ASD; it is that going ‘above and beyond’ the norm that determines whether a person will get that job or not, will keep that job or not, will get a partner or not, get a house, raise a family, become a functioning member of society etc. How galling to hear fully-paid up members of society, with their pension-plans, bucket lists, and family events tell us routinely how they, too, are ‘different’ and on the spectrum. Such people are clueless. And they would be upset and annoyed if I should tell them, given that they are making such a public show of being so sympathetic. Immediately, I am the awkward one, one to be wary of, back on the outside, without a voice. You either raise your voice and worry people, or you silence your voice and smile, with any remaining issues about not fitting in being attributable to personal character failings. It’s as sweet as a nut.
I don’t have to assert how different I am, I just have to be. I am different and I do difference as naturally as breathing. I struggle with ordinary. That much is obvious to anyone with whom I have had repeated contact. I have learned to keep a distance from people, to mask and mirror, and seem quite normal, even enormously successful. But I struggle badly with the ordinary. I not only struggle to fit-in and function, I struggle to understand the need to fit-in with what appears to me to be utterly dysfunctional. The ordinary to me seems to be broken, sporadic, and ephemeral, all surface-level noise. The same with respect to people.
I don’t much care for socialising. The sporadic connection with all and sundry is remarkably irritating and destabilising for me. Brief, passing contact, or mere observance, can have me thinking for days about something which I find not merely annoying but abhorrent. The other person making an offending comment or remark will, no doubt, move to another (similar) comment a day or so later. It’s of little concern to them. But I think about things. When you are alone, you have plenty of time to be thinking about things. A one-off encounter with other persons will be present in your head for a long time after. The words you hear or read will be nagging away at you for days and weeks after. People who make stupid comments, giving vent to their passing mood, people who are unthinking and unreflective making some bold assertion about politics, religion, people, football, a sneer directed against Elvis (or any of your interests, you name it, the list of potentially offensive subjects is endless). I really don’t need to be in that company at all, and I certainly don’t need to be hanging around in that company in the hope of the odd sensible exchange with the odd sensible person. The rewarding, uplifting exchanges are far too few, the debilitating ones too many, to justify forever being in touch with the world of talking heads. I would compare social media connection to the telephone systems I once worked on. I didn’t do that job for long, with its constantly flashing lights and noises demanding attention for whatever disconnected nonsense was being sent my way. I was quickly overwhelmed (and even more quickly annoyed). I mean, have you seen the drivel that people post all over FB? The assertions based on nothing more than personal preferences and prejudices, the hobby horses being ridden, the endless neurotic contention, the wishful thinking, the demonizing of alternative platforms, the fear mongering, the crises and the suffering. I picture such people switching off to plug back into their very normal and comfortable lives. I post in anticipation of some passing neurotic coming to rain on my parade. Clearly, it’s not the place for me to be hanging around. So why do I do it? I am suckered in by the promise of connection and community, the feeling that there might well be people in the vicinity who are interested in the things I do and say. Those people exist, but they are not always around, not always in contact, so you have the feeling of being present in a waiting room, with all manner of annoying people with annoying things to say wandering in and out. I don’t need to have the constant presence of such people as the price to be paid for the occasional contact with the others.
It should be no surprise, then, that I constantly have to retreat into a world of my own. It’s quite a world, exhibiting a rich diversity around familiar themes. I exclude the things that irritate and bore me. That’s what really hacks me off about social media – not merely the capacity of others to irritate and annoy, but the sheer predictability of it all. I can tell what’s coming from the subject matter alone, the opening line, the image on the meme. You get to know people and the rule book they sing from. Very rarely, if ever, do they surprise you by saying something you hadn’t anticipated. For a few years I chipped away with ‘hints,’ asking for qualifications and inviting new directions. I had found that open challenges meet merely with denial, resistance, and silence. So people carry on saying the same thing the same way, year in year out in an infernal re/production. Annoying, certainly, but most of all as boring as Hell.
Basically, you are in a quandary. You are looking for like-minded individuals with which to share space and time with, knowing that such individuals are a rare species indeed. So that leaves you with a restatement of the initial problem with regards to ‘social’ interaction, communication, relationships, and imagination. The problem is easy to state. But dialogue and relationship is a two-way process, one that goes both ways. This is what you must do to engage, exchange, interact.. You have to meet others on their irritating, annoying, boring terms. Many a time when talking to people I have found myself mouthing silently, and at speed, the words I anticipate them saying. Invariably I am right. When the words are expressing views and exploring interests I enjoy, I relent and participate in the joy of a shared experience. But in the main, I am just plain bored and having to repress frustration and anger. You are not enjoying the company of others, you are enduring it. Worst of all is the endless repetition that comes from talking at cross-purposes with others, involving the endless explanation of oneself to uncomprehending others. It’s a drain of time and energy. It’s a life spent in explanation mode. I don’t need it. So it should come as no surprise that I have a tendency to withdraw, further exacerbating problems of social communication and interaction. The price of joining in the society of ‘normal’ others is far too high. I could never become so predictable and boring.
So it is reassuring, gladdening even, to know that someone like Tim Page is aware of your work and has acknowledged it, whether approvingly or disapprovingly. He knows the things I’m talking about and I know exactly what he is driving at in his letter to the New York Times. I doubt many will. To others, such statements may sound like assertions of an irreducible difference that preclude genuine communication, whether through notions of superiority or inferiority. If so, they are born of years of miscommunication with uncomprehending others. That there are more of those others than there are of us merely restates the problems of social communication and interaction facing those on the spectrum.
How less than edifying it is to switch on ‘social’ media and enter the world of acrimony, recrimination, and mutual antagonism. I can only presume that the people I encounter on there who are so vocal in expressing the loathing and contempt they feel for others are so safely anchored in real and meaningful relations to significant others – family, friends, work colleagues – that they can use their electronic space to vent their spleen at general, anonymous others. Some of us do not have that luxury and, sadly, reach out in electronic form for the connection and community they lack in ‘real’ social life. The people I see on social media launching making such extreme statements strike me as hypocritical, phoney, complacent, and spoiled. As Brel knew, the truly desperate fade away without a sound, unmissed and unmourned, because no-one knew they existed in the first place.
So I am left with no option but to keep withdrawing into my own world, knowing it to be a rich and varied world, a stimulating environment packed with ideas and imagination, vibrant and fulfilling – everything the ‘real’ world of ‘real’ people isn’t. Notions of impairment here don’t come close to expressing the misery that issues from miscommunication and disconnection. Nor does it even begin to adumbrate the special qualities that come with the condition of being very differently ‘different.’ Very different, that is, to those who in the social media circus are very vocal on asserting how different they are and have always been. In my eyes, such people all look and sound the same, bland, boring, and entirely predictable. Nor does the idea of having a ‘special,’ ‘narrow,’ and ‘obsessive’ interest remotely express the fierce, relentless determination I can bring to any issue and any task that succeeds in inciting my imagination, ventures that quickly take on the contours of a mission. It could be anything, from arcane issues of philosophy and the burning political questions of the day (and what else is ‘global heating’?) to mapping the music of my favourite singers and bands. I recently spent a weekend attempting to count how many words I have written since around 1990. I can account for at least 15 million, with estimates on remaining work raising that total to well over 20 million. Tim Page writes of ‘the immersion in an otherworldly ecstasy’ that his interests have provided for him. By this, and any other, reckoning I have through my endless writing lived a life of plunging in at the deep end, holding my breath in pursuit of some elusive goal, and of soaring beyond infinity. Which is to say I have lived a life of total immersion and transcendent joy. I ride the wild wind, living life on the razor’s edge, not so much in the external, physical, world, which I keep at a distance, but in the much more interesting and dangerous landscape, that of the soul. The joys to be had exploring the inner landscape are much more occasional than the pain and suffering that contact with the out landscape inflicts, but much the more profound and enduring. Nevertheless, it remains a sad, but revealing, fact that, some two weeks after being given the diagnosis of ASD, I have found no-one to confide in. Either I don’t trust the people I do know, or people are just not present. I'm alone with my deepest thoughts. Isn't everyone, though? As usual, I am left with no option but to type out some of my safest thoughts to a computer screen, to be read by the Tim Pages of the world whoever and wherever they are. They don't even come close to the whole truth.
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