It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down on the weekends to read. My rule was, “Read at least 50 pages, more if you’re in the right headspace.” Today I read around a hundred pages, finishing Russel Brand’s book Mentors: How to Help and Be Helped. I started last weekend but couldn’t quite get in to it. I mean, I’ve always liked and respected the guy, but the idea of having a mentor and mentoring someone when I literally have a social life that’s made up of one wife, who I see daily, one mother, who I talk to weekly and see a couple of times a year, my coworkers, who I only talk to over teleconference meetings, the folks at Safeway, and the nearby bartenders, I really don’t have a social life. Or, to put in terms most people will understand: I have no meaningful social life outside my marriage. So for me, starting this book about people with people in their lives would be the equivalent of a starving homeless person watching episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares where said person would just be thinking, “Wow, don’t throw that out or stick your nose up to that burnt fish and chips, I’ll take it!”

It’s not that I haven’t tried to make friends—with some random successes—throughout my life. But over the last twenty years in particular I’ve either bumped into users and abusers, and being lonely and vulnerable I was all to willing to allow them to take the wheel (and beat me to it). Those hand full of people I really thought were great, who I looked up to, who I could in some respect consider mentors, had their own thing going. The chemistry just wasn’t there. Course, it doesn’t help being stressed out and sick all the time (who wants to be around that?). And of course there are those I’ve reached out to that may, for a time, be all, ‘Yeah, I love this,’ and then silence. In the modern parlance it’s called ghosting, something I’m all too familiar with having nearly half a century’s worth of experience.

There’s an entire world in that paragraph that could be elaborated upon. Not tonight. I’m working towards the better, deeper journal entries that I used to write, pre-Lyme, but we’re not there yet.

As I’ve come to embrace being autistic, I’ve looked back on my life in a much different light. I see now how easily I was manipulated or needed to be in a relationship with anyone, regardless of how they treated me. To the only x that emotionally and physically abused me, you know what I’m talking about.

You haven’t felt loneliness until it causes you actual physical pain. Headaches. Insomnia. Muscle pain. Fatigue. There was a time, in the late 2000’s, where I kept a counter on the home page of my web site indicating how long it had been since I’d been physically touched by another human being. At one count a 60+ day lack of touch was only interrupted by getting my teeth cleaned, and I can tell you, I really enjoyed that teeth cleaning. The moment I felt another person’s hand on me a warmth went over my entire body, as if I’d just snorted ground up oxycodone (something I haven’t done, by the way, but have a good idea what it feels like so it’s a relevant analogy).

In the end there was much, in this book, I could related to.

In one section he talked about how easily he fell into romantic/physical relationships with women. I could relate. I dedicated the larger portion of the 1990’s to my infatuation to a single person, to a promise I’d made to them, to my “love”. Russel writes:

“I’d gambled my mental health on her moods, I’d cast her in the role of a deity when she had the limitations of a human. I’d constructed my ideals from the wrong manual, the demented manual of our culture, which instructs us to view our partner as part magical sprite and part Saint John’s Ambulance volunteer. My own strain of idiocy always led me to see women as sky-high, rarefied, unobtainable and unreal. Always astonished when anyone was attracted to me I’d go a bit giddy and fall in love too quickly. My mind would race up the aisle to the alter, I’d be covered in confetti midway through the first day. I wanted to save them and I wanted them to save me; it was all so high stakes—love at the point of a loaded gun.”

In many respects, romantic relationships were like this for me. And it makes sense, too, if you look at it through an autistic lens, or at least my autistically filtered one. Things in life were all or nothing. Friendships and relationships, doubly so. The idea of just dating around, being a social butterfly, has never computed with me. Easier to focus on one thing, one person, and be good at it, and the more time I spend focused on this ideal the more it seemed I would succeed. It made sense to me. If I wanted to learn math, I practiced. If I wanted to get good at a certain hobby, I kept at it. Why any different with a romantic relationship? Besides, isn’t that what God asked of me?

Another section is more relevant to my current circumstance:

“Co-dependency can mean ‘relationships where the boundaries are not clear and the roles are blurred’. In my case I had outsource many aspects of my life that I needed to take personal responsibility for. …. I saw there was no future in that identity, that I had made myself dependent on too many people because I was afraid to grow up. That I select relationships with women that were doomed because I was trying to satisfy a religious impulse in a practical dynamic. A marriage must be clear and robust, the married couple must have a mutual vision of the relationship and a consensus on their roles within it. It is a highly practical arrangement that includes domestic management, sex, child-rearing, recreation, counseling, tension, friction, love and hate. I used to enter into relationships with abandon, like it was a balmy lagoon. I was always astonished by the tsunamis and whirlpools that consumed me.”

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got in me tonight. Time to eat brownies and watch that ~3.5 hour film I didn’t go to see this summer (something about flowers? Lol).

Take care and goodnight,

Ashlynn