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I remember my mom being on the phone quite a bit on some days when I was a kid. We shared a party line with several neighboring houses, about ten miles out of town along a rural highway. Back then we didn't know anything about depression and how connecting helps people get through rough days. Telephones were probably a godsend to her on some days, but none of us really understood the need. Our world was pretty black and white back then.
I was in the 9th grade when we moved to another state. My best friend and I snail mailed each other faithfully 3 times a week for a little over 4 years. I'm not exaggerating that at all. I had a huge box full of letters that documented her half of our unending conversation, and when that conversation ended, I was so lost that I completely shut down emotionally. It took me years to understand why that particular friendship was so deep.
In the mid 90s I jumped into the email trend, which was basically a lot like twitter in slo-mo, and wound up in fan groups and forums quickly after that. I had never had so much connection in my whole life. I cannonballed with so much gusto into connecting all over the place that I irritated a few people with my splashing, but I loved every minute of it. I didn't learn how to emotionally connect, though, until real faces started showing up with all that connecting. I had no idea what to even do with that, but I learned very quickly that's when it starts to hurt. It took more years to figure that part out. I had to learn to be more careful and play nice, and I'm the first to admit that my idea of careful and nice back then were not careful and nice.
I ran into a wall one year that disconnected my whole world, and everything felt like the rubble in the wake of the Nothing in Neverending Story. Several horrible years of rubble went by before I decided to give up and walk away. I was on the verge of deleting the very last of the rubble when Something Happened and shook me awake in seconds. From that moment I have intensely interrogated myself and studied how to get what I want.
I made a Plan and got back into the internet, learning to swim all over again, trying new ways of connecting. People are real, and I need people. I've spent most of my life so alone inside of myself. I have felt several times like if I didn't find a way to connect to my own humanity I would wilt and die inside. I cannot connect if I'm alone.
Part of my motivation was unclear at first. I had to keep reaching deeper and deeper inside myself, pulling out ripped up shreds of cast off emotions I never dealt with. My survival skills were a lot like the Walking Dead, shoot first and walk away, or just go another direction and disappear so no one can find me. I've done that both in real life and on internet. I am really good at knowing how to just go away. Part of my intense self questioning vomited up a very ugly self righteous gloater that didn't have a clue how to care about other people (my narcissism diagnosis, guys), an emotionally distant loner buried deep in obsessions (my autism diagnosis), a sad cynic who refused to believe happiness was nothing more than a lie invented by social structure controlling people (severe depression), a tiny child terrified of monsters and shadows and water and death (anxiety and dissociative disorders), and an overlord squeezing all of that together into a tightly controlled survival unit that blew apart after a string of viral illnesses affected my brain.
I watched everything about me fall apart as I raced time to keep dissecting, keep laying it all out in autopsy, keep looking for all the pieces I need to make all of this functional again, because without a coherent goal, 'I' simply have no meaning. My soul is a tattered shred on a crusty plain in a very long night. There is nothing else laying around inside myself that I am able to see that gives any part of me a tic mark in a box that doesn't say 'FAIL'.
Except to tell the stories.
There is redemption in honesty. I think that is inside all of us. Humanity is a story. We are all stories.
HEAR and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild--as wild as wild could be--and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.
That paragraph clicks back to source.
I need each of my people in each of their individual places. I can no longer slot people into categories like a tackle or embroidery box. Each person I connect to is unique to me and in their very own slot in my mind. Each slot has its own kind of personal reason we are connected, and I will never be able to go back to the traditional slotting of genders and roles and whatever else people get labeled with. Each and every person I've ever met seems to have grown into their own thing inside of me while I have taken myself apart, and as I put myself back together I can see now that the only way any of me goes all back together is by intersecting the connecting lines of other people with myself. I still feel all the same feelings about each person now that I did years (or days) ago when we last connected, and those feelings never change, even though I keep changing. Each person I have encountered has helped create who I am now, and I could never go forward as a soul being severed from that.
One of the things I've learned over time is that no one person can hold all my feelings. I am a wildly oscillating passion of obsessions with very little natural social intuition, so when my emotions, whatever they may be, blow up into roller coaster rides, the only way to survive them is to spread myself across as many friends as possible as quickly as I can before one unlucky person gets yanked into the roller coaster with me. I'm afraid I'm only just lately over the last few months becoming cognizant of this, so apologies to a few people who've been dragged in front of the bus with me, and especially one nobody really knows about who has actually been surviving that in real time.
I am part of what I now privately think of as a small tribe of emotional consorts. I can see now that the one person I needed and pulled into that crazy upside down fling needs to reach out and balance with others who need to know what's going on for the support system to work. I can be very selfish when I'm stuck in my tunnel vision, but to get what I need the most, I need that entire support system in place. I'm still getting used to this idea.
This is all new to me, but I think it's what I've been missing and needing all my life. I just never knew how to be part of a little group of close knit friends. It's exhilarating. And I think that's how it's supposed to be. It's not about rigid roles in labeled slots, and I don't think it ever has been. Psychological health in homo sapiens sapiens is about the connect/disconnect. Before there were societal norms, there were little groups interacting without labels, without rules about roles. Maybe aspienado kicking at the cart all these years was simply about persisting in my quest to find other brains that mine can fit with, without all the junk in the way. Like the first friend I faithfully wrote letters with 3 times a week for 4 years. She was popular and had lots of friends, and she was my only. She incorporated me, the others moved over, and I dismissed them a bit (I accepted and talked to each of them in school, just never thought of them as *my* friends), but maybe it's time to finish growing up. I run with a pack now, and we take turns stepping aside for each other. I got that a bit wrong on the medias, but I think I'm kind of getting it right now in the background. I sure hope so.
