I have come out only to a few family members. Two were my parents, who are like most people discriminate against mental illness, told me that I should not listen to my girlfriend of the day and to wake up. The other I expected more from so I was most disappointed, and since their opinion would be counted more weighty than mine, I never told another. I told my Aunt, who was a teacher and therefore would, should have been more open to the condition, the disorder. Such, as I have already eluded to, was not the case.
She dismissed me out of hand. She told me that she met one of them once and he acted completely different from me. There, that is done with. She was a teacher. People see one example, an extreme example, and assume that that one example applies to the entire set of that type. How would you feel if all men were tarred instantly with the reputation of e first man a woman met? What if every man were then assumed to be assholes and jerks, well actually that might be a valid judgement, but seriously what if every man was instantly assumed to be an abuser based on one or a series of interaction with one person? That would be stupid, everyone can see that, but not with mental illness or like Autism, a genetic disorder or an environmental anomaly.
So the dreaded day arrived, a family reunion, all e descendants of my grandmother and their spouses and children. I have two first cousins, both married with children and I have one sister also married with children. Don't get me wrong, I like my cousins both of them, well all of them as I have three across the pond in Europe, but all at once, me and seventeen other people.
Parents, Aunt and Uncle, two Cousins two nephews, and three second cousins (my cousins children) and three spouses. All know me to varying degrees, all who know I went to teachers College and I am not working as a teacher. All of them want the best for me, but none of them can I tell the deepest part of myself. Obviously I am an introvert, but still the is more, because they can see how pained I am at this event. Each of them there is a story.
Stories
Parents. Everyone has the same story on parents who have been together forever, right now getting close to forty-five years. Not really a story other than I suspect strongly that the genetic component of my Autism comes from my father and quiet a lot of the learned behavior too. He believes he is normal, we all do, that is why it hurts.
Sister. I think that one should wait.
Aunt and Uncle. What needs to be said, I stated it above, burnt once thrice shy. Growing up with an introvert Father who was in control of the transportation meant that all visits were short. It is tough to get to know people when your exposure to them is limited to two or three hour visits when your own introversion takes minimum of two hours to conquer. As a child I found both of them intimidating, my Aunt is about a meter eighty and built like my father, large, but not fat, just large. I only really got to know her when she and my Uncle came to the city for the annual Mayors convention, yes he was mayor of his town for years. Which is why I told her.
Cousin one, older than me. As we were estranged from our cousins by way of our father and distance, neither my sister or I would be expected to be close, except for my sister who decided that she would go to college and my cousin decided to go to the same college and they even were in the same program and so they rented together and they became very close. They became close, but not us. She married and had two children and they stayed close, my sister and her, but I never had a lot to do with them. They were each others Maid of Honour at their respective weddings. I would ay that there is a gap between us all.
Cousin two. Huge gaping gap. Because we interacted though. Because of me. He has a checkered past, as we all do, just more deeply checkered than others and this is family knowledge, which is another reason I don't tell family any thing they don't need to know. He married his post secondary school girlfriend, a brown girl, technically beige, because she is Indian-English, if you met one you would know but if you haven't then here it is in brief: a nearly pure bred mongrel sub race created when the English controlled India. They are a mix of the two and believe they, generally, are better than both. They are a cohesive community and typically only marry within this group, typically. There is talk about them in the family that I am not privy to, it is mostly about his wife and the typical, "she is not good enough" talk, but there are other things. I like them both, I ofcourse like anything vaguely Indian, so I really do have nothing but warm feeling for the both of them, but I can't talk to them and every interaction seems to go horribly wrong somehow in my mind. Add that we lived in the same city and I never talked to them because of my horrible social blunders and embarrassment. When you like someone, every time you put your foot in your mouth it feels like there are two feet in there. So I don't talk with them and I am sure they know that the family talks about them and they can assume they likely assume that that includes me, but I am just too awkward to say anything to improve that notion or whatever. Stirred to inaction. And they have the only girl of the five children. I love children, but I really like girls most of all.
Sister. Four hundred forty-three days apart, night an day, oil and water. One year apart in school so we were always compared. One year apart in school meant she was always a threat that I had to keep ahead lest I found myself in her grade. As it was remarked from one of my classmates in a new school in a new town that we moved to, "She's your sister? What happened to you?" life together was never easy, because we were so different. I was told likely when I was three, that I was not to hit my sister, so I did not, but she was not told likewise and so she did. There were fights, daily fights, weekly fights later monthly fights. She bullied me. She told the local bully that he was not allowed to beat me up, that was for her to do. There were the knife incidents, where she chased me around the house with a butcher knife; I knew she was not playing, I knew she wanted to be a single child, my bedroom door can attest to that. I did not start to fight back until my last year of high-school. My ager was less in check and I was twice her size. I did not hurt her permanently or seriously but I let her know I was not going to take it. The first time I was playing a computer game and I through her under the table and put my foot on her neck with just enough pressure before resuming my game. The second time I choked her to unconsciousness while she hit me repeatedly, that was the last time. Things improved when we moved away and had four hundred kilometers between us. Later, much later we even lived in the same city, and we saw each other once or twice a year and discovered we had som similarities, we both like Star Trek and a few other things. We talked occasionally. A few years ago, just when MPTR was severely messing with my head, she needed my help. Her Nanny that she hired so she could go back to work was not working out and I agreed on short notice to step in and take over for a few months. Until she got a new nanny. I was there for five months before I had to leave to start a different job. We are closer now, but distant. I can talk to her husband, but feel out of place.
So yesterday all of us were crammed in together socializing. There were way too many people there for me. And I felt terribly out of place. It was like being with people that you knew of who knew of you and talked about you and knew all your history of, but you knew only a fraction of what they knew of you, of them. They asked me about how my job search for a teaching position was going. I lied to them because my Summer's realization about exactly how horrible a communicator I am made me realize that my dream of being a teacher was a baseless fantasy. That my ability to read people's body language, the 95% of communication, was almost totally nonexistent thanks to the Autism, that I would be a horrible teacher, in the extreme. But I could not tell any of them that. Luckily non of my total failure was portrayed on my face, thanks to the same awesom autistic mask. Add that I was the only spouseless person there, except for the nanny, the only one who had no children, including the nanny. The meal was a a carnivore's wet dream, three kinds of ribs and a few token salads. My attempts of humour all fell flat, as usual. To say that I felt uncomfortable there
I gave up a day of work from my meger paycheck to go to Family Reunion so that I could feel uncomfortable and more of a peoria than I usually am in my isolated life. I feel that I made other people there uncomfortable and I felt that people might have gotten the wrong idea. I wanted to go sit in the car and read, ie hide out.
Ask me about eating in public sometime, including family events.
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