For me, socializing is the most important thing in the whole world. I have known this for ever even before I knew I had autism. I knew that one way that I could gain the appearance of social acceptance was to know things that no one else knew. I know that you want to jump to secrets, but here is the thing, in the past I did not see them as secrets, but as things that others did not know. I can chastise myself for this now because I know, but recently I have been slipping.
When you are friends with people they develop trust with you and they tell you things. If you can't see or read their body language you don't see that what they are telling you needs to be kept between the two of you. Truthfully, I still don't know when someone is telling me something that can be general knowledge and what is not. I think this means that I have to treat every conversation as completely private. Maybe that is it, every conversation has to be completely secret? I did not see that.
Maybe the correct statement is that I am a poor secret keeper. I don't see benefit to keeping secrets. Well that is not true, what is true is that I don't keep my secrets well either. If I am talking to someone and I know them and I want them to like me I fall back on an old tried and true strategy. Tried and true just means that it is a method that worked in the past and so if it worked once many times in the past maybe it will work now. I am not interested in hurting my friends, it is just I don't see how I am hurting them.
Written words are even tougher. The things I write here, the secrets I tell about myself, I know that they are only secrets because very few people I know read this. I mentioned the blog on my Dating profile. I have WaifGirl subscribed to the blog, and MountainWoman reads it, GardenerGuru was once reading it. I know that they read it and therefore all the secrets written here are known to them. I know that you are reading it right now. This blog is not really a secret, because I have offered to include others in reading about it often, it is just not tatooed on my head. What I am saying is that what I write here is not really a secret, but perhaps it should be. Do I want MagicEyes and PolyGirl who read this blog to know everything?
If I do, I will start another blog and make it private, by invitation only. If a blog were to say that, I would not speak of it, because that is explicitly telling me to shut up!
But it is about how I hurt my friends. I tell people things with no expectations of secrecy, if they tell me things how do I know what is private and what is not. Perhaps I have to extend the talk I recieved from the MountainWoman, she said that people want to be around me because I am a good person to be around and not because of what I can do for them. I don't have to wash their dishes, I don't have to massage their back, I don't have to tell them things they don't know. My value is in who I am and not what I can do. But what about the people who don't know who I am, what do I do to show them that I have value? What do I say to SuperGirl to let her want to know me? That one is lost, but what about the next person?
The fear is that if I am not talking about stuff they don't know, doing their dishes, giving them a massage, will I have no new friends? Perhaps MountainWoman will give me a smack and say, if they are unwilling to get to know you, then they are not worth knowing. But, SuperGirl was a person I thought was worth getting to know, only she was not interested in getting to know me
Stop talking about my friends to my other friends, stop treating their words like you treat your words. Stop referring to my friends with their names, but perhaps just use the names I give here. I will call Seventh Seventh if she comes up in conversation and not her real name. Is that too extreme?
Okay how about: just shut up!
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