What is something others do that sparks your admiration?
When I really reminisce about my childhood, I get very angry. Not at my parents. At the way I walk in the world. I am not built for it, and a lot of it is the way I think. I am not neurotypical, and I am also bipolar. Then, there’s the added layer of complication with being an INFJ, the personality known for being a hundred thousand years old. Interestingly enough, there’s a connection between autism and INFJ. You can be one without the other, but there are so, so many of us who are both. My biggest for-instance is being emotionally abused.
Many people wondered how I could fall apart that badly….. my emotional abuser told me and everyone else that she was my best friend………. sometimes. At others, she pretended not to know me. I fell apart because my psychologist in middle school told me that I was obsessed with her and I needed to work on my own issues. No one thought “emotional abuse, autistic, introverted anyway, driven to help others more than themselves.” My emotional abuser got away with everything because the fault was always in me. My therapist blamed me, and I cannot think of a reason why, except that autism wasn’t on her radar, thus she did not see my emotional abuser as my monotropic thought process, she did not see that this woman genuinely traumatized me because a 14-year-old cannot be friends with a 25-year-old when there are not serious boundaries set. Everything was dependent on my behavior, not how she acted.
I felt married to this woman from the time I was 13 until I was 36, because I did not realize how incredibly unsafe I was. How could I, when my doctors as a kid had convinced me that this obsession was all in my head and if I just turned my attention, it would all go away. But “married” is relative. I knew that we weren’t going to be a couple, but I did know that it was for life…….. back then. This is because she clearly needed help. Clearly. Of the two of us, I’ve always been the more emotionally mature one, and I knew this from the first conversation that actually went deep. I was not like other children. My bullshit detector is finely tuned because of my preacher’s kid upbringing. So, I could tell that I was older, and that wasn’t a bad thing to me.
In fact, once she actually said that she was “older and often not wiser,” so at least I know my intuition is correct on that one. The solid truth is that I am more emotionally intelligent than most people you know, and this is not because I’m so great. It’s that INFJs are only 9-15% of the world’s population….. probably another reason my psychologist thought I had OCD.
The problem is that most neurodivergent behaviors are the same. Am I PTSD, bipolar, borderline, narcissistic, OCD, ADHD, Autistic…….. the list goes on. Parsing everything out is a matter of degrees.
The part where I can take responsibility but no I can’t (I was 14) is that I wasn’t completely honest with everyone because I knew she would get in trouble. My mother had already told her to stop talking to me once, and it didn’t work. I am still not sure how I feel about that, and it’s almost over 30 years later. Part of it is that I felt like I had to protect the path, but part of me needed a queer friend and I didn’t have any others. For every moment I’ve felt used and abused, I’ve known it wasn’t all disingenuous. It wasn’t all healthy, either.
She became in charge of regulating my emotions, because what happens in abuse is that when you’re not around that person, your dopamine nosedives. You’re only really happy in their presence because your dopamine ramps up. And, of course, you don’t know it’s the trauma bond talking, so you think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s not true, of course. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. You just feel so much better when you’re with them than you do without them that they seem more powerful than they are……………………….. and they know it.
Everyone looked at me like I was just this crazy fan. No, surely it couldn’t be because Leslie is being emotionally abused. Some people did see it, and instead of doing anything, just talked shit behind my back.
In effect, what happened when I was a teen is what happened 10 years ago. I switched from one friend being my monotropic thought process to another. That wasn’t the bad part. Supergrover is the most amazing woman we have on earth, and we’re not going to get another one. She is everything, everywhere, all at once…… or as I say to her, “that’s my badass out there…. not yours.” Supergrover didn’t see “monotropic thought process and INFJ,” either, so she tended to attribute things to me that just weren’t true. I can believe that most of it is not being able to take the time to get to know me in person, but that would have had to happen when we first met, not after all our virtual patterns were entrenched. It became too scary to face each other, in some ways.
Both of us are the type of people who are intimidated that would never admit that something is intimidating. Her way of dealing with it was to avoid talking about it. My way of dealing with it was to pretend it didn’t exist. That meeting for lunch wasn’t weird because it couldn’t be. What I know from experience is that it is indeed intimidating to go from online to IRL after many years, but you both have to be willing to sit there and let it suck for a second as all your senses are overloaded and the person you’ve known for X number of years is right in front of you. It’s surreal and disorienting, not that you don’t really love the person. You just take the time to get over the weird.
If there is one thing I’m grateful for in terms of a silver lining on the pandemic, it’s that people understand me in a whole new way. During the pandemic, everyone had to learn how I do what I do all day long. I was a hero, when I was previously “Miss Get Off the Computer” in 1993. All of the sudden, people could see something they couldn’t before. Real emotion exists in virtual relationships, full stop. We conducted business and personal relationships with people often being coworkers for years without seeing each other in person. It was a paradigm shift that benefitted me, because I had to explain a lot less.
What I have to explain a lot less to me is how ill I am. Turns out, a lot of the symptoms I was attributing to bipolar are actually just autistic quirks. There’s so much less depression and hypomania, so much more meltdown and burnout because my sensory perception is so incredibly high.
So, I admire how people think, because it’s worlds different from my own in nearly every case. Other people are just as complicated, but not in the same way.
Which is good, because it means we are all admirable in our own way, too.
Stories That Are All True 