I Have a Place

I have a place in this world, but it is not the one I wanted.

I wanted to be someone else’s Man Friday, without looking at the ways in which I’m incapable. I’m Sherlock, not Watson. That I am perfectly capable of orbiting someone else, but that is not my true strength. My growth this year has been realizing I’m the one that generates ideas, not the one who files them.

My life would have been completely different if I’d disconnected from Aada emotionally and just let her be my coprocessor, and that’s something I’ll take with me for sure. For instance, letting her edit my documents, but not letting her into the chasm underneath them. I have learned to respect what a relationship will sustain. Aada was incapable of being my Girl Friday because she was only reading the page and reacting. It would have been totally different if she’d been there in the flesh. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again…. she liked being onstage, she didn’t want to pull rigging.

I wish that I had known the difference back then. I could have made better choices.

I was trying to make something fit and it didn’t, and instead of taking the hint, my autistic ass waited years for things to change. I just accepted that things were a dumpster fire, I’d made them that way, and I was just going to have to live it.

If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, ’cause I’m not capable. I’m fucking Irish — I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.

Because here’s what happened. We both clicked off safe and spent 12 years trying to reclaim it. The difference is that Aada could read about her effect on me because I was only writing down to an audience, not talking to people. I have never known anything about my effect in her life, because she hid it from me and told everyone else. Therefore, everyone knows what I think. Her feelings ABOUT ME are spread out among her friends and family, and that’s just supposed to be okay. It is not my bag that she does not have enough courage to face me directly and never has. It is not my bag that she would rather triangulate than foster honesty.

I am walking away from this relationship knowing that I am the emotionally mature one, and that she left the relationship out of embarrassment and emotional inability because she masked competence and truth and in the end showed neither. She could have changed our entire narrative, but it was easier to stay silent and gaslight me into believing that every problem in the history of our relationship was all mine.

It’s what happens when you have a hero complex and insist you don’t.

Aada wanted to be the sun, and I was willing to let her for so many years that I loved her until I lost myself. That is the disconnect, that Aada loved my blog and shaped it with her approval…. taking something she loved and crushing it into a shadow of itself. I didn’t have enough self-esteem to steer my own ship, because steering my own ship would have been saying to Aada, “it’s been lovely, but you’re crushing my soul because you’re emotionally constipated. Call me when you’re better.” I folded unto her every expectation and built my narrative around her. There was a solid reason for this. She isolated me from all my other friends and created a secretive little bubble. Therefore, to this day she has an access to my world that I will never get, because she kept all her feelings about me to herself and her other friends don’t care about me. So whatever story she’s got, it isn’t important enough for me to know.

And in fact, her story is not as interesting as mine and that’s been another problem because I thought her story was better than mine. No one showed up to see what she was doing. They showed up to see my thoughts about it.

So my growth is realizing that I am enough all by myself. I am the trend setter, when I thought I was born to follow.