What is emotional is also physical. Not only that, I didn't say that you have no compassion--just that logically speaking, if you abhor emotion, then you should also abhor compassion. So, you know, there is also the scenario where you are weak, which is fine by me.
This is the problem: I don't want to share my story so that you can make your point. I want to share my story in service to myself, not so that you can tell me I don't know what I'm talking about or whatever.
But here you are. You asked for it; here's my story.
My cousin died when I was seven years old. Before that, I was a very happy person. Then I withdrew, because I didn't know what to do with the situation. Stopped talking, stopped making facial expressions, whatever. This withdrawal was not very good for making friends, and the rest of my family was traumatized and began to treat me as a scapegoat. They told me I was dirty and stupid, and not fit to be with the rest of them. I was allowed to sit and read my book on the floor, but I wasn't to be spoken to--I was to disappear and become an object.
My parents didn't treat me that way, but my mother was in crisis and my father had to take care of her. There was also a question as to whether I would die of the same illness, and the few friends I made were often quick to tell me that they wish I'd told them I might be ill, so they could have chosen to never befriend me. I was largely estranged from any sort of support system and suffered from chronic depression, to the point where I don't remember what it is to be happy and carefree. Ever since then, I've been told that my eyes look old.
But that didn't do it.
Fast forward to when I was eighteen years old, started going out with my first boyfriend, and went to college. I found out the following about myself in the space of a few months:
I am attracted to all genders, but not sexually so
I do not identify with any particular gender
I am not, in fact, an atheist (my family is Catholic, my major and the boyfriend of the time militantly atheist/agnostic)
most people are not in fact chronically depressed;
My assumptions about the human race's general amity towards me was wrong--they tolerated me, but they weren't acting in a friendly way.
I had (have) Asperger's syndrome, probably exacerbated by massive isolation between ages 7 and 18
when I went to college, people were not going to stop bullying me
One of the main reasons why my boyfriend went out with me was because he thought I was broken, that he would fix me, and then I would be beholden to him (I never thought of myself as broken before that)
That boyfriend was abusive, and tried to isolate me from my parents and my last remaining friend. It worked--helped that my informing my best and only friend of these things led her to call me an "abomination," and that I could never tell any of it to my very religious family, or most of it to my very irreligious boyfriend.
The way this all started was by thinking that random people were trying to kill me because, after all, a blight on society whom no one likes isn't something you'd particularly try to keep alive--so randomly running them over with your car wouldn't be too big of a deal. Then the delusions, that past mathematics was created by the masters just for me. Then the self-isolation and the obsession--if they didn't want me, then I would serve them from the shadows and remove myself from humanity. Then the clawing loneliness, heart-rending, impossible to escape because I had almost literally no social skills. Then the realization that I was standing in a contradiction and could not both do my duty to mathematics (the only thing that gave me any societal value) and gain social skills (an almost impossible endeavor, and something necessary so that I would be able to do math later).
Then the mood swings. Sadness, rage, anxiety, blinding happiness, cycling from one to the other in a blink of an eye, utterly unpredictable. Hours spent sobbing under my desk and asking God to take me out, or hours screaming into my pillow for sheer fury. Panic attacks. Psychotic episodes. Hours spent babbling, rhyming, alliterating, speaking pure poetry, counting off numbers, reciting things I had read, moments which no one else could understand but to me where a height of terror and bliss. Sleeping between two and five hours a night for months. Self-starvation--less than four hundred calories a day, because I was obsessed with accruing societal value and I thought that maybe, if I were thin enough, someone would politely tell me I was beautiful for once. I felt like I was being shaken apart. When I stopped walking, my vision would blur and blacken and I would lose balance.
He wanted broken, I thought? I'd give him broken. It wasn't just an outside force. It was a vengeance committed, a pain that I was going to extract from both his flesh and mine. I was infuriated. My only value to other people was the degree to which I had suffered an unusual degree of pain. As a human being--as something other than a crucible of sorrow--they had made it clear that I had no worth.
I remember, once, one of the happiest moments of my life: walking down the street, laughing so hard I was almost falling down, thinking about cutting off body parts and mailing them to people. The pleasure of self-destruction cut on the icy edge of their disapproval and lack of care. The more I knew it didn't matter, the more joy came from the idea of public, gory self-mutilation. Something people would never remember forever, because I mattered to no one--a sort of signature event. Paradoxical.
I went to a psychologist, of course. They spent hours of my life telling me how blisteringly, unusually bright I was. They didn't give me any of the help I needed, because autism is a child's disease, and no one much seems to care about those who remain.
Why am I alive? Because of my love of mathematics. That is why I am alive. I wanted to badly to die, but I wanted to do math even more--and there was no fear of failure, because I recognized that if I wasn't trying, or if I was dead, that was isomorphic to trying and failing. I dropped out of school. I spent a summer taking long, slow walks, thinking about nothing, feeling nothing, caring about nothing.
But the sad thing is, I will never again experience anything in my life as intense.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 8581072 times)