Our igloos

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(SORRY, I had to edit, it was obscure.)

For all of us the problem is what to do of our life given what we know now. We can continue to pretend, but now we have to do it coldly, without letting ourselves be involved. If we continue to pretend it must be only once in a while and for practical reasons.
Before knowing the situation, we pretended normality because, after all, we still wanted the company and the acceptance of others. But this goal that we have pursued for years is unattainable, as long as we continue to play the game with rules that were not made for us.
Because acceptance, companionship, even affection would be directed to non existent persons, our faked selves. The more we tried to gain acceptance by pretending, the more we drowned ourselves in this fabricated character of “the pretender”.
We do not exist if not in the burrow, in the bubble, where we have to retreat as soon as possible. After we have made our alienating traffic with others, we have to repair the bubble, the burrow in which we live. We are still in need social warmth, but we must abandon the old way of losing ourselves in the search for affection.
And this vicious circle is not broken by revealing our difference, because our difference is out of any possible perception and understanding by others. So we must stay cold for now. How long? For ever? We must not try to escape our igloos with artifices, it would be a failure.

Hmm that seems a somewhat pessimistic view of life. To a certain extent it is true for everyone, not just aspies. People are always forced to alter their personalities to "fit in" better. But that doesn't mean you can't reveal your true self to your close friends. I think that everyone in my closest group of friends truly knows who I am, what I am like, and accepts me for it.

If you don't think your friends can handle you for who you are, they're not worth being around. Ditch them and find some real friends. In my experience, people who are themselves outcasts are more accepting of those who are different.

As a final note, NO-ONE can ever fully understand you, nor can you ever fully understand anyone else, but this is true of every person on the entire planet. You are unique. But that doesn't mean people can't TRY to understand you, and at least BEGIN to do so.

A little overexposed? The NT world can be a bit taxing at times. Go ahead and retreat into your igloo and come back out when you are good and ready. NT's can be amazingly adaptable. Try and get them to interact with you on YOUR terms.

“seems a somewhat pessimistic view of life” Yes it is in a way, it is a very pessimistic view of social life, here and now. Anyway it’s a view of MY life. Among other aspects of autistics the is their being absolutely self centred.

As for my friends, I haven’t any now. I tried to make them know where I lived, they all fled and rightly so.

What you say about knowing each other is quite true. We are icebergs and only the tips can communicate about the tips not about the condition of all the rest, which is not known even to ourselves.

Having no friends has also some practical inconveniences.

“Go ahead and retreat into your igloo and come back out when you are good and ready.”
This is a little harsh. After all I live in my igloo and I don’t incommode many people except someone here in these forums.

Among other things, not the worst, I don't know how to make quotations here.

I have a Bus, instead of an Igloo.

Negative influxes on the mood. Meteo: if it is cloudy and grey, and days are short. They will start again to lengthen in two months. They will be tough months, complicated by an abundance of holidays, luminaries to encourage shopping and spending (same thing).
Halloween in Europe is All Saints, followed the day after by "the dead", people going to cemeteries. These are summed with Saturdays and Sundays to form a long “bridge”. Bridges are mortal for mood.
Then there are this unforeseeable fluxes of endorphins, serotonins coming and going or being stopped by some mysterious bottlenecks.
I will talk of positive influxes another time.
As for igloos, I don’t like them so much, I suffer terribly the cold. I would prefer an African hut. Eskimos put out of the igloo their old people when they become an useless nuisance. Which, after all is not worse than the drudgery of an hospital or an asylum. Africans do the same with their dying people, I think.
Then: why do they have to botch jokes? Why do we have to suffer for their need to be witty among students?

Just use [quote] and [/quote] tags around the text. Or alternatively click the "quote" button beside the post you want to quote. Hope that helped .

Do you think that 'our faked selves' are our personas, the 'mask' we present to the outside world which we wear when we interract with people?

I have been wondering for some time whether it is an inadequate persona which is the problem with being in the outer world and with people, and if this is a particular problem that people on the spectrum have. It is so difficult to know. Yet if we are aware of our mask, if we construct it deliberately, then we feel ourselves to be false. It is a question I am still pondering.

Nice avy pic.

It will take some time to answer Starr. And: is the glass thing part of the message?

Something now:
I think there is always some relationship between the mask and the real self. What I would like to do, when I meet a person I like, is to kneel, put my head on his/her lap and ask for a signal of acceptance and affection (I don’t know why I would prefer a woman, no matter the age). I would satisfy myself with a littel hug. It’s difficult to meet the right person, so generally I say only some sort of futility (politics, books, films, end of the planet, Taoism or some other falsities and bluffs). This in the attempt to stay near the person for a little while, as I normally don’t see anybody excepts the janitor for weeks, and passers by. There is some little part of me in what I say, (and even now in what I write here). But certainly they are crumbs.

I might add something later.

Last edited by paolo on 07 Nov 2006, 4:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

No, the glass quote I saw on a poster and I liked it, so decided to use it as a signature.

I've a vague memory of reading something about Autism in relation to the persona...if I can find it again I'll post it. A good memory would help but - alas.

The first time I reaized people put on different fronts was perhaps at the age of 16 or 17. I noticed that some of them started sounding extremely different depending who they were talking to. Rhey started shifting gestures and words depending on the people they were around. That made me wonder who they really were.
I felt they put on a show whenever they talked to someone else using different language and stuff. But of course from the other people's point of view, they out on a show when talking to me! So who of all these personalities were the "real" guy? If there are such a thing ...
How far can you take this? Can you change beliefs or opinions along with your language and clothing? Can you go on a KKK-meeting on Monday, and attend a black-rights demonstration on Tuesday? If you put on a good enough show, and feel the acceptance from both groups, why not?

Do NT's in general suffer from some kind of mutiple peronality disorder? Or are aspies hollow tin-men?

Thankyou.

I think its more of that whole reciprocity thing. For an NT talking to someone is interactive on more than an intellectual level. The very act of speaking and interacting with someone else temporarily changes their personality. With two NTs talking to one another after a time their personalities will slightly modify each other till they "mesh" I guess you could say.

For aspies I dont think we "give" any during these interactions. We are always the same person and the other must shift farther from center than normal in an attempt to reach us which is why they appear to vary wildly depending on whether they are talking to you or someone else.

I think this is why NTs seem to suffer so often from an identity crisis while we very rarely (if at all) have any doubts about who we really are.

Im fairly certain there is a limit of how far from their core personality they are willing to go which leads to two people being unable to come to an understanding and the rare "incompatible personalities" problem so they arent completely fake and its considered normal and acceptable (from an aspies point of view any deviation from the core personality would be considered fake so it can be difficult to understand).

But then again this is all just an aspies hypothesis based on a couple decades of studying human behavior.

This is a very interesting subject.

I often don't see the masks people put on and assume they're really like that, the 'false picture' which they are presenting to the world. That is such a strange feeling, when I realise I've been conned, because it does feel like that, being hoodwinked. I kind of assume that NT's understand about this 'masking process' that goes on, and understand that it is not real, but it always fools me.

I think these masks are used by NTs for socialising. Maybe it works like this ; two people meet wearing their masks, as they gradually get to know and like each other they feel safe to show a little more of their real selves behind the mask. Eventually, if they trust each other enough, they are 'maskless' with each other most of the time.

I am coming to the conclusion that I don't actually have a persona, and that's why socially I feel so vulnerable. I wonder if it is possible to consciously construct one, but probably that would make me feel false, like acting a part, and I'd forget to 'wear' it, and it would seem like just another hassle that I've not got the energy to do. The saying 'just be yourself' comes to mind, but if 'yourself' is a seen by others as a very strange creature...hmmm, still thinking...

Yes, the more you come to know someone, the less you use masks. Friendship should mean that you can reveal yourself. In the family, as a family shoul be at least, even if there is some conflict, you don’t put up masks. But families don’t last forever and as soon as you have to explore the territory outside and you have to take roles in institutions and places of work, you have to play a part, more or less. You must show a competence that you don’t have, a friendship you don’t feel, a morality to which you don’t adhere. And you become a prisoner of this self falsification process.

There is an American author, Ervin Goffmann who has dealt abundantly and in an amusing way with these problems (“The presentation of self” “Encounters” “Relations in public”). Most interaction in work places at higher level is strategic. "Strategic" means that those you interact with are enemies. So you can use mimicry, feign moves, act foul to prevail. It's manipulative and scarcely fraternal. Competition in the market and in careers is aimed to win advantage no matter how.