I was thinking about atypical friendship today, and also about the kinds of masks neurotypicals forge without realizing it. Originally I had planned on writing a different paper for each subject, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these two things are intertwined. Friendship can be a funny thing; especially when things are weird already.
Now in hindsight, I admit that I was not always the easiest friend to have. I used to constantly videotape what I was doing before the age of YouTube, and it is all…just awful. I had a lot to learn, and these lessons didn’t always come with the best teachers. One of the perils of masking is that you are always a reflection of the people around you, and this can lead you down paths where you become a much crueler version of yourself than you may have been otherwise.
Like most white Midwestern American parents in the 1980s, my parents were extremely worried about inner city gang violence. What were the actual odds any of this violence would ever reach a town no one has ever heard of? That didn’t stop my parents (and a lot of other parents) from banning any “gang” related things, along with whatever toys and games were filled with demons.
Despite the promises from random kids claiming they knew gang members in the city who would travel nearly a hundred miles to beat up middle schoolers, there would never be any gang violence in any of the towns I resided in during my childhood. “Gang related” was obviously just code for “stuff we think black people like,” and the actual fear of the parents was that their kid would start “acting black.”
This led to a lot of rebellious teenagers listening almost exclusively to gangster rap on a stereo that more than likely sat on a worn-out shelf in front of a confederate flag. These are some of the people I got to choose from when picking friends, so try to keep that in mind as I relate to you a few of my failed experiments at friendship.
One of my first friends was a dude who had a Wang Computer and glasses. I hung out with him until the day he swung a piece of wood as hard as he could at my temple. He seemed startled when I just rubbed the side of my head, but I figured it was an accident. He quickly muttered something about having to leave, and we never hung out again. It didn’t occur to me for at least a decade that he may have done it on purpose. Oh well.
A few years later, I became friends with a couple girls from the church my mom used to drag me to. The girls were black, and while that didn’t matter to me, it does to the story; so there we were, just three friends hanging out playing legos and running around outside for no reason.
Then some little piece of shit pops out from behind a slide.
“HEY!” he yells. “What are you doing playing with those n____s!”
I am ten years old, and while I had encountered the idea of racism before, this would be the first time I would experience it targeting someone I cared about personally. I was enraged for my friends, angry that this racist little shit dared to speak that way…
“Fuck you!” I yelled back. “Don’t fucking talk to them that way!”
I heard a quiet voice from behind me say “You sweared….”
I never saw either of them again, as they moved away shortly afterwards. I didn’t get to say goodbye to them, because our parents were both very religious and I said the f-word to some little asshole. I hope they’re ok.
In seventh grade, South Park was the talk of middle school for its outrageous comedic stylings and irreverent poop-fueled humor. I had just made a new friend: the child of some Christian missionaries who apparently had just come back from living somewhere in Africa. This kid would tell everyone stories about stealing four-wheelers and driving through African huts. His tales of darkest Africa seemed pretty fucked up to me, but everyone else laughed and laughed. One day, while playing some stupid game in the barn on his parent’s farm, I managed to stand up directly into a nail protruding from the roof, temporarily impaling my skull. The resulting trickle of blood seemed to concern him, and he convinced me to run my head under the bathroom sink until it stopped bleeding instead of telling his mom.
Later, he convinced me to set fire to an old RV that was rotting in a field behind my house. The smoke from the blaze could be seen for miles, billowing up in great black rings that made the sunset look like an ominous warning. I wasn’t surprised when the police showed up to arrest me.
I ended up getting a year’s probation for grand arson, and I guess that other kid went back to Africa or something. What a fucking asshole. Oh well.
When I was 16, I had no friends at all. I was living with my mom in the house of the same ancient lady that had taken my dog from me when I was a young boy. I was “home schooling,” which meant that I would do tests for a mail correspondence school and send them in. I eventually just stopped sending them in. Exploring the outside world proved to be a futile effort. In my first attempt, I ended up getting mildly robbed. I tried to get a cup of coffee in what I thought was a coffee shop, but to my horror it was actually a homeless shelter with a stupid name. I tried to play it cool, but I really had no idea of what the proper response was for that kind of interaction. I waited until the guy went to get some paperwork, and made my escape. After that, I didn’t leave the room I was staying in for at least three months. It may have been longer, but I had lost any concept of the passage of time. The old lady had gone to stay with her daughter, and where was my mother? Working? Church? The loneliness increased. The psychic pressure began to build up behind my left eye more often, and I began observing how blood would slowly ooze from my skin when I cut it slightly with an antique straight razor. I would watch shows like Homeboys From Outer Space and Blockbuster’s entire anime collection. I probably would have found even more creative ways to torture myself; had the old lady not figured out I was selling her shit to the antique store and demanded I leave. Oh well, that’s what I wanted anyway.
The remainder of my teenage years were spent in a quaint, idyllic, racist town in rural Illinois. The first thing I learned about this town was that they still had a “sundown” law on the books, a fact that was relayed to me by some random teenager whose name I didn’t bother remembering. The fact that some dumbass kid knew enough town lore to not only know about this law but to also recite it as some sort of feature should definitely reveal something about this town. It was, and is, a terrible place.
Here is where I learned about the kinds of masks neurotypicals wear, although I wouldn’t realize it until years later. The autistic mask is forged from necessity; it provides a barrier against the otherwise seemingly constant barrage of questions and comments like “What’s wrong with you?,” “Are you r_____d?”, and the all-time classic “You are so weird!”
It is useless to try and interact with the neurotypical world without this mask, as they become very confused and frightened when they don’t get their usual conversational constructs. It is a lie, but a lie that is demanded. I promise you, if it were possible to simply not bother with the layers of extra processes I have to perform to have a simple conversation, I would simply not do those things.
The neurotypical’s mask is a much simpler creation, as it is simply the difference between “business” and “casual”. The neurotypical’s business mask is prim, proper, professional. They carefully consider their words to not utter anything that could affect their general social standing, but these actions frequently conceal their true feelings. They resent this mask, as much as they resent any other work function. It becomes a chore, one they must undertake merely to prevent controversy. It is never part of who they really are.
Their true character is only revealed when they believe they can relax around kindred spirits; when people stop being polite and start getting real. I absolutely hate being included in this.
“Locker room talk.” The seemingly innocuous euphemism refers to all the things they would never say publicly, and holy crap I never want to be confided in again. Small talk is tedious enough, but I was never able to properly keep a mask up and carry on a conversation that started with something racist or along the lines of, “Dude, I was totally railing this chick last night…”
I am always disappointed when I am mistaken for a kindred spirit to someone’s ugly inner core. What am I doing wrong that I keep attracting these people?
Overall, I never had great luck with friends. Many of the ones I had stole from me, talked behind my back, played tricks on me, and used me for entertainment. The ones that weren’t awful to me still turned out to be Trump-loving right-wing conservatives. This shouldn’t surprise me given the amount of racism I witnessed growing up, but it doesn’t make it any less disappointing.
Not everyone I’ve called a friend has been a terrible person. I bring my own social flaws to the table, and start mixing things up in the worst of ways. My sense of social bond works as a sort of latching switch, where the last state of the relationship is saved until the next time it’s updated. An argument sets the flag to negative, and if the situation does not present itself, I will just never interact with that person again unless I think they want me to. It’s not that I’m even mad; I rarely stay mad for more than a couple of hours unless there’s a meltdown involved. Even when I want to stay mad because I know if I don’t I’ll let it happen again; I still eventually get over it like a fool. But I am also very concerned about being annoying, because in the past I have often been extremely irritating with my constant noises and general intensity.
And so I will go for years and years never talking to my friends, because I believe they are tired of dealing with my shit. I also assume they are still my friends, but rather than dealing with the constant maintenance that neurotypicals require in a companion, I let the friendship exist like Schrödinger’s cat, neither dead nor alive, but always preserved by its last moment. I suppose in a sense I just like the idea of friends, although I also know I could not survive comfortably in complete isolation. That did not work out very well the last time I attempted it.
The internet has been fantastic for countering this, as I am afforded all the parasocial relationships I desire, without any of the maintenance requirements. The ability to finally feel in control of a conversation was what drew me to the internet originally, and continues to be a comfort.
The autistic appeal of online friendships isn’t solely in the ability to self-administer companionship. My in-person weirdness is must less of an inhibiting factor online, and I can take all the time I need to find the right words and double check that I‘m talking about the right thing. Here, nobody demands that I eye wrestle them or assumes I’m lying because I keep shifting my weight to not stand on one foot for too long. Here I don’t lose focus in the middle of someone’s sentence and suddenly have no idea what the conversation was about; because I can just go back and reread it. Here I feel almost normal.
Here is where I can find other people like me. Out there, I am usually sitting somewhere far enough away from the crowd to handle the noise, but still close enough to be considered part of the action. We might have even been in the same place at the same time, but I was sitting somewhere out of the way, trying not to bother. Just a weird dude behind a barrel on the side of the item shop, eager to hand out valuable information for no real reason.
Without external interference, I would have been content to sit up in the rafters of IRC chatrooms instead of setting fires and swimming behind abandoned factories in contaminated water. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom dictates that boys need friends. I ended up with whatever friends I could find.
Autism researchers continue to be baffled at how autistics are able to form friendships, and the short answer is that we find the least shitty people we can who will put up with us. I was lucky enough to have one childhood friend that wasn’t awful, although he does have questionable politics these days. My biggest pressure to make friends did not come from my desire for group activity, but more from the pressure applied by all the people around me who insisted I needed friends in order to be a healthy, well-rounded individual.
It took a long time to remove those people from my mask and unlearn their lessons. I had grown up assuming that people were generally honest about their intentions; that people would rather just not talk to you at all instead of wasting their time pretending to be your friend in order to trap you with some terrible situation; one that is apparently funny for reasons you’ll never understand. I was wrong to make that assumption.
Still, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I am trying to absolve myself using the classic “society is to blame!” cry. I realize that I am still responsible for the actions I chose to take. However, I don’t believe I would have ended up in many of the wildly uncomfortable situations I have often found myself in if I hadn’t been convinced it was a good idea by some enthusiastic third party.
The day I left Illinois, I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I hadn’t read Watchmen yet, but I really was tired of these people and their lives. I was tired of hearing racist shit, tired of stupid gossip about who had AIDS or who was going to get beat up by truckers. Tired of the neighborhood pedophiles and lingering creeps. Tired of hearing verbatim propaganda from white supremacists about how other races and creeds were conspiring against the white man. Tired of them assuming I am interested.
That was the day I left my friends. From that day on, my life became stranger.