Interactions

Social interaction. Why is it so hard? Or more exactly, what is it that makes it so demanding to me?

My life is filled with people I care about, and I want to interact with all of them. So what’s stopping me? I don’t know. Maybe that I can’t focus on more than one person at a time. Maybe that I have to think very hard and tend to spend energy on thinking about how to behave to not be a burden or annoy the other person. Maybe it’s because dialogues sometimes make me hyper. Maybe it has something to do with that my brain is such a mess and to keep focusing I have to contract every mental muscle as hard as I can to remember what we’re talking about.

It has something to do with my inability to shift focus. I can focus on writing (or sometimes talking), or I can focus on reading (or sometimes listening). But the shift from one to the other, back and forth, feels like running a mental marathon. When I have to shift focus, I don’t parse what I’m reading and thinking automatically.

It’s ironic, the focus shifting comes back in everything.

I read what people write. I ponder. Then I write something but never as an obvious reply. I rarely reply in twitter threads. I read and then I make my own thread.

Sometimes it’s easier. When I get to talk about one of the things that I care passionately about. But then I feel guilty about me taking up too much space. It’s not that I don’t want to know what the other person is thinking, it’s just that I’m not good at articulating questions. I fear that I will ask something that is too private. I don’t want to be the person that violates somebody’s privacy, because respecting boundaries is always more important than a correct conversation.

Of course, it’s also the fear of rejection. I can’t get rid of the gaze that deems me as defected. Nowadays I call myself autistic and I have found other people that are very much like me, but it doesn’t erase thirty years of being wrong.