57: What does it mean to be a little weird?
Exploring confusion and judgment
Sometimes I’ll meet somebody and think to myself, “That person seems a little weird.” Then I have to remind myself that I am a super weird person compared to many (most?) others. I’m often uncomfortable around other people. I don’t know what to say, or it seems that they don’t know what to say. I’ve learned how to fill that silence with meaningless questions, or comments about the weather, but I’m never sure if I’m doing it because I think it’s what the other person expects or if we’re both annoyed by it. I’m comfortable with silence, but I worry others are not and try to fill it to appear more “normal”. In pretending to be normal, perhaps, I am attuned to what I perceive as the weirdness of others.
It feels judgmental, this determination of weirdness that I bestow on others. The older dad who walks his kid to school on the same path as I do, who always wants to stop and talk about upcoming community events for kids. The slow, meandering tone of his voice, and the seeming arbitrariness of his comments strike me as odd, or annoying. But why shouldn’t I want to talk to him about community events for our kids, who go to the same school, and live a few doors apart? I don’t know, he just seems weird to me.
Or the guy who used to cut our lawn and rake up our leaves, until he got a steady job and stopped returning my phone calls. He didn’t do particularly good work, but he was reliable, and relatively cheap. I always tried to pretend I wasn’t home when he came by, because if he saw me he’d want to talk, and talk, and talk. He’d repeat snippets of conspiracy theories from conservative talk radio, or express frustration about little annoyances that he experienced day to day, with other clients. I regarded him as not fully in command of his abilities, telling myself he didn’t know better and was probably “on the spectrum”, preventing him from fully understanding the world around us. That sounds harsh. And it’s ironic too, that I would later find out that I myself had been autistic this whole time. That’s the funny way the world works sometimes, “You know how you sometimes see someone and think, ‘I bet that person is on the spectrum’? Well, guess what!” Ha, ha.
I think my reflex to identify people as a “little weird” is related to my internalized sense of weirdness. But not in the way I first thought. After my diagnosis, I assumed because I was autistic that I was able to more easily recognize other autistic folks - a kind of autdar (autistic radar). But my recognition of other weird people is usually tinged with judgment. I get annoyed when I see other people blissfully unaware of their weirdness and flaunting it with no shame. Out of resentment, perhaps, I label them as “weird” as if there is something wrong with that, and then proceed to speak to them as if they are not fully in control of themselves, all the while thinking I have the ability to easily adapt between modes of speaking with people of different neurotypes.
At the peak of my eating disorder, 25 years ago, I remember saying something contemptuous about somebody’s weight. I was in a fancy apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with my friend from back home, Sula. The apartment belonged to a wealthy Wall Street couple. Sula was the man’s sister, and the nanny to their child. “Do you have a thing against fat people?” Sula asked, surprised and sort of offended. I knew I should say, “No”, but it was obvious that I did. I was putting myself through some kind of hell to not be fat any more, and it was making me resentful of people who just went about their lives, seemingly unconcerned about their bellies, or jawlines, or waist size. Sula’s comment that day made me think. It stopped me for a moment and allowed me to see what I was becoming - the very thing that pushed me into this corroded mental state. I didn’t pursue that thought, though, I just let it die and continued my descent. If I can learn how to be skinny, I thought, so can anyone else.
And so it is with weirdness, I suspect. I recognize it with a kind of kinship, but instead of embracing it I pretend it doesn’t reflect me and treat it with scorn. I’ve felt so judged in my life, felt so often wrong, or dumb, or inappropriate, that I’ve internalized those feelings and instinctively criticize others the way I feel I have been criticized. I have much more self awareness now than I did 25 years ago. I’m able to see a thought, reflect on it, and talk myself through my reaction before I verbalize anything. I no longer make the blunt, judgmental comments that used to pour from my mouth without a filter. Now, when I find myself reflexively sizing up someone who seems strange to me, I point it out to myself (you are judging someone for being weird) and remind myself that if anybody is weird, it’s me. And I ask myself, weird compared to what, exactly? What is “not weird”? Is that what we think of as “normal”? And is my sense of “normal” the same as everyone else’s? I’ve often felt that because I’m so abnormal, that I was good at understanding what “normal” was - it was the opposite of whatever my instinctive actions or thoughts were. Something would pop into my head, and I’d think, “OK, what’s the opposite of that? That must be normal”.
It reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I thought the word “mandatory” meant “optional”. I remember planning a road trip with my family and reading the AAA guide to the different states. In each state it said whether seat belts were mandatory (this was before they were required everywhere). The book said that seatbelts in Arizona are mandatory. I told my dad, “Well, then I’m not wearing a seatbelt when we get to Arizona! I don’t have to because it’s mandatory!” My dad laughed, perhaps thinking I was making some kind of joke that was more clever than I even realized, but I don’t think he explained to me that mandatory meant required. I don’t know how many years I had the definition wrong in my head, but the world made sense to me according to my own terms. So, when I think of “normal” I wonder if it’s like “mandatory” when I was kid. Do I really know what it is? Or am I operating on the wrong definition while everyone else intuitively understands the correct one?
When I was a teenager I confused any kind of fondness or liking for another person as love. I would think I was falling in love all the time. If a girl was nice to me for a minute I fell in love with her. If a girl touched me, like on the shoulder, or put her arm around me in greeting (a rare occurrence), I fell in love with her. I professed my love to several different young women, all of whom reacted with confusion at first, then a kind of sad pity, and finally gentle revulsion. It wasn’t until they hit the revulsion stage that I would get the hint (confusion and pity were too easily confused with love in my mind). I think of that now because at that time I thought I knew what “love” was, or to flip it around, I somehow thought that the correct label for my feelings was “love”. This, it occurs to me, could be the same as how I think my interpretation of reality is “typical” and that somehow enables me to spot people who are “atypical”. My interpretation of reality, of course, is different than most other people’s. Just like what I thought was love actually was not love.
Confused, perhaps, is the best word that describes me. Young women would explain to me that I must be “confused” if I thought I loved them. I was confused about the meaning of the word “mandatory”. I am confused by what is “normal” and what is “weird”. In confusion, perhaps, it is easier to judge, to make mistakes, to do the wrong thing. I am still confused much of the time. The great advantage that I have now, though, is the ability to recognize that I am confused, and the willingness to say it out loud. Before, I refused to accept the idea that it might be me who was confused. I had absolute clarity in my misinterpretation of the world, because I hadn’t yet allowed myself to acknowledge that things might be different than I thought they were. Now, I think my awareness of confusion, and my comfort with being confused, might be my greatest strengths. They can save me from falling into the spiral of judgment by reminding me that if something feels “off” it’s probably me.