How To Deal With Your Weird Friend (Part 1)

I am the weird friend and I've written you a manual.

"Weird" here is literal, a deviation from the statistical norm, not a negative description, not a downside. For my parents, I am their weird daughter. For my husband-to-be, I will be his weird wife. For my best friend, I am the weird person who showed up one day and just never left. And I wish that when I was born someone had given me a manual on myself: that the earth had cracked open and this scroll of knowledge had risen up into my mom's hospital room.

Scroll-risings aren't that common, though.

I've spent the last twenty-two years of my life trying to live by the standard manual of human thinking and functioning, which, in retrospect, is like watching a train slowly crash. I was barely able to finish high school, I haven't finished college. I left on medical leave this winter feeling completely burnt out. It was fun. I'm not being literal now. It wasn't really fun. If we were speaking in person now would be the time you would probably roll your eyes and say, "I knew that! Anybody would know that." But I wouldn't know that. Because I am your weird friend. I'm going to be writing from my own personal experience, casting myself as The Weird Friend in question so as not to generalize the Weird Friend community.

Let's get started.

Item #1

I will understand what you say literally all the time. All the time. When I was five years old and at my first day of kindergarten the lead teacher put a wristband on me and said, "Don't take this off." I cried that evening. I felt so stressed out about having this band of thick paper around my wrist, touching me, being papery and asymmetrical the way quickly applied kindergarten wristbands are. I worried that I would get it wet while washing my hands and it would fall off and I would have failed this prime directive of my kindergarten career. I couldn't understand why the adults in my life kept trying to take it off of my wrist. I felt like I was fending off enemy forces intent on forcing me to fail my kindergarten teacher.

It fell off that weekend. You can probably guess how well that went.

Are you playing a video game and you tell me that "Eight hundred people just showed up on here and made my game stall," I will look immediately at the number of players on the planet and server, expecting there to be 800+, and then frown and say, "Jack, there are only thirty players here." I know this because Jack and I did this yesterday evening. I was genuinely expecting to see 800 people.

Some people find this frustrating. They've told me that it feels to them like I interpret them literally as a way to annoy or undermine them. I have no idea how they can reach this conclusion, but then, that's also how I feel about many conclusions people have. All I can really say is that it's an automatic feature of my brain. Words get heard and read in their exact meaning.

Do you know how many times people hiss in novels? Authors seem fond of using "hiss" as a variant of "said." He hissed, she hissed. For a very long time I thought that this meant that the characters were actually hissing, hissing like stepped-on snakes or upset cats. It never occurred to me to question this.

Let's just say that the Twilight books were a lot funnier inside my head.

How You Can Deal With This

Don't take my literal interpretation personally. I'm not trying to mess with you. It's just how I understand everything. It's really helpful for me if you say exactly what you mean or stick to using words that work for both of us. If I misunderstand you, be patient and just explain what you really meant.

Sometimes people take my literal communication and expound on it to create this weird cloud of figurative strangeness that I don't understand and didn't intend to convey. They end up offended and I end up confused. Listen to the literal meaning of my communication and try not to read between the lines: there is nothing there. I don't do in-between-the-lines meanings. I will tell you what I mean and why I mean it.

Item #2

My brain likes to pick one thing and do that one thing, and it's best if that one thing has come from the (short, short) list of brain-approved things. I've struggled in school because I've tried to move my brain to interest itself in other topics and not succeeded very well. I've always had trouble with mathematics, for example. It's like math is so different from Kathryn's List of Brain-Approved Interests that my brain refuses to absorb anything to do with it.

Jack keeps trying to get me to play other video games with him, but all I want to do is play one single one to completion, and then play it over and over and over and over again. When I watch television shows I watch each episode in rapid succession (because otherwise the set of episodes is incomplete, and my brain hates incomplete), and then I watch only episodes from that show for the next few months or so, over and over. I've always disliked libraries because I can't just read a book and return it: I will read it and reread it and rereread it, and for a while it will be the only thing I will want to do, and then it will cycle back to being the only thing I want to do. When I was in the third grade, the book of the year was a Harry Potter book, and I no longer have that copy because I reduced it to a long series of pamphlets.

I repeat some motions and words a lot. You'll notice it if you hang around me long enough. I have a few phrases I use to calm myself down or distract myself, or that I just catch myself saying throughout the day. I often reach out to touch the walls. And I've been spinning around my room in private moments for hours at a time since I was very little. It's just a part of me being myself.

On the upside, I am very good at what I am interested in. I'm good at reading, good at writing, good at learning languages, good at learning stories. History, philosophy and literature are my academic jam. If you have any questions about obscure Star Wars extended universe trivia, I'm your girl.

Also: pumpkin spice. I love it. I adore it. I have never tired of it and I likely never will. I could have it morning, noon and night and be completely set. It is a brain-approved taste. I will probably be buried with it.

How You Can Deal With This

I understand that most of you aren't thrilled with the idea of only watching Hannibal or Firefly ad infinitum. I understand that you don't want to play The Old Republic every free moment that you have; that you don't want to only listen to Lana Del Rey on our two-and-a-half-week roadtrip; that you don't want to go on every date at a bookstore; that you don't want to study Welsh with me for weeks at a time. This is cognitive understanding, not intuitive understanding (intuitive understanding is convinced that you're all the weird ones, especially when it comes to not wanting to learn Welsh), but it will serve well enough. It won't stop me from asking you to join me, but I've learned not to feel abandoned when you mysteriously disappear whenever I suggest watching a television show. Because you know that it will probably be Firefly. And you will fall to your knees and scream heavenward if you have to see Firefly one more time.

Please don't think that I am uninterested in your pursuits or wanting to repeat the same things and focus on the same interests as some sort of power play. I just want to share them with you. I do try to balance out what I want us to do with what you want us to do, but my brain finds that very stressful. It's constantly tugging me back over to a brain-approved topic. Let's go back. Let's go back. Let's go back. Let's go back. So if we do something that you want to do and I immediately go do one of my brain-approved things afterwards, please don't interpret it as an offense. I'm just trying to keep the peace between my brain and you.

However, please don't mimic my repetitive phrases or gestures. I make an active effort to suppress these when around other people, so if some do happen, I would like you to just ignore them. Repeating them to me just reinforces how much I know that Normal People Don't Do This, Kathryn, and that's not a very cool thing for you to do. Laughing at them is worse. Don't laugh. Come on.

Please give me space to spin in peace. Don't question me at length about it, don't interrupt me (please, please, please, please knock) if you can help it, don't make fun of me for it, and don't put down rugs while I'm at school because you think that it will help me. It won't help me. I'll come home, see the rugs on the floor, and get upset. Let me spin. It's really quite soothing: you know, it blurrs out color and shape and outside things so that I can have some moments inward. You should grab a wooden floor and try it.

Item #3

I have a very low tolerance for stimulation. Noise, light, heat, doing things, executive functions of all sorts -- these drain me. Being in the same room as other people who are doing things can drain me. If I'm already drained from the previous days or weeks, even little things, like taking medication or going out to get coffee, will drain me. Inner stimuli, like fevers and headaches, will drain me. Drain me far enough, and I will melt down and go to bed for days. My room is full of soft places to tuck myself away while I recover.

"It's like you have one bucket," Jack said once, "and you fuel everything you do from that one bucket, and then there are people who have fifty buckets of fuel, and they wonder why you can't do all the things they can do."

It's a good explanation. I've seen a similar one with the spoons theory. And it makes me feel a little better about my very short list of things I can do each day. For most of my life I and everyone else around me assumed that I had fifty buckets of fuel and tried to push me to pack my day with things that drew on that fuel. It wasn't a viable life strategy, given that I was short forty-nine buckets.

How To Deal With This

Your voices are loud. Really loud. Take how loud you think your voice sounds to you, dial it up about twenty notches, and you'll have a good idea of how loud your voice sounds to me.

Please respect that I am working with a limited amount of energy. I've been at parties and places where I've said that I needed to leave, been put off with "Just ten more minutes," or "Just let me do this thing," and I've ended up in cold December cars and hidden in closets. Please understand that when you draw out time talking and doing small things, you are spending my energy. Even having people around me do things spends my energy, because it's sound and movement and focus and presence.

And overstimulation is painful. It's actually physically painful. Psychologically, it's a nightmare. Your body and mind shut down, you're in pain, you can't explain yourself, and you need to leave immediately. When I was little I would just start sobbing at stores with my mom because she kept wanting to go to another store, and another store, and it would get to the point where that just broke me. "Recovery" is not a phrase I use lightly: de-stimulating myself feels like a process of healing. If overstimulation is being shattered and filled with static, then de-stimulation is being stitched back together and calmed down to silence.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and wrote a little bit on another site about it:

How to screw with your overstimulatable friends:

Invite them somewhere, insist on doing something overstimulating beforehand that they can't shelter themselves from, and once they're in pain and exhausted just leave them behind while you go somewhere anyway.

Stop people from screwing with the neuroatypical people in their lives 2015.

Needless to say, this is not how you can be a good friend to me, your weird friend.

So how do you deal?

You can't take my overstimulation personally. If I'm sobbing and shouting at you to shut up, it has nothing to do with what you are saying and everything to do with that you are making painful noises that I need you to stop ASAP. I may have to cancel plans or ask you to do things for me. I try not to do these things unless I need to and/or you are an ethereal servant raised from the netherworld to serve me, in which case the ritual clearly specifies that going to Starbucks is an acceptable request to make. Also, please take me seriously and literally when I say that I need to leave somewhere or stop doing something. I tend to push myself to stay places and do things, so if I say that I need to leave, I really do mean it.

I may need days to recover from doing something. I'm not avoiding you. Well, I am avoiding you, but not because you're you, but because I need to avoid everything.

I'm not a lazy person. I spend so much of my life forcing myself to be as active as I can be that being told that I am lazy just makes me feel hopeless and resigned. My parents have told me that I am coddled and sheltered and spoiled. They want me to be out in the world, earning money and racking up degrees and paying my own way. They don't see that all of this downtime is physically necessary, that I can't function very well, if at all, without it.

I am very grateful to have a wonderful and supportive partner in my life. Jack is someone I used to assume I could never have, our relationship a relationship I couldn't maintain. We both work hard and at our own limits, which means that he does a great deal of the literal and figurative heavy lifting. In fact, being friends at all with me requires a lot of effort on both your part and my part. We need to work hard to understand each other and learn how we can accomodate each other before we can have a working friendship. Casual friendships of mine often fall apart before they really begin.

I often feel that my needs are selfish demands, that my recovery is wasted time, that I am a perennially glitching program requiring caretakers, I've internalized a lot of ableism, which is, of course, what all of this is. It makes for a lot of confusion and loneliness. I don't like to admit that, but it's true.

And now it's time for me to talk to all the other weird friends out there, all of you reading this.

Affirmation: you are not burdens.

Affirmation: your recovery times and de-stimulation needs are important, very important, vitally important.

Affirmation: your needs are not demands, your needs are important for everyone around you to understand. It's okay.

They're your needs, same as water, same as air.

#overstimulation #health