Saturday: routine and reading

I took T. to martial arts and Vic’s. He drove both ways. Piano lesson happened and _in person_! Yay!

A. met a couple friends at Westside Creamery; they had planned a surprise birthday thing for her. Very sweet! I dropped her off and R. retrieved her a couple hours later.

T. and MIL went to Papa Razzi and were there for a couple hours have a grand time. They made it back barely in time for T. to change clothes to go to Roche Bros. for his job.

I walked with M.

I finished Misha Fletcher’s _Cooking is Terrible_, which is a fantastic book AND a fantastic cookbook. You should buy it and read it. It’s for everyone. Well, unless you are completely allergic to swears, in which case, maybe not.

I am now reading _Odd Girl Out_ by Laura James. Liveblogging may follow!

On FB, I posted:

“I’m reading _Odd Girl Out_ by Laura James. It is really interesting (I picked it for book group next month, so I’m glad it isn’t sucking), but there are really some moments.

“”You use humor to hide from your problems,” a therapist once said to me before asking me to choose which cushion I would like to play the role of my mother. I laughed, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Turns out Gestalt therapy was not for me.”

That’s good for both insight, and a chuckle, so, fine. But then the author says this a few pages later.

“I have never quite found that breakthrough point others talk about with therapy. I have never found it painful and have never become emotional.”

I hate to break it to the author, but if you start laughing and cannot stop, that actually counts as “emotional”.”

Here is the author describing a friend she had in her very early teens:

“Even when I briefly had a best friend, Helen, it didn’t work out. She was too needy for me… She expected me to spend all my free time with her and didn’t like it if I saw any of the other girls alone. (New para in book) She thought we should have lunch together every day and walk to and from school together. She expected us to spend Saturday nights together and to sleep over at each other’s house, not leaving until just before bedtime on Sunday evening…(new para in book) She became jealous if I spent time with anyone else and would try to start arguments…She was bright and funny, thought, and we could sit in her bedroom and giggle about nothing for hours…(new para in book) We became close when we were twelve … (new para) By the time we were fourteen, we had more or less gone our separate ways… (new para) The other girls from school were less needy, and although often I felt I didn’t quite fit with them, I never felt consumed in the way I had with Helen, who would frequently storm off in a huff for no obvious reason. I missed her, though, and we became friends again later, although the friendship followed a similar pattern and once again we fell out. My divorce clashed with her wedding, and she felt I was somehow trying to steal her thunder. For years I believed it was all my fault. In hindsight, I can see it was a clash of needs, mine to have space and hers to feel connected.”

Well, from over here, sounds like your best friend maybe had some borderline personality disorder going on. Just sayin’.

More from _Odd Girl Out_

This is so cool. She’s interleaving stories of her life with discussions with Tony Attwood.

But first! I posted this on FB:

““In my teens I would sit outside Cafes on the King’s Road or in Hampstead flicking through the latest Jilly Cooper release, devouring every word. Not just because they were thrilling, fast-paced, and addictive, but because I thought they offered a blueprint for how people behaved. I genuinely believed that if I could just be more like a Jilly Cooper character, I would be a normal person.”

This _feels_ like someone trying to be normal by imitating what they watched in a soap opera, or a Judith Krantz novel or whatever, but I’m not sure I’ve got the right idea here. And honestly, the idea of reading Jilly Cooper novels that I see on Amazon does not … appeal.”

After I went back to reading, there was more about Cooper:

“I genuinely read Jilly Cooper as you would read an instruction manual for a washing machine. I thought I would find all the answers to life within these pages.”

Leaving Cooper behind, Laura James has some interesting things to say about her communication style.

“I’m often surprised when a situation spins out of control. I have begun many relationships with men that I understood to be completely platonic (!!!), later to discover that they read things very differently. I can be intense at the start of a friendship. I love to learn new things, and new people may have knowledge and experiences I haven’t come across before. I get excited about new facts, and that excitement can be contagious.”

OK, my readers who know me are going to go, looking at you walkitout, and I want to be clear, _I absolutely get that this sounds a lot like me_. But I _also_ want to be clear that while she’s got some insight on this happening when writing this book sometime around 2015/6, it sounds suspiciously like maybe she doesn’t have that kind of insight in the moment, and it _also_ doesn’t sound like she’s taken meaningful steps to change her life in a way to keep herself out of trouble. Right? “I’m often surprised when a situation spins out of control” is kind of her telling you that. And _that_ part of it is very not me any more, and hasn’t been for a long time now. I’ll give you some more quotes to show where I think the divergence in our life paths happened:

“My social style is easy, fun, and above all else different. I have learned that men can find this attractive and confusing. I’m a quick communicator. I can’t easily leave a text or email or call unanswered. I perhaps seem more intensely involved in the friendship than I actually am. (New para) This leads to a mismatch in expectations. I think we’re exploring a new friendship, one I naturally imagine will be doomed to failure. He, on the other hand, will often imagine this intensity is the sign of something more.”

…

“Because I find neurotypical women slightly frightening, most new relationships I form tend to be with men. They are easier to read and more straightforward. They don’t feel slighted by my directness…”

But this is a big mismatch! How can men _simultaneously_ be easier to read AND she keeps being surprised by the misunderstanding she’s having about how they are perceiving her?

Answer: men _are not_ easier for her to read! Probably it just takes longer for her to be frightened by them. (I think she is actually aware of this part of the situation.)

Anyway. I had a friend from rec.arts.books, initials CB, who was local enough to meet up with on occasion. We had delightful conversations, and she described how she was consciously living a woman centered life. (I am also eternally grateful to her for recommending a really awesome dental hygienist; I hadn’t been to the dentist for several years, was terrified to go back, and badly needed to. Best of all, the experience gave me a framework to assess future dentists, so when I moved to NH, I could come up with a solution there eventually as well.) I was kinda skeptical, because I shared James’ pattern at the time. _But I was in my 20s_. It took a while — the first baby steps were basically, I’m friends with someone who has a girlfriend / wife. Go hang out with her instead. But CB _also_ pointed me in the direction of consciously reading books by women, which again, I was kinda skeptical about, because I was a very avid SF/F fan at the time. It took a while, but again, absolutely worth while.

That conscious decision to focus on women friends over men friends whenever possible, and to read books by women rather than books by men whenever possible, _meaningfully_ and _permanently_ changed so much about me that in many ways, my younger self seems at time unrecognizably alien (and, to be completely honest, pretty unlikable). I’m not entirely certain that the author has been through a related process.

[ETA: I kept thinking about CB, so of course I tracked her down online. She’s gotten even more amazing as a photographer over the years. http://www.caitlinburke.com/]

“Would I like to go back to my teenage years, knowing what I know now? God, yes! A million times yes! I would love to do it all again with the knowledge of my autism and the skills I have built up in the intervening years.”

Gah!

“Would I want to experience again the same emotions I did then? I’m not sure. I find emotions — my own and other people’s — scary and overwhelming.”

Yeah, so, we’re pretty different. But also, how do you go _back_ and relive those years _without_ the emotions? I mean, teenagers are balls of overwhelming emotions, neurotypical or otherwise! WTF?