I used to think that having friends was about social skills, something I didn’t have, which meant I didn’t have friends. Part of this was because I lived in a different world than other kids. I didn’t have much understanding of pop culture at the time, except for occasional encounters with pop culture intersecting with my special interests, a rare thing. In sixth grade, for instance, I was obsessed for several years with the soap opera General Hospital and loved to watch it whenever I could. I was also obsessed with Star Wars, though I think for different reasons than anyone else. But my other interests, from Sherlock Holmes, Louisa May Alcott, biographies and history tomes, were not at all social magnets. And my utter inability to get jokes (which are often based on pop culture references) also gave me a reputation for being a “stick-in-the-mud.” My focus on academics gave me a further reputation for being a “teacher’s pet,” which unfortunately, I was not, since most teachers found my pedantism annoying.
I had one friend in fourth grade and beyond, but not ever more than one friend. And honestly, for most of my childhood and teen years, I did not want any other friends. First of all, friendships seemed to take up a lot of time and effort. Trying to figure out the social rules like what to do on birthdays or when they were sick or other things I probably don’t understand still—impossible for me to keep track of. It was also clear that what I liked wasn’t at all what other people liked, which made them seem very strange and alien to me.
In addition, I saw very few people with whom I wanted relationships. Most people, as far as I could see, were mean and selfish and they changed their mind often and didn’t think very clearly and didn’t have interesting things to say. So as a child, I mostly had relationships with characters in books and with family members, who weren’t necessarily better humans, but at least were more predictable. Predictability was important to me when it came to relationships, in large part because I felt like my father’s moods were so dangerous and so unpredictable.
I assumed, in that way that children assume that the present will be the future, that I would never have friends. I figured that this was fine with me. I liked my own company and unless other people showed themselves to be worth the effort of making friends, I didn’t much care about making an effort with them. This remained true for most of my twenties. But when I hit my thirties, a strange thing happened. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with me, but other people seemed suddenly interested in me. I had far more friends than I’d ever known what to do with, and I was a little cautious at first because I didn’t know what that meant. Were they going to turn on me like some more social friends had in elementary school, because I didn’t offer them much social capital?
In the end, yes, there were a number of friendships that ended with betrayal. I had scars from those relationships for many years. I still don’t really understand what happened. I was accused of being both too honest and of being a liar. I am not a liar. I don’t lie. It is simply not in my constitution. I certainly don’t lie with an endgame in mind of making myself look better. The only kind of joke I’ve ever been good at telling are jokes that end with a punchline about me being ridiculous because of some clue that I’ve missed. Or possibly, something that I see differently about social expectations because they don’t make any sense to me. These are mostly autism jokes.
Now in my 50s, I’ve found that people seem to like my honesty. They use various words to describe this. Raw. Vulnerable. Authenticity. And yes, I am all of those. I’ve always been all of those, though I suppose I’m more articulate now than I was as a child. If anyone had given me a chance as a child, I would have been much, much more articulate than my peers, but no one thought of that as a good thing then.
Now when I look around me, I find that I have the most extraordinary list of friends. Some of them are people who, like me, are somewhere on the autism spectrum. There’s an obvious reason they prefer my way of communication. But there are many other people who, as it turns out, have grown a taste for bluntness and brutal honesty about my upside-down view of the world. But all of that was true of me decades before now.
I think that what I’m accepting about myself now is that I am also an extremely compassionate person. I still (despite attempts to not do this anymore) give people around me the benefit of the doubt. I extend trust even before they deserve it. This sometimes leads to me being hurt, just as it did before. But it also leads to some wonderful people reaching out to me in love and kindness in return.
When I was a child, I tried to be understanding. I tried to show kindness. I wasn’t always able to figure out how to do it. But I always genuinely wanted not to hurt other people. My father’s abuse made me hyper conscious of the effects of that treatment and my top priority in life has always been “do no harm.” But there is another level of compassion that I think I’ve seen develop in myself in my adult decades (if you think that autistic people can’t learn social skills or don’t develop as adults at all, I’m proof against that). I’m a highly sensitive person and while I don’t show my own emotions easily, I do easily feel emotions for others. I carry around other people’s pain and I try to do something about it. I send small gifts or write something. I can’t do a lot and I regret that, but I search for how to help anyway.
It has been a surprise to me to realize that actually, most people don’t do that. Most people don’t grow more compassionate with age. Some do, but most don’t. One of the great gifts of the internet age to me has been the ability to find a lot more of the good people, the ones that I never had the fortune to bump into in childhood, purely because my life then was so limited by geography. Now I have a wide view of humanity and it turns out that someone who is interested in me is likely to be someone I want as a friend. This is a miracle of my autistic life and one I do not take for granted. I have become someone who is a good friend, and I attract good friends and I’m proud of this about myself.
I think this is one of my favorites among your posts. You sound a lot like me. (And I like you. 😊)