Lived experience

[greenstorm]

A friend of mine wrote this:

could this body be a wilderness
instead of a garden?
could it thrive, grow mysterious & intriguing,
develop shadows & secrets
and wild glens where herbs sprawl green
on the banks of burbling streams, and
aspens shiver gently in soft breezes,
their clean straight stems welcoming sun and wind.
could i be filled with endless summer sun
and the passionate torment of monsoon rains?
could i freeze hard in winter and come
to a complete stop
just breathing?

We played around in the comments a little, and eventually I added this:

could these humans be a garden
instead of a wilderness?
could they thrive, grow gracious and perceptive,
develop tolerance & knowing,
and walled rooms where creatures sprawl safe
in the murmurs of shared conversations, and
bodies melt in sympathetic support,
their nerves and muscles welcoming desired contact.
could i be filled with challenge and answer
and the passionate torment of empathy's exploration?
could i shed my armour in society and come
to a complete stop
just breathing?

She is yarrowkat / Kat Heatherington and you can find more of her here, her work is excellent: https://www.patreon.com/yarrowkat

But I want to talk about the process for a minute, because this felt really important to me.

I'm different from other people. That's really been the crux of this whole autism/PDA/whatever thing: it's that my experiences are just not the same as other folks, even given the same events. It makes folks very uncomfortable to know that my experiences are different from theirs so I spend most of my energy smoothing that over in various ways: highlighting the overlaps, shrugging off statements about "universal" or my own experiences, denying my own senses and the reality of my own thoughts.

A lot of folks don't seem to feel like people can be different from each other, so when I assert my experience they argue with me: no, I must have actually thought/felt some other thing. Or, if they accept that difference, they feel like then stating their own experiences somehow challenges the existence of mine, so they get real quiet. The concept of neurodiversity helps me put this into context. These folks don't believe in neurodiversity.

When someone states an experience around something I'm interested in, I want to find it fascinating. I want to dig in and compare. I want to both know their experience and share my own. Through this process I feel like I am both acknowledging/legitimizing this new experience and building knowledge about my own. So many folks view this as an adversarial invalidation, though, that I don't do it often. It's viewed as contrarian.

(I'm a little bitter: I grew up with "celebrate our differences" slogans and then when I go to do it folks feel attacked)

So when Kat wrote this poem (there's a bunch more to it) I kind of played with some of the lines. She identifies as a human, she is within the social and human sphere, and in the poem she's experiencing wilderness as external. I identify as a piece of nature, I guess, outside of the human sphere but interacting with it, and I identify wilderness as internal and humans as external.

In the comments of the poem we went back and forth: she'd write something, I'd use her formality of thought and her structure to invert her writing and gain a better understanding of myself, by using her lens. It was tremendously valuable. The exchange also reads as if I'm contradicting or challenging her. So for instance she'd write: "the wilderness is what doesn't fit. outside the comfort, the sunlight, the fence itself, it is what lies nameless and unknowable and necessary" and I'd write "humans are what doesn't fit. outside the intuition, the body, nature herself, they are what trade words for truth and congealed facts for certainty and busyness for the work of living and dying"

And through this process we built a thing, I learned a lot, and I also felt like I was allowed to exist as my actual self in the world: like making statements about myself didn't harm or challenge someone else. It was a precious experience for me. PDA never lets me just accept things, it always makes me assess them on their own merits (well, usually, I definitely have blind spots) and this leads to a worldview that's just... different. I got to play in that difference with another person, and I liked that.

Not quite sure where I'm going with this but I wanted to put the poem up there and to mark this. Notice what you like, so you can steer towards more of it if you see it around.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

i also do not play card/board/rp games etc. i'm just not interested; never really have been. everyone around me plays imaginal games, mostly RPGs and they all clearly derive immense satisfaction from it. i think it is the exiting this reality with other people into another one that's the appeal. i exit this reality by reading and am generally disinterested in taking everybody with me, lol. except in that terra & i read books aloud to each other slowly over time.

[greenstorm]

I was so, so into roleplaying (non-competitive, basically co-writing stories online where each person took a character and either shared or had another person do "the world") for many years, then it just... stopped. And I was so into reading for many years, and then that stopped. At some point I became really attached to spending time in my own head instead of in other folks, not quite sure what changed. I'd sure like a break some days.

[yarrowkat]

reading, which I do constantly (and since I got into audiobooks, I've had two novels going simultaneously ever since - i read or listened to 80 novels last year), is incredibly valuable to me for its escape quality, as well as for what I learn or think of that wouldn't otherwise have crossed my path. it's also how i check out instead of working on myself when I'm feeling avoidant, so it's definitely got its downside in that regard

[greenstorm]

Yes, reading like that probably saved my life through from seven or so until my late twenties. I found it really fertile ground for working on myself, honestly, even just to give me different frames of reference so I could differentiate my *self* from the background noise of living. Someday life will quiet down enough that I will either start reading again or dig into why I can't.

I did pick it up for a little while again while I was dating Blake, who read like I used to. We would trade books and stay up late reading together and talking what we'd just read. Then it just... stopped again.

[yarrowkat]

there's some truth to the idea that you can explore the whole world, and beyond, through books. fiction included. (says the inveterate fiction reader.) Jaime told me once that "reading is approximately as important [to me] as breathing" and he is not wrong.

[greenstorm]

Sometimes lately I wonder, now that I've laid the foundation of reading about lots of other people, if maybe I'm waiting for someone to write a book about someone like me. I'm considering picking up "Diary of a Young Naturalist" to see if it approaches that, but really what I want is fiction. Reading about people like me who actually exist is too lonely.