Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

Yesterday's topic of discussion: my tics.

I forced myself to stop doing the things I do with my nose when I was thirteen because my friends picked on me, which caused years of frustration and pain. It's back now, and it feels great! Now I've also started doing something terribly ugly with my head/neck, and I grimace more than ever. What's more embarrassing is my habit of repeating overheard fragments of other people's conversations - I don't even think about it, but once I realize what I've done, I just can't stop myself. I go on and on, repeating the same thing over and over again. Haha, so far the worst thing that has happened is that I've made people uncomfortable, and I have a strategy: telling my friends what I've done, without mentioning suspected syndromes or anything. It doesn't really feel as bad once I've made a joke about it, and those things are what people tend to like about me anyway.

At home (or by all means outside), I shout things basically every day. My son, who is now four years old, loves it when I say "poop". Usually it's small words or sounds like that, other times I say whole sentences that have nothing to do with anything that's happening. Nonsense sentences in English are quite common as well. I have spent many lectures rolling around in my chair with my fists pressed against my teeth to keep myself from saying things. I don't think I've actually ever done it, but I occasionally wonder if I just said "fuck", and once I've thought about it I will probably start. Maybe I should try letting it happen? Could be fun! Haha!

Of course, C mentioned Tourette's syndrome after all this. Coffee and Tourette's. I might get a whole box full of diagnoses! Anna and the syndromes. Sounds like a band name.

He also asked how much I hide from him. I've told him about the tics, but I actually hide all of them from him. Stupid? Yes, especially considering that I'm way too honest with him about everything else. All we ever talk about is my problems, and now I am the opposite of myself: an arch-emo, lacking independence and in need of care. I should do it the other way around, stop being so damn honest but be open about my weirdness. Sure, I wouldn't sound intelligent or look good (well, I never do anyway) but at least I would like myself more.

I, Robot

It rarely, if ever, happens nowadays, but there was one day a year ago when I really wished that I could instantly paint myself the same color as the floor. It was one of those classes that I hate – I love literature, I just hate studying it, especially when I have to talk about a text with people outside of the group hearing it. This day, we were given a poem, which had been voted “Favourite English poem of all times” in a BBC poll: “If” by Rudyard Kipling, which you can find here. I guess I had a bit of an unintelligent day. To begin with, I still hadn't realized that the fact that the course was called “Text and Culture” meant that we were not just studying literature. Secondly, I didn't really know anything about Kipling, or about the cultural concepts we were supposed to link to the poem, so I actually had no idea what we were doing. Don't worry, I know more now. Because of this, I misinterpreted the study questions (Why do you think this poem was voted best English poem of all times? What does it really mean?) as “there are cheesy things to say about this, so go ahead”. I said something cheesy about “If”, but in reality, I had no idea what to make of it. Not because I found it difficult – I just thought it was silly and a bit boring. Was there something that I missed? Why say something so natural in such big words? Really, most of the 'ifs' of that poem seem quite normal to me, although exaggerated. I don't see it as an ideal way of living or some kind of definition of being a human, but I think I work like that to some extent.

Shortly after we got back into the classroom, I found out what was wrong. “If” is appalling. The “Man” is not a real human. I am not human. The poem describes a robot. Perhaps I was ashamed of having misunderstood everything, and of having forced myself to say something cheesy about "If", but I think the worst part of it was that at least three people then knew that I was one of Them. Those who don't show their feelings. It wasn't the first time I heard "not showing emotions" referred to as an extremely negative personality trait, but I believe this was when I finally understood that I am a cold psychopath by most people's standards.

Of course, I understood what it was all about after the teacher told us about Stiff Upper Lip ideals. I don't agree with those, no, and I don't think repressing emotions is a good thing either. I don't think of emotional expressions as signs of weakness, and yes, I cry too sometimes, and unless I do it in front of other people without being able to explain why, I am not ashamed of it. Fine. But it's not just about that – not showing emotions, regardless of the reason for not doing so, is ugly. Having a rational and analytical approach to emotional situations is ugly, too. That was what my teacher said that day, and it's very clear that this idea is basically everywhere (not least among aspies), but no one ever explains why. I guess this is something that shouldn't have to be explained. I have understood that decisions are supposed to be based on emotions. I have also understood that showing feelings and talking about them is an essential part of being a real, emotional human being. Unfortunately, I don't work like that, nor do I instinctively understand the beauty of it. 

Although believe I am very emotional, I don't always know what I feel or why, and when I do, I sometimes have no idea how to make the appropriate facial expression. More importantly though, I don't actually understand the point of sharing my feelings with others. What would they do with the information? What's in it for me? I prefer to wait until I know how I would like to solve the problem, and then say what I think about the situation rather than flap my arms and scream about how I feel. If they can't help me and my feelings have nothing to do with them, they don't need to know how I feel, right? And what exactly does it mean to "talk about feelings"? I am sad. Very interesting. 

My nasty habit of rationally analyzing the situation and think of solutions without getting stuck in a cloud of feelings has actually helped me solve conflicts quickly, easily and with respect for the emotions of everyone involved, but I guess I should stop saying that. Even the one person who always understands me and my weirdness seemed to think that was really disagreeable when we discussed it.

This is probably the one part of the human grammar that I will never really learn. All I can see in the “emotional” ideal human is selfishness. Does anyone ever see beyond their own beautiful feelings when reacting appropriately emotionally? I don't think I've ever seen it. To me, that constant emotional fever, the helicopter-like gestures, the screaming, which is what I see every time someone claims to be “showing emotions”, are just confusing.

And I guess no one will ever explain these things to me.  

(Yes, I had some wine, and yes, I am indeed very tired).

Childhood memories - eidetic memory, or things I've been told?

I recently read a post on a Swedish aspie forum, where someone asked about childhood memories. Do you remember much of your childhood? Are you sure they are actually memories, or could they have been formed after people have told you about the events you think you remember? Can you find any typical AS behavior in those memories?

Apparently, autobiographies about Asperger's (I haven't read any, so I don't know) tend to contain detailed descriptions of the author's childhood, including very clear autistic behavior. I probably won't write a book like that – my books are fictional, often about perverted academics – but if I did, there would probably be many guesses and estimations. The book wouldn't be very interesting or give a clear image of my autistic traits if it was only about my adult life, but I don't remember my childhood in chronological order. There are things that I know I have been told by relatives, some of which I don't remember at all and others that add information to the fragments I already remembered. Some things occurred later than I thought they did, for example, I remember sitting in the middle of the living room while my mother and some of her friends were tearing down the wallpaper before painting everything white. At first I thought I was about two or three years old when this happened, but I have later found pictures of myself at about age four with the old walls (dark green, velvety 70's stuff in the living room and dark, fake wooden panel in the kitchen) in the background.

However, I do remember a whole lot from my early childhood (before the age of 7). Things that nobody could possibly have told me later, because nobody was around to see it or because the only person who saw it was my mother, who died when I was seven. Some of the events that I can replay in my mind, like short videos, are also such insignificant everyday things that nobody would remember or think of as something worth telling me afterwards if they saw it, for example gesturing at a friend at daycare. My memories are all fragments of events, yet detailed as if I saw the things and places in front of me. I remember the smell and texture of things, sounds, even my own thoughts the way I thought them – in my own voice the way it sounded when I was a child.

Some of the things I remember thinking are quite funny. For example, I remember thinking that a doctor was an idiot when he told me, in a silly “nice” voice, that the vaccine he was going to give me was raspberry syrup. When I finally let him give me the injection, I wondered why raspberry syrup would be better; wouldn't my veins get a sugary crust in them if it was syrup? What a jerk.

When an old lady smiled at me, I got angry. Not because I was shy, but because I believed it meant that she thought that I was having fun, which I wasn't. Before asking my grandmother about it, I was also puzzled by those public toilets that I thought were in every corner. My mother hated the word “piss”, but if that was so offensive, why did the signs say “pisseria”? And wasn't “pisseria” silly enough, even without spelling it with 'z' instead of 's'?

One thing that is recurrent in the memories which are about my thoughts is my odd relationship with my toys. I rarely ever played with my favorite things, which probably led my mother to believe that I loved the things I played with and was uninterested in the ones I never touched. In fact, it was the other way around: I was afraid my favorites would get worn out or break so I didn't play with them. Once I took my collection of small, square paper books and quickly folded them one by one, and didn't even understand that I was ruining them until my mother came into my room and saw what I was doing. All I wanted was the repetitive movement, the relaxing feeling of which I can still recall when thinking about that event. I loved to smell things, especially soft plastic and paper (smells that I still love to this day, just like my son). When I got older, my favorite thing to do with my things was to categorize them. I took three or four chairs from the kitchen, lined them up in my room and made small piles of stuff on them. The plastic animals – starting with my least favorite, the teddybear, and taking the ones I loved, the birds, last. I followed the same pattern of saving the best things for last with every pile of objects I made: the little soft, plastic containers of bathing foam, my clay sculptures, the masks... Apart from the things that I didn't like, and played with, that was all I did with my toys. Smelling, categorizing and touching them.

I remember phone numbers I haven't dialled for twenty years. I remember the smell of a friend's bathroom, the hole in the wall above the bathtub in our own apartment (and why I always touched it and said “Böj”), the smell and every detail of every room in the huge apartment where my grandmother lived, the sound that sometimes came from a pipe in the corner of my first room. I see objects and places from a small child's perspective: extremely high ceilings and chairs that almost reach up to my chest. This list of places I saw for the last time twenty years ago, but can still see, feel and smell in minute detail, could go on forever and I sometimes wonder if I actually have eidetic memory. That would also be a possible explanation of some of my earliest drawings, mainly of bicycles and sharks, which are extremely accurate in detail and proportion.

My memories of things that happened after I turned six are much clearer, and I could probably line them up in chronological order, more or less accurately. The book about my life, which will never be written, would be based on other people's stories rather than my memories, but I obviously remember my childhood. Asperger symptoms? Well, yes, I think there seem to be several, both in the nature and the content of my memories.  

For the love of my life

Our first real meeting was not quite like I had been told it would be. Not that it mattered – I think we both could live without pink bubbles and flying dolphins. You were supposed to look in my eyes, they said, but you just glanced quickly at me while you tried to eat. Fair enough, I was quite exhausted and hungry myself. I had been told that I would instinctively stroke your head and back, so I did, although I actually didn't feel that natural urge to do so. I knew that there was a certain look I was supposed to have on my face then – a mysterious smile, a special glow of a higher form of enlightenment – so I played along. After all, I was then a part of that special women's club. My duty in life was fulfilled. I had a meaning. I couldn't worry people by not acting that way, could I? Attachment problems? Not at all. We just had an unconventional relationship.

You just kept growing. I had been told that people your size wanted to lie down on their backs, looking at their mothers' faces, but it soon became clear to me that you didn't. Long before you could sit, you tried to get up. Taking a walk with you was impossible; you screamed and struggled until you puked and then screamed and struggled some more until I picked you up and held you in front of me. When you were about four months old, I gave up and bought one of those strollers that would supposedly screw up the attachment. People stared – I even got some nasty comments from strangers – but you were happy. If I tried to talk to you when we were outside, you ignored me. All you wanted was to be alone in your oversized buggy, watching and thinking.

Some people didn't understand you. Grandpa the Priest wondered why you were so uninterested in lamps, and Grandpa the Professional Slacker thought you were deaf because you never reacted when people called your name. But hey, there are cooler things in this world than lamps, right? And you could obviously hear. You would notice every little sound around you. When people tried to get your attention, they never had anything to say anyway.

Most children's first words are “mommy” or “daddy”. Yours was “hat”. I guess we should have been sad, your dad and I, but we just laughed. We like hats too. You said my name before you started calling me mommy. Although you didn't say much, other than “hat”, “mommy”, “daddy” and “achtung” until you were a year and a half, you then developed quite an impressive vocabulary. I wasn't worried when it was time for your 2-year check-up. According to the papers we got before the check-up, more than 50 words was good. I didn't know that 300 nouns meant that you couldn't speak, so nothing odd was found then. They were worried at preschool. You bit, pushed and slapped the other children on a daily basis, often sat alone looking “blankly” in front of you without reacting to your teachers' voices and showed no interest in other children. I know we should have sought help then, and we probably would have, if your teachers hadn't spoken about the problems the way they did. I'm sorry it took me so long.

I know it's my duty as a mother to miss the baby year, but I don't. What could possibly be more fun than spending the days in the company of a four-year-old? How could a little baby, no matter how cute they can be, ever be better than a tall, beautiful wild poet/comedian/lecturer? Sure, we have our disagreements. My eyes hurt the other day, when you won the battle of my sunglasses on the tram. Sometimes we have radically different opinions on how we should build the wooden railroad, or whether we should watch freight or high-speed trains. There are days when you drive me crazy refusing to eat anything other than fish, and I wish I didn't have to stay with you until you fall asleep every night, because I would really need to study for at least an hour or two every evening, even during the weeks when you're here. I also wish I could find a way of making you stop destroying our furniture and the apartment, and it would really be great if it was possible to get you dressed in less than 30 minutes every morning. But at the end of the day, these things don't really matter.

There are, however, things that are not minor problems. Some days, when you run out into the street or almost make yourself fall in front of a train, I wonder why I don't just walk away and leave you there because I will probably not be able to keep you alive for more than a year anyway. There are times when I have to struggle so hard I almost faint to keep myself from exploding and attacking those who stop to shout insults and threats at me because I have to sit on you and hold down your arms to keep you from hurting yourself.  I have often wondered how long it will take until you get big, strong and angry enough to actually kill me. These things are the reason why we took you to the doctors at the place where you had to do all those tests with the building blocks and answer strange questions. They're finished now (and they all loved you).

Forgive me son, for I have sinned. I have been what most people would call a cold, unnatural mother. I never changed my voice when talking to you when you were a baby. I thought it was enough for you and me to communicate and bond in our own way, in our own language, so I never cried when you showed signs of not responding like other babies. I didn't even cry yesterday, which I guess would be the appropriate reaction when your child is diagnosed with autism.

It just made me happy. You can get help now, if you need it. Unlike your mother, you may not have to stand by helplessly watching your life fall apart with no one to ask for help. You will matter more than I ever did, and that was all I wanted.  

Born to desire normality?

The stereotypical aspie is a man. He reads railroad schedules for pleasure, has no friends, lived at home with his parents until the age of thirty-seven, spends his weekends with a camera and tripod in the freight yard and falls madly in love with anyone who is nice to him and happens to be in possession of a vagina.

However, the growing awareness of ADHD and Asperger's syndrome in women created a gap. A new image had to be created to fill it – a comfortable reason why these things have been thought of as “boys' problems”.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Aspie woman. She is well-manicured, with perfect makeup, a sexy green dress, straightened hair and high heels. Aspie woman also has a nice tan and uses gold shimmering body lotion. She gazed at me, sipping a cocktail, from a picture in one of the various articles about women with neuropsychiatric conditions.

This is the popular explanation: girls are born wanting to fit in. I guess it's a chromosome thing.

We are less obvious aspies, because our special interests are usually conventionally girly. You know, horses and puppies. Astronomy is for boys.

Another thing that makes us come off as neurotypical is that we follow trends and try to look good. Again, girls are genetically programmed to desire normality and will therefore imitate typical girls and make sure to get many friends. If we fail, if nobody likes us because we're too autistic, our broken genetic wish to fit in and be popular will make us severely depressed.

In general, girls are nice. Easy to handle. We don't cause trouble and we stay quiet. We're all born that way.

Hello, Aspie woman. You and I have very little in common.

Sure, there are well-groomed aspies. Aspie woman probably exists, just like the male stereotype described above. I just don't believe she is any more representative of the majority than the train-loving man. After reading this article, which I have tried to find again but couldn't, I asked around a bit. For example, I shared this WTF-moment on Wrong Planet. I know it's not scientifically impressive, but that was not my intention in the first place, so I guess I can comfortably claim that most aspie women seem to be more or less like me. One person was (moderately) interested in horses as a child, but there was generally nothing noticeably different or “feminine” about their special interests. I found some fellow shark lovers, and I was far from the only one who wanted a telescope for my 18^th birtday, for example. Those who said they wore makeup on a daily basis and dressed in a conventional way pointed out that it was mainly because they had to look presentable at work. Again, most of the women who answered were more like me. I absolutely care about clothes, but my idea of a nice oufit has nothing to do with trends or what most people consider sexy. Most days I just put something on without trying to dress well. Furthermore, many fabrics feel uncomfortable or plain WRONG, as do low-cut tight pants and other things that people tend to like.

I occasionally straighten my hair, but mainly because I notice it less that way. Otherwise, all I do is wash and brush it and keep it away from my face and neck. People have always called me boring because of it, but that never helped. For special occasions, I can make an effort with hair removal and makeup, but that happens about twice a month (in other words: my boyfriend probably thinks I do it all the time) and I'm usually really boring with that too.

I am not entirely skeptical of theories of different Asperger symptoms in girls and women. There are plenty of articles on the subject that are longer, better and more complex than the one I just described – articles where, for example, descriptions of symptoms can be interpreted as something other than innate “niceness”. Both boys and girls imitate others to some extent, as a perfectly normal defence mechanism. Sometimes it is said that girls do it while boys don't care at all – I'm quite sure this is wrong, but I do find it likely that girls do it more, because people expect more normality from us. I believe that I had more harsh reactions to escape from than I would have had if I were a boy, especially from my parents, and I surely wouldn't have been as frequently criticized for stupid things like my boring hairdo or “ugly” body language if I had been a boy either.

Still, articles that simplify the matter are sometimes published. I believe the main reason for this is that sometimes, journalists and others just can't bare to think about girls who don't want to be married and become princesses. Such a girl might grow up to be unattractive, wear comfortable shoes and work in a lab. Ewww, you wouldn't have sex with THAT, would you? The journalist does some research, finds other articles and breathes a sigh of relief. There are differences between boys and girls with Asperger's. Phew – the new article is saved, thanks to some comfortable misinterpretations.  

Is impaired hearing a myth too?

There was a blind student on my course a year ago. Everyone knew that she got the course literature as audio files from the library and had to record the lectures. She must have felt like an outsider. It would probably have been better for her if they had just left her with the paper copies and expected her to read them.

Sickening, isn't it? I would like to make another absurd statement before I continue:

Cerebral palsy is a social construction. It's a label that bad parents want to put on their children to get off the responsibility for not having taught them how to control their muscles and walk straight.

Now imagine that I wrote a book about this (and published it two years from now so that I could refer to my degree in Russian to claim credibility and sell more books). The interesting thing is that similar opinions are widely accepted in the context of ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. “ADHD is just an excuse for bad parenting” and “we try to label children as hyperactive so that we can medicate them with amphetamine and make them obedient” are phrases so frequently repeated in debates that hardly anyone questions them anymore. They have become fact, or at least influenced most people's opinions. Even a close friend of mine, who suspected ADHD in himself but was denied investigation because he had passed the age of 35, repeats those statements as a mantra whenever he gets the chance to. Some people even make a career claiming that neuropsychiatrists are nazis who put “sick” labels on anyone who doesn't fit into the narrow norm. The most well-known example in Sweden is probably Eva Kärfve. I will not say that she has not been questioned – many have pointed out the lack of factual background of her claims and the irrelevance of her academic status (she is an assistant professor in sociology and a registered nurse) – but the majority of the criticism against her book on the subject comes from neuropsychiatrists. Of course, this has provoked conspiracy theories (Censorship! Bias! Forbidden criticism! Nazis!). In public debates, however, she has been given unreasonable amounts of space (again, not completely uncriticized, but acknowledged enough to influence people who don't really know).

The thing that most people sooner or later bring up when I discuss my suspected AS or my son's difficulties is this “narrow norm”. I agree to some extent, but I also think they're missing the point. There are many things we take for granted and see as normal, for example the ability to see, hear, walk and speak. These popular ideas of tolerance and, from what I've understood, the works of Kärfve and others, seem to be based on the general notion of neuropsychiatric conditions, i.e. the parts that have to do with communication and social skills. But there are other things to it. Even if we make a list of every common aspie trait and then remove the parts that are only connected to what other people think (of course, to make this work we will either have to pretend that we live in a beautiful world where social skills are not a requirement for making/keeping friends or getting laid, or assume that those things are not interesting for aspies), there will still be some degree of disability. The nature and the extent of disability depends on what each individual perceives as a problem, but for example many people with Asperger's (myself included, although I should probably point out again that I don't have a diagnosis and might still just be lazy and worthless) have trouble being on time, taking care of their homes and themselves etcetera. I don't know if I will be able to finish my studies on time and keep my business afloat, and if I don't, I don't know if I will be able to keep a full-time job instead either. “Asperger's” may be a label, but not more so than “deaf”. A person with undiagnosed AS will not miraculously learn to function in life, just like my blind ex-classmate wouldn't have gotten her eyesight back if our teachers had pretended that she could see.

Defying disability is a different thing, though. It's fully possible to live a good, healthy, interesting life with a physical or neurological impairment, with or without help (wheelchairs, amphetamine, sign language, whatever). A diagnosis doesn't have to mean anything more than the possibility of getting help, if it is needed. As I wrote in the post “School and the Asperger brain”, I do think there should be room for differences in school and elsewhere. I wouldn't mind a change of the norm – not at all. I just don't think denial is the cure.  

To stay on the safe side of friendship

One thing I realized not too long ago is that I isolate myself too often. I don't do it consciously, but I can look back and see it after it has been done. There are probably several reasons for this, but I think I have identified the most important one. You could say I have a history of friendship gone horribly wrong.

Before E came to my class in second grade, I didn't really have any close friends where I lived then. I wasn't completely alone either - there were a couple of girls in the class that I occasionally played with and I had made friends with a girl who lived in my house - but I still played alone most of the time and had no one I would call my best friend. I remember looking at her that first day in school and disliking everything about her - she was a neat, clean, polite, sweet little girl - but as early as that same afternoon we started talking and after that there was no stopping it.

It didn't take long before my father got worried about my friendship with E. Among other things, he told me that it looked like I wanted to hold E's hand all the time and asked if I thought I was going to marry her (not in a playful "naww" way, but to tell me to leave her alone). There are many things I remember saying to her. For example, I made up an imaginary friend named Penny, who I said was very shy and would therefore not come over and say hi to her. I once made E wait while I ran behind a wall (to "talk to Penny") and peeked at her through a crack in it, later claiming that the eye she had seen was Penny's. That time I could tell that she didn't believe me, and I understood that Penny was quite unbelievable, but I felt like I just couldn't stop it. Most of the time I didn't understand anything like that, though. About a year earlier, my father worked a lot in San Francisco and once said we might have to move there. There were probably no serious plans to do so, and by this time it was definitely not going to happen since my dad and his then-girlfriend (now-wife) were planning to get married and have more (better) kids together, but that didn't matter. I sat down with E to have a serious talk, told her that I was going to move to America and that I wanted her to have my dolls and my photo album because I would surely die in an earthquake.

One of the things E and I used to do was to dig holes in slopes we found around our school - I wanted to make a hobbit house where we could live together, away from our parents. And this was where our friendship ended, in the mud next to one of the little holes that I still seriously believed we would manage to make big enough to live in. We started arguing about something, and all of a sudden I came to think of a scene from one of the Neverending Story films, where one of the heroes falls and rolls down a hill, and pushed her. She slid a couple of feet down the hill but got up again and managed to escape when I tried to push her a second time. I didn't really mean to do what I did, but I was too absorbed in my little world of fantasy fiction to see what happened. It was not until I saw the mud-stained knees of her white tights run past me that I understood what I had done. Two teachers, one of whom had always openly detested me, helped her and heard what had happened. By then it was too late, I tried to run after her and apologize but the teachers stopped me. The one who hated me told me that I was the devil or something like that.

From that moment on, I was no longer allowed to talk to E, try to approach her or even look at her in class. In fact, I wasn't even allowed to mention her (even a couple of months later, my dad's wife once started yelling at me because she thought she had heard me say E's name while talking to one of my dolls). It was a bit difficult to grasp at first - I thought we had just had a fight. People have fights, then they apologize and everything is fine again, I thought. I wanted to, but couldn't. However, it turned out that it wasn't because I pushed her that afternoon. When my parents interrogated me that evening, I told them what had happened and it turned out that they hadn't even heard about the pushing incident. Of course, they asked me why I had done it, but I insisted that I didn't know. At least I understood that the truth - that I just wanted to see if she would roll like the boy in the movie - was too ugly to tell. What really frightened and confused me was hearing what it was all really about. Everyone - our teachers, our parents - except me had always seen that E tried to say no. She didn't want to dig holes or live alone with me in a house. She never wanted to play along when I tried to make her believe in my imaginary friends, she never wanted to sneak around with me in the bushes outside the schoolyard, she probably didn't even want to play with me at all. I just didn't understand it. She never told me, so I thought we were doing all of those things together. Apparently, in everybody else's opinion, I had forced her to do things she didn't want to do for several months.

Although these events were extreme and nothing like it would happen today, sometimes my strong friendship feelings have resembled an obsessive kind of love even after that. I just don't trust myself. What if I go too far without seeing it myself? I know I have those problems. I know that I sometimes can't see my own behavior and understand the consequences of it. I also know that I can't always see the more subtle emotional signals, such as E's silent way of trying to show that she was uncomfortable with me and the games we played. There are various different reasons for my periods of isolation, but I believe that this is the main reason why I tend to shut myself out of conversations and keep good new friends at a distance, unless there is no doubt that they like me just as much as I like them. I'm unconsciously staying on the safe side.