Letting People In
From my late teen, through my twenties, and well into my thirties, I was very guarded with people. I was remote in my dealings with people; I kept interaction brief and contact minimal. I cultivated distance and people sensed the presence of a cold, glass case around me. I could be pleasant, cheery even. But always there was the invisible barrier. And always I looked to exit no sooner had I entered relations with another. It took an immense effort on my part to leave my safe space and, outside, I was possessed with the desire to return. I never let anyone into that space. I was curt and uninviting with others, deterring them from pursuing their friendly interest beyond the invisible iron wall I erected. Behind the iron wall was the iron cage in which I confined myself. It was clear that people would have to force their way in, if my coldness had not cooled their interest.
Unfortunate experiences with others had made me guarded and withdrawn with respect to other people, and pessimistic as to possibilities for the better. The problem is that such a mentality tends quickly to become self-confirming, self-reinforcing, and self-perpetuating. I would claim to have been open to people, so long as they were prepared to get stung, pricked, and burned in seeking contact. People, naturally, take that response to their advances as a rebuff.
I cultivated the art of cold indifference in external appearance, neutralizing the passions, wishes, and desires burning within. I was world class in concealing what was really on my mind, leaving people having to guess and having to negotiate a path through my defensive walls.
And why would anyone make the effort given that I never offered the hint of an invite?
Very occasionally, the odd perceptive female saw beyond the hard exterior. (Males don't bother). Three in particular. None of them got further than noting an incongruity, all hit the invisible wall and fell back.
The last perceeptive woman was my nurse in cardiac rehab. I’d been a lively and vocal member of the group, the class comedian, in fact. I was long past my sullen and silent period of late teens to mid-thirties – which is a very long period indeed. The nurses kept noting the extent to which my pulse rate would escalate quickly. More than a few times, they took the dumbbells from me and had me rest during the exercises. Elderly gentlemen in their seventies and even the odd one who was eighty were allowed to continue, but not me. My pulse rate was described as ‘pathological.’ I felt fit. I have a competitive nature, and was measuring my performance against the others, getting a little carried away. So the nurses were right to monitor. But they were most concerned by the way that my pulse rate would rise suddenly. They didn't know why.
The issue was addressed in the final one-to-one meeting with the senior nurse, Sue, who ran the rehab class. She took my pulse and soon wore the same worried, puzzled expression on her face that the other nurses had worn when testing me. Since we were alone, she probed further. She noted that I had been talking freely and openly with her, very friendly and funny, and yet my pulse rate showed extreme stress. There was something amiss, a missing cause to go in search of, something more than a heart condition. Sue is a highly experienced nurse in her forties, trained in mental as well as physical health. She stated the incongruity openly, soliciting feedback from me. She told me that whilst I looked relaxed the tests on my body said otherwise. Exterior calm, interior stress.
What did I know? This was 2017. It took another two years of physical health problems, caused by relentless stress and anxiety, for my doctor to finally suggest Aspergers or autism. Instead, Sue raised the issue of my diabetes and raised the issue of erectile dysfunction. I was somewhat taken by surprise and pondered my response. I was committed to exercising and eating well, and suggested that this would stave off any issues here. Sue seemed unconvinced and probed further, saying that problems are likely given diabetes, health issues, and ageing. ‘Well that’s something to look forward to,’ I replied, a statement she briefly pondered, before breaking out in smiles and taking me over to the trampoline to show me how to use it. End of. Sue had seen a problem lying buried below surface level, pushed past my first defences, and taken her chances in the realm of the unknown. She ran into my other defences. I have layers and layers of defence. Sue played a hunch. In her experience, men don’t talk about erectile dysfunction, when it turns out that it is a key barometer of male health. She felt that, like other men, I was bottling my concerns up. She got the call wrong, and with that stopped seeking the cause of my ‘pathological’ pulse rate and inner stress. I think she thought I found her irresistibly attractive. She let her long blond hair down and then proceeded to work her body trampling on the trampoline, to show me how to use it (why, I don't know, seeing as the class had finished and I was leaving). I am only relieved that she didn’t check my pulse rate, let alone anything else, after she had finished.
For the next miss, I have to go back to 1992, when I visited a careers service in search of employment directions. I had no idea where I was going and so sought advice. I was twenty seven and as clueless as I had been at fifteen on the brink of leaving school. The nice lady I met with was maybe late forties, early fifties. To me at the time, she was a confident, experienced woman. Looking back now at her reactions and responses to the things I said, I see that she was uncertain how to advise me and that I made her nervous. I was clearly something outside of her experience. Externally I was not merely confident but somewhat arrogant and superior.
(I should add here that in a recent meeting seeking employment advice, the nice lady I spoke to admitted – once we were on familiar terms – that she found me intimidating. It’s in my manner and bearing, more in the way I say things than in the things I say – I am world class in deterring people, keeping them at a distance.)
The careers adviser was struggling to offer me advice. I was a twenty seven year old with the queries and quandries of a clueless fifteen year old and the manner of a dominant Alpha male. I unsettled her. Nervously, she started to pick up on little revelations contained in the information I offered to try to discern certain character traits. She found out that I disliked being in closed spaces with others. She also discovered that I had always felt uneasy in others’ houses and always sought to exit. ‘This isn't normal,’ she declared, looking concerned. Again, a social stress had been identified. Again, the mark was missed. The careers adviser suggested that I lacked confidence, needed to be more assertive, and should consider attending assertiveness classes or simply meet people, undertake activities, open up to others.
How do autisticpeople do that?
I had no idea about autism then. The problem had been stated, but neither named nor identified.
Another missed opportunity.
The third miss goes back to 1984 when I was seventeen and at night school. This was a miss of a very different kind. It also shows how impregnable my defences were from the first. I spent the year sat next to the most beautiful girl in the world. She looked like a young Jane Asher. I’ll call her ‘S’ after her first name. She spent the year asking about me, later asking questions as to my future plans (and, indirectly, my present intentions with respect to her), and I spent the year refusing to answer, postponing, avoiding, and deflecting. Recalling her questions now, and relating them to her behaviour (her laughing at my jokes, the way she initiated conversations and sought to develop them, the way she probed for information beyond the surface I presented), it was obvious that she rather liked me (putting it mildly). I wasn’t so stupid as not to feel this at the time. I was happy just to be with her. I kept thinking to ask her for a date, only to postpone that day of reckoning. I couldn’t have lived with any rejection on her part, so didn’t invite it. As the weeks went by and the end of year exams approached, I reconciled myself to having to leave her in my past. Week after week she would ask me about university. Literal-minded, I took her to be some kind of school careers’ officer urging me to do the right thing and apply for a degree course at university. Why was she so interested? She already had a decent job, was doing A levels to improve her prospects, but had no interest in university herself. Her questions about my university ambitions were indirect questions to see if my hesitation to apply meant that there was something – or someone – keeping me home. I stone-faced my way through the weeks and weeks of questioning, never once giving the slightest hint that she did indeed loom large in my thoughts. I spoke endlessly about going to university; I thought all the time about her. Week after week, she pushed and probed. She received nothing but cold indifference – other than the fact that I always sought her out, spoke to her more than anyone, and kept her company in the car park as she waited for her dad to pick her up. She did all she could to provoke me into coming out of my steel-hard cage cloaked in barbed wire.
I went to university and never saw her again. University was a disaster. I returned home in less than four months. In desperation, I enrolled at the local college again. I had got lucky meeting her through a friend the first day of the previous course, and deep in my subconscious I was hoping to get lucky again. My hope was that she would be on this Government and Politics A level. A long, desperate shot, I know. Oddly, one of the members of the past class had indeed enrolled on the course. She was the mother of an old school friend and I knew her well. She was pleased with her ‘B’ and asked me how I had done in the exams. I loved telling her that I had scored a grade ‘A’ distinction. I was crowing! She then asked how ‘S’ had done. I said I hadn’t seen her since the exams. ‘No?’ she said, looking and sounding mystified. ‘We all thought that you two were an item.’ Instead of registering the significance of what she had just said, I kept on boasting about my 'A' grade.
That wasn’t so much a miss as a disaster. But it shows how hard it is for people to break through my hard exterior. People will make only so much running until, hitting a brick wall time and again, they simply run away.
I knew she liked me, it was impossible to miss; I just didn't want to know how much she liked me in case it was less than I liked her.
