November 5, 2002

• You know how when you get a cut on your finger, you put a band-aid on it, and you try not to get it wet, and you make extra sure to keep it out of the way while slicing lemons, and so forth?

  For a little while you forget, and you end up re-opening the wound, or you end up pacing around the kitchen saying “Shit that hurts…” over and over.

  Then, over time, you somehow develop a kind of behavioral dance with this source of potential pain. You unconsciously lift the finger out of the way to avoid getting the bandage wet, and you ask someone else to cut the lemons.

  Eventually the wound heals and you take off the band-aid, but the habits remain to some degree. Eventually they fade, however.

  I’m thinking about the things that hurt in my life. Not in the sense of failed relationships or shattered dreams, though those things can provide endless sources of amusement.

  No, I’m thinking about the things that are just plain unbearable and must be endured. Like a cut on the finger.

  Humans are like trees in that they grow around barriers. You see two trees growing around each other, literally in mortal combat, but also in a state of mutual dependence. They combine with the barrier (in this case, another tree) to be stronger than they could be alone. Reacting to the cut on the finger works the same way, except the barrier eventually goes away; unless you’re a hemophiliac, the wound will heal.

  But imagine if the wound healed, but before it did, you restructured your whole entire life around protecting the wound. You’re like the tree twisting around its barrier, only there’s no more barrier. You build up supports to prop up your now-meaningless twists and contours. Remove the props and the twists and contours would be liabilities in and of themselves.

  In other words, you’ve created another set of barriers while protecting yourself from the first set.

  That’s how I feel right now. I can see so much of my life as reaction and so little of it as action. I’m utterly out of my depth. I don’t really know what to do.

  This is bad, because, well, it’s kinda freaky. But it’s good, because it means I can redesign the twists and contours however I want to. The pressures of life, however, demand immediacy, and I can’t sit around and gaze at my navel waiting for answers.

  Asperger’s Sydrome has been called the ‘little professor syndrome.’ I certainly fit that category. AS folk tend to be pedantic and literal, and to have a very definite perspective. Guilty as charged. However, this works less and less for me as time goes on (if it really ever worked at all), and certainly this moment in my life is a brilliant example of that.

  And really, up there where I say ‘if it really ever worked at all’ shouldn’t be in parentheses. It’s not parenthetical in the least. That’s the big deal worry. Maybe I’m not even informed enough to understand how completely I should regret my life up to this point.

  Yes, I hear you groaning, ‘But Homer… Why are you so hard on yourself?’ However, you don’t ask that question of a tree that’s sick because the other tree it grew around died.

  I’m not sad. I’m just trying to make sense of this crap. And I’m not talking about psychological stuff here. I have a fundamental hardship dealing with certain kinds of stimuli, and my being has evolved into something that guards against this problem. Now I have to take it apart and put it back together so it works better.

  Heavy beleaguered sigh.

  • 6:35 pm
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