I, Cold-Dodger, having been born of goodly parents; wherefore I was taught somewhat in the ways of my father, which consists in the quasi-intellectualism of the Corridor Mormons and the quackery of alternative health and multi-level marketing. I, Cold-Dodger, being on the spectrum however, was overly logical and so in a sense had my eyes open the entire time to all the ways that we could be wrong. However, being socially incompetent on my own and also suffering from the ScatterBrain Affliction, which making for an emotionally turbulent and isolated soul in need of consolation and having a guileless nature, did learn the ways of my father mostly as it was taught to me by my mother and did internalize it verily verily.

Yea, methought my logical mind was, inasfar as it called the ways of father silly and childish, the voice of Satan himself. Does not the Book of Mormon prophecy that the devil would say as much? It must be true, the logical voice must be the devil who was a liar from the beginning. Unbelief comes because of transgression, and I knew I was sinner more than anybody. But, said a voice from within, the science channel isn't trying to persuade me to sin: they're just communicating knowledge with the facts in the humblest and most interesting ways they can think. I used to watch documentaries all the time even as a boy. My parents usually encouraged it, but one day they were teaching about Darwinism, and my father walked in. He was not usually very expressive outside of bearing his testimony to people, but that disturbed him, and he looked at me, and I was apprehensively waiting for him to tell me what this new emote was I didn't recognize but didn't like, and he seeing my young brilliance with which he could not content but fearing to lose me did caution against accepting science with all my heart.

Behold, I cannot write the hundreth part of my stream of consciousness, but I can share token memories that represent commonly recurring themes. What my Dad said shook me, because did he not understand that I was digesting each part of the Darwinism being shared with me and only accepting what I had to accept while reconciling it with what I knew about the holy precepts of both Mormonism and Chiropractic while listening in real time? Did he not trust me? Every time a religious person moves the goalposts, it doesn't feel like moving the goalposts, it feels like the mysteries of creation glorify God even more than I had ever imagined. At least, that's how it would have felt to me continually if my father didn't overtly demonstrate to me that what he does is categorize everything outside the limits of his own comprehension which he fears could change his mind as devilish.

My moniker -- Cold-Dodger -- is a reference to the movie Happy Feet, which I discovered as a young teenage boy suffering through all the same emotions as the penguin protagonist Mumble. I was different. I wasn't sure why. I struggled socially, much more so romantically. But I had good grades and special talents that people admired, but they were talents best kept bridled because the elders of our people hissed at them when they were too visible, especially if my peers liked it and especially if I started to become an authority unto myself. My father had long since given up on his own individuality and thrown himself on this priesthood in lifelong service, often to the detriment of our relationship, in order deal with his own demons. Maybe fathers assume their kids will make friends and grow and forget that the days they used to play baseball together with their dads just stopped one day. I didn't. I didn't have friends. I had a dad, and I lived for him whether or not he ever realized that.

So, when he lost his dad and his best friend who was my preschool best friend's dad all in the same year, he wept and grieved and found Jesus in the COJCOLDS, and I observed his behavior with curiosity at first and then felt his indifference to me when I tried to comfort him in my way and I took his emotional vacancy as the social cue for anger with me personally. And behold, the COJCOLDS asked for everything, dangling the promise of peace over the man or at least temporal blessings and financial success for his family, which since my granpa died at the age of sixty my dad figured his own mortality was coming fast and he had to be a man and secure a provision for us. Thus did the days of my father not being around as often commenced, and when he was around he got home late and fell asleep in his armchair. I never blamed him. I blamed myself. Something about the way I always felt different, something about the ways I had always felt special, something about the ways that people noticed my burgeoning intelligence, something about the ways that my own dad cautioned me to beware Satan who "probably would never get [me] with word of wisdom problems but might get me with immorality," combined to set me on my lonely path which would torment me for the next twenty years with anxiety and PTSD.

I was used to being abandoned. I was used to being a loner. I was used to not having people make any sense to me the way that people seemed to make sense to each other. I was happy being an Other, a people watcher only, free to think what he wanted, free to observe, free to dissociate from the now and slink into his own imagination when he needed to. If only Dad didn't convince me that he loved me and that if only I tried hard enough I could dwell in the everlasting burnings with him and see as he saw and be loved as he was loved. For surely, I had never met anyone who didn't tell me they thought he was a great man. I knew. I just wished he spent that energy more in his own home and less on everyone else.

From what I read, the literature makes it sound like Aspies don't have vivid imaginations usually. Huh. Really? I do. What, is that like something the ADHD adds like sprinkles on my otherwise overly-logical, overly-contrete, incapable-of-human-emotions consciousness? LMAO. The literature on autism seems to be written often from the neurotypical perspective, the people who don't have it but who watch us, marveling at God's cruelty, as though not being like them and being outside of their comprehension most of the time is to suffer by definition. God didn't make me to suffer, though. He just didn't give me something that he gave y'all, and he gave me something else instead. What is it? Well, the literature doesn't label the thing I don't have, instead it gives a name to people who don't have it (which is the most neurotypical thing I've ever seen): Alexithymia.

Alexithymia is, some would say, to struggle having emotions. Oh brother. Every mammal has emotions, and mammals which evolved to use emotional expression as the language of building and maintaining their social hierarchies have very complicated emotions. Autistic people are just as capable as anyone else of tying themselves in heart pretzels. But it doesn't look that way from the outside, because we don't the NTnet. The what? The NTnet. Huh? That's not a thing. Yes it is. It's the thing that people with autism can't perceive like you can. I named it. It has to have a name. Maybe someone else named it something better. Alexithymia is a state of not being in tune with your own emotions, but it doesn't mean your body isn't trying to tell you. It's just that, you don't speak that language very well sometimes, wrapped up as you are in the coping strategies you have happened to come by to shove your emotions way down and "function." Some seven percent of women and ten percent of men are alexithymic for this reason, but for autistic people it's upwards of 70% -- and the shocker is -- it's for the same emotional reasons, only multiplied by leaps and bounds because their stressors are unique, extreme, and omnipresent. That, and we don't have the ability to see the NTnet like people usually can, which makes it all the harder, because we have to live in a world full of people and try to relate to them regardless and in futility.

What is the NTnet?

Neurotypical is the name given to people who neurologically develop in the expected way, the default way, the normal way. You know what, any accident of history combined with a genetic bottleneck could easily put the Spectrumites on top as the dominant neurotype in the population, and then the occasional person born into the world who was 8 IQ points lower on average than most "normal" people and overly obsessed with eye contact and reading social significance into everything would be the weirdo, and the rest of us would watch your strange behavior -- like wanting to be with your teenage mate instead of studying for a test that's going to affect the rest of your life -- and wonder if it hurt to have your affliction. But, that's the world we live in. We live in a world where something like 59 of every 60 people are NT and the 60th is autistic, which is the name we've given people who struggle in "that way."

What is "that way"? How do Spectrumites struggle? Remember I said NTs are usually 8 IQ points lower than Aspies? Autistic minds aren't larger, nor do they burn more calories doing more processing; they're just wired differently. So what are all those neurons doing in 59 out of 60 people? What is this "typical" wiring we speak of? Well, perhaps the best way to explain it is with computer terminology: those neurons formed connections which you could think of as a socio-emotional partition whose sole job is to recognize what they feel by seeing it in other people. That's the NTnet. I have another metaphor. When our species started using "texting" as its dominant means of communication, we discovered that classical text was not very emotive, or socio-emotionally expressive. It is easy to misconstrue what people mean when you can only see their words and not how they "meant" it, meaning tone of voice, body language, environmental context, etc and etc. So, some people tried to use more words and be more articulate and logical when they texted while others simply learned how to use punctuation marks creatively to make simple human faces connoting emotions. Eventually, we got the Emoji keyboard with many many options to express our emotional intelligence, but most people just use the simple ones and when they got something more nuanced they wanna say, they'll meet in person or whatever it is that NTs do these days. Face-time use to mean something before it got patented as the name of Apple's video conferencing system. Nothing beats the emotive power of a human face. Nothing ever will. At least for most people.

But I'm different. You can make me stare at your face for days and it only does so much for me before I start to get the impression that you're trying to express more with it than I can really see even if I wanted to. I understand that people make eye contact. "It's just what we do" -- a phrase I'm sick of hearing. Here's what that phrase means, transated from NT-speak to Spectrumite for a logical understanding of the nonverbalized subtext: "I did not know how to behave on this subject at first, so I looked to people around me and saw how they behaved, not only saw how they behaved but saw the social reasons they behaved that way and understood on emotional level that it was connected to how they didn't feel clueless like my original state, so I intuited how to be like them (or at least look like them and act like them) at a completely nonverbal level to get similar results -- cuz my partition into which I've set aside some 8 IQ points(ish) of my neural activity which connects me to the NTnet did all this work for me -- and so the only parts I verbalize to myself are entirely within the realm of problems of people who can see the NTnet but need dilemmas sorted out verbally with other Neurotypicals."

( ﾟoﾟ)

It took me a long ass time to work out that that's what that meant.

This is the part of my "I, Nephi" narrative where the fact that I'm a millennial betrays me. Millennials, or Gen Y, came of age right when the analog world went digital. Our teachers raised us for success in the world that my older readers grew up in, but we came of age into what sometimes feels like an entirely different world complete with its own ways. The internet changed everything, but it happened slowly at first, and we had a foot in both the "Boomer" world and the "progressive" one. Millennials are the ones trying to commune with the Boomer world and bring them into the progressive digital world and communicate their unique problems to the Boomers who still have most of the political and financial power in this country. The generation after us, Gen Z, who grew up in an entirely digital world, who grew up pushing tablet screens with their fingers and who get upset because words in paper books don't define themselves in a convenient pop-up screen, are content to say "ok boomer," and dismiss the denizens of the old analog world with their "outdated" or "regressive" analog ways. But "millennial" has become a hiss and a byword for stupid, young, entitled brats, because on one hand the older generations which were only baptized into the digital world after their brains stopped being plastic got tired of being told they needed to change, and on the other hand Gen Z likes to meme everything and they go after millennials as much as boomers as much as each other, all for likes and clicks and perceived digital prestige, because another way of saying that we've digitally democratized everything is to say that we've brought our monkey social hierarchy neural wiring with us into the future. It is an age of cynicism for many people, because the Ntnet was not meant to work like this -- not this fast, not from behind a screen/camera. Emotes for say, mating availability advertising, are meant to be cast into the sea of local prospects within one's sphere of acquaintances, which the holy bible of anthropology -- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari -- says is about 150 people, max. These emotes were not meant by Father Darwin to be chiseled in something more permanent and accurate than stone like a photo or a video recording, and they were not meant to viewed by more than those 150 people or recalled so vividly so many years after the emote depicted in the photo or video vanished "IRL" back into the seas of collective human emotions expressed socially through emotes.

But enough of my big picture narration. Let's get back to the "me" part of this stream of consciousness. I am showing you how I think. I am demonstrating it for you. I have emotions created by the difficulties of needing to fit within the society I was born to know. That's how emotions work. That's why we have them. But, we're all connected now. I'm a 33-year-old Aspie with ADHD whose stream of consciousness moves a million miles an hour, oscillating between the difficulties of regulating those turbulant emotions which come from understanding so much and yet feeling so powerless to be like everyone else on one hand, and on the other hand using my overly-developed frontal lobes to dissociate from my emotions which in my youth tok the shape of high adventure sci fi fantasies in my head but that in later years turned into ongoing Socratic dialogue trying comprehend as much as I can so I can get a "God's eye view" of literally everything from that the vantage point of my Father in Heaven figure out how he saw me and what I must do to "fix it" or fit in or repent or do whatever it was I was supposed to do. I didn't know what I was supposed to do in order to achieve the things I was supposed to do. I just knew I was frontloaded with expectations since the time I was a boy that I knew I could never meet. People in my little Mormony corner of the world thought that my "wisdom beyond my years" meant that it was ok to tell me "oh, wow, you're gonna be a bishop someday." And they said that because I was my father's son, his heir if you will, and I let them say it because I never controlled the social part of my life -- my parents did. Part of that smothering helicoptery parenting was them pruning away the possibilities they didn't like by controlling me with shame, and another part of it was me hiding behind my mother's skirt, so to speak, because neurotypicals and a world controlled by them where I had to pretend to be one of them were the stuff of my nightmares.

Aspies don't do the thing NTs do where they take first impressions of people from a glance and then pretend that like that's as good as having deep knowledge of a thing. To Aspies people are things, but also things are people. It's difficult to describe, but I think the reason we Spectrumites are the way we are is because our nodes which perceive and logic within the NTnet didn't cook right, and to compensate aberrant and novel connections formed instead. So, where NTs have definite boundaries about what constitutes a person and what constitutes a thing with their emotions focused mostly on people on their conscious thoughts focused mostly on figuring out "people problems," Aspies are different. We keep saying autistics are "different." Well, this is how, or one major way anyway. It's not just a nicer synonym for "retarded." Sometimes we're actually rather gifted, and I spent the first quarter of my alloted 100 years of my max life span, give or take twenty, thinking of myself as a broken or evil or something "not good" neurotypical. I thought of myself that way in between trying to cope with bright lights, loud noises, tactile discomfort, pain sensitivity, social difficulties, emotional turmoil over religious thoughts, and a strangely rigid and fixated kind of thinking. This last quality is a two-edged sword that I've often hurt myself on as much as I've impressed people with what I know when you catch me in one of my special interests. Also, I believe that when they say that autistics struggle to imagine things, this is part of what they're noticing. But, I can certify that with enough devotion to wanting to know how shit works and with a lot of patience and if your particular neural wiring permits it, you can imagine anything, even if you're on the spectrum. It just takes a lot longer to get there, because you don't have the NTnet, and it's really really easy to give up before the clouds part and the pillar of light of revelation shines upon you and you hear the voice of God (which is a metaphor for achieving an absolute degree of certainty about something abstract and difficult to describe but nontheless necessary to grasp which has eluded you to this point much to the chagrin of your ability to regulate your own internal state).

What did Joseph Smith Jr. feel the moment after? I don't mean the historical Joseph Smith, I mean the mythological one. Mormonism is bull. The First Vision was an exaggeration for political reasons of some personified and mythologized experience he had with himself in the woods maybe. But, to me, as someone who loved the church because I loved my father and he loved the church, the mythology of Mormonism penetrated my mind and became the axiomatic scaffolding upon which the weight of all my other thoughts rested and the language of emotive life. I have an emotive life, it just isn't socialized by default, probably due to the same or similar aberrant neural wiring that stresses me out every minute of every day if I'm not rubbing my face, playing with my hair, rocking back and forth, gritting my teeth, making noises with my mouth or with my hands, or otherwise "stimming" to distract myself from the constant stress that baseline perceptional reality is for me. I don't mean to make it sound like it "hurts" constantly. Sometimes it hurts. When I don't move my body for longer than a moment, I can get these strange sensations in my peripheral nervous system which want to manifest as pain. This is probably where the ADHD and the autism intersect and become a composite demon greater than the sum of its parts riding the pathways of my nervous system.

I find my greatest solace from my physical and perceptual discomfort -- which comes from being socially uncomfortable or having to sit too still or do things I don't wanna do or be places I don't wanna be -- by letting my frontal lobes or my logical mind take over my inner eye and entertain me with a sweet dopamine drip that comes from chewing the fat of familiar topics which I know a lot about already. I come to seem like an expert at those topics to other people. But I don't do it for vanity's sake. I'm not egotistical in the neurotypical sense. I can hardly play the game of the social-emotional hierarchy enough just to look like an NT some of the time, much less do it well enough to actually genuinely carve out a niche for myself on the NTnet and recognize what I did and feel joy in it and immediately begin gaming it for intimacy and resources the way normal people do. I can conceptualize these things, but my awareness of what I can't see very well is informed mostly by bumping into its invisible ass and getting beat up by it. My indifference to it and my strange behavior is interpreted on the NTnet as some kind of power move at a glance, but upon closer inspection they realize that I'm just a weirdo who isn't in sync with the game being played by most of the population and they make sure that I feel their subtext one way or another that I belong on the bottom of the pecking order or at least beneath them.

Actually, I was never actually bullied in the classic sense. But there are other ways of being bullied, and I picked up on this whenever I was around the non-mormon kids. The Mormon kids I knew either held me in holy awe or just did the mormon version of the same thing but never bothered making sure I understood their meaning because my dad was the guy they all confessed their shit to. Or were supposed to confess their shit to. Maybe they were afraid I'd tell on them. I was afraid they'd tell on me. Suffice it to say, I felt the most emotionally distant from the Mormon kids than any of the other kids, even though those were the kids whose inner lives I knew the most about and was most comfortable pretending to be like. But, strangely, I was forbidden from befriending the gentiles too closely until eventually it was conditioned habit until eventually it was simply a cultural distaste for the gentile ways.

I don't forget things though. I mean that very literally. I don't have a photographic memory per se, but something close to that, only emotionally and verbally. I can't remember names or faces to save my life, but I remember the content of conversations I watched and the feelings it caused me to have I naively placed myself in some sort of similar scenario, trying to understand. Oh, Jesus, just me typing that sentence brought back a memory of the vivid textures of the ground at grade school, specifically the area just outside of the cafeteria where we lined up for lunch every day. I was usually staring at the ground. I was usually anxious around other people, especially my peers, but I watched everyone around me socially and emotionally develop without me and wished to be part of it but I couldn't figure out how they did it. I passed the years by like that, and when I became a teenager, Mormonism added all the shittiest explanations for why I felt that way and I wondered if that was really the reason.

I said Aspies see people as things, but they also see things as people. I have a relationship with knowledge itself, I guess you could say. There are things that I think simply because I'm trying to establish a kind of relationship with a person, but then there are whole avenues of thought that I think to their logical conclusions just because it was be an insult to that subject not to do it justice. But academic subjects don't have feelings. Lol. Yet when I'm a lonely, socially clueless dreamy kid who is always anxious about missing out on something important or having my parents descend upon me in wrath for making them or the church look bad, the way I was conditioned at church kinda spilled over into my public schooling too. Only, in hindsight I think the reasons my parents got mad at me at church and got mad at me for bad grades were different reasons when I think about it. They wanted me to get good grades, because this is the credential that the NT world sees as vital to economic success, and I was brilliant for a kid, but I wasn't thinking about a career or living independently as an adult someday. I could barely keep up with my masking project while dissociating from my emotional mind into my logical mind as often as I could to figure out if there wasn't a different way to exist.

My parents picked up on some of my discomfort, although they never guessed the whole breadth of it. My masking was legendary. But also, they're hopelessly "alternatively" educated. I remember one day my father had one of those rare moments where he approached me to tell me something important, and what he said was that he and mom were scared that they had screwed me up somehow by having me, their oldest boy, vaccinated. I was the only one they had even partially vaccinated before they "figured it out." They somehow got around having the rest of my brothers vaccinated. He continued by saying that if my asthma and lactose intolerance were all that was wrong with me, "we lucked out." Well, that was not something I wanted to hear in the way that he said it. I might be autistic, but I'm not stupid and I've been burned enough times by how NTs think and behave to understand the range of their likeliest thoughts. I just don't always have the experience or the common sense to pick which thoughts those might be, so I often let my anxiety pick the worst possibilities and turn them into assumptions. In my defense, my anxiety is often right on the money. That was not the appropriate time to tell that man that I was not having a good time, you know, with life. I couldn't express all the ways I was stressed, and I was afraid it would let him down somehow if I could articulate it or that I would make myself of special concern to them in ways I didn't want or maybe it was my fault somehow.

I don't have a lot of green memories from my childhood. I'm reading this book right now called Permission to Feel, and it rates emotions into four quadrants where the x axis is the desired pleasantness of the emotion and the y axis is the intensity of it. High-intensity, positive emotions are yellow. Low-intensity positive emotions are green. High-intensity, negative emotions are red. Low-intensity, negative emotions are blue. This is probably where ADHD bites me in the ass, because it's impossible to feel low-intensity anything without flipping my shit and needing stimulation or at least some novel thing to think about. In other words, having nothing to do and feeling ok with it is almost impossible for me. I will either shift into the yellow by participating intensely in the intellectual discussion being had around me, or I will introvert and entertain/educate myself in the same way. If I don't shift into the yellow, this is what happens: maybe I'm too sad that day to be enthused about anything, so I shift into the blue and I keep getting bluer as I often tend to blame myself for not being on the same page as everyone else until I can't stand it anymore, which is a shift into the red where anger and lividness dwell. The way I was raised, all my red emotions were turned inwards towards myself as were most of my blue ones. I like being in the yellow, because that's where I can ignore the bad emotions that come often come with an awareness of myself. For a long time, I hated the sound of my own name, and I supposed I still do, because my most genuine emotional human connections don't even know my real name. I'm not just talking about this board. I'm part of a gaming community too who know me as Joe, which is not my real name but is starting to feel like it, sorta. My point is I'm always "emotional." There's never a time when humans are devoid of emotion. Everything we think and do comes riding on and proceeding forth from an emotion, even Spectrumites, only with us communication and the discovery of equivalent feelings in other people is harder which makes introception of our feelings the ability to tell what they are harder. But what Spectrumites need to understand is that even with the proper NTnet wiring, NTs rarely master their emotions either.

We're all clueless apes at the mercy of our own nature, ignorant of it, going around the sun on a giant spinning mud marble in the void of space at a thousand of miles per hour. But we have each other, and that's all we ever wanted. We gaze upon the vastness of space and almost every way we conceive of its possibilities is to place ourselves as the locus of the experience somehow -- thinking of how supportive those worlds can be of our race, wondering how different they are perceptually from earth, or musing upon the emptiness a planet suffers when it doesn't have us doing our ape shit on its surface -- the "history" that isn't happening there. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I thought these thoughts many times as I saw pictures of what other planets looked like in those documentaries I watched as a boy. I still watch them -- for fun. The universe is full of desolate worlds, and earth was once no different. But God was there, I once thought, a being in whose image we are made, which means, if not corporeally, at least emotionally or some human sense, God is one of us, the first of us, the seed of us, the provider of our existence. I imagined him like my dad, and I imagined me and my earthly dad making worlds together someday. And when we failed to have all the time together that I wanted as a boy, I turned inward and thought of the time we could have hereafter if only I could get this worthiness thing right. That fact that he was my bishop was very awkward. But, even before he was my bishop, I tended to think my Socratic inner dialectic at him or at my internalized talking head version of him. I discovered the scriptures that way, and landing upon scriptures I had heard him muse upon and tell in his stories felt like treading the ground he walked before me.

I don't wanna give Mormonism any credit for taking my life and selling it back to me, but something like that happened. It became a special interest which I could have and explore as autisticly as I wanted and no one thought this was weird. I didn't know I was autistic, but in my own way, I did know I was different and I was self-conscious about it and even tried to hide it as often as possible. Religion is where I rediscovered the socio-emotional parts of other people I had developmentally diverged from and lost sight of a long time ago, like ships lost at sea looking for the same promised land which still haven't found it but by chance find each other again ere they die. I went on my mission with this confidence. I had finally confessed my sins to my father and also kinda sorta reconnected with him again, although I was very anxious about losing him all over again. My mother was anxious about her own reputation and graciously threatened to disown me in a fit of emotion if I came home early. She was like that sometimes. I think I understand her very well. She subjected her kids to the church the way she subjected herself to her husband the way he subjected himself to the Lord, and that must be the way she talks to herself sometimes. I know what that's like. Still though, I had to imagine an ally against her in my father, even though IRL he always took her side, but from the many talks we had about how the universe works after I rediscovered him emotionally, I really leaned into it.

And out there in the American midwest
far away from the familiar desert mountains,
among the cornfields and cornfed rural Protestants,
I found out that my religion was not true
And I was undone.

I was out there doing exactly the things I was supposed to be doing, working on exactly the things I was supposed to working on, running towards the fires to save souls from antimormons, and of all things it was the questions that the people who trusted me asked me which destroyed me. The honesty of the questions. The level of immersion in Mormonism gave me the ability to intellectually (or should I say spiritually) compensate for the NTnet I usually don't see very well. I had had those questions, but I had viciously put them down in my own mind and then put myself down for ever thinking them. But, I can't and won't talk to a person who trusts me that way. They deserve answers. But don't I deserve answers too? No, I'm just sinner. But I'm not. Talk about self-abuse. Self-abuse isn't sexual self-stimulation; it's self-bullying. Years of autistic masking had made going on a mission an actual joy, because the Mormon mask that I had was I hoped the real me, and going on a mission felt like a break. I mean, people are anxiety no matter who they are or where they are, but they're also my bane because I can't leave them alone, I can't stop watching them, I can't stop noticing that our emotions are similar sometimes. Go figure with as fast as my mind races, some of the thoughts I've had are thoughts other people have had some versions of at some point. Lighting upon parallels even briefly lit up my emotional brain in ways like nothing in the whole cosmos ever did or ever could. I am a person and I was meant "to people," but my genes didn't allow the most important neural nodes for socialized emotive reading and expression to form right. That doesn't mean I don't want to. I read that ADHD when it occurs comorbidly with autism can soften the blow of how divergent my neural connections get. So, they're frenzied connections to be sure, but I guess just intact enough that sometimes I can see the fuzzy shapes of the NTnet, and it's like seeing God. For a while I thought I was in a sense seeing God or that God showing other people to me out of sheer goodness and grace, which only made all the evidence that he -- or the Mormon version of him -- wasn't real so much more confusing.

What I understand is that my emotional being which had wallowed in confused anxious isolation for so long, only being able to guess what all my capacity for feeling meant, finally felt it when it saw what other people are like in their most intimate thoughts and felt how easily I could reciprocate those emotions. Imagine what our far-flung future descendants would feel like if after eons of adapting to other planets rediscovered earth and walked on its surface for the first time, breathed its air, saw its flora and fauna and finally understood some of their deeper instinctual nature which had remained a mystery to them up until they had the earth-sized experience which made the evolutionary history finally make sense. A scriptural phrase about wanderers in a strange land cast out from the land of our origin comes to mind. Also, our days passing like unto a dream. But sometimes though, something happens that makes my neurons light up like they did all the time when I was kid. I live for that.

Something like 20% of all your calories burned at any given moment is just your brain matter doing its metabolism. Neurons connect with each other, exchange neurotransmitters, and form a complex web of connections, the most complex thing in existence so far as we know in fact, and you are something that emerges from that. You aren't the neurons, per se, so much as much they do and the ways they talk to each other. I saw my grandfather's corpse when I was seven years old, and I remember it. I poked it. It was cold. He was unresponsive, and I understood that this flesh might have constituted his temple when he was alive but he was somewhere else now. What I think now is that he had ceased to exist and all that was left was the decomposing organic machinery that used to generate him. I don't believe in immortal souls anymore, but I believe in mortal souls. I believe they can die, be snuffed out. I guess I believe something like the Jehovah Witnesses but without the Biblical part. While they're alive though, there's nothing more sacred. I searched into my own soul thinking I was searching out God, only to find there was no God, and rather than return to my former loneliness, I decided to continue searching into my soul but now I wasn't searching for God, I was searching for how to find the souls of other people, beginning with where I left off in my great spiritual journey, and that begins with getting a God's eye view of how everything works and then working backwards to where people are at with the way they perceive it and then I can comprehend something of what they feel, and I don't feel alone for moment. I may or may not successfully communicate with someone after catching a glimpse of their soul, and they may not reciprocate the effort, but -- before all of this pseudo-royal provincial redneck Mormon drama started, beginning with my meltdown after my mission -- I always liked being a people watcher, the fly on the wall content to observe and to be left alone to think.

There was a poem I discovered in Rexburg, where I went to Mormon university to see if there was any dignified way of putting my testimony back together to save my relationship with my parents and spare myself the self-consciousness and knowledge of my gross corporeality that would always haunt me should they turn on me and stop being not only my allies but in a sense my access to the NTnet, my social-emotional eyes and ears into the subtext most people can perceive but that I can't. It was the first poem that ever spoke to me the way that I thought poems were supposed to. I guess I'm too niche a human experience for most poets to hit the notes just right, but it can be done. It's called I Am by John Clare.

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

and your intelligence blow me away. I've said it before, you remind me of my son. I could have him read this and he'd understand everything. He has always struggled and is now 36. I've probably said he had a mental break down 1-1/2 years ago. He talks far over my head and it makes my head want to explode as I don't understand. They say he might have dis s ociative identity disorder or that he does. I'd like to talk to his therapist. His childhood was not pleasant. His father left when he was 10. He begged him to come back. He was the one who hung around with me while his twin sister RAN from the situation. He worried about me. He has been trauma tized by his father abandoning him and not just physically. For years, both of my kids said their father didn't want them. My son just wants his father to love him. When they went on a trip to California a few months ago, my "husband" took his 22-year-old boyfriend with them. My son was irritated or angry or furious. I don't think there is a bad enough word I can use. He was upset that his father was paying so much attention to his boyfriend, the attention that he always craved from his father. He called his dad a fag got and his dad hit him with a closed fist in the side of the head. I know that he wouldn't have hit him if the boyfriend wasn't there. It only made things worse for my son. How do you save your son from the person who should love them the most--like you. You just want your father to LOVE YOU. What is wrong with these fathers? And mothers, too.

What I can understand IS what it was like to not fit in in mormonism. I tried so damn hard. One of my "friends" from the ward I grew up in died a few weeks ago of a heart attack. It was sudden. I quit talking to her 30 years ago as she needed me as a friend, but I was her go to if her cool friends didn't have time for her. Her mother even told my mother to please ask me to be her friend again as she needed me. I chose not to.

Mormon guys NEVER liked me and so I ended up married to a gay as I had to have a temple marriage and I had to save him of course, per the leaders. I could have married 3 nonmormons before I ever met my husband. But no, I couldn't do that. The most I felt I fit in in mormonism was when I worked with a bunch of chemists and scientists. These men were good people. Just good people and "different" in the sense that chemists and scientists don't think like the typical mormon ward member. I love those guys to this day AS I FIT IN. And the nonmormons I became friends with--I fit in. I could date any nonmormon at Thiokol I wanted to. I got asked out a lot, but I thought God would bring me a husband.

My whole family is like this. We are all "different" or however you would call it. Once I left the church, I felt free. My husband says that I was never happy mormon and I wasn't. I'm lucky in that my parents weren't TBMs, especially my dad. My dad was TOUGH, but he loved us and I miss him and my mother to this day. My brother is also like you. He and my son are so much alike.

I'm so very sorry that you have lived this life. That you were raised in mormonism and I believe it damaged you, just like it did me. There are women out there who would love to be with you, who are also brilliant like you are. I've found those that are like us will appear in our lives, not that we have to look for them. Live YOUR life the way you choose. Keep working on understanding yourself (I hate to say I still am). From what you write, you have talent and intelligence that most of us will never have. TAKE CARE OF YOU. Do what makes you find some peace. And don't worry about what anyone else thinks of your decisions and choices, or your intelligence.

Personally, I think you have HIGH emotional intelligence. It is those others out there who don't.

are not all Mormonism’s fault. But, a lot the extra anxiety, extra avoidance behavior, and extra niche-ness are perhaps Mormonism’s fault for trying to condition me for its sole benefit. The conditioning never took the way I think it was supposed to.

Your son and I might get along. Someone on here offered to get in contact with me a while back. I always feel guilty for that, but initiating social contact isn’t something I deal with very well, although once I’m set up in a comfortable space I can very TMI. They live in France, I think.

Funny, I met a fellow Spectrumite who lives in France through a game we both play, although not the same Spectrumite from this board. He likes me, I think, because I demystify NTs for him. I know the Spectrum experience. I just didn’t know what it was called until recently. I’ve spent all this time trying to reverse engineer autistic Mormonism gone rogue so people could get me. Lol. There was an easier way, but doing it the hard way is not without benefits. I understand a lot.

My parents deserve a lot of credit, actually. As far as my apostasy goes they’ve been slightly better than typical Mormon parents. But still, I was raised to think I’d get something different from what I got, I think. I keep saying I think. I don’t see the NTnet very well, or in other words I struggle to read people between the lines and tonally before my anxieties and my peculiarities introvert me again. I can be quite a chatterbox with the right person though. My mother hit me more than my dad ever did, and my dad didn’t have to, because if he had been no better than he was, I would have understood that I had no allies in my home. But, to my mom’s credit, she always burst into tears and begged forgiveness later.

I’m sorry that Mormonism hurt you. I’m sorry it hurt me too. I’m sorry it infected my family at the level of emotes, or in other words became their only emotional expressive language. What I have become I have become in a desperate bid to make them understand who I really was. You see my ability to verbalize feelings I have no business being able to articulate that well, since I’m too alixothimic most of the time: that’s how much I wish to be understood by them. Here I was thinking if I could prove it wrong, my family would have to listen. That isn’t how the neurotypical wiring works most of the time, sadly, not once their NTnet experience has been completely taken over and described to their satisfaction by the cult. they’re content to let the cult be the only firmware running them at the subtextual level that they’re ever need and they don’t wanna learn other cultures at all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2022 12:11PM by Cold-Dodger.

An interesting post by Anonuk.

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1869486,1869718#msg-1869718

very interesting. That sounds like the intersection of ASD and OCD almost.

It’s not that high-functioning autistics are compelled to tell the truth like the inverse of a pathological liar who can’t tel the truth if they wanted to, it’s just that the truth is the truth and anyone with eyes should be able to see the data. It’s just the truth. It’s the data in the room.

People on the spectrum have never understood why “normal” people can’t handle the truth, just like they don’t understand why most people are so difficult to get along with. In the wrong conditions with the wrong flavor of autism, life is hell, as I know.

There’s no front with ASD people. We are what you get. We speak up or we keep to ourselves.

I know there’s people on this board who are on the spectrum but who thought they were broken or peculiar NTs. These things are very difficult to verbalize, precisely because we’re talking about the lack of ability to read people between the lines at an intuitive level. Depending on neural wiring, it can be difficult or downright impossible to read other human beings between the lines, meaning beyond what they verbally say.

Chalk this up to my hubris if you need to, but I think I get it. I think I get how to explain to NTs, even Mormon NTs, what autism is, and I think I know how to explain NTs to citizens of the spectrum. My special interest is, well, what I tried to explain above. I think about these things every day.

I’m not a PhD in psychology. I’m not saying that.

What I’m saying is that my special interest is something like “understanding the mindsets behind controversy and contention.” It requires me to know a little about a lot instead of everything about one or two things, which it sounds like is what a “special interest” usually is. This is what ADHD intersecting with autism looks like, at least in my case. Those are my diagnoses, and it seems to explain my peculiarities to my satisfaction, and goddamn if I’m not picky about that already.

That's me. I don't like to meet new people. I even hate just going to an appt like the doctor. I am comfortable going to my therapist, but I've been seeing him for 25 years or more actually. I dread the day he retires. He is 2 years younger than I am. He is brilliant, too. He isn't your normal therapist. I had gone to several before I found him.

But I work at home. The perfect situation for me. I could work at the office for about 5 or 6 years and I did sometimes to force myself to keep working and I'd have panic every time I went in the office and I knew them all. I'd go in at 5 a.m. so I didn't have to see anyone. I hate making phone calls. In fact, I barely use my phone. Having cell phones just made it easier for me as I never have my phone with me.

My brother and son don't think I have anxiety like they do. I had no choice. I was a single mother. I had to DO IT ALL for my kids. I could write long lists of what I hate doing. My therapist even made assignments for me to go outside and walk around the yard, go get the mail as soon as the mail truck came. I can still hear it a block away, though I'm not afraid of the mail anymore. I had too many bad things come in the mail. I wouldn't go downstairs and that was another assignment. My kids learned to do their own laundry then.

Mormonism was like a spook alley to me. I went because I believed, not to socialize. I avoided people at church. So I'm not what you'd call social at all. But I find myself in situations where I have to be and I don't like it. I found I have to walk outside my neighborhood or I get stopped and people talk to me too long. And I don't know how to get out of it.

My mother was antisocial, too. We all are basically. I have a brother who had a stroke when he was born, lost the use of the left side of his body. My dad made him lift "weights"--he got him huge bolts to lift as a little boy. The doctor said he wouldn't have walked if he didn't want to be like his big brother and sisters. He then drank paint thinner at 18 months and was hit by a pickup on his bike when he was 5. He was in a coma for 2 weeks.

He has some autism. He is really amazingly smart with numbers and his memory is amazing. He just almost cut off the top of his finger doing things for his "job"--he finds jobs here and there, though he is on disability, and they sewed it back on. Took 3 hours of surgery. He has taken the bandaging off 3 times in a week. He just wants to go back to work.

We have an amazing mix of siblings. My brother with only a GED has become manager of 2 companies and earns in the 6 figures. He is the one who is like my son. Going to work takes it out of him, his anxiety is so bad.

We were TAUGHT to work as we had a farm. It was a good thing as much I as hated it. I miss it now.

My son it takes a lot of energy for him to go to an appointment, to go pick a prescription 2 blocks away. He won't take classes as hard as I've tried to get him to. He would do really well. He knows how to code and he taught himself 3D modeling.

But we are also hesitant to meet people or even talk to them. It is amazing I come here, but my therapist sent me here about 14 years ago and it has helped me a lot.

My family is mostly out. My disabled brother is still in the church and they treat him well. He has 2 best friends from childhood who are not disabled who watch out for him. They are AMAZING and mormon. My older sister just FINALLY quit the church. The rest were out before I was. My dad was never much of a mormon. My mother was the most supportive of me leaving. My dad's family is a bunch of heretics per my sister and she'd be right. My dad considered the word of wisdom bulls*it.

I was the most devout. I thought that if I lived right that I could save my family, that God would bring me the man he had chosen for me, that nothing bad would happen to me if I continued on the path I was on. I'm a testimony to how you SHOULDN'T LIVE. They broke me. That's just the truth. I've told most of them off.

Anyway, if you want my e-mail, just say and I'll get it for you. That is entirely up to you and it also makes me think AHHHHHHHH!!!! Mormonism is not a good fit for people like me and like you and so many others. It isn't a good fit for my WHOLE family.