Had dinner with me ma tonight. was... uh... interesting.

On one hand it was simply pleasant, no hostility really. I got to share a lot of feelings I've been wanting to share without getting immediately slapped down.

On another hand, she was skeptical of my diagnosis out of pure naivety.

"You always did remember things that people usually don't."

yes.

"Ya, you never expressed yourself really, except when you were really excited or really upset."

yes.


"You are very booky"

yes.

"Sometimes I feel like you don't quite remember what people meant even though you remember the words they say."

yes.

"Are you sure this diagnosis is correct?"

"Ya, mom." Lol.

"Oh, I guess your father and I used to think all diagnoses were made up and people just use them to excuse themselves [in sin], but we learned that *some* are legit. I guess that one is a thing."

Yes, I guess that one is a thing.

Paraphrased dialogue, but more or less the content of our hour conversation.

I've come a long way from the near-nonverbal mess I was as a teenager in that house. She's never going to understand exactly what their stupid bull did to me. How do I work with that? Or do I just stop trying to "fix" her the way I won't let her fix me anymore and just enjoy and wonderful winter dinner with my mother? That's what I decided to do. It was very nice of her to let me express some feelings of how difficult childhood was for me though.

I was hoping you’d tell us about your mom. :)

so sad to hear about your autistic diagnosis OPie ~

was that if you were depressed, you were being sinful and that all you needed to do was read your scriptures and go to church. After going through suicidal depression over my boyfriend/husband being gay and dealing with the leaders, I viewed a diagnosis of depression entirely different. I had a lady I VT who was extremely depressed and she called me one day and told me that all the other members of the ward told her she just needed to read her scriptures. She actually ended up in SL City getting electric shock therapy.

I have a very good friend who only talks to her daughter now. She is in bed all day. She always felt like she was less than because she took antidepressants and she was STILL depressed. She felt and it was probably true that other members looked down on her.

My mother needed something and she refused to take anything that doctors gave her. All of her children are on an antidepressant except my oldest brother. She convinced him not to take one. He had a bad hemorrhagic stroke at age 42. He isn't even the same person he used to be. He is SO OCD. He never was before.

I've had different primary care doctors try to diagnose me, but I do have my long-time therapist and he says I have major depression and always have since he met me. He asked me recently if there was anything I wanted to work on as he knows I've been very depressed lately and I told him, "Nope. I know the routine. It will get better eventually. I just suffer through it." I am on only 10 mg of Prozac as everything else I've taken has been HORRIBLE. I tried getting off Effexor and my doctor at the time wouldn't help me. I had brain shivers. Lexapro made me extremely suicidal at a good time in my life.

My son has some interesting diagnoses. They think he has dissociative identity disorder, severe anxiety, agoraphobia, maybe bipolar, maybe schizophrenia (they threw a mixture of diagnoses at him when he was in the hospital for 2 nights and a day--not nearly long enough to diagnose him). YOU KNOW what fits, how it feels, what you struggle with. I'm just assuming your parents don't consider any diagnoses appropriate. If you were active mormon, you'd supposedly be okay per members of the church. I'm glad you got to spend time with your mother.

She also might be afraid that she caused this, something she did, that she failed you in some fashion. I don't know her, so I can't say for sure, but mothers sure worry about those things. I wonder what I did to my son all the time. I do believe a lot of what he is going through is directly related to his father leaving, abandoning him. He feels DEEPLY. I believe you do, too. You can't write like you do and not feel DEEPLY.

My mom is afraid she hurt me but she’s also afraid of questioning too much of her own worldview, I think, so it would be a lot easier if I made it easier for her by reporting what he wants to hear. This is the people-pleasing thing that I’ve always had a problem with, but I’m starting to see the big picture — insofar as how their thinking goes when they put that pressure on me.

My family are emotional creatures too, and Mormonism is their socio-emotional language, the scaffolding upon which they make sense not only of reality but mostly of being human in the subjective emotional sense. So, I’m describing religion. I knew that, but I want to know how they meant their behaviors over the past seven years and also before that: what do I look like to them? Is that fair to me? Are they capable of better but aren’t putting in the effort? Is that hostility then? I need to know these things before I let myself feel sorry for anything I’ve said back to them.

I, because of the way I am, can’t read people on that level very well. I can only guess, and my emotional maturity isn’t what my thirties man body or my logical monologues make it look and sound like, so there are limitations to what I can imagine without experiencing new social and emotional arrangements first. Which is why I love fiction and history so much, I think. But…

Mormonism is a pretentious, obnoxious, all-encompassing yet shallow axiomatic language to allow to take over one’s emotional brain and become the language wherewith your rhetorical mind searches within your deeper emotional one. It tries to make you feel so bad to resisting its influence and when it has to, it turns others whom it has already taken or is in the process of taking on you to press your shame buttons. I did not read these facts wrong: that’s what Mormonism is like and how it operates. And my family be all, “but, once you surrender, it feels so much better.” Ya, it feels better because you’re suddenly released from stresses it caused in the first place. I was always aware of that fact and it kinda kept me sane like a totem in the movie Inception, or like how Sirius Black from the Harry Potter books knew he was innocent so the magical demon guards of the wizard prison couldn’t steal the memory from him because it wasn’t a happy one. I knew or at least suspected the full extent to which Mormonism was manipulating me. It was an awareness I always had, much to my chagrin. Because sometimes all I wanted was to be immersed in whatever koolaid those people were drinking and be with them where they are, but I’m different, and my difference smites me specifically in the social-emotional areas of my mind where I would have silenced my logical inner voice to live full time if I could have.

My differentness kept me bobbing on the surface of the Mormon koolaid, so to speak, never able to drown myself in it like I wanted. At one point drowning my logical mind in that drink was all I wanted, because I was desperate to feel the way other people felt and socialize with them the way they socialized, and I just couldn’t, and I didn’t know what that was or whether I should ashamed of it and hide it, or if it was sin and needed harder repenting to go away… so ya… That was my emotional life in their home. I could logically tell that things were a lot simpler than the way I felt — I could tell they loved me, I knew what love looked like and sounded like, crudely, but I often ‘overthought’ or decided upon an assessment of the contents of other people’s minds which robbed me of feeling loved. I knew I was loved, but I didn’t feel loved. I wanted to feel it. I thought maybe I felt it. But, I wasn’t sure, and to go make sure, I had to expose my emotional being in ways that terrified young me, and when I did, I still didn’t have an awareness of the NTnet — which is a word I made up for the ways that neurotypicals ‘feel’ each other in a complex web of relationships at a subtextual level through social cues — the same ways that a non-autistic person does, so it went sideways, and I think I’ve only just cleared up how that all worked.

Damn these people for being so emotionally retarded, because they’re not even on the spectrum like I am. They’re emotionally dammed up for a completely different reason, one that seems voluntary but that I have to remember isn’t always that voluntary. They do grow just like I do, but it’s frustrating because even that growth is held back by their axiomatic-emotional limitations. They’re too Mormon, even when they’re trying to learn how to tolerate me my and brother Chief. They’re the only family I get to be born into though, and it’s already done. So, I’m grateful for how much my mother was able to listen me the other night. I don’t know how much she agreed with, probably not a lot, but we were both content to have each other’s familiar presences at least and not be at each other’s throats. I just wanted to say more of my feelings than I ever got to say before and be heard. That’s all I’ve been envious for. They can have their God; just don’t let Him come between us, ok?

It's sometimes good to express feelings and all that, or simply enjoy/ discuss dinner/ food/ whatever, and sometimes good to change/ have different conversations all together. I think you have to do both, just, at different times.

Mormons don't think like people should
So they don't always get the finer points

In relating to those they don't consider LDS
It's like, you're "different"/ non-lds/ other

That's what I've noticed

Since Mormonism is a kind of DIY lobotomy and padded cell arrangement, your ma seems to be doing surprisingly well.

Most people don't "get" me, nor would I want them to. That includes most of my family. I spent too much time sorting out my own head. I have a few close friends. Some of them treat me like I walk on water, which I find a little creepy. I'm just struggling through, like everybody else.

“A do it yourself lobotomy/padded cell arrangement”

Uhh… wow. Yes, that is strangely accurate.

In my experience, nobody really has a great time with this arrangement but they do it anyway because they think they have to or else God will whoop their ass in this life for the next. Then, with me, I added a autistic sensitivity\overly logical\ hyper focused\super aware\perfect recall kind of self criticism to it mixed with the emotional turbulence of ADHD.

And, if people can picture the interplay of those traits with the Mormon conditioning as described above, that explains my Mormon experience to my satisfaction.

Autism is something I am aware of. As my wife is ASD.