Ideas are more real to me than flesh and blood. The discovery of how things tick is far more exciting than sex or getting to know somebody. The majority of my life I spend with my head in the clouds as other people would say. Those Clouds, that Other World, is my real universe, and it's this one only abstracted. If people grant me some patience and stick around, I come down from the clouds and share what I see from that place.

That place is this place as I understand it, and I'm always working on improving my understanding. I get quite the spinning model going as rich and as grand as I think a person's social life is supposed to feel. I wouldn't know, but I think that what makes me different from other people is, in part, neurons that were supposed to help me find people interesting at a basic emotional/perceptual level didn't quite hook up the way they were supposed to. Instead, the objective world holds my fascination followed up closely by the ideological world. I can make meeting people interesting for myself, but only by going through the neural pathways that I have. People become interesting to me when it somehow relates to my fascination with learning things and sharing it in an information dump on someone capable of understanding what I'm on about.

I think I've always wanted to people the way people seem to be able to people, but I don't and I can't, although I wish I could. That's probably the single biggest imprint/conditioning that Mormonism left on my mind. They raised me in that one mold in which they try to raise every male. In my iteration of that Plan, my parents and their friends and my priesthood leaders were so exciting that I seemed to be a bottomless receptacle of all the right pieces of knowledge. They would wield it. They would point it towards the edification of the church. They would have me be like my father who has been in and out of high councils, bishoprics, and stake presidencies. They would have me build the Kingdom. They would have me sit as a judge in Israel. They would have me pontificate of the things of the Lord like few could who people in my little click knew face to face anyhow.

Once and for a long time, I wanted to be that for them. I wanted to want it. But I didn't want it, not really. I don't have the neural pathways to do what my father does, and I knew it, although I didn't have those words yet. I tried to become that person anyway. It took a toll on my soul, holding that unnatural shape as best I could. Anxiety devolved into anxious depression devolved into panic attacks devolved into burnt out depression devolved into jaded apathy. There were moments in those days, though, when I could hold the pose in all the right ways to have the right effect. But to my everlasting sorrow, it did nothing for me on my end. It didn't make me happy. It was supposed to. It was supposed to. It did not. I plead with people from my old life to understand at least that fact. I tried, and I hurt myself trying. I have psychological wounds that I would hope people understood and interpreted as the scars of my how hard I tried to hold on to a testimony and fit into the mold expected of me.

There was an intellectual conversion to the church in my heart that fed me and edified me and kept me going, but it only worked while I was still convinced there might be answers in the universe somewhere to all the hard questions that would let me have the riches of science and philosophy AND the faith I was born into. The more I grew up, the more my mind matured, the more I understood how things fit together, the more I despaired that there was a fork in the road coming down the pipe and I would have to decide which of contradictory options was "true" and follow the one and push the other away. It terrified me. Both forks in the way terrified me.

I could choose faith, but it would cost me any chances I had in the secular world. Or I choose the education that school had always been trying to shove into my head, but I would lose the social privilege and social access I had to people to who loved listening to my infodumps just because I was my father's son. Maybe somewhere in the infinite universe there's a version of me who played his cards right and found a way to have both. I didn't. I wish I could have. Just because I find myself so made that as I mature and learn too much I begin to hold my received faith in skepticism doesn't mean I hate the social relations that I've always enjoyed or that I've suddenly learned how to love making and telling lies. Why? Why does a love of truth have to cost so much? Why aren't people generally as interested in these things as I am: namely how it all fits together?

It was because my love of truth was so, well, Mormon (Mormon-conditioned or laid on a foundation of Mormon axioms), that I got a bad taste in my mouth about it after I figured out it was b.s. The problem is not, in retrospect, with religion generally. Human beings organize themselves into tribal groups based on shared ideas about how things work. Call it religion with a small 'r' if you want, but it's inevitable. It's a hardwired social behavior, I am convinced, that most people have that hits me particularly on the nose because I don't have it in the same way. I am able to pick up on the social nuance and adapt my behavior to avoid being thrown out of the group (if I want), but I don't have a natural ability to turn my brain off to intellectual things and exist in a purely social and emotional mind frame. The problem is that Mormonism teaches lofty ideals about what truth being universal, objective, enteral, binding, and necessary for every single person to know, and then declares itself the ultimate and logical end of all truth, declares its competition bastards and apostates bound to damnation, and then spends more energy than it has any right to do so separating the sheep from the goats and persuading its youth to hold the larger world in derision and at arm's length, chancing contact with it only to save the occasional soul who might convert to Mormonism. That's a steep price to pay, and myself and many others were willing to pay it up to a point. The point past which we could not was when the truth was obviously something else and we could not justify the self-righteousness and social insularity expected of us anymore and we despaired knowing what was coming next: either a silent inner death of hope or else a scarlet letter. That hurts exquisitely to put into that circumstance when your cultural conditioning is, well, Mormon -- such that you never expected to come to this juncture but here it is like blunt force trauma between your eyes.

Mormon writers and speech makers and talk givers and pulpit pounders have for almost two hundred years articulated the shape of the hole that the Truth would fit into without sufficient exposure to what there is to know in the world to know that their implied Truth would not fit into that hole, ergo it's not "true" in the way that was articulated to us since we were babes. How does this happen?

The Foundational Prophet of Mormonism was never educated formally. He declared a love of learning, especially in the King Follett Discourse, but he didn't have any expert idea what he was talking about. He seemed to understand new subjects in terms of lies he can tell and fiction he could weave and have people believe him, and I don't know if he actually cared about learning beyond that. His audience for the most part were immigrants and peasants who wouldn't have known any better either, and even if they doubted his ideas -- he was a prophet and got his ideas straight from God supposedly. That's hard to argue with that when most everyone else in your family believes it. Good families have split right down the middle over that exact point of conflict. It causes inter-generational trauma, and the ones who stay in the faith historically tended to push the apostates ones away and then raise the children henceforth to avoid whatever Uncle Joe or Aunt Jane was drinking, because it's obviously the poison of the devil. Compound these dynamics with the fact that the whole church fled into the wilderness literally to be culturally insular, and there were top-down purges on top of the ones that happen from the bottom-up. That's what Mormon culture's aversion to all things "anti-Mormon" is.

This recurring drama is something of a map to how my inner life's drama has unfolded. It's my whole life in a way I want my reader to understand. I didn't have friends as a kid. I mean, I did, but they were more like people who hung around me for reasons I didn't comprehend, although I liked it. I offend people a lot. I never fully understand why. From my perspective, it happens randomly and with great traumatic force, so I tend to be very cautious and aloof from other human beings. The only maneuver I ever found to deal with this problem is by marrying my every thought to the Mormon gospel and embodying the religion's creeds and scriptures and scruples as the very best avatar I could be. Because then when people randomly take offense to me, it is not ME but the Lord they have rejected... lol. I think this is a maneuver so Mormon you don't have to be on the Spectrum to have discovered it. Sometimes I feel like I didn't get the memo, like I missed the seminar, or like I showed up to the party right when everybody else is leaving. I'm never on the same page with anyone else. I'm always behind the curve. Which doesn't mean I don't have my intelligent streaks, but book smarts is not street smarts, and the more I get caught in the web of trying to use my book smarts to compensate for my lack of street smarts, the more the academic future itself I made have had begins to suffer, especially in this church's society.

I intellectually echo-locate those things which my neurotype forbids me from seeing and reacting to in real time like everybody else does. That's why it's especially confusing when I stumble on to something true, something real, something solid, and everybody in my life combines to deny that thing and call me insane for thinking that's a thing. It is a truly bizarre paradox to my perception. I am especially susceptible to gaslighting and manipulation, so I have to know, um, everything to be able to protect myself. I had command of the Mormon gospel like nobody else in my social life had, and I turned it over and over in my analytical mind, not trying to find holes but to figure out how to articulate it as the truth which I was sure it was. The holes present themselves, and it's devastating. I was not shopping for another church. Never entered into my mind. I'm not the kind of guy who goes looking for new social connections except in crisis, and then only because I have to or else I might do something stupid if I don't get a new perspective.

That has been for the larger part of my life my social-emotional reality, but has not been my whole life. What a lot of people on the Spectrum do to escape the stress of their incompatibility with other people is retreat into their special interests. Day dreaming if it can't take an external form in the current social circumstances. My interests are many, because my autism has ADHD to boot, but as a plus my ADHD is autistic. It is very interesting to have both neurotypes blended into one. I must understand something that has my attention all the way through from the bottom up, but I can't regulate my attention for shit, so I end up understanding just about everything there is know at least a 101 level, and some of the most exquisite joy I've had in my life is sitting or driving or otherwise musing on my own time, lost in my thoughts, about how things connect together and make sense, because it's the only window into how the universe makes sense to other people that I've ever had.

My thoughts can come across crisp and orderly when I take the time to write them out. That's why I like writing. But that's not how I have them. The best way I can think to describe the order of my mind is organized chaos. I'm along for the emotional ride of being me, but there is an inner eye combined with a very powerful logical and analytical voice that files everything of interest that happens in my perceptional awareness categorically for later rumination. Constant, constant overthinking of everything: rumination, re-visitation, cross-connection, revelation. I used to -- and I think I still do to some degree -- relate to Joseph Smith's statement that revelation is like pure inspiration flowing into you, the "aha" moments that edify you. I have those every day. I used to understand it as communing with Deity, and I think it would have stuck if Mormonism hadn't been such a sick fucking joke in the end. I still exist the way I always did, only with a different understanding about what my thoughts and feelings mean and where they come from.

This is my inner life, and people who see this and understand it to any degree know me more intimately than anybody in my "real life" does or cares to. I'm quite jaded about "real life." It's not real at all to me. In my inner world, I dive ever deeper into how creation spins across many subjects. That's the real world. Then I'm pulled out of it by the necessity of having to interact with human beings whose minds I can't wrap mine around who seem to be preoccupied with bullshit for social reasons, and I'm told this is the "real world" and to get my head out of the clouds on focus on it. I spit on it in much the same way I used to hiss and spit at other Christian churches. If you asked me at the age of twenty, I would have quoted the King Follett Discourse to you to the effect that I have the best book inside of me in the form of the Gift of the Holy Ghost, and it is to those lights which I turn when people see me tuning them out. Today, I would say I used to be a religious nutter because I born into it and didn't know any better, but I always loved learning truth in my own way, which is why discovering the error of my former ways was a bit humiliating and a little traumatic, but I can't help myself but chase the white rabbit OUT of Wonderland. I like to keep it real, if you will. Reality gets realer the closer to my center one gets. I'm not here on this earth to close my eyes and stop my ears until death calls and says the ride is over. I lose respect for people when I realize that's what they're doing, even myself when I catch myself doing it. In that sense, I'm still a repenting man too. Every day. Forever or for as long as the universe lets me have my being. I love it.