Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: April 13, 2023 04:49AM
These novels by CJ Cherryh continue to thrill and intrigue me. There's this novel series called Foreigner about a human diplomat living among a race of humanoid aliens whose minds are significantly different from humans. The protagonist's emotional isolation and his witty internal dialogue being a diplomat in an alien culture without ever being entirely sure if he has other people figured out right remind me of my earthly experience poignantly on three different fronts: culturally, traumatically, and neurologically.
Autism creates a sense of emotional isolation that has sometimes been described as being an alien among humans or perhaps a human on an alien planet; that's because the brain developed in a unique and independent way from what is typical for most brains. A mind on the spectrum is still human, but it can be different quantitatively. If you think of a human being's sensitivities and strengths and neural skills as a control board full of sliders, kinda like the character creation screen of a video game or a Dungeons and Dragons match, the sliders of an autistic character are all maxed or deficient in seemingly random ways. Your objectivity attribute might be maxed out, but your your ability to tolerate certain smells or textures is nerfed, for example. It's a strange experience to describe to someone who doesn't have it; suffice it to say the quirks and oddities that you've ever noticed in someone on the spectrum that make them different from others have to do with neural connections either being weakly formed or else formed overly strong. It's not something that can be changed; it's the way the brain grew from the womb. In my case, I think I'm something of a savant, but my experience has been very emotionally turbulent and almost never socially successful.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that autistic people develop quite easily, but anybody can. Suffering trauma creates new sudden neural pathways in your mind of extraordinary strength and they're all connected to your anxiety. I think the trauma response, shock and the debilitating stress which comes after, is your body's way of trying to protect you from the thing that traumatizes you. You play the thing over and over and over again in your head and it fills you with such dread and stress and makes you anxious you might see it again, because the last time you experienced X it almost killed you -- from the way you perceived it anyway -- so you enter into a kind of avoidance behavior dialed up to the very max that your nervous system can tolerate without overloading itself to give you the maximum fight or flight response it can give you if you see or hear or experience anything remotely resembling the X experience -- insert whatever traumatic experience you wish into X.
Finally, I have come to think of the faith crisis as half a kind of PTSD and half a kind of culture shock. The Mormon faith crisis is caused from living in an artificially self-contained reality apart from actual reality enforced by fear of social trauma propped up on a scaffolding of dogmatism that begins to unravel when either the social loss once feared occurs anyway or one begins to doubt that the dogma is believable anymore. Mormons are afraid of peer rejection, and further Mormons are ill prepared almost by cultural design to live in any other culture. Public speaking is the number one fear next to death itself, and to understand this we need to bear in mind that human beings are social creatures: if in the ancient pre-history of our species our ancestors found that they had committed taboos or otherwise offended their tribe so much that they were cast out, death was certain to follow. So it logically makes sense that fear of losing your relationships is experienced as something akin to having a brush with death. Picture all the sensitive souls you've ever seen get up to the podium and picture the grim reaper behind them with a slimy, bony hand on their shoulder as if he'd take them to the underworld immediately if they didn't perform well, and the body language of that anxious speaker makes perfect sense.
I have experienced all three before, and sometimes all at the same time. I have experienced the anxiety of thinking about the loss of my relationships at traumatic levels, behind the cultural veil of Mormonism which ill prepared me to understand the world outside, while processing it all with a mind that was not prepared to be socially and emotionally compatible with most other people most of the time but that did bless me a strangely present, objective inner eye of awareness that never turns off even when the rest of me is crawling around on the floor in a state of anxious defeat.
What does this have to do with the Foreigner novels? The Foreigner novels are the best description of what it's like to experience being on the inside of my own skull that I have yet to discover in English literature. I, like anyone else, want to be heard and seen for what I am and accepted if others would have that much grace for me, but finding the words for it while living under multiple layers of cultural and neurological translation is the whole trick.
I am capable of wrapping my mind around so many different objective things and systematizing the data for my own comprehension, but on the flip side I'm not always able to experience social emotions or emotions socially with other people in the ways they would like me to be capable. This has made years of being known as the bishop's kid, the one who knows things about the gospel, very difficult. People used to come to me, attracted by my ability to dump large amounts of information, usually scripture or stories from testimony meetings, from memory, and they poked and probed what I know. If impressed, they dared to go a little further and start challenging some aspects of the religion that they may find harder to digest or outright tyrannical in their personal experience and ask me what I thought of it or if it could work some other way. Sometimes people just outright poured their whole souls out, trusting that my emotional being is as capable and ready to give them answers as their intellectual being seems to be. Maybe I channeled the Lord himself to these folks or at least they hoped I could. I'm note sure. Trapped on the cultural island of Mormonism where professional expertise and outside sources are distrusted, in moments like that I had to try to do what I could to be the guru or therapist or whatever these people need at the time they let me in. I was intensely concerned that people believe in the church/gospel back in those days, and that extended to wanting it to be the answer they needed, the cure for what ails them. It needed to be both historically correct, empirically correct, and therapeutically correct, and if it seemed like it wasn't at times, there was nobody but me as far as I could see on my horizon of trusted faithfuls who could go find the answers. I began thinking this way as a very young boy, and nobody stopped me or discouraged me -- quite the opposite. People were grateful for it, especially teachers trying to beat a difficult concept into the heads of my peers who I didn't often understand very well and was usually anxious to approach directly. My own peers who were raised the same way I was!
In the third novel of the first trilogy of the Foreigner series, there is a character named Jase. Jase is a human from a human space ship. One day the ship turns back up at the planet that it dumped the settlers on over 200 years ago. The settlers had two centuries in the absence of the ship that brought them to figure the local sentient species, the Atevi, out and they still hardly understand them enough to know how to keep the peace. When the ship returns out of the blue, though, tensions between both races on the ground come to a bubbling point. The protagonist, Bren, is the main diplomat and translator between both sides (a Paidhi), and he takes it upon himself to train someone from the human ship to communicate with the locals for and in behalf of the ship. Jase was sent down as the most capable human being from the ship, but he has never even set foot on a planet before. A difficult learning curve ensues shepherded by Bren, the first Paidhi.
The theme of this novel is culture shock and navigating the emotions of foreigners in a seemingly hostile alien world with high stakes where the answers must be figured out for oneself if they are ever to be found at all, or any day that ends in Y for me -- hence why I love it so much so far. The reason I wanted to write this little think piece is because I stumbled upon the following passages.
While Jase is trained to become the translator between the ship and the Atevi people, he suffers the loss of his father. He cannot go up into space at that moment to attend the service or to comfort his mother who lives on the spaceship, and he cannot grieve openly on the planet among the aliens because they will not understand his grief and may interpret his hurt feelings as hostile. The aliens don't think the same way and especially don't feel the same way. So Jase must mask how he feels and pretend to be fine. In that state, the protagonist takes him to see the ocean for the first time. Maybe the stimuli of nature will help.
On the train ride towards the resort they will stay at, Bren notices "that twitchiness was back: that extreme reaction to stimuli of all sorts, even when Jase was trying to Joke about it. Randomness of light and sound had become a battering series of events to senses completely unused to interpreting the nuances.
"He [Bren] rated himself tolerably good at figuring out what went on in atevi, and he could make a guess, that the way a baby overreacted once it had started being startled, it must seem to Jase as if there were no order and no recognizable logic in the sensations that came at him. Jase had that look in his eyes and that grip on the edge of his seat that said here was a man waiting now for the whole world to dissolve under his feet.
"But the logic inside the man said it wouldn't, so Jase clung to his seat and kept his eyes wide open and tried with an adult and reasoning brain to make sense of it.
"And an infant's brain, not yet reasoning, might have had an advantage in programming. A grown man who from infancy had never had light flashed in his face never had a floor go bump, had never been slung from one side to the other -- what was he to do? Jase came from a steady, scheduled world, one without large spaces. If he's lived in the equivalent of a set of small rooms, God, even textures must be new.
"What had Jase said to him? The tastes, the smells, were all overwhelming to him?
"It was possible he'd never seen bright color or different pattern. The ship Jase had come from began to seem a frighteningly same kind of place.
"The beach, the waves, the rocks and hills, these things should, if Jase should meet them, be a very good cure for what ailed him. And if he could tolerate the environment, get a look at the natural processes that underlay the randomness of storm and weather that reached the capital at Shejidan [alien capital city], he would have far fewer fears. Jase was scared of thunder, and knew better than most now what it was, but still jumped when it thundered, and was embarrassed when the servants laughed. They thought it made him like them. He thought it made him foolish.
"let Jase see the historic origins of the atevi, let him experience the same sort of things that had opened the atevi world to his imagination. That was the plan.
"It was, though he hadn't thought so then, the best thing that had ever happened to him in terms of his understanding of the world he lived in, a textured, full of smells and colors world that could fill up his senses and appeal to him on such a basic level that something in his human heart responded to this atevi place and taught him what the species [humans and atevi] had in common.
"On the other hand, watching Jase flinch from sunlight and shadow, it might not happen to Jase. It at best might be a bit much to meet all in one day. Their spaceman was brave, but growing vastly disoriented just inthe sounds and level of perceived threat constantly coming at him; fast-witted, but lost int he dataflow that had begun to wipe out the linkages in his brain and rearrange the priorities.
"It wasn't just the language now that had overwhelmed Jase with its choices. It wasn't just the same linguistic shift that overwhelmed every student that came close to fluency -- it was the whole physical, natural world that came down on Jase, stripping away all his means not only of expressing himself --that wsa the language part --- but also of interpreting the sensations that came at him. Jase was hanging on to that part of his perceptions with his fingernails.
"And that disorientation, coupled with what he guessed Ilisidi [a feisty alien Lord in Bren's confidence] might provoke him to, would make it a very good idea to limit the breakable objects in Jase's reach."
What this passage is describing is brilliant use of language to describe this feeling, to describe a man on the edge of emotional stability outside a world he is familiar with trying to grasp the social world around him enough to see the patterns and know what to do to secure his position in it and feel secure.
"He began to have misgivings. Jase wasn't planet-born. There might not be that common ground he hoped to have Jase find with atevi. For the first time he began to fear he'd made a mistake in bringing Jase out here and asking this of him.
It was a lot of input.
But it was fractal, soothing input if Jase's brain could just figure out it did repeat, and loop, and that it didn't threaten."
("Invader" by C.J. Cherryh)
Jase's reaction to trauma and foreign cultures and strange sensations all at the same time makes perfect sense to me. The inability to speak as one processes the data flow coming in on one's nerves, especially when one does not know which details are socially relevant and is trying to sort it all while people are watching and judging, is real. People on the spectrum know, and those with severe autism never get beyond that point sometimes. There were times during my childhood when I was near nonverbal as far as most people could tell. The only thing that kept me away from professional attention was the fact that I knew which answers to give when called upon by an authority figure to get them to leave me alone. I was just quiet, they thought.
Specifically, I was a Mormon kid dealing with an angst that comes because of the sensory tuning I was born with while trying to wrestle out what was going on in the minds of people around me while trying to pay attention to the things that would get me in trouble if I didn't master them while trying to siphon all this information through the Mormon cultural filter, because I didn't need God to be mad at me too. I think I've done ok, considering everything.
I've left a string of posts on this board for almost ten years. This board has watched me "figure it out" from the age of 25. I've tried to share anything of major emotional or social significance that feels in any way connected to my departure from the Mormon church. The revolving door of the Bishop's office taught me how to be transparently honest. My deep and constant overthinking has made me confident in my positions when I finally settle my mind on something. My experience as a missionary and my concern for others -- "the children of God" -- and my desire to feel like part of what was going on around me have tutored me to be articulate and to leave nothing to be misconstrued.
Both people on the spectrum and people suffering from complex post-traumatic stress can develop alexothymia: difficulty reading emotion, either one's own or other people's emotions, and difficulty expressing it too. Similar causes, I think, just with Spectrumites the traumatic event was possibly just regular life taken on nerves ill suited to discern the patterns around them in nonthreatening ways. But everyone has their breaking point, their overload limit, and PTSD is something that can happen to anyone when they suffer something beyond that traumatic threshold.
Adding a cultural barrier to it is just -- if I was a God that loved torturing my children and maximizing their angst, that's how I'd do it. Mormon culture doesn't have any business being so... so... different from everybody else. Back in the day, it started to be different from every other church based on runaway religious certainty so self-righteous that it would flee into the western wilderness by itself to celebrate itself. If Mormonism was an an entity that could think and feel, this religion did its adherents great disservice. It was born in the era of the affidavit and it claims many things that just do not hold up to scrutiny, and it was bound to be scrutinized in the digital information age. In 2023, you cannot run from information forever, you can only constantly reassure yourself with evermore delusional paranoia that "they" are just out to take your testimony. When it finally catches up to you, you are forced to rethink the entire universe from the ground up. The data points of your memory stay the same, but what they mean and how they fit together can be something radically different from what you had planned as a believer. The Mormon scaffolding is just too inadequate to be a lover of truth connected to good sources of information, and in its jealousy for retention it deprives its faithful not only of how to tell good information from bad information -- it makes them afraid to fraternize too much with the enemy, the outsiders, the Gentiles or nevermos.
I love truth, though. And I needed to be seen and heard so that one day I could figure out just where on the human spectrum I fell. I still haven't given up helping people who I understand by putting them in possession of information that I have found useful and explaining to them how it connects to things they care about. This is who I have always been, and though I have forsaken Mormonism I fundamentally am the same person I have always been -- just further down the path towards the logical conclusion of all the things I have ever valued. So to speak, I see in shades of color that used to be too much for me to look at it. I can see more of the patterns now where my fear of God used to get in the way. I can hold a complex understanding of my surroundings in my head without overloading and introverting. I have friends, and I know they're my friends. I go out of my house, and it doesn't necessarily feel like an assault on my senses that has to be survived. I have a growing, regenerating soul with enough to give a little away to people who need some. My anxiety attacks are mere whimpers of what they used to be shortly before I reached out to RFM for the first time. I had searched Mormonism top to bottom and the scriptures cover to cover for what was promised -- the pleasing word of God which heals the wounded soul -- and I found it not. So having it not, I got busy exposing myself to all the input I had previously held at arm's length and sorting through it, and I made something like it from scratch that works for me. To each their own Balm in Gilead. For me, all that is important is that each person have access to one that works for them, and that's what I try to help people find if they will still trust me like they used to.
Edited 11 time(s). Last edit at 04/13/2023 05:11AM by Cold-Dodger.