Withdrawal

My primary means of protection from other people is withdrawal. Either literally—by staying at home and not going outside where I risk interacting with others—or else in more subtle ways. I tend to make an effort to seem as boring as possible to other people. When someone asks about my interests, I try to come up with the least personal answer. In every little interaction I have with others, I lie. Or at least I feel like I’m lying. When I’m by myself at home (and especially when I’m dreaming), I feel more like a full person—I might even consider myself somewhat weird or unusual. But when I’m out in public, I try so hard to seem like no one that I sometimes start to think that I actually am no one.

I used to spend more time around others. After I’ve been around other people for a bit, I get caught up in this perfomative nothingness. Like an unreality hangover caused by social interaction. There have been long stretches of time where I would completely lose my sense of self into that void of fake relationships. Even now, whenever I’ve had to interact with another person, I begin to doubt my own subjective reality and instead worry if the “objective reality”—how others view me—might not be more accurate. Since I act like I don’t exist around others, maybe this proves that I really don’t exist, and that, to the extent that I do feel like I exist, it’s this feeling that’s fake, while the reality is that I really am who I seem to be to others.

I enjoy writing in part because it proves that I can be who I am, even in a way that others can see. There’s a sense of robustness to the words—although that robustness carries the risk of congealing and asphyxiating whatever is caught in it. I rely on you, the reader, to read only superficially, “like when you look”.¹

People notice how awkward I am around others. I’ve been diagnosed with autism. They see that I can’t really communicate with others, that I seem overly formal, that I can’t maintain relationships (or even get into relationships to begin with), and especially they sense—although they might not put it in those terms—a severe unnaturalness or inauthenticity: the fact of acting like someone else, of not really being myself.

More recently, I’ve had a lot of time to myself—I’ve gone a couple of years with barely any contact to other people—and in the process, I’ve started to trust my fantasies about myself more than the “reality” of how I act in social contexts. This newfound sincerity has even started, albeit very slowly, to bleed into my social interactions with others. They’ve now also diagnosed me with schizotypal disorder. I think whereas “autism” is their word for when I seem awkward and inauthentic, “schizotypy” is their word for when I act more authentically; it describes what it looks like from the outside when I allow myself to be myself.

In fiction

Are there other humans like me? If so, they don’t write books about their experiences. But I suppose they wouldn’t. I mean, I’ve read books about people that share some of the same struggles, but somehow, they all seem to be just not quite as isolated from other people. So far, I have found no evidence that any other human has been this way, at least not to the same degree as me. I suspect that they do exist. Part of my motivation in writing this is to write down something that others who are like this can read and see that they are not totally unique.

Sometimes, I’ll find a book where I almost get the sense that there was someone who would have been able to relate to me: Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., Strindberg’s Inferno, Hamsun’s Hunger, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. These are all works wherein the characters are isolated and foreign to the world—people who cannot seem to find the connection between the physical-social reality and the deeper spiritual or divine reality. They are confused about their position in the metaphysical hierarchy, trapped between two realities without feeling at home in either. Not quite dead, not quite alive.

Yet in each case, these people seem to have something that I lack. They all have some relations, however tenuous, with other people: G.H. (like Lispector herself) is a well-liked woman with various acquiantences among the Brazillian bourgeoisie; Strindberg likewise has a family with whom he lodges for a period; the main character of Hunger manages to initiate a short-lived relationship with someone else; the Underground Man has, in the start of the novella, a kind of friend group, even if he later sabotages his relationships through his own paranoia; Soares has a quite normal job and interacts with his colleagues, even if only superficially.

In my case, I literally have no friends whatsoever. I haven’t had a friend since I was maybe 10 years old. Virtually every human I’ve spoken to in the last decade or so has been paid to listen to me—psychologists, psychiatrists and people like that. Am I uniquely estranged? It’s like there is something really fundamentally wrong with me. I wish I could connect with other people. Not just people—the world in general. It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s different. It’s like I’m failing to articulate just how awkward I am. “Awkward” is the wrong word; there’s something metaphysical about it. Sure, these characters may have issues connecting to others, but I cannot talk to anyone. When I try, it feels horrible. Even in simple day-to-day interactions. Objectively speaking, I am much more isolated than the fictional characters named above, in that I simply do not interact with others at all. I certainly couldn’t tolerate staying at someone else’s house, for example.

You’re probably reading this and thinking “if you’re so unhappy, do something about it!” Well, you’re not exactly wrong, but what is there to do? The real problem is that there is no problem. I can’t explain what’s wrong. I often doubt that there even is anything wrong at all, although, objectively, it’s surely highly unusual to have no social relationships to any other people at all. Sometimes I force myself to go out and interact with people. But every time, it’s like whatever is going on just happens to someone else that happens to look like me, and I am not really involved as such. It makes me feel more isolated, not less.

Withdrawal

In fiction

See also