Unfolding

Me with Fey sitting on my shoulder.

Sometimes I want to unfold
The beauty of the world
As if it was the most intricate
Origami flower
That had ever seen the light of day

Then I want to wait
And wait
Until the flower blooms for real
Until its velvet black blossoms
Tinged with purple edges
Grow fuzz that you can run your hand over

And I want to hand it to you
And watch you rub the fuzz
Against your cheek
Against your lips
Against your nose —
The yellow-black stamens tickle

And then fold the flower
Back into paper
And put it in my pocket
For safekeeping

I would make more of them
And write secret notes
That only some people could read

They would say things like:

“The most beautiful things
Are concealed all around you.”

“You are a flower and
This is how you become real.”

“You are unfolding
Just like this.
Don’t hurry,
Don’t wait.”

I would hide them in plain sight
And I would hide them in places
That only the curious and observant
Would bother looking

I would hide them in places
That can only be found
When doing shit work
For 22 cents an hour

I would hide them so that each person
Stood a chance of finding at least one
Just one
That told them what they needed to hear
Right now
Just then

Unfold them, they become real flowers
Fold them, they become folded paper
You can do this as many times as you need
Because they are magic flowers

And if you get good at looking and listening
With more than just your eyes and ears
You will find these creations everywhere
Left by someone
With far more magic
Than I will ever possess

You know when you find one because
Suddenly something ordinary
Becomes extraordinary
Suddenly you’ve been let in on a secret
About something you’d seen before
But never seen before

It can be anything from
A spray of mud on your pants
To a pair of decorated crutches
To a butterfly

It doesn’t have to be pretty on first sight
Many times it isn’t
Many times it seems horrible
Until that flash of inspiration
When it unfolds into a flower in full bloom

And then every texture is like suede
And every color is like the deepest blue before dawn
And every taste is like boiled collards with butter
And every smell is the fur behind a cat’s ears

I wish I had the magic necessary
To make these things myself
To fold reality into paper
And leave it everywhere for people to find

As it is, all I can say is
Someone has already done it

You can find these magic folded papers
On the inside of a zero
In the yawn of a kitten
In a feeding tube
In a wadded up rag
In a tangled old root
In a leaf that skips down the sidewalk

And all of them are flowers
And all of them are there to tell you
There is more in this world than you can ever see
There is more love
There is more light
There is more beauty

And you are part of it
Always
Even
(Especially!)
When everything seems to be
Crashing down around you

Can you accept
This magic spell
This gift
From the world
To me
To you?

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A bunch of stuff that needed saying

The following stuff is important stuff I wrote elsewhere on the net. If some of what I'm saying doesn't make sense, ignore it, it's just context that I'm not able to describe right now. The main thrust of what I'm saying should make sense without understanding the full context of what I wrote. And I can't rewrite it all right now for this blog. So the following is pretty much as I wrote it. Also sorry for all caps in places, it was because where I was writing it I couldn't use other forms of emphasis. And please don't assume that this is all about autism. Everyone always assumes that everything I say is all about autism. It isn't. Most of it isn't. Not even the stuff that talks about autism is all about autism. I am fed up with just about every such assumption because my world isn't made up of only or mainly autistic people and when I talk about things I always get replies saying “This applies to people without autism too” and I want to say “no shit Sherlock, that's what I meant in the firs

This turned into a long post, and it may not apply to the people I’m replying too, but this conversation just brought up a lot of things I’ve been thinking but having trouble saying.

Thank you for writing that. It’s really important.

Also another point I want to make. There are many autistic people whose best method of communication is nonverbal. By which I mean, not speech, not writing. Some of us this is true of, can communicate well by speech or typing also. Some of us can’t. But we usually have trouble with receptive language — either some of the time, all of the time, or especially, during the early formative years of our lives. I’m one such person.

Most people don’t know this because the current theories of autism all involve us being terrible at nonverbal communication. By which people mean, terrible at one specific kind of nonverbal communication that most nonautistic people are good at. Also, most autistic people who can talk about their experiences in words, are (or believe themselves to be) bad at nonverbal communication, and their experiences get seen as applying to all of us, when this is not true.

So for many of us — nonverbal communication, and the world of things outside of words, are our best way of communicating. Whether we can also use words or not. I wrote about one such group of autistic people in my contribution (“Untitled”) to the Loud Hands anthology. Because I want people to know we exist. Because I want other people like me to know they aren’t alone, in an autistic community made up mostly of people who experience themselves as terrible at nonverbal communication. Where people even say that autistic communities are communities where people can use text or other forms of language, rather than having to deal with nonverbal communication. Even though there’s plenty of us who do better in person, BECAUSE we communicate best nonverbally, because words, whether we can do them or not, whether we are or seem good at them or not, are so hard and so difficult and so painful to keep using.

There are entire groups of autistic people out there who communicate with each other using our own unique forms of body language that are different from nonautistic body language, different from other autistic people’s body language, specific to ourselves, specific to each other. Who communicate best reading each others writing, looking for the patterns that exist between the words, rather than inside the words themselves. Who communicate best by exchanging objects, by arranging objects and other things around ourselves in ways that each other can read easier than we can read any form of words. Who share the most intimate forms of communication, outside of words, outside of anything that can be described easily, in between everything, seeing each other to the core of our awareness. Who see layers upon layers of meaning outside of any form of words.

In “Untitled” I was writing about my favorite communication ever, my video chats with AnneC (and her cats, when they show up, which Shadow absolutely loves communicating with me over video and reminds her every Friday at the right time because he loves it so much). I don’t necessarily do the best at visual stuff the way most people think of it. But I can see the patterns of movement in other people, including cats, whether or not I see them well in the usual forms of visual perception. And those patterns of movement tell me more than any word ever could.

I can even read nonautistic people fairly well at times — just not in the ways nonautistic people read each other well. That’s one of the problems with nonautistic research into autistic people’s abilities to understand nonverbal communication. Most of it relies on the understanding and use of words at the same time as understanding the nonverbal communication. And most of it relies on the kinds of nonverbal communication that nonautistic people are most aware of. This frustrates me to no end — how can people research forms of understanding that they don’t themselves have and therefore they don’t themselves understand even exists? I’ve actually told researchers ways they can research autistic people’s understanding of nonverbal communication without having to resort to the faulty methods they usually use.

And one researcher told me, when I asked, that every parent of an autistic child she ever met said that their child picked up easily on things like stress in the household, but that SHE ACTUALLY DISREGARDED IT UNTIL I ASKED HER, BECAUSE SHE’D BEEN TAUGHT THAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE COULDN’T READ BODY LANGUAGE. I’m totally serious. If researchers are that biased themselves, how can they possibly hope to even notice that we can understand things they assume we don’t understand?! I taught that researcher a bunch of very simple ways to test that without relying on the painfully stupid research methods that guarantee researchers will find only what they expect to find — relying on us to use and understand words, relying on our understanding of actors and stage conventions rather than real people’s real nonverbal communication, relying on nonautistic people’s limited ability to read autistic body language, all sorts of other flaws that seem obvious but that researchers themselves seem never to notice. So hopefully she will set up some real experiments that show our real abilities.

Anyway. Back to what I was saying. There’s entire subgroups of autistic people out there _ not just my own — who rely on nonverbal means of understanding the world, and nonverbal means of communication. That’s one reason I usually put myself in my videos — because I know that certain other autistic people will be able to read me like a book, even if nonautistic people usually can’t. And that nonverbal communication is a crucial part of my videos. (See why the entire first half of “In My Language” has no words in it. I was trying to make a point about the best way I communicate, the best way many people communicate, autistic or not, verbal or not. Mostly lost on people, who think it’s a video about autism. It’s not. It’s a video about communication and understanding and personhood, that happens to be made by an autistic person. Big difference. I told CNN why I really made the video, and they left out that part of the interview in favor of putting their words in my mouth. I think my real intent was too political for them.)

Anyway. I may be a writer, but my real best form of communication has nothing to do with words. I use words because I have to. Because most people won’t understand me if I don’t. I don’t use them because I like them, or because I “can’t do nonverbal communication so text is best for me”, or any of the usual reasons most people assume. If I could never use language again, spoken or written, I would be really happy. But the world won’t let me do that, so I carry on using a means of communication that is outright painful for me.

I don’t know the people in the video, but I know that the way their bodies move makes intuitive sense to me and communicates things whether they intend it to be so or not. (The forms of nonverbal communication I understand best are unintentional, in fact. That’s one reason tests using actors don’t work on me. I know an autistic woman who failed a test of nonverbal communication because it used actors and she kept describing their real feelings instead of their acted ones. What this says about nonautistic people’s understanding of nonverbal communication is… interesting.) Whether they are able to use spoken language or not, the video would lose a lot if it only relied on showing them speaking or typing the words.

And I really dislike a lot of the self-advocacy movement for relying mostly on the self-advocacy that happens through words, written or spoken. This leaves out people who can’t do either but who are nonetheless quite capable of advocating for themselves through their actions and movements. If I hadn’t spent a lot of my life forcing myself to do words, I might be such a person, so I am always aware of this. Words are not natural to me the way they are to some autistic people. They’re difficult and my development could have gone either way. There are also people who, no matter how much effort they put in, could never have used or understood words, and they are also extremely important, and they are also capable of self-advocacy, and they are still capable of communication that is more full of meaning than the communication of many people who use words.

I wish there were videos using their communication — which by definition wouldn’t involve words. Both people who would have been able to use words had they put in a crapload of effort at critical times in their development, and people who would never be able to use them no matter what. Such people exist. I sometimes wonder if they are too inconvenient for some autistic people to remember. I hate when people tell parents, “If you just gave your child a communication device they would be able to type words (or use picture symbols) and everything would be solved.” You don’t know that. You just can’t possibly know that. I hear that a lot, this idea that autistic people would all be able to communicate in words if only they were given a means to type them instead of speak them. And it’s so not true that its utterly ridiculous. I hear it both from people whose main way of communicating is speech, and also from people who use typing, and people who use both. It’s wishful thinking and it’s not true. There are people whose understanding of the world is just like a typical “aspie” except they couldn’t speak for motor reasons, and they are the most likely of those who use typing, to believe this myth.

Reality is that there are lots of people who will either never be able to use words, never be able to understand words, or both. Or whose use or understanding is so limited that they will never be able to use words as their primary means of communication. But they do communicate, whether the communication is intentional or not. And they do matter. And they are capable of self-advocacy. And they should be included in self-advocacy movements if those movements ever expect to represent autistic people, developmentally disabled people, cognitively disabled people, disabled people in general, whatever group is trying to represent itself in that movement. And in order to include them, you have to show their movements and their sounds and all the things they do that aren’t words.

It’s true that many people who are thought not to be able to use or understand language, actually are. And it’s terrible that they are overlooked. But in their desire not to overlook such people, many people claim that all disabled people who can’t communicate through speech fall under this umbrella. And that’s simply not true. In order to communicate with people who will never use words, you have to learn their language. (And surprise, that’s one thing that “In My Language” was actually about. And it would be about that whether I used typing or speech to communicate — either one would be my “second language”, and as such I can easily, easily envision a situation where I never learned and never would learn to use speech or typing, both of which I used at different points in my life.) And each person has one. Sometimes several people have a language that is in common but is not words. Sometimes each one has a separate way of communicating that is not words. But either way, you have to learn how they communicate, not force them to either communicate how you best communicate, or else be considered “non-communicative” for the rest of their life. And yes it’s possible to get consent to use their communication, it’s just sometimes harder work than asking a yes or no question in words.

And a community that doesn’t include such people isn’t my community. The developmental disability community is far better at including such people than the autistic community is, even though not all of the DD community manages it either. One reason I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with people who can’t use words in any form is because I’ve been in the developmental disability system for pretty much my entire adult life and have spent a lot of time with a wide variety of people. And I’ve spent a lot of time communicating with people who can’t and may never use speech or typing or even picture boards. And that’s something that certain segments of the autistic community are sorely missing. Even parts of the autistic community that involve people who don’t use speech, are often made up of only those people who were able to learn typing, and often put forth the (false) idea that everyone could learn typing if only they tried hard enough or were exposed to the proper teaching methods.

The response someone made is true: Some of the people in the video use typing, so they could never be shown speaking the words in the video. But I’d like to go further than people who use speech and people who use typing, because unlike a lot of people, my social world is made up of a lot of people who can’t do either one. And also made up of a lot of people who, even if they can use speech, typing, or both, those are not their best means of communication, and it would be better to show us using our best means of communication rather than merely the form of using words. Not everyone has words but everyone has a voice and a means of communicating. And not everyone who uses words sees words as their primary voice or their primary means of understanding things, and that needs to be respected. And I’m sick to death of spending time in communities where most people seem to miss these facts, and automatically see having a voice as the same as using speech or at least using language.

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The Summer Thing

I want to start out by explaining what this is, and what this is not. Blog carnivals tend to bring in unfamiliar readers. People tend to misunderstand topics like this one. So here goes:

I write about things like this mostly because nobody was talking about these things when they happened to me. I want people who are going through similar things, and those around them, to have a frame of reference I never had. I also want to end the taboo that says only bad disabled people talk about our bodies and the things that have happened to us. The one that says all such discussions must be a plea for pity or attention. So if you get only one thing straight, it’s that this isn’t about getting sympathy, it’s about describing a piece of reality.

This is for the disability blog carnival. The theme is relationships. It might take awhile to explain how it fits into this theme, but I’ll get there in the end.

I have always experienced the world in ways that mesh up with neither language nor most people around me.

Body perception is one of those things. Internal sensations feel external. My brain also doesn’t prioritize them in the usual way. Once, when on neuroleptic drugs that only amplify this problem, this happened:

I was pouring water from a large bucket, onto an electric fence. I slowly realized something was different — no, bad — no, very bad — and hang on, it seems to be in the vicinity. And colored bright white, and… oh yeah, painful, and pain has something to do with my body (???), yeah it does, but where on my body, …, …, …, …, …, arm. My arm is a part of me. Let me turn my eyes on. Now look at my arm. Stuff on my arm. Stuff… water. Where is the water going? Fence. Electric… oh. Better stop this. Where’s the arm again? Got to move it. (Wait for those instructions to mosey down into my arm.) There. Phew.

But even without neuroleptics, connections like that can take even longer. I was lucky I was old enough to make such connections on my own at that point.
 
That level of detachment from one’s body can happen in autistic people and can happen as a neurological response to a kind of pain that’s existed as far back as I can remember feeling my body at all. So it’s hard to say if it’s one or both that caused that kind of thing.

So I am trying to give enough background information that when I start describing certain kinds of childhood experiences it will make sense. It’s hard because as usual the English language wasn’t built for the sorts of things I’m trying to do to it.

When I was a kid, I sometimes considered myself bad. Other kids didn’t scream, cry (the noisy out of control kind), or lash out when cornered by bullies. I felt like I was always in trouble. Even bullies got higher grades (and even sometimes awards) in citizenship. There was something about this that had little to do with social skills, though. I had no words for it, but in my head it was always connected to summer.

I experienced it as external. The sky existed, the black stuff on the ground existed, and the summer thing existed. Like the sky and the black stuff on the ground, the summer thing covered a wide area. But unlike them, it truly seemed to be everywhere.

It got a little less if I pressed body parts into cold, smooth surfaces. It got a little more if I was stressed out or having to process more information. But otherwise, the summer thing changed in ways I could never predict or explain. The worse the summer thing was, the more “bad” I was, and the less I could relate to people (including myself).

When the summer thing got bad enough, all I could do was cry or scream, or sometimes just sit there encased by it. My dad told me later that I used to scream or cry for no reason. My dad didn’t know about the summer thing.

Nearly always, I felt like I was cut in half. Half of me was in the clutches of the summer thing. The other half floated somewhere distant and numb. I tried my best to increase the numbness however I could. Half numb was better than none of me numb. I spent a lot of my “free” time finding ways to distance myself from the summer thing. When I had to use the most effective of those techniques in public, people accused me of having a creepy thousand-yard stare.

Not surprisingly, when I ended up in the hands of psych professionals they saw “severe dissociation”. They spent lots of time trying to connect it to physical abuse and molestation, but those things were barely a blip on my radar compared to the summer thing. Eventually they decided I was just biologically set up to dissociate easily and that I used it to deal with boredom. Even though in reality I was almost never bored and almost always the opposite — overstimulated and overworked.

The funny thing is that pain psychologists teach patients with severe pain the same techniques I discovered on my own. But when they teach it they call it adaptive. Every time I go for a nerve block, they have someone there to walk me through the same techniques my body discovered before I knew I had a body. Because severe pain is exactly what the summer thing is, and professionals consider dissociation under those circumstances more adaptive than pathological.

When I was 15, the doctors put me on Neurontin for seizures. This made the summer thing fade a fair bit. Either I couldn’t describe it well, or they didn’t know Neurontin treats several kinds of nerve pain. Because they told me if something went away on Neurontin it must be a seizure.

When I got off Neurontin, the summer thing came back and pretty much stuck around until my early twenties. At that point I’d spent three months mostly writhing around on the couch before a friend said “This is how pain makes a body act, go to a doctor.”. I went to the doctor and she put me on Neurontin pretty fast, which helped both the pain and the seizures. I’m now on a Lyrica/Trileptal combination that deals with the summer thing, the seizures, and trigeminal neuralgia all at once. But even once I first got on meds, the spot that had formerly occupied “1” on the 1-10 pain scale now occupied a “6”. Which is a huge change.

It was only after treatment I could begin to either describe the summer thing itself, or differentiate lots of smaller pains that it blocked and distorted. Synesthetically it’s dots and streaks of brown, orange, yellow, and white. And what it feels like? Burning, both burning hot and burning cold (like I’ve been told liquid nitrogen feels like). And prickly. And like my skin has been scraped raw, gone over with sandpaper, and then sunburned. Hence “summer”. And like… if I had heartburn, for instance, instead of feeling just the heartburn in one spot, I would feel like someone had put an iron on my entire upper back that was red-hot and ice-cold at once. I only got treated for a lot of other lifelong conditions after the summer thing had been treated enough to feel them.

From what I’ve heard, even people who never had pain or communication problems before developing something like this can find it hard to describe. They’ll end up describing limitations on their functioning, or use torture metaphors, instead of describing pain. Because pain that they are used to feels like a whole nother category than this. It just doesn’t feel like it ought to have the same word. So maybe as a person who never knew life without it and who had communication problems I can be excused for not even knowing I should describe it, let alone knowing how, until that first dose of Neurontin made it lessen.

What’s the actual name for the summer thing? From my descriptions, people have told me it’s some kind of neuropathic (nerve-related) pain. But whether it’s originating in my brain or somewhere further down the line isn’t something they can tell with current tests. And since it began so long ago, nobody knows if it’s a function of an injury, or the way my brain or nerves happened to grow, or some early neurological response to overload, or what. It’s also important to realize it’s not gone. It’s just less than it used to be.

Now there’s enough background laid out that I can talk about how this thing has affected relationships, which is the whole point of this blog entry in the first place.

The first relationship the summer thing interfered with is my relationship with myself. On both a psychological and physical level. How do you form a relationship with yourself when the more connected you get the more it hurts? I spent most of my time trying to edge as far away from myself as possible. One of my early memories involves trying to imagine the world without me in it, and getting aggravated that no matter what I imagined I was always the one imagining it. If I got anywhere near my body or mind I would get overwhelmed by this blast of pain and retreat if at all possible.

If I picked up a Lego block, my hand felt a burning, scraping afterimage for hours. Touch from humans created a different afterimage. Sometimes I would put up with these things and sometimes I wouldn’t but it was never without a price.

When pain gets severe enough, it does weird things to your thoughts and feelings. A lot of the anger and fear that made me “bad”, stemmed from the summer thing. The only way I could get calm was by identifying with my numb side. And the problem with the numbness was that it went away the moment I felt into my body to either move it or interpret what was coming through its senses.

So imagine I am lying curled up in bed, losing myself in the dark brown bedrail. Then someone comes in and wants a response. If it’s a good day, I may be able to imagine the response without any unpleasant feelings attached. But even then, most of the time I ended up snapping at the person for no good reason they can see, and for no reason that I can understand. Predict, yes, but understand, no. I often did an aggravated hiss my mom called “lizard breath”, but I wasn’t in much position to understand or explain the irritability. (And pathologized as I was sometimes, I shudder to think what a modern therapist would have diagnosed the irritability as part of, or treated it with. I have some good guesses.)

So I end up becoming a really grouchy person with no idea how to avoid being grouchy, and this becomes one more thing to hate about myself. As usual at that point, I had no idea how other people avoided snapping, stomping, hissing, growling, and generally being disagreeable. And knowing I was. And not knowing why, or how to avoid it.

I also learned an awful kind of strength. I was always expected to do things people in that level of pain don’t normally do. And even if I did not learn to do those things, I learned to exceed the expectations of someone in that kind of pain. I didn’t think I had a choice. When I failed, I beat myself up harder than anyone. I learned to push myself until collapse.

To this day, this makes it hard to admit when something is wrong, pain or otherwise. The stuff I do admit to is the tip of a large iceberg. I try to talk about these things because I believe it is very wrong to teach people it’s wrong to discuss them. But I am fighting the training that taught me to press on no matter the difficulty. Because the result of pressing on is almost always dangerous, sometimes deadly. Even though I know this, it is almost always other people who threaten and cajole and drag me to the doctor or hospital when something is wrong. Because growing up this way has also messed up my relationship to my health.

The summer thing also sometimes has made me seem weak, not strong. Those times when I could do nothing other than curl up and cry, or hit myself, or zone out as far as I could. Try explaining that when you don’t know what’s going on, and don’t know fully how to connect words to experiences. That one affects relationships by convincing people you are weak-willed or bad somehow. And so do you because you don’t understand the forces behind these problems. Especially when it’s always been there so it’s just scenery.

“Answer me. Why is she lying there on the ground? I’m serious. What are you two up to? I need an explanation,”

(My body had taken over and I was pressing my face and arms into the cold concrete. I kept hearing these high pitched sounds that turned out to be my own voice sort of wailing. And I wouldn’t have had an explanation that would satisfy those guys even on my best day. And how was the person with me supposed to handle always being called upon to explain me? He reads this blog sometimes, so at least he can find out.)

Years after that, I was in a similar situation and eventually asked a friend why my body kept acting like it was in pain. She responded that my body was in fact in pain, and that the reason I didn’t understand my own reactions was the dissociation that goes with severe chronic pain. And that nobody who wasn’t in pain would ask that question. Wish I had had people like that around as a kid.

This of course affected sexual relationships as well. Touch in sexual contexts can temporarily diminish the pain a bit (and a lot of other things, according to a book I’ve read on the science of sex), but only to a point. Try to push anything into the usual orifice, and my reaction is more like a scared wild animal than a sex partner. As my only sex partner found out the hard way.

It’s affected my relationship to any activity I do with my hands. Many activities I used to think I just didn’t like, were things that made my hands feel scrapey for the whole day afterward. Lego blocks are only the first of a long list of things that seemed great until I touched them. It’s why I never use my Zometool set unless company wants to, why I finally got rid of the things.

The summer thing has also created a certain kind of distance in all my relationships. When I am in the part of myself that feels more pain, the pain fills up my head and creates a wall between me and whoever I relate to. When I am in the part of myself that floats at a distance, the floating creates its own distance. This effect has lessened with medication, but it’s still there in some amount no matter what is going on.

Many of the effects on my life I have talked about, are things that other conditions have affected as well. It’s impossible to know which has contributed how much to what, and I have not even tried to work it out. And while I cam sit here and list off things it’s affected, I don’t generally sit around feeling morbid or morose or melodramatic about it. Everyone’s life has constraints on it, mine are just not the same as the usual ones. It doesn’t make me pathetic or pitiful. It just exists and always has. I don’t have to like it, but life’s too short to wallow in misery about it, so don’t get me wrong about my reasons for writing about it.

When I think of relationships the summer thing has affected, it’s hard to think of anything it hasn’t affected. It’s affected my relationships to my mind, my body, my emotions, my family, my friends, people in general, anything or anyone at all in my environment. It’s made it so that my two main vantage points in life have been either scraped raw and affected painfully by any sensation, or else floating numb but too far distanced for direct interaction. It’s a good example of how a condition that isn’t technically supposed to be pervasive, can affect just about every conceivable part of my life. Even though I take every effort possible to diminish this kind of pain, like all events that have left such an intense mark on my past it is something that I have a hard time knowing who I would be now if I hadn’t grown up with it. Life is too complicated to know things like that, and it doesn’t make much sense to ponder an unreality that much.

So that is more of the history of the summer thing than I have ever written. I have gone into pieces of it here and there, but never gotten as much detail as I have just now. And it reminds me all over again how complicated life is, because there is no way to write about everything on even a topic so narrow as nearly thirty years of a very particular condition, let alone any other topic a person might write about. Experience always has more depth than words can (if they are used in even the best way) just point at, even a few seconds of experience. Not that I ever really forget this, but tasks like this one bring it home. And finding anyone with similar experiences (not just to this, but to anything) can create a level of intense resonance that renders words unnecessary after a point. Having almost no such resonance until I was an adult, is why I bother with the task of pointing at experiences in words, and working for years just to get some of them out at all — so that anyone with similar experiences might find such kinds of resonance (or find the words and tools to express it to others), and anyone who knows anyone with such experiences can understand them a bit better. And it works even though no two people can have the exact same experiences. And things like this are how I have formed some of my most rewarding relationships despite the distancing effect of the summer thing. It’s like even if pain sometimes forms a wall, this kind of resonance makes it possible to perceive the other person without having to scale the wall itself. And having those few but invaluable relationships gives me the will to scale that wall in relationships where there is no such shortcut.