Today I got back home from a holiday trip to my hometown of San Antonio, Texas. I want to preface this post by saying that I did have a good time, and I am glad that I went, but I had a realization that I feel like no one has any idea who I actually am.
Throughout my time down there, I was asked questions by relatives and family-friends that I felt like didn’t apply to my life at all. I can’t really blame them – these people are pretty distant from my life, but it was still mildly disappointing to get questions like “how are your grades?”. Questions like this are from people who don’t understand what it is that I do; I don’t get grades. Not that explaining that is an issue; I will gladly explain details of my life, but I got the impression a nuanced answer isn’t what those folks wanted out of their small-talk opener.
Again, the people I was around last week aren’t close to me anyway, so they wouldn’t know what to ask. But that got me thinking: is there anyone in my life that would know me well enough to sit down with me in person and have a conversation that I would find relevant to my life?
The answer to this is “no”, or, at least, “not to the degree that I would like”. While I do feel like I have friends, I feel like nobody actually understands me as a person. Basically, this tweet from a while ago:
This is really on my mind and it’s causing me some distress.
How does one go about fixing this? I am planning to try to be more involved in mutual friends’ social events, and I look forward to returning to local Smash tournaments at some point next year. But meeting new people is far from a guarantee that you’ll find friends, and and even less likely is finding someone that finds you interesting enough that they want to know about your life. And, of course, I’m autistic. While I “pass” as neurotypical, I still think I am prone to interactions that give people a weird or odd impression of me. It also doesn’t help at all that a new Covid-19 variant is rapidly spreading and is likely going to result in people staying home.
It sucks that I’m recognizing my social needs while the world is in this state. I have to try to not feel too sorry for myself when it comes to that.
Part of the reason I made this blog is to put myself out there, but as I’ve stated many times the kind of person I am in a blogpost and the kind of person I am in real life are just going to be distinct because of the differences in the mediums (of typing out a post by myself, compared to a real-life conversation). But I guess that isn’t really here nor there… I don’t bring up my blog in real life much anyway (in fact, I may have mentioned it maybe thrice since its inception in March).
Also, I recognize that all of this is a two-way street. I can’t do all the talking in a relationship. The other half of communication is listening. If I were to find someone that truly understands me, I would put effort into truly understanding them. But how do you find that? How do you find someone that’s that compatible with you, aside from cloning yourself?
I don’t know.