At A Certain Distance

"Everyone is unique. That's why no one feels different." It's a kind of stupid line of thinking but it's a common one. Go up to someone and tell them that you feel different from others and they will assert this odd line of thinking without missing a beat.

That's not what I wanted to say, I just thought it worthwhile to preface with that. Like some fancy talisman that wards off bad juju or whatever.

All I wanted to say is that I feel alienated and different from others in a pretty clear cut and expansive, yet invisible way. It's kind of annoying being a few worlds apart from someone who is unreasonably sure that you're in the same room as them. People really love the lack of distance they have with others and are aggressively defensive of it. It's vital to society that no one have any distance.

That's why it's important to remember that everyone is similarly unique and no one is uniquely unique and that's why we all feel the same.

Being the same as others lacks value, every major contributor to human history was unique. Just like everyone else. Being different is dangerous and anti-societal that's why everyone feels the same. Kind of annoying, right?

It's the small stuff but even saying something like "I don't care for chicken parm" will have someone go "Yeah! Exactly, me neither! But...Really, does anyone?" moments before eating chicken parm, their favorite food.

Big stuff too, of course. I'm talking mostly about big stuff. Well, it's small stuff to me. I only care because others care a lot and that makes it a recurring obstacle and when you have to jump through the same complicated hoop some fifteen times a day- you start to give a shit about the hoop itself.

I've always been closer to my family than most but the truth is that I'm really quite distanced from them. No one really knows me and not due to some sort of privacy on my end but rather because I haven't yet learned how to speak in a language they can understand. They feel very confident that we're speaking the same language, thus the disconnect.

I mean, no beating around the bush, a large part of this stems from my own autism. That can't really be blamed on them, make no mistake, I'm not blaming them. It's just that there's this inconsolable distance between myself and the people I love most and I'm the only one who gets hurt by it, somedays it just hurts a lot. It's more than the distance between people, it's the distance between species. The core elements that define, and are connatatively associated with, humanity are absent from me. I'm not alone in feeling that way, it's a common sentiment amongst the autistic. This strange inhumanity is remedied through pity and constant compromises, of which I can stomach neither.

Here's some communication that feels so clear to me: "I can't do that because it makes me nervous.". This sentence isn't comprised of English nor does it express human sentiment. It's simply letters that serve as garnish to an overall attempt to make yourself sound appealing. "Me too. I get nervous all the time. I hate doing that too." they say doing it calmly.

If one is to look closely at this page, you'll find that I have written nothing but lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

I don't read my shit back, I don't correct spelling or grammar or whatever. My diary is all stream of conscious.

So why did I read this stupid entry? I don't know but I'm happy I did. There's something sort of charming in the way that my emotions and intended message change over the course of it.

Due to this charm, I felt incited to read my other shit. "Few Restraints of Conscious" I say some of the same shit, I guess it bugs me more than I realize. I'm glad that I was blunt this time.

Nothing. No thing. Is a reference to Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (like the title phrase of the entry), I skimmed my copy to find the context of it and couldn't find that quote for the life of me. Did I make that up? If so, I quite like it, I may very well plagiarize it if I can't find it lol