Again with the processing, I know. I have all kinds of files busted open in my mind they have spilled over and are causing chaos. 
(Keep that in mind while reading I am not sure if I am making sense.) I am feeling sad, my head is telling me that it is useless to interact with anyone, and it is pointless to ever talk to my family again. No one gets me. As much as they love me and try to interact with me, I cannot conform. I feel alien, we think so differently. Even when it seems that we have had clear communication we do not. I feel fake after leaving them. I feel like I am hiding so many parts of me as a means to protect myself. I think it was triggered by the contrast between how I interact with my mom and how I interact with the rest of my family.
At this very moment, my heart hurts so badly.
I sobbed this morning feeling as if my heart was being ripped out of my chest. I cannot tell you exactly why. I cannot give you specifics. It is just a feeling. I look at pictures of my family and the comments they put on facebook and I do not connect with them. I have virtually nothing in common and I never have. I have tried all of these years to pick something to try to relate and connect, but it does not work. When I talk to them, I feel like they think that I am arrogant, or full of myself. Not all of them of course, but I feel disconnected from everyone here at the moment. I do not know how to talk to them. If I go into my special interest tangents, I see them look at each other and I do not know what it means. It feels like and I have convinced myself all of these years that I have done something wrong.
I have been reading through a facebook thread about receptive/expressive language challenges.
Why does every single resource I have found only speak of children? What about the adults? Never mind. I read this post this morning Come Into The Garden: Hidden Issues With Expressive Language. After reading through this, I felt a great relief of understanding toward myself. Then, I felt hopeless. I have discovered yet another thing about me that explains how I do not work in my real life community. I am trying to pull myself out of this feeling. I am searching for the strength and holding on to my own acceptance that I have been fighting for this past year. It would be so much easier if I could just fit in.
It would be so much easier if I could simply communicate better.
It would be so much easier if I could force my mind to bend and mold and conform to all of those people around me – I cannot do it. It is inevitable that I will continue to get hurt, and I will cause others frustration. I have been doing Google hangout with my mom. We were actually on the phone for over 45 minutes yesterday because she was having problems with her computer. (Could be a contributing factor to my tears, emotions floating around that my brain is trying to process unbeknownst to me.) She finally got it working and we were on the video chat for a while. She talked to the kids – I enjoyed listening to them talk to her. They each took a turn because I do not have speakers so they wore my headphones. Daniel was talking so clearly, articulating so well, he was expressing himself in ways I have only experienced. Others have not had such pleasures.
They have not because they expect him to be a certain way.
Though I do not think anyone purposely does this. I think it is happening. It could be because they do not know how to communicate any other way, but I also do not feel as if they want to learn another way. It would seem that no one knows how to communicate with him, unless he communicates in the way they have encountered other children. They expect him to change all of his ways of communication to bend so they can understand him instead of bending toward his way of communication. Although, my younger cousin who is about to be a 14 year teenage boy has taken to Daniel and is very interested in how to help him. He has been sensitive to learning about Daniel’s sensitivities and how to talk to him while we are at their house. As well as trying to ensure he does not do anything that could upset Daniel. He has been spending time with him trying to talk one on one.
It my closest aunts son – it makes my heart happy to see that.
Many times, I am able to express myself clearly through written word. However, not many people want to take the time to get to know me so intimately through my written words. Also, I have been told I write too much. People quite honestly do not want to sit down and read the thousands of words I pour out day after day. (Nor do they have the time.) I understand that. I know it can take me a while to write out what I want to express too – hence, the over 130 drafts sitting in my queue just on this blog alone.
Daniel expresses himself through relating his objects of joy with others.
Sharing with my mom how much he loves this house, showing her his Hex bugs and in the middle of the conversation telling her, “I like you a lot” were all forms of him showing her how much he loves her and misses her. She understood this and it touched her heart deeply. My mom understands this because that is how she expresses her affections. I understand this because that is how I can express my affections. Others do not and we (mom and I) have felt a lifetime of rejection and feeling wrong for the way we communicate and express ourselves. We miss what people mean and have felt unloved because the way they have expressed their affections has not made sense to us. We have done this to each other as well. This does not only apply to the feelings I am sharing right now I am trying to give an example using affections of love.
I think this statement can make it clearer (I wish they would add adults!):
“Children with mixed receptive-expressive language disorder also have significant problems understanding what other people are saying to them. This lack of comprehension may result in inappropriate responses or failure to follow directions. Some people think these children are being deliberately stubborn or obnoxious, but this is not the case. They simply do not understand what is being said. Some children with this disorder have problems understanding such specific types of terms as abstract nouns, complex sentences, or spatial terms.”
While I am very thankful to have this information, it still causes me to hurt.
It explains so many things, but it does not change the fact that if I want to participate in communicating with others I have to change. I have to teach my children how to communicate the way the world communicates. Frankly, I do not want to. I am now beginning to understand how I express myself, how I communicate, and that I am not wrong. However, I am wrong if I want to fit in outside of my computer. I will not work in society properly unless I pretend and stay quiet to some extent. I will not survive unless I do that because I will continue to get confused and taken aback by peoples comments no matter how much I study human behavior.
No matter how much I study and observe family members.
No matter how much I “logically” understand what is going on – I will still be thrown by it because all of this is intertwined in my neurological waves that get confused, blocked, misfire, and overloaded causing my communication system to be a jumbled bunch of circuits. My children can quite possibly be made fun of, bullied, and made to feel like they are wrong because they communicate differently. This can happen among family members only in a “I am only joking” type of air. I will not accept that, but we will embrace difference and accept that we will never “fit in” with mainstream. I may not tell them that so boldly – I will build into them so much that those types of things will not affect their self-esteem as it did mine. There is a question that comes to my mind though.
How do we do that without becoming the very thing that we are fighting against?
How do we stay outcasts without prejudice and anger? How do we maintain a spirit of acceptance ourselves toward others, while knowing the mass majority will not accept us? How do we not become cynical? Many will stay in their “group thinking” and condemn people based on their lack of knowledge and their own inability to empathize. I do not know how to stay in the neutral all the time without my heart breaking and my soul crushing. I am trying to process a huge amount of emotions that I am feeling. One being the fact that I am in a state of mourning. I am mourning the loss of my ideals. The farce that I believed would happen though I did not realize it. I am mourning a family that does not exist. My fabricated version that I created. The realities and truths that I have always known in the back of my mind are looking at me in the face and saying, “It is time.”
It is time to smash all of the images I have created.
Acceptance. The reality of accepting me fully and fighting against the pattern of conformity while being around my family, and others. I cannot expect them to understand me. I cannot hold on to that precious moment when they finally want to understand me or the way my kids think. I have to accept them. I somehow have to continue to remind myself that I am different – I think different. I speak differently – they speak differently, though we use the same words. I have to be myself in the midst of feeling rejected even if no one is directly rejecting me, or my children. If I do not communicate like others, they do not understand me, and I do not understand them, it will always feel like rejection. By both parties. I am in a processing mindset. I have a lot to sift through and many emotions are hitting me all at once. While I am down, I do not mean to give the impression that I am hopeless.
I feel hopeless, but it never lasts long.
I see this all as a good challenge. All of this helps me to change. I have had the wrong mindset of thinking that others want to change as much I as do. I have thought that everyone was seeking truth, growth, and trying to embrace understanding for difference as I do. I am going to forget this, but right now I know that I am thinking and expressing my meaning differently than others when I say that. I am not saying that they are not seeking the same things, I am saying that those things have very different meanings to each individuals. As a group they can collectively come together and mold those ideals creating the image of wholeness. I will always be the one on the sidelines saying, “But what about this?” Each time I go around this loop of being confused it is because I forget that many people like to be in a group.
I find the “group” confusing.
Even if I agree with the group, even if the group is my family, I will fight against the feeling that I must join them. It forces me to look at things from every angle to ensure I have processed properly and have not lost my footing. I find conflict to be a positive thing, as long as it is constructive. However, I do hate it. Conflict makes me ache in the core of my being – I want peace, but we do not grow or change unless we face challenges. I find certain conflict to be beneficial for me in discovering my true emotions, and ideas. It hurts beyond words. However, this is my way of showing that I care – I am trying to learn the world around me. I seek hope in that, it gives me hope that one day people will do the same for me. Though at the moment I am so not “feeling” that.
Here are my hopes expressing themselves!
