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via Poetry Daily

by Jeffery Donaldson

from The New Quarterly: Canadian Writers & Writing, Issue 117, Winter 2011

As I get older, I find it harder to spend time with friends. And I love my friends. My friends are the warmest and most generous people I know. That’s why I can’t spend much time with them. The stress is too much. The feeling of having to pull myself together, be collected, unscattered, equal to their kindnesses, ready for the nice things they will say and do. Please, don’t let me blurt out something awful. Tourettes and a dash of Aspergers make for a perfect storm in polite company: excess mental energy and an anxiety about every worst thing that can happen, combined with being utterly unintuitive about social decorum. And the obsession! I once spent an entire lunch with a colleague worrying that I was going to spit my mouthful of salad into his face. He’s talking about marking stipends and I’m looking at him picturing the romaine lettuce on his forehead, a speck of red onion on his chin.

What if all that junk in your head came out? You don’t have to have “mental issues” to know that there are rules in conversation, things that can be said and things that should remain hidden or reserved. I always seem to have Edgar’s caveat at the end of King Lear in my head: “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say,” that next-to-impossible ideal that is supposed to keep tragedy at bay. The idea that people can be natural in company is a mystery to me. I don’t know what natural is (does anyone?). So I make it up, stand on the alert, watch, listen, pick up cues from others, and double-think every least gesture and nuance. I’m a Henry James conversation on crack. Intuition for me was an aggressively learned skill: “learned intuition,” the first and last oxymoron for people on the autism spectrum. It helps to explain why there is for me something very eerie and unreal about polite conversation. I feel like a ghost: insubstantial enough to be not noticed, but bound to frighten people when I am. It is embarrassing and very stressful to be around so many real people. I’m thinking, being real is such an unfair advantage. I’m thinking, I could reach out and my hand would pass through you. Ghosts don’t make genuine connections.

Now writing is another matter. Writing puts the mediacy back in immediacy. It lowers the urgency-rheostat and cools down the over-heated neurons. In writing, you take a step back, gather time and space to yourself. You can think and decide, reflect, have second thoughts. Best of all, you can play! You can be whimsical and daring, flirt with limits, meet friends half way, challenge them, tease them, welcome them at their word. You can be hospitable. All in your own good time.

Now I’m not getting all mushy here about genuine feelings in writing. I haven’t forgotten Oscar Wilde’s “give a man a mask and he will tell the truth.” Wilde was spot-on, of course, about writing and masks; writing is nothing if not an epitome of exercised social control, about making yourself up and putting yourself out there in the terms that best suit you. W.H. Auden said that you can walk into people’s living rooms and know in an instant whether you want to see them again. Something of that is true in writing as well. We size people up. In writing you have the same sorts of tensions that you have in conversation: the give and take, the underlying messages, the judgements and anxieties. It all goes on, and sometimes in ways that are much more biting and cruel than one would ever tolerate in conversation.

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