Coping Methods: Inner Worlds

I have mentioned in two of my previous posts in the series that I have another reality in my head.

It is only very recently that I discovered that this is actually fairly common for aspies/auties to have, and so I think it is very important to spread the knowledge thereof, because I have spent many, many years thinking I’m crazy and trying to defend, explain and rationalise what I was doing – mostly by telling people I was thinking it up for novel-writing and publication purposes.

What do people do when a location/situation they are in becomes too much for them? They leave. This is why some people leave the pub after their fellow pub-goers become too loud and rowdy. This is why parents move their kids to different schools because of bullying. This is why you stop hanging out with people who treat you badly. This is why people get divorced (among several other reasons). If your situation is too much for you, then you leave it, if it is within your power to do so.

It’s that last part of the sentence that’s important, because auties do exactly what everyone else does too. We attempt to leave a situation that is too much. Our problem is, though, that the situation/location that’s being too much very often happens to be the world in general. That’s a pretty difficult location to leave. (I’m still hoping for intergalactic spaceflight in my time, heck, I’ll settle for interstellar )

Since outer space is not an option, we often look to inner space. I want to also acknowledge that a lot of people leave the world permanently by way of suicide, but this is about a non-permanent way of leaving. Inner space as I termed it. Our headspace as other would call it – that term never really agreed with me, though. Inner worlds and inner friends can very quickly become a safe refuge for an autie, and for me it certainly has been. As with the other posts, this is about how I experience this particular aspect of my dx, but I simply can’t help talking about others as well, because it is, in fact, only a few weeks ago that it became fully clear to me that I am not the only one who does this, and have done this since forever. It was a talk given by another aspie that brought it home, because this aspie, Louise, described exactly what I’ve been experiencing – always.

So this post is just as much to all you other auties/aspies out there, who don’t know yet: A lot of us have worlds in our heads that serve us as refuges from physical reality. If you do this, you are not alone, and you are not doing autism wrong.

This post is also to all those parents, friends, et al who are very concerned about their autie-friend’s seeming craziness. Don’t be. Most of us have a very good grasp of what belongs in which world, and we don’t get them mixed up. Mostly. Most of us. The whole point for us *is* actually to keep them very separate, because your NT world is hell to us much of the time, and our inner world is safe. That’s why they don’t mix, and we won’t let them. Please don’t try to force us to.

So that was my lead-in. You may have noticed now that I call them inner worlds, where others (primarily NTs) would call them imaginary worlds. This is on purpose. Because these worlds are not imaginary in the regular sense of the word. To us these worlds are real – they just aren’t physical. And I hope you will acknowledge and accept that difference. Stuff doesn’t need to be physical in order to be real.

To say that they are imaginary would be to imply that we think up what is to take place there; that we decide who will be there and what they will do. That is, in fact, what I was telling myself all those years before I realised what was going on. To manipulate and rule my inner world was what I tried to do, because I thought that was how inner worlds were supposed to function. But I had the concept of inner worlds all mixed up with imaginary worlds. If my world had been imaginary, I could have done what I tried, but I couldn’t. I’ll quote the aforementioned Louise and translate her words for your edification:

“As a child I talked to my friends and we told each other about our imaginary worlds. And I told them about what had happened in my world since last time we talked, and when they told me of their own I realised that they were making it up as they went. Nothing of what they said had actually happened. They were making it up. So I thought it must just be me, and I stopped talking about it.”

And I can SO relate to this. I assume she realised that they were making it up, because she found internal inconsistencies in their stories. That’s how I usually notice that something is up. She didn’t say this, however, it’s just an assumption on my part. Anyway, for me to tell you about these things would be like you telling me about a dream you had. It is something that happens in your head that you don’t have any influence on, except sometimes on your own actions in the dream.

I don’t remember when I first started visiting my inner world. It’s a long time ago that’s for sure.

I always did prefer games of fantasy, science-fiction, adventure. Something different from my own world. I hated playing “family”. What do you English-speaking folks call it? Playing house? I’m not sure. Why would I want to play family? I had one of my own, after all. Games of fantastic places fueled my inner worlds – that is clear to me now.

The first year in school was kindergarten. No actual book-learning yet, so my oddness had not yet stood out as much. That year I played with the boys in my class. We played pirates, cowboys and indians (yes, I know that’s incredibly racist, but that’s how it was, I know better now), soldiers, knights, heroes. Tales of daring and adventure. I came up with the interesting plot-twists and -hooks, so it wouldn’t all be about fighting each other. A lot of it did involve play-fighting, though. My goodness, we were like puppies, now that I think about it.

Anyway, they were stand-alone stories for me back then, and my plot-construction was unconscious. Like a constant awareness that nothing is ever simple, so I never accepted the premise that “they hate each other, so they fight”. I analysed my way to the possible reasons for the enmity and went from there, and I did it without even realising that I did it. In my mind the motivations of the fictional characters in our heads were as real as our own.

Of course, after that year followed 9 years of not having any real connection with my class-mates at all, because I was too good with book-learning to share their experiences in class, and I was too poor at social interactions to compensate for it with my lop-sided and poorly timed smile, odd sense of humour and sharp reactions to being touched.

Things developed from there. I had no real friends. Companionship is hard to find when people shun you like a plague-carrier. You might as well have painted a cross on my door. The few friendships people did pretend to have with me were exactly that: pretend. The answers to the maths problems were awfully neat to have.

So what to do instead? I immersed myself in books and music and with that kind of stimulation comes companionship and creation. Not necessarily of books and music of my own composition – I can’t claim credit for that unfortunately – but of creations of the mind. Reading and listening formed pictures in my head. And those pictures took on a life of their own. And they became my companions.

Lives that have continued in my head ever since. A good example is how I watched the first three Star Wars films back in ‘95. I was 11 years old. I latched on to one supporting character (Boba Fett – like many others) and told my own stories from there. It wasn’t until several years later that I found out that entire books had starred him as the main character. His tale in my head was better anyway

And they really do take on a life of their own in my head. I don’t so much decide what their stories will be as just follow with the natural flow of things. Even the role-play characters I make with a conscious effort to make a specific type of character do this after having been played for a little bit. They become real to me. Real people with feelings and motivations and purpose.

You know what’s awesome about this? You can go to a place where you are someone else, and it’s completely safe for you to do so.

Mind, that doesn’t mean I don’t ever get hurt when I’m spending time in one of my inner worlds (because, yes, there are many), in fact sometimes I get hurt rather badly, but hey… that’s just realistic. And it’s okay, because in those worlds I have friends and sometimes family, and skills and possibly weapons etc etc to help me out. Those are things I don’t have much of here. Sometimes I’m the hero of a tale, at others I’m the Damsel in Distress so to speak. And sometimes I’m just a by-stander.

The by-stander position, which I often have, is what’s hardest to explain to people. They don’t understand that I’m not the main character of my own tales, but that’s just the thing. They’re not MY tales. They’re just tales. And sometimes I’m in them, and sometimes I’m not. That’s why it’s an inner world and not an imaginary world, because if I came up with all of this consciously, damn straight I’d be the super-heroic lead in all of them. But I don’t, and I’m not.

My inner worlds are there. Some of them I have adopted and adapted from fictional worlds created by others. The Star Wars universe as mentioned earlier. I don’t go there very often these days. But I very often visit the Star Trek verse and the Forgotten Realms verse of D&D. And then there’s the one my mind created entirely on its own. It’s not the oldest of my worlds, but it’s close. It’s the one I’m writing an atlas/encyclopedia for. It’s my homeworld.

Much of the time I feel more at home there than I do here. Not because everything is peachy-keen there. That world has seen war, too. But I am not the odd one out there. I am not a freak of nature there. I’m just me. And being me is not a problem there.

As I have grown older I have begun using my inner worlds consciously. They’re there, after all, why not make the best of it, no?

Therefore, when I know I’ll have to talk to specific people about something specific I practice it in my inner world. I so often screw up on how to do or say things, because I can’t think of the right things, when I’m in the situation. But when I have a chance of preparing, I can get into my inner world, and talk to someone about it there. I can test what I want to say, see if it makes sense, because the peeps in my inner worlds will respond and tell me if it’s completely off. There’s a reason I’ve been able to hide my disability for so long.

Unfortunately this leads to a lot of talking to myself – out loud – and that tends to worry people to bits. Got me labelled crazy more than a few times.

So?

It helps me. Sometimes I go there just to receive a calming pat on the back, which I can’t receive without physical pain in the physical world. Sound strange? It probably is. But I don’t care anymore.

If I were to denounce these strange worlds of mine and stop using them as sanctuary, it’s very likely that I would get worse – mental health-wise. No, not just likely. Absolutely certain.

I have seen and heard a lot over the years. Films, radio shows, conversations people were having next to me. Everything has been stored, so I actually do have a large database of neurotypical things to say and ways to be. I cannot access that database during a conversation, though, so I need to have prepared the necessary stuff beforehand. So how do I know which phrases I need to bring with me? I go test the conversation in an inner world. I do this with almost everything. The only exceptions are conversations with people whom I feel completely safe around. Not just safe as in knowing they won’t hurt me, but safe as in “it’s okay to be evidently autistic and socially awkward around them”.

When I’m picking out clothes in a store, I am mapping out a conversation ‘tree’ for when I go to the check-out. What are the things the shop assistant is likely to say? What will I respond to either of those options? What might they respond to either of my responses? Etc etc.

A friend once said she thought I’d be majorly good at chess. I probably could be, but it wouldn’t be a game for me. It’d be too much like my own life. See, every interaction I have with people I have mapped out on trees before they happen. I improvise very few things, because I can’t do that very well. And so I rehearse interaction types and such in my inner worlds – sometimes speaking them out loud, correcting myself and my words if it ended up sounding silly or wrong.

This is also why I only seldom chat with people. Instant messaging is the kind of improvised chatter I do not do well, even if it is in text, and so I end up messing up. So very often.

I talk to more people in my inner worlds than I do in the physical world. I touch more people in my inner worlds than in the physical world. A lot of the time I miss touch a lot. But allowing touch is a major gamble for me, because it could very well trigger one of my sensory overload meltdowns, even if the touch was wanted.

I try to assuage this lack in my inner worlds. Sometimes it works. A lot of the time it does. Also: it is easier to find non-bigoted people in my inner worlds, making it a lot easier to find people whom I can get along with, and would actually bother to get close to.

It’s never quite the same as the physical world, obviously, and that is both good and bad. I cannot sate a physical need in my inner world, it’d be lovely, though, I’d never need to buy groceries ever again. But it doesn’t work like that. On the other hand it never triggers my sensory hypersensitivity, because my mind has been kind enough to make my inner worlds liveable for someone with my disability. My mind appears to have been very good at this, though I tend to have the same non-touchy mannerisms there as I do in the physical world. Curious how I never got rid of that caution.

Anyway, most people would probably be quite surprised at the richness of my inner life. And many would advise me to start living with real live people in the real live present-day physical world. Yeah, that’d be awfully nice if I could, I’d tell them, but fact is that most of the time I am alone because being with people is detrimental to my health. People in general cannot stop talking over each other, they keep habitually touching each other, and that unfortunately includes me, they want the telly or the radio running constantly, making the environment hostile for my sensory perceptions, and since most people won’t make accomodations, I’m the one bowing out. I’m the one saying no thanks to parties. I’m the one not wanting to go to the café. I’m the one not coming along to celebrate a birthday, and at some point people just stop inviting me.

Not because they don’t like me, but because they think my reasons are just poor excuses to hide that I don’t like them. That way shit quickly becomes a very lonely existence.

So ever since I was a child I have been soothing that loneliness with company I couldn’t frighten off with my strangeness. Yes, it’s all in my head, but the safe space, the sanctuary it gives me does not replace interactions with people in the physical world. It gives me a refuge in times of sensory or emotional overload, and it can compensate a little for the interactions that people in the physical world refuse to share with me, because I need accommodations that they are unwilling to make (speaking plainly, no subtle joking references, no touching, no winking and nodding and expecting me to pick up on social cues).

Hmmm, this post is becoming rather long and rambly. It is hard to describe how these inner worlds really work, because I have not fully explored the function myself yet. I just know that it helps me a lot to have a place to escape to – even if I can’t go there physically. There is one thing that sometimes prevents me from going inside, though. And that is physical discomfort. A level of physical discomfort will keep my attention in the physical world and prevent me from escaping inside to calm my mind and soothe my senses. And that makes it really bloody important that I have the option of become physically comfortable in my own home. A good bed/couch, the right covers/blankets, a good chair, the right clothes. Not everything is needed all at once, obviously. And sometimes when I just need a conversation with someone I can have it while doing something else in the physical world – like driving. But if I need to go inside and pull my physical awareness inside as well. I need to not be stimulated by physical stuff.

But when I have complete control of my surroundings, like I would in my own home, then I can make sure that no sounds, smells, touches that I have not okay’ed will assault my senses. And then I can go away for a little while, to a place where I don’t have to feel unwelcome.