John R:
I have not had a friendship since Q3 2010.
All my life I found it easy to make friends but not really easy to keep them. Not "discovering" spirituality until 2013, I thought there was something wrong me with. Doctors called it Autism. I just couldn't deal with interpersonal social dynamics.
At the end of 2010 I "gave up" on friendships and around 2012 after it depressed me I made the effort to go out of my way to reject any at all.
Lately things have been going on and I realise how lucky I am not to have people to deal with in my life. I actually think I should write a book going into all of it...but I wanted to ask if I should because of ethical responsibility. In my view, it is perfectly healthy to not have any social interaction. But society say this is a no no. Am I just...wrong, and therefore would it be unresponsible? Or is the negative part of the mind trying to talk myself out of doing it?
I feel like I grew so fast spiritually because of not having to deal with dramas, as well as it giving me a unique perspective on life. I feel I should share this with the world.
Thoughts? Thanks.
It seems to me that the friendship must have meant something to you, because you know the date (Q3 2010) when it ended. Someone who could have taken or left the friendship wouldn't recount the date in that way. In other words, you seem to be keeping careful track of the overall timeline here and, now, are even contemplating spending a lot of time and energy to write a book about this subject. That strikes me as the kind of preoccupation someone might go through in response to a painful loss or an unmeet need.
You also say that it was the friendship or social interactions that depressed you. This is not how it works. Your inner response to the friendship/social interaction involved some kind of sadness, disappointment, frustration--a feeling of being misunderstood or of not connecting with others and of not wanting to feel this anymore and, therefore, turning away.
Your inner response
could have been the opposite, but it wasn't. The question is why.
If it had something to do with the behavior of others in response to some of the social challenges that can arise out of your autism, then it's undertandable that you would experience these emotions and want to wash your hands of the whole business. But even when people behave poorly and disappoint you it's possible to respond to them with loving kindness and a sense of humor. People don't depress you; you depress you.
Since you're here on the DhO, maybe going into the inner process that arises during social interactions could be a part of your path? There are people who tell themselves "I cannot be alone" and are constantly looking to be enmeshed in social situations. For them, the task might just be to learn how to be alone without being lonely.
If you were saying, "Hey, I have come to a place in which my social interactions involve zero difficulty and yet I find that I also have zero need for them as well, and it's a cool place, and here's how you get there, and you don't have to listen to all of these voices telling you that it's bad to be socially isolated," then the conversation would be different, I think. But you're saying that social interaction is painful for you and that you've learned to avoid it. That doesn't sound like something you should celebrate or encourage others to emulate.
