Teleen's Journal

A PSA for every man I encounter on a daily basis:


When I'm in the grocery store, waiting in line at the bank, going into the bookstore at the same time you are, walking across the parking lot...  Basically, if I'm in public, minding my own business and we've never met before, leave me the fuck alone.


I don't care that you like pink (the color of the shorts I was wearing at the store today) or my hair or my dress or my shoes.


I don't care that you want to know what time it is (a common distraction technique for criminals).


I don't care that we're both waiting in the same line boring and you find me attractive so you want to make small talk on the off chance I'll jump on your dick after knowing you for ten seconds.


Don't fucking talk to me.


I don't know you.  If we don't have friends in common or I'm not at work (where I can make money off of you*), I don't even WANT to know you.


Your speaking to me makes me uncomfortable and also makes me wonder if I need to worry about you doing more than speaking. 


I'm a woman alone.  Respect that my paranoia level is up and if you are truly a good, decent and nice human being, YOU WON'T FUCKING ADD TO MY STRESS by being "friendly" with me, a TOTAL STRANGER.


Just... Leave me the fuck alone.


Thank you for your time and attention.


*To everyone who says, "Well, you make money off of men all the time, why don't you like the attention outside of work?" I say, go step on the sharpest Lego you can find.  When I'm alone, not at a social gathering and we have no friends in common, YOU SHOULD NOT BE SPEAKING TO ME UNLESS IT'S TO TELL ME THAT MY HAIR IS ON FIRE (or other equivalent emergency)!

When I first began to suspect I had HFA, I contacted a high school acquaintance (now facebook friend) who actually studies brains and asked him about it.  His first response (in part)?  

You strike me as a very empathetic person. Your Facebook posts show that you have a keen sense of how others feel. (For example, think of how you feel about all this recent bullying news!). You probably don't have to "figure out" or "calculate" how others feel... you just empathize automatically. You also seem to be a person willing to try new things and can be social when you choose to be. If you were "autistic enough" to have anything to worry about, you would probably have been diagnosed by now. ASD folks tend to be noticeably weird. But then, there are also perfectly normal people who are weird. :)

I wrote back with my (very long list of) suspicions as to why I was feeling that way and he was very supportive and felt that since I was so high-functioning, I should only mess with a good thing if it was making me unhappy.  I felt fairly comforted by it, especially by his impression of me as having empathy for others, but recent events have forced me to realize that he was wrong.

I have empathy for certain people and situations.  If we agree (or mostly agree), I have empathy for you.  However, if you disagree with me, a lot of the times I am actually completely unable to see your POV.  At all. 

( Cut for epic! length, rambling and incoherence. Read at your own risk. )
There are no rules to human interaction, but I really wish there were some, :(.  I also wish that there were a way to predict how people would react in a given situation, but I know it's a forlorn hope.  

In summary, I'm stubborn, set in my ways and will defend my position to the death if you come at me in a way that makes me feel as though it's necessary, even if you honestly aren't attacking me, only my position.

However, if you give me a thoughtful, reasoned, CALM explanation of why and how the Earth goes around the Sun, I'll listen.  It might take me a while to reset that part of my brain to accept it, but I will listen.

Finally, if for whatever reason you feel that what I've said is so made of fail that you can't be respectful, please send me a PM and vent there, because if you do it publicly, it won't end well.  

Thanks for your time and attention.

There have been a lot of posts on my friends' lists lately about bullying and a lot of stories in the news about it, which has forced me to go back to my own childhood and actually think about sharing what I went through.  This part of my youth is separate from every other part.  It's the icing on a very large cake filled with bullshit and it's something that I think about less than most of the other pains from that time. 

I'm going to start generally, because it's the only way I can even begin to find a place to start.

( Cut for EPIC!Length.  )

This entry is long, rambling, repetitive, probably incoherent and I feel as though I've strayed from my essential point.  You be the judge.