A Cat’s Love

I have had this problem since forever, for as long as I can remember, well before I realized I was a girl. The problem is that I cannot read people. At all. It’s prompted every major romantic partner I’ve ever had to demand that I get evaluated to see if I’m on the autism spectrum. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that I might be, or am, but every time I see a professional about it, they shrug it off, and say that even if I was on the spectrum, I’ve developed coping mechanisms and am basically fine.

Except I’m not.

I’m fine in small doses. I can do okay when it’s a format like a doctor’s office, because it’s not too different from a format like performance. I show up, everyone in attendance has all eyes on me, and I mostly monologue until my time is up. Maybe I sing a song or three.

The trouble comes when I start seeing someone a lot. Whether it’s in close friendship, or in romance, before long, people start feeling like they are not important to me, or that I feel I’m much more important than them, or something along those lines. Words like “inconsiderate” and “selfish” get slapped onto me, and are often followed before long by ghosting; people disappearing from my life without a word, leaving me wondering, each time, what even happened. “Thoughtless” is probably a better word, because it’s almost never that I actually think consciously that I’m better or more valuable than anyone else. It’s just that the needs of others do not naturally occur to me. And I’m guessing that the aforementioned lifelong complete inability to read non-verbal cues has probably gone a long way towards making that the case.

When my last ex, now my best friend, and I finally broke up after six years together, she came to me months later and said, more or less, “I wish I hadn’t gotten so hung up on you not just knowing what I wanted or needed. Because I know if I’d just asked, you would have done anything for me.” I sat there in silence for awhile before I finally said, “You’re right. I would have.” That was a difficult and bitter period between us, before I realized who I was at last, before we could put the past away and rediscover why we loved each other so much in the first place. It was simultaneously the most heartbreaking and uplifting thing anyone had ever said to me.

One time, a very close friend blew up on me, saying something like, “I’m so sick of your problems always becoming everybody else’s problems!” I remember being shocked and confused. I didn’t understand why they’d said that, but it seemed to blow over, and they returned to interacting with me as they always had before. I forgot about it, because their frustrations with me were never put into terms exact enough for me to really understand, and they also stopped the tirade. Eventually, they ghosted me, too.

For the most part, forgetting those kinds of blow-ups is the natural result of the extremely narrow focus that is characteristic of how my mind works. That, too, has been frustrating for romantic partners. It translates to my being absurdly attentive and interested and focused on them when we meet, because they are The Subject. They are the newest and most interesting and gratifying thing in my life. But as time wears on and our relationship settles into a routine, something else inevitably becomes The Subject. It may be a song I’m writing, a game I’ve started playing, a book I’m reading, a political issue that’s got me heated, or any of a million other things.

By the time it’s pointed out to me that I am less engaged, less connected, less a lover or friend than I had been, I am always, always, always taken by surprise. And then I have a completely unproductive reaction, which is to turn the laser focus onto myself and enter an endless spiral of “why? why? why?” and “what is wrong with me?” instead of focusing on my partner or friend, and trying to better understand why they feel that way, or what useful thing I could do about it. Maybe it’s because I kind of expect them to ultimately feel like that, anyway, on some level, some subconscious layer of my brain. Realistically, it’s because I just didn’t notice all their non-verbal cues in the preceding weeks or months or years.

Combine that with an entire childhood of being told that everything I was doing, I was doing wrong, and there you have it. I rarely do something for someone else without being asked or told to do it, because if I am not far enough beyond sure that it is what they want, my self-doubt about both guessing at it correctly, and then actually doing it correctly, is too strong.

When I first realized I was a girl, I shed my previously lifelong depression practically overnight. Because I suddenly (very suddenly) went from feeling like an alien in my own skin to feeling like a human woman whose existence actually made sense, I think I assumed that the larger sense of alienation from the human race would disappear with the depression. But now, I think I just tricked myself into thinking that. That I didn’t notice because I was actually fundamentally happy for the first time in my life. But what I’d understood as a single massive difference in me that made it impossible to truly connect with anyone appears to have always had two parts. At least two parts. Certainly more than just the one.

I’ve been feeling more and more alien lately, and at its worst, it brings me into mindsets that are perilously close to the absolutely awful one I lived in for decades. I try to remember that that sense of alienation is, itself, one of the most human things anyone can feel. But when hashtag-girlfriend tells me that she feels like I don’t think she’s attractive since I never initiate any kind of sexual contact with her, that goes right out the window, and I’m back to feeling like some kind of freak.

Instead of remembering that feeling alienated is core to the human experience, I remember how I spent decades fighting a hormonal command to initiate sex with just about every girl I ever met. I remember how much I hated that feeling, and how terrified I was that maybe someday I would actually hurt someone because of it. The sense of complete and utter relief I felt when that evaporated under HRT ran sharply into a wall when, for the first time in my life, someone asked me why I wasn’t initiating sex.

I realized early on in transition care that I had never actually understood what a healthy male sexuality looks like. I still don’t. But now I wonder if I perhaps don’t understand what a healthy female sexuality looks like, either. Maybe I don’t understand what a healthy human sexuality looks like, just in general.

I thought I was okay. I really did. Because of that persistent sense of relief from the absence of an imperative sex drive, the absence of a thing I spent huge swaths of my life resisting, I had gotten into a head space where I felt very fundamentally happy. That’s translated into my perpetual state of readiness and willingness to be sexual with my lover. It’s had me feeling so happy and content and accepted as I am, that at her barest touch, I am completely hers. And I think that that would ultimately be the case for me with anyone I had this kind of relationship with. What I don’t know is whether that’s generically problematic, or if it’s not inherently bad, just difficult for us because of her needs and my incapacity, at least for now, to meet them.

Sorry if this has gone in directions you were not prepared for, based on the title. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve also recently had a lot of people suggest I might have ADD or ADHD. It seems like a fair enough guess, but for that, too, I’ve gotten the same response from doctors.

I realized a few weeks ago that the love I have for others is very much like a cat’s love. I can connect about as deeply as a cat can connect with their owner, but beyond that, it’s a real crap shoot. I can recognize someone as a person who has been consistently kind to me, who has helped me in some way or another, who has either not touched me at all, or touched me only in the ways and at the times I wanted to be touched, per my whim. And I can sit in their lap, I can do cute and silly things that make no sense, I can look pretty, and I can feel like everything is fine because my life is fine. I can purr while there’s a gas leak, because I don’t understand what a gas leak is, or that I should be afraid of it. When the explosion happens, I freak out, because something scary-bad happened, and I don’t know why, or even quite what it actually was.

When I realized that about myself, it suddenly made sense why I have so much easier a time with animals than with people, why I have more cats than truly close friends. Relationships with animals are necessarily extremely basic. I can achieve a complete understanding of those relationships in a way that eludes me with people. And it’s not just that that complete understanding eludes me; it’s that it’s so far out of reach as to be absurd to think of ever achieving.

When someone passes on the street with a dog or dogs they are walking, I look at the dogs, and I smile and wave and greet them. (They’re all named “pup pup,” if you were wondering.) But I kind of can’t deal with the person. The people are basically obstacles between me and the dogs. When I go to the home of someone I don’t know very well, if they don’t have a pet, I kind of zone out, because I can’t intuitively connect with the people. If they have a pet, I work very studiously to bond with the pet (or pets), because I have so little hope of truly connecting the people, anyway.

And honestly, a cat’s love is fine, if you’re a cat. But as much as I joke about it, I’m not a cat. Which means I need to fix this problem, which in turn seems like it means I will have to convince doctors that a problem exists. Now that I know what I need to do, I’m gonna sit here and groom myself.