#oneaday Day 729: The struggle for your emotions to be heard

One of the things I find difficult and, at times, frustrating to deal with, perhaps particularly as a person with an autistic spectrum condition, is properly conveying the emotions that I am feeling and the depth of those emotions. Our recent anguish over Oliver's disappearance is a prime example of this. I am feeling intense amounts of pain, sadness, anger, fear, grief and all manner of other emotions over this situation, on a pretty much continual basis, and yet I'm not sure if I have accurately conveyed that to anyone.

woman checking compass on trail — Photo by Ali Kazal on Pexels.com

It's not as if I haven't tried to do so. But I feel like any time I have attempted to — with the exception of my therapist yesterday, who is trained in such matters, and my family members, who have been through situations like this and thus understand — I have simply got a response that is, at best, a cursory "oh, Pete, I'm so sorry" and then nothing much after that.

I'm not really sure what I'm expecting or wanting from other people, to be honest. But something about it just doesn't quite feel… "enough", you know? I am here, devastated at the potential loss of a family member — because make no mistake, Oliver is a family member — and I feel like a lot of people I've expressed this to have pretty much forgotten this fact almost as soon as they have given the appropriate response as defined by the unwritten social contract we all agree to.

To be clear, I'm not angry at anyone who has responded this way and I'm not annoyed that very few people have reached out to see how I'm doing as the week goes on. I know that everyone has their own things going on in their lives, and their own priorities of things to care about. I cannot reasonably expect people who are not directly involved in this situation to care about it as much as I do. I know that.

But I think what the problem is, is that this is putting my overall loneliness somewhat into perspective. There simply are not very many people left in my life that I feel like I can express these things to, and that they will give a shit. It is at times like this where you really feel like you need people in your life to support you, to uplift you, to distract you from the dark thoughts swirling around inside your head, and when you simply don't really have that outside of your immediate family members, it can feel a tad difficult to deal with.

I think about how I might feel if someone close to me was dealing with such mental anguish, and how I would want to be there to support them. I think about how I have been with people who were once close to me who have been through similarly challenging periods of intense, sustained emotion. Perhaps I am the one who overdid it? Perhaps I was overbearing, smothering? I don't know. It felt like the right thing for me to do at the time, and the people in question seemed to appreciate it, too.

It's just so difficult. Like I say, I really don't know what emotion I am really "supposed" to be feeling right now, because the fact is I simply still do not know what the situation actually is. All I know is that Oliver is missing, and his condition is unknown. And until we learn something more about what has actually happened, that uncertainty is going to be probably the leading cause of the intense sadness and frustration that both Andie and I are feeling right now.

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2468: Empathy

While I've worked a number of crap jobs over the years, one positive thing that I do feel I have taken from each and every crap job is a sense of empathy: a feeling that yes, I understand how people who do this every day have it.

Consequently, I find it pretty hard to get mad at people who are just doing their job, sometimes with all manner of obstacles not of their own making in the way.

I try and extend this attitude to everything about life, even those jobs that I haven't directly done myself; I know what it's like to have to pay your dues (and indeed am continuing to pay my own dues in the hope that something actually good will happen one day) and, as such, don't get mad when my order in a restaurant is late, or if a package doesn't arrive on time, or if someone in customer service isn't able to help me on this particular occasion.

This doesn't mean I blindly forgive, obviously; if someone has clearly fucked up somewhere then I'd expect them to be suitably apologetic about it. But the reason for them fucking up in the first place? I might be able to understand that, whether it's working long hours, working for pay well under what you deserve for challenging, demanding work or having to meet increasingly unreasonable targets from the higher-ups in the company who are completely out of touch with the man on the figurative street.

I like to think this is a generally positive quality in myself, and it's also one thing that keeps me hanging on when times are tough such as they are at the moment. If nothing else, I am developing "life experience", coming to understand how all manner of different people experience the world and what they have to put up with from Joe Public.

Joe Public can be an asshole.

Joe Public can, however, also be appreciative of someone who goes out of their way to help them, or someone who does their miserable job with a smile on their face, or someone who simply has a kind and friendly word to share.

I try and fall into the latter category whenever possible, even when it's tough to do so. To date, my attempts have usually been successful, and even, in a couple of instances, have defused situations of high tension that have arisen for usually stupid reasons.

I derive a small degree of comfort from the fact that every time I do this, I am helping to develop myself as a decent human being. I derive somewhat less comfort from the fact that having empathy for other people is, unfortunately, not a particularly marketable or profitable skill — at least not without expensive training to forge that raw material into something a bit more tangible.

My faith in myself may be at an all-time low thanks to being kicked around repeatedly by all and sundry over the years, but at least I still have this to hold on to, I guess. It's something. Not much, but it's something.

1508: Learn Through Play

Learning through play is not just something for pre-schoolers; it's something you can continue to do throughout your life, and I absolutely love it when you twig that it's happened.

My earliest memories of genuinely learning something from a video game that wasn't explicitly an "educational" title came in the mid-'90s when MicroProse was on top form churning out flight sim after flight sim. I learned that the F-19 wasn't real and the F-117A was; I learned how aircraft carrier takeoffs and landings worked; I learned about the physics of flight — though admittedly, most flight sims that weren't made by SubLOGIC and subsequently Microsoft didn't have particularly accurate flight models — and I learned about real-world conflicts around the world, primarily in Libya and the Gulf.

More recently, my love of Japanese games has equipped me with a surprising amount of knowledge about Japanese culture and how people go about things over there. Shenmue taught me to take your shoes off when entering a Japanese person's house; School Days taught me about saying itadakimasu before starting to eat; Persona taught me about national holidays and the way schools work in Japan. Granted, relatively little of that is what we might term "useful" knowledge (unless, of course, you're going to live or work in Japan) but it's still pretty cool to learn it.

My Japanese class this evening showed me that even Final Fantasy XIV has successfully taught me things, primarily through its seasonal events. Currently running, for example, is an event called "Little Ladies' Day", which I discovered is actually a real-life Japanese celebration in March known variously as Girls' Day, Doll's Day or hinamatsuri. In the questline for the seasonal event in the game, you're tasked with taking a doll around and showing it to people, and references are often made to it being far too expensive for most people to afford. Coincidentally, the real-life dolls displayed as part of hinamatsuri celebrations are often elaborate creations that are well out of the price range of casual collectors.

This isn't the first time Final Fantasy XIV specifically has taught me something like this; last month, the Valentine's day celebrations had a distinctly Japanese flavour about it, too, particularly when it came to the whole "exchanging chocolates" thing. That and the costume you received as a reward for completing the questline there made you look like you were heading off to work at a maid café — no bad thing, indeed.

I find it pretty fascinating to consider video games being used in this way — to passively impart knowledge without you realising it — and am particularly inspired by the prospect this raises of my favourite entertainment medium being a brilliant means of encouraging understanding and empathy between different cultures. The industry as a whole still has a very long way to go with regards to diversity, of course — while it's possible to learn a lot about Japanese culture through games, you're less likely to be able to interactively immerse yourself in, say, Middle Eastern or African culture, or even subcultures from closer to home — but I have faith that over time, we will start to see more and more interactive experiences that genuinely have something to teach us, whether that's knowledge we can actually apply in the real world, or simply a means of better understanding our fellow human beings. That'd be nice, wouldn't it?