3 Jan: No, I was not imagining things. The pheromones were really oozing off him that evening.
He also had told me that I could sleep in his wife’s bed – I’d hate that if I were her – and that I could sleep in his bed during the day, but this may be the (nonjudgmental) autism speaking.
21 December 2024, noon: He just apologised for having hurt me. He’s also kicking me out, though. For two weeks now, he has been going on about a place that I can go to. Keeps going on about it. Insisted it was local. Turns out to be in Utrecht! (Not free. I can’t afford it but he was willing to lend me money for it.) He’s undoubtedly been telling people that I have been refusing to go to it. Yes, but that’s because it doesn’t actually exist!
Afterthought a day later: What I find really shocking is how convincingly he pretends that nothing happened and hasn’t even asked whether he hurt me. (I think I get that, actually.) It’s not that easy for me. My tailbone is hurting so I’m constantly reminded of how hard he threw me to the floor, and only over someone else having moved his iMac a few inches… While think I get what this is about, I am also a little shocked.
It’s an eye opener. About how mild autism works. I had underestimated how complicated this is. I saw it too much as mere diversity. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Now I understand that letter that a woman with a husband with Asperger’s addressed to autism experts that popped up on my screen in England one day. (Yes, I think that I was dealing with an autistic person there too. He shares interests with me. It may make a big difference.)
I’m learning that you don’t help mildly autistic people by trying to confront them with their challenges. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible not to start criticizing and accusing them if you are around them, but it makes things a lot worse. You can support them relatively unobtrusively by accepting their idiosyncrasies and also accepting that what is paramount for them one day can change the next.
I’m also starting to suspect that particularly if mildly autistic people are living on their own, they may need someone to help them manage their household. They aren’t necessarily highly organised (even if they may appear to). It just so happens that I stopped by at the home of another mildly autistic and highly educated person the other day. (I didn’t dare mention the autism to others. Thing is, this person has an entire house and rarely seems to spend time at it. I had to see if I might be able to stay.) Both the garden and the house were a mess. Bottles of water in two open packages behind the front door, boxes with junk and other junk on all the chairs and seating in the front part of the living room, not as if she was moving out, but as if she couldn’t care less. I remember having helped her clean up, clear out and organise a cupboard decades ago. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. I decided to help. Just having someone else there who quietly/gently takes the lead apparently can help a lot.)
After civil servants and a few others essentially bullied me out of my not very pleasant but in some ways certainly tolerable temporary home in the Netherlands, which also cut me off from income (but I’d figured I’d have income or a job soon enough and in fact, had recently already worked a shift) and I was also still due 400 to 500 more euros in benefits than I eventually received, someone has been letting me sleep on his couch off and on, and now for a few weeks already.
But without income, I’m probably even more trapped and more isolated and more powerless there than on the streets, aren’t I. I currently can’t even wash my hair and I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two weeks. I do have plenty of socks and underwear with me, thankfully.
Yesterday, he threw me to the floor. He grabbed my arm and pulled hard. I fell hard.
I’m pretty sure that he wanted to start kicking me then. But he didn’t. He just walked away.
My right arm hurt for a while and my tailbone is probably going to be hurting for quite a while. He’d grabbed my left upper arm and left a bruise (as I discovered the following morning) and my right wrist and yanked hard. (The right arm later also developed bruises.) I’m not sure how exactly I fell backward, whether he pushed me or let go or whatever.
But that was a lot of anger and it’s scary.
He’s mildly autistic. He’s a former colleague. I’ve known him for forty years but in a professional capacity, until about 18 months ago. That’s when I learned that he’s autistic. He masks incredibly well, comes across as very convincing and as far more together than I.
He is in the middle of a divorce, but he’s probably – mostly to himself? – woven an intricate web of lies around that marriage, to a woman who’s about forty years younger. Hard to tell.
He has a first ex. I’ve noticed that he speaks with a slightly different, more posh accent, when he talks with her over the phone.
He recently told me that his current wife had taken his iMac without his consent and shipped it off as a donation to a developing country. She often finds stuff on the streets and she had found another iMac in the streets that she had taken home. (She takes home a lot of things, granted. But an iMac?) Could I help him set it up?
“Oh, look, there’s all sorts of stuff on it.” Files. Folders. It was his own iMac, of course. I said nothing.
That was so unhinged. I became really worried. If he says shit like that about his wife, then what’s he saying about me? I now find myself doubting other things he’s said about her. According to him, she is pretty paranoid. Is she really?
About me, one of the stories he made up was that I had a pioneering business that failed. That’s hogwash. I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Did he only say that to try to flatter me or has he also been saying that to others? I have no idea.
He’d recently suddenly given me what looked like a pretty trashy novel to read and on the same day, he’d plopped down next to me suddenly much too eagerly and much too close on one occasion. That told me that I probably had to be careful.
He has been really tense. He vocalises just about nonstop, also through his breathing sounds, and his breathing was pretty crazy. He sounded so so so tense. Like a bull that is about to charge, scraping its leg across the ground impatiently, steam emanating from its mouth.
So I’ve been pretty tense, too. He had thought that I wouldn’t just be sleeping on his couch (which he denies of course, but I am absolutely right about this), and ever since that became crystal clear, I’ve been on edge. He began to sulk, basically like a big child and also trying to get my attention. Years ago, he said something like that he liked the tension of chasing a woman (figuratively speaking), I remembered. I don’t. I didn’t consider it reassuring even though I can’t be sure what he meant by it.
I suspect that he had told himself that my shitty situation was just a ploy to get into his life and home, but I can’t know for sure. I suspect that he was expecting another fairytale, like a woman forty years younger falling for him. One evening, he really scared the crap out of me. Nobody else was in the house. Nothing happened but his behaviour initially was so weird that it really worried me. When I decided to ignore it, then he became deliberately intrusive. (I think he mistook my lack of response as encouragement.) Sitting closer to me on the sofa, leaning forward toward me. I got up. He also pretended not to hear me and deliberately stood much too close to me to be able to hear me. I kept backing off but I also got scared. He did seem to notice that.
I felt so betrayed.
He’d also referred to me using his bed during the day or his wife’s bed instead of the couch. I didn’t think that either would be a good idea.
He can be really controlling, I’ve noticed. Not good. He also has memory problems but they are partly an expression of pathological demand avoidance, I suspect.
He’s often ignoring me when I speak, he’s ignoring emails and when he asked me to use WhatsApp, he apparently blocked me after he mentioned The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a film that I don’t know but doesn’t sound like my kind of thing. I emailed him that WhatsApp did not seem to be working well on my phone and that I had uninstalled it, to avoid a discussion. (He’d been doing other things in the run-up to this, btw, and it now looks like it was about, I don’t know, domination? Control? Hard to tell.)
Part of the childish behaviour is also that he sometimes seems to be doing things to try to annoy me to voice his displeasure. Splashing my clothes, for example.
I kept my mouth shut for days, trying to say as little as possible, trying to avoid what would largely nonsensical discussions or even an explosion. But I am in a shitty situation and I am not well. My right lung was clogging up again (another reason why I really want out of the Netherlands as its weather is not good for me). I’ve upped my dosage of N-acetyl cysteine and the junk seems to be really coming out now.
(He’ll say things like it’s just a nervous cough. He likes twisting my truths into stories he makes up all by himself, I’ve noticed. Stories that are more palatable to him, but it may also be stories that paint me a certain way at the same time.)
Yesterday, I brought it up. The iMac. I was at the end of my tether, couldn’t keep it in any longer. He got furious and stormed at me.
(He takes a lot of effort masking like crazy. What’s behind it is supposed to be a secret.)
He did admit that the iMac thing was just because his wife had moved it a little on the table. Later I thought that it may just be because you now get to see that the keyboard is broken. He doesn’t use the iMac but it looks impressive, of course. I suspect that that’s why it’s on the table. He’s into what things look like, I’ve noticed, at least to a degree. Appearances.
After the incident, his breathing was changed markedly. Normal. But he tried to get my attention again, the way he’d been doing for days, and when that didn’t work, he grew tense again. I feel like I’m around a ticking time bomb.
He’s said nothing.
I need to get the hell out of here. I do not feel safe here. There are others around, but this situation is not helping me in any way, isn’t moving my life forward.
To help defuse the situation, I decided to thank him for the cucumbers, tomatoes and tofu he bought for me, but the fact that he’s willing to purchase a package of coffee for me but not a small bottle of olive oil which costs less than the coffee and is adamant, forceful, that he will not buy olive oil was worrisome. My digestion was seized up for days. Coffee helps. Olive oil helps too and it protects the heart. He now uses sunflower oil for everything. He shops at the most expensive supermarket. Appearances. At least I have gotten him to install the app so that he can activate their weekly special offers. They offer a choice of 10. You can pick 5.
I also texted him that I know that this is the autism speaking. Maybe I should not have. Maybe it sounded too much like condonence. (He turns out not to have read it, may have blocked me on his phone too. Who knows.)
I need to get out of here.
I know he can’t help it, but I can’t have this on my plate in my current situation, can I.
(For a while, since the incident, he has been muttering under his breath off and on. I don’t know what he was and is saying to himself.)
I have known someone else who’s highly educated and mildly autistic for about two years longer. Since 1982 or thereabouts. Some months ago, when I called her, she instantly started shouting at me angrily. She said that me and my sweet little voice shouldn’t be pretending that I didn’t know what this was about, why she was angry. I had no idea. Next, I discovered that only five days earlier, she had sent me an email in which nothing sounded amiss. She’d sent it to a new email address that I was only accessing at a public library. I set it up to circumvent the stupid hacking. (The hacking alone is enough to be dealing with.)
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