The other day my wife made an off hand remark that my love language is personal time. Now I've not read the five love languages, I know, I know, I should, but when she said that it was a chord that began to resound in me.
There have been times in the past, I know especially this past year, where I have not treated my friends well. One of my struggles has been working on friends' cars. Now I don't mind doing this and I need the money. The problem has been that I really want people to come over and hang out. So things might go kinda like this. Jim brings his car over and we talk for an hour then he leaves and over the next couple of days I work on the car. He picks it up and we josh for a few minutes and he leaves. Great experience. Some time later Jim calls cuz his car is broke again. I want to spend an hour or two bs'ing but Jim just wants to know when he can drop it off. I've wanted to spend time with Jim since the last time six weeks ago but life is busy and we don't make the time. So I offer to work on it. He drops it off, I say a total of about two words, Chris takes the keys while I stare at the ground or go back inside. I fix it, text the total when done and manage to be elsewhere when Jim comes to get it. Now I feel like I'm Jim's mechanic whore and he probably feels I just want him for his money.
I have tried to figure out why I do this. My wife's comment about needing personal time added another piece to the puzzle. A piece I'd already found is Aspergers. I need consistency. I need regular routine. Things need to fit in regular boxes. When someone is there and then they're not, like when summer break starts or ends, it takes weeks to adjust. Sometimes much longer. When someone is in my life sporadically it's hard to know how to manage that. How much do I invest? If i invest deeply and then they are not around what do i do with that? Maybe i refuse to invest but then i see them regularly. Am i a total jerk now? To some of you this might seem silly. If you don't get it I don't blame you. I often don't get it either. I don't simply want to be a jerk all the time. I've kinda given in to that as my default setting. Remember when the Terminator would be injured? We would see him working through a list of options to restore power. Often this is me. I look through all the options and often I just choose quit. Leave. Hide in the car. Take a nap. It's like if I'm gonna fail I might as well just quit now. It takes a lot of effort to try so if failure is likely I should just abort now. I guess I'm kinda just avoiding pain. I've learned to live with being a jerk. Sometimes it hurts more but that's just the way it has to be.
I don't know how to end this. There is no solution yet, no Jesus fixed it, hallelujah! so far. My wife tries her best to help. To smooth things sometimes, to let me escape other times. Anyway, if I've treated you poorly and your reading this it is not an excuse. You deserve better. I'm sorry. I got talking to her about it and she said, you should write about this so here it is. I hope you get something out of this. Maybe you feel really screwed up and now not feeling quite so alone. Maybe you simply have a clue now why Jethro is so difficult sometimes. It's about bedtime now and I'm down to 10% battery so thanks for reading, bye.
