We Are Not Crazy, Just Lacking Representation

TV relationships have done me dirty

Am I…insane?

This is just a casual, every day thought that I’m sure most Neurodiverse people can relate to, right?

I want to talk about that deep capacity we have for feelings; especially when it comes to relationships and how they’re depicted in film and television. As an AuDHD person, when I experience emotions, they consume me and feel like they will last forever.

Growing up, I had many real crushes on fictional characters. I would fixate on a new one every so often, but it was always the same. It was intense.

I could always tell when I was building to the point of no return. I would feel the obsession bubbling up inside of me and would think to myself, “Oh no. Here we go again.”

Cue the nonstop daydreaming, rewatching, and deep diving into the character and actor/actress who portrayed them. (On a funny note, I genuinely can’t remember who most of my obsessions were. ADHD is wild man.)

I love watching relationships blossom on TV. It’s the best part, right? The flirting, the baby steps it takes for it to finally be official…it makes me all warm and tingly.

What I cannot get over, however, is how break ups are portrayed. Most of the time, a couple would break up, the woman would cry about it for about a day, and then an episode later she moves onto the next person. Even if she still has some feelings for the recent ex, she has no problem fully functioning like nothing happened and would go out again with the first person who asked her out.

Huh? Pump the brakes. What do you mean?

Watching these scenes play out over and over again made me feel like I was insane, because I could never do that.

Listen, I know it’s all fictional. I know it’s not realistic. But tell that to the teenaged girl who sobbed so hard over Mitchell’s death in Being Human that her sister had to go get her ice cream to calm her down. Ugh, I still love him.

For me, when I go through a breakup (or any big, unexpected change), I am a complete wreck. It can take me months before I feel “normal” again. I feel things so intensely and so deeply, that when a change like that happens to me, it takes me forever to adjust. It takes my heart ages to heal. This is due to something that we experience called delayed processing.

For Autistic people like me, it takes my body much longer to process emotions and respond to certain situations than neurotypical people. So when I experience heartache, it not only feels like the only emotion I have ever known in my entire life, but it takes me much longer than everyone else around me to process and heal from it.

I would observe my friends go through their relationships and their breakups too. I couldn’t understand or relate to them either, which was isolating. They always seemed to bounce back so quickly. It made me extremely self conscious of my emotions to the point where I didn’t want to talk to anyone about them. I was often embarrassed by how long it took me to “get over it.”

When I finally do heal and I notice my body regulating, I still can’t open my heart up to another person for at least a year afterwards.

Really, every relationship I’ve had, it takes me about a year or two in between before I can even think about dating again. I wish I wasn’t like that.

Truly, I wish I could be the kind of person that bounces back. I wish that heartache wasn’t debilitating for me. I wish that I could shut off that part of me so that I can function at work, at home, with friends, etc.

So when I watch Susan Mayer (yes, I’ve just started watching Desperate Housewives thanks to James Matthewson - my life is over btw thx) move on from man to man after dating Mike Delfino, I actually feel physically sick to my stomach.

Yes, I know how TV shows work. I also know that women were written very poorly in the mid 2000s.

I still want to scream at Susan though, like I’ve wanted to scream at Rory Gilmore or Jessica Day or literally anyone in How I Met Your Mother.

Am I insane???

Maybe I’m just a silly girl who experiences every emotion so deeply that attachment is inevitable (even fictionally) and the process of detachment feels like individually plucking every single strand of hair out of my head.

That’s normal, right?

This has been a constant battle for me throughout my life. From being a little girl to an adult woman, this inevitability has deterred me from getting into relationships, (or even watching TV dramas for that matter) because I know what the ending of that relationship feels like. It’s devastating. I know that I can’t help but become so deeply attached to people and when those people don’t feel the same way or have the same capacity for feeling that I do, it ends in disappointment.

Relationships have always been difficult for me. Expressing my feelings is very challenging (this is also due to the fear of being judged for my Big Feelings), and TV telling me that I should be able to flip a switch and move on without skipping a beat pisses me off.

I don’t know exactly what fictional Neurodiverse representation looks like in media when it comes to relationships (which is sad), but I know that what I see in every dramatic television show is something that I simply cannot relate to. It has just taken me a very long time to understand why I can’t relate to it and that it is also very okay that I can’t relate to it. In the end, I love my Big Feelings.

Maybe one day I will create such media that accurately represents what my relationships feel like. In the meantime, enjoy my ramblings.

Reminder, We are not crazy, just lacking proper representation

xx

Disco Brain