Episode 7 - Jealousy
[Laura]
Hi, you're listening to In the Kaleidoscope, a podcast where parent Laura…
[Carrie]
…and child Carrie…
[Laura]
…talk about family dynamics when the parent is neurodivergent and the child is neurotypical.
Welcome.
So, this episode, we're going to talk about jealousy, it kind of has come up, in conversation here and there. And so, I got curious, I'm active on Mastodon, which has been my complete replacement for Twitter now that we can't stand the Twitter environment. I mean, where it’s not even Twitter anymore. So, I looked into Mastodon, I really enjoy it.
And I'm active in kind of the Actually Autistic community in there. And so, I lobbed out to the group. “Actually Autistic friends, do you feel jealousy? I don't much and I'm wondering if it's an autist thing or a me thing.” And I got a lot of people weighing in saying in general, it seems like they don't, there's kind of this sort of hyper rational attitude toward life. And one person finally said toward the bottom, in a way that I really liked, let me go through the things here. Sorry, I should have. Okay, here we go.
She says, she, I don't know, I'm saying she, I have no idea. None of us know anybody's gender. So, the answer is “with romance, it can partly be resentment and or default self-devaluation about not getting what you think you want. That can also be the shadow side of realizing what you wanted and what's good for you are two different things. The flip side of accepting your experience, fighting it and feeling cheated. So, it can be an autistic thing as we work out that bad attachment doesn't work for us. It's painful, but we learn.” And so, I said, “accepting your experience to me, sounds like the opposite of jealousy.” And so that kind of gave me a framework to kind of be thinking about it. I know you and I have talked about it a little bit. So, how is this relative to you? What's your thinking on it?
[Carrie]
I mean, there's a whole part about this as a child to an autistic parent that I would love to talk about, but real quick, just because you gave kind of this primer, I also just wanted to share my philosophy on jealousy. Cause I thought about it a lot. I thought about a lot outside of my relationship to you and autism or anything like that, because for me, the experience of jealousy is very energized. It's like right there with, but it's got urgency to it. Like I got to get something done. I agree with that person that goes with resentment and has something to do with like not accepting self and life.
So, the way I've always thought of it, it's a feeling I need to metabolize into inspiration. And when I feel it, it's important to, as an artist, my background, I have a lot of background in acting, a lot of background in design. I went to design school, acting school, and you feel jealous all the time.
Everybody's awesome. Every time you see anything beautiful or clever or just genius, you're like, ah! As a creative person, you want to do something like that. You want to be at that “level”. And I just found it very important very early on to recognize that feeling as a positive. And the way I would do that is I would be like, that's inspiration. Something about that is inspiration. And it's important to then go study the technique or get to know this artist's life and stuff like that. So that's my main experience of jealousy before I put two and two together.
[Laura]
Is that like admiration?
[Carrie]
It can be. I mean, it definitely comes with admiration. I think jealousy happens much more rarely than admiration. A lot of the people that I think are awesome. I don't feel the identity like urge to be like. I can see somebody and be like, that person's awesome. And there's no part of me that's like, “oh, I want to be like that. Why am I not like that? Why don't I have that?” You know, that kind of thing. I often get more jealous of, “I want to be like that” than I do, “why don't I have that?” And I know a lot of other people think of jealousy as a “have” kind of thing. But even if there's something that I want to have, I should make a plan and get it.
[Laura]
Well, that's the thing. The toxicity of jealousy comes where I want something somebody else has, and I don't want them to have it anymore. I want it.
[Carrie]
But I do not relate to that. I don't relate to that at all.
[Laura]
That's like the only time in my life I have felt jealous was over a breakup where the person was with someone else. It was part of kind of a mental addiction I had to that person. And it was, you know, umpteen years ago, but I just, I was just so enraged, not at that person, the person I wanted, but at the person who had him.
[Carrie]
Oh, interesting.
[Laura]
I just was enraged at that other person who was sleeping with them now. I, ugh, you know, and so then I obviously, I realized that was pretty toxic and I shouldn't indulge in that too much. And I kind of tried to use that as if you want to say inspiration to get over the guy.
[Carrie]
Yeah.
[Laura]
Cause it's like, well, okay. I don't want to say it was hurting me.
[Carrie]
So, I mean, I don't want to say that I haven't felt that that's a very super universal feeling. So, like when you talk about jealousy and you're talking about in that way, I definitely also felt that, but I've also really recognized that I don't know what that relationship's like, like, what do I know? I'm just projecting the dream of what I wish the relationship had already been because, what are you going to do? You don't get to be with the person the way you want to do. And that sucks, but they're not magically with somebody else in the way that you wanted to be with them.
[Laura]
Well, for me, it was very much about the physical aspects of what I wasn't getting and what that other person was. So, it was pretty carnal. It wasn't like fluffy stuff about the relationship, which was extremely toxic anyway, but then there were people that I made jealous with my actions that I just did not understand. Like, aren't you just happy I'm having a good time and I'll have a good time with you sometimes? And I'll go have a good time with somebody else. And what's the big deal? I'm like, I was kind of free for all. Anyway, taking this lens now and thinking back on even my childhood, like why all the kids in school didn't like me. And I didn't have very many friends.
Were they jealous of me? Cause I was like this A student that the, that the teachers all loved and everything. I mean, that never even occurred to me. I thought they just despised me.
[Carrie]
Some, some of them probably were, probably not everyone, but okay. So just to change it to the focus of the podcast. Okay, so, at a very young age, I was aware of the fact that I could not perform the way you could, like, I couldn't perform at school the way you could. I couldn't track information in the same way. I read slower than you did, that used to drive me nuts. And then also I was a kid, but I was being treated like I should be already able to do these things. So, I always felt like very behind you as an adult, able to do everything. And more recently, as I've been unpacking this awareness of the fact that you're autistic and I'm not, I've noticed that a lot of the latent jealousy and envy I have is actually towards the autistic traits, because I definitely had this belief that someday I would mature into an adult who would display autistic traits.
I was always trying to figure out my special interests, figure out how to focus for that degree, how to care less about people's take on my life, how to be totally confident in my own decision, in a way that we now know is like, these things are all autistic traits. I remember in college at one point, just like I was kind of just in school and I was feeling so confident as a designer, you know, like so confident. And yet I still couldn't make a design choice with greater than like 65% certainty maybe. And I had to just finally be like, I just don't think I'm ever going to feel a hundred percent confident in anything. There's always another possibility that could work. And I had to just be like, I guess I'm just going to have to make decisions at 51% plus, because I don't think I'm going to pull off even 80.
[Laura]
And just to kind of give some context about that, I was, and I always have been kind of the person that just makes a decision and goes with it. It's like the decision has been made and we're now going to commit to it a hundred percent, because I believe that a hundred percent is something that you get when you fully commit to the thing. And so, once I've made a decision, I literally like forget all the other options and I am on this path and this is the path that we are on. So why was the point of even like second guessing or thinking about anything else, which isn't always accurate, right? I mean, it's not like every decision I ever made was the best decision. I made a lot of really bad decisions when, especially in the realm of parenting, like you say, I was pathologically certain of everything.
[Carrie]
I was so jealous. I was so, I am still jealous. Like I will never have the experience of that kind of certainty outside of the childhood belief in God, right? There's just kind of like a moment where you kind of have matured past the child's just taking everything at face value. I was never going to feel that way. And I really wanted to. I really was trying, I was always trying to really look at my decisions and get to the point of certainty. You know, I put a lot of effort into it. At this point, I can tell you in some ways it's good, right?
From a decision-making standpoint, like I know how to take full responsibility for my decision and I'll commit to it until there's a reason to pivot. But I have been jealous of that.
I've also been jealous of the ability to recognize your preferences, expectations from the faith around you. Because I mush so easily to other influences. It has like taken me years to figure out I'm going to have to go, I'm not going to mature into knowing what I want.
I have to like pick by way of trial and error, like that kind of thing.
[Laura]
I didn't even know this about myself. I have supersonic hearing, right? So, I am sensitive. It's not even sensitive. I can hear everything. I just hear everything and I don't stop hearing it. You know, I don't just get used to a random noise. So, our house was quiet.
[Carrie]
Yeah.
[Laura]
And I didn't even recognize that as a preference. I just assumed that everybody can hear this way. So why wouldn't everybody want the house to be like this? And I thought I was providing this respite or whatever. Come to find out years later that the two of you tell me that you would blast the music when I wasn't home, you know? And as soon as you heard the garage door open, you'd turn it down and make it all quiet again.
[Carrie]
I will say that it left me with a preference for quiet. I still expect many hours of my evening to be spent quietly. But again, I don't prioritize my life to make that happen the way you did. I just was living with the low key. I never was chill as I was when mom was forcing everything to be quiet.
[Laura]
So, for you, it's generally a preference, for me, It's actually like a somatic need. I mean, I can't stand it, otherwise. And you guys are kind of working around me and whatever. So yeah, I definitely created the environment that I was able to relax in or be comfortable in at home.
[Carrie]
But here's the thing I'm trying to express the jealousy about.
[Laura]
Yes.
[Carrie]
You can claim the severity of your somatic need. I have spent decades recognizing my own preferences as just preferences and not designing the space accordingly. I have been living in discomfort because I was waiting to have the kind of certainty that you just had available to you, like thinking at some point that's what grownups do. Right?
[Laura]
Wow.
[Carrie]
I could have been more comfortable that whole time, but I didn't know.
[Laura]
Well, I was like that long before I grew up, I mean, it was just like, I didn't grow up and become this. I just was always this, you know, I understand how much of my parenting influenced this set of circumstances, because it's not like I was saying, well, you know, I have very strong hearing and that's why I like it quiet. It was more like, no, quiet is good. Quiet is good. And we will all enjoy quiet now. If I had to do it differently, now that would be something I would be a little more mindful of because, ike that goofy movie, right. The movie, um, runaway bride. Julia Roberts, where she doesn't know how she likes her eggs because she just likes the eggs. However, the guy she's involved with likes the eggs. It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask you what your preferences were.
[Carrie]
And I wouldn't have had the answer. What you actually would have had to do was show me all the options you could think of and find out with me what my preference was, because I don't know, right? Like I am mushy. I am fitting to the humans around me because that's how children are made to fit. And it would have required options and exploratory interests.
[Laura]
We had a, well, I had a very strong biblical background and there's that verse in the Bible, “train up the child and the way they shall go. And when they are old, they will not depart from it”, basically discipline the hell out of them or whatever, literally. And I mean, I know there are certainly contexts in which that's a positive, treat a child to be honest or teach a child to be considerate or whatever.
But when it comes to preferences, things that are considered to be virtues when they're really just preferences.
[Carrie]
Yeah.
[Laura]
Are really way more up for options.
[Carrie]
Yeah. And then the special interest one is an important one for me. And I'm not saying that I haven't done well with these influences.
This is kind of a side, but people without these frameworks that they're trying to match, they can wander a lot longer than I did. So I think that there's been some like benefits for striving for this. Like I've watched you, one of the things I remember is my mom reading about England Kings and Queens, like royalty. It was such an intense walk of information. And it was fully invested interest. Right.
So, I'm like, okay, that's what it looks like when somebody is interested in something so that I'm wandering around high school where I luckily had a lot of things I could try, but I'm looking for things that make me obsessed. And to be fair, all humans can find things that they are so interested in. They are willing to go down a rabbit hole, all humans, but it's not hyper-focused. It's not hyper-focused for me. I found like 10 interests that I really like and I do them all sometimes. And I felt like a failure.
[Laura]
Wow. That whole Kings and Queens of England thing was because we were going to England. Right?
[Carrie]
Yeah.
[Laura]
It was before the trip to England and I wanted to have them all down before we went. Yep. That's why flashcards, I had books, I had movies. I did all the things. Yep. Yep. I still have them all over in the other room. Like getting a tiny bachelors in the King and Queens.
Yeah. It's like little mini bachelors. All the things that we're into and obsessing about it so that it like gets locked into our brain. So, you were jealous of the ability to do it or what that looked like?
[Carrie]
Uh, I thought I hadn't found things that I loved because, like today, I'm reading Unmasking Autism now and it's helping. The more I learn about autism and the more I know how I am not autistic. I mean like the 10 things I'm interested in today are mapped pretty consistently to the 10 things I found in high school, theater, design, human health, gardening, a little bit like growth, like the love of the outside, like that kind of thing. I don't know. I've only said four, but it is true that my interest in them has stayed consistent. I may not always have the access to practicing my interest or engaging with my interests because of like, I'm not in school for acting right now or I have a design job, so it takes priority, but it's so consistent.
I am still interested in the same kinds of things spread out over my life, but that's not what I witnessed growing up. What I witnessed was I'm super interested in this and then at some point I get tired of it. In reflecting on it right now, I'm realizing just like that at some point that acting would release me.
Like at some point I'd get to the end of my interest and it just doesn't happen. I could still get up right now and go and start fanning the flames for acting and it would be wonderful. But I'm realizing now that I'm going to have to work on that a little bit in but, I'm still waiting for things to lock down or end so I can change focus to something else that's my proper right next interest.
It's not happening.
[Laura]
I have a special interest queue right now and I have told myself I need to complete before I bring in another one. Like I'm scrapbooking, I have my scrapbooking thing where I scrapbook my whole life obsessively. I collect things all the time. I'm bringing them in a thing and finishing that, and I wanted to start needlepoint, and I wanted to start cooking artisanal chocolate. But those are both going to involve a deep dive into this whole chemistry of the whole thing and the color of the thing. I wanted to learn to paint with thread basically, thread painting.
[Carrie]
Yeah.
[Laura]
And I'm like, okay, I need to just put those over here until I finish. You know, I need to get it caught up on my scrapbooking and I need to get this art gallery thing off the ground that I'm doing and make sure our podcast is humming along. It doesn't need like active shaping, you know, it's just working. And it seemed like there was something else that I was like, I don't even know what it is now. But I do have things it's like a flame. It's like, I flame it up.
I get really, really intense with it. And I always remain an expert on that thing up until the level I got because I don't really forget what I've learned. But I always need a new thing coming in. And it used to be relationships. It used to be the people I was involved with. That was unfortunate.
[Carrie]
Interesting. Yeah, I've noticed that. I think in some of the autistic people I've dated, I have felt---and that's a weird side part of this is I am learning right now, even as we speak, that I am cued into the good feeling it is to be someone's special interest. You know?
[Laura]
Yeah.
[Carrie]
And that has created some, amongst other things that have also created this, but there are created some weird dynamics where I end up in like---when I first started dating back when I was like, 15 in college and stuff. It was a codependent relationship over and over again, because it was that special, there's something about that, like being somebody's special interest is being a fixation, which is very close to an objectification. It's not a, I gotta unweave.
[Laura]
Well, that's, I mean, well, part of your unweaving, that is how I parented. That's how I love. You and your sibling were my special interest for a long time. And remember, I used to call it enmeshment. My style of loving is enmeshment. And it was like, I would overwhelm the object of my love with so much shit. And when I had kids, I was just like, I really can't do that with these little tiny people.
I mean, I didn't know that I can't be like totally full on enmeshment, but, and so I'm kind of artificially pulling back from showing the amount of love I was feeling this overwhelming love I'm feeling, but you can't show it to someone who's that kind of defenseless. But I'm sure you sense that also, that there's like a distance here. There's like a gap between the reality of what you probably intuited I was feeling, and what I was actually showing, because I didn't want to overwhelm you.
I didn't want to push you away the way I'd pushed away so many other people. And I did not, I never figured out how to balance it out or how to do that correctly. I just did the best I could with it. Kind of knowing something is there, but not really having any tools to deal with it.
[Carrie]
And you didn't have the language to know how you can't manage something you can't name.
[Laura]
Yeah, I know. So, our dance is from my point of view has been me, and being able to feel love and return when that's your style, when your style is this kind of love, how do you feel love and return when it's not that style? You know, it's more like, it's just something different. It's a different sort of dynamic. And that's not something I've even come close to understanding until this relationship I'm in now, like how to move in a healthy way. And you of course have taught me so much because even before all this exploration of autism, you were setting boundaries.
You were articulating to me what you were learning and the therapy you were doing saying, “here's what I need from you, mom”,very explicitly telling me things. And I would earnestly try to do those things without understanding them, but I would try to put on the disposition, and even that was helpful. No, even that was helpful.
I think it was for both of us to kind of, it's like that line in Hamlet, “assume a virtue if you have it not”, you know, I would just, I act like I could do the stuff. And then, we got to the point where I started my own therapy and that just took it to another level, me talking to a therapist about all this, and having them kind of go, well, did you think about blah, blah, blah, you know.
So that's kind of been the journey, but that underlying hum of you being jealous of me or things that I was able to do. I mean, I always knew it was there. I always kind of felt sort of a I'd want to share something with you that I was proud of. And there was always a piece of you that was a congratulatory, but also there was that piece of your reaction that was kind of like, why can't I do that? And why aren't I doing that or whatever?
[Carrie]
Yeah.
[Laura]
So, I'm grateful to understand that a little more now. It's just--
[Carrie]
Yeah. Once in college, you said to me, I think I made it all the way through college and we were on our way out the door into real life. And you said, I have no idea why the things that you do work out for you, but I've just, I have observed that they do. So, you know, you just keep doing you. And I was like, thank you.
[Laura]
That was it. Cause there was a certain point in your detachment from me and you have the healthy teenage detachment from me where you stopped taking my advice. There was absolutely the time when you were younger, where you're like, mom helped me, like with whatever. And I'd use my mom voice or I'd help you or tell you exactly what to do. Give me the script. You would say, write down what I should say to somebody, and we would do that stuff.
But there was a certain point where you were like, nothing that you say applies to me anymore. And I think it was the first thing it was like, when you said you were applying to colleges, this isn't the first time this happened, but you were applying to colleges and you got into every college you applied to. And my charming and fabulous advice was for you to go to the university closest to home so that you could be close to home. You know, and it was also a liberal arts college as opposed to art school. And everything else was an art school. I don't know if I argued with you about it, but it's like, man, you threatened me.
[Carrie]
I threatened you. So, you threatened me.
[Laura]
I didn't, I didn't mean it in a threatening manner.
[Carrie]
That you wouldn't sign off on any of the other ones unless I could explain. I had to prove it.
[Laura]
Not a threat, it's an exercise in intellectual consideration. Well, so you did the smart thing, right? As you roped in my best friend, who is a long time designer. And she went to---did she go to art school? I don't think she actually did go to art school.
[Carrie]
No, she's always wished she had. And I knew that.
[Laura]
Very clever. And she said, Laura, she needs to go to the top art school she can. It's going to set her up for life. So, okay.
[Carrie]
I don't actually know if it was that. I think actually, Carrie's advice too, was to go into like the deep design side, like follow advertising and stuff like that. Versus getting like a day job at a more neutral company. Go as hard on design as you could for as long as possible.
[Laura]
Well, that was after you graduated, but this was just the decision to go to Pratt instead of going to whatever it was in the middle of Boston, you know? And then I saw what you had to do that freshman year and how difficult that was and how great it was for you, et cetera. And it was that point I was like, huh, okay. My dad couldn't give me career advice. I can't give you career advice anymore, but it's going to work. And look at you now. I mean, you're freaking amazing and very successful. But the whole thing has been kind of---
[Carrie]
I got a little bit of special interest for when it comes to like typography and UX and layout, like sometimes, but people keep calling it passionate.
[Laura]
And it was nice that there was enough overlap between our two career things that we could maintain kind of some common vocabulary for a lot of the things. I'd majored in marketing and so we have a lot we can talk about it. Well, okay. I think this has been probably more than a half hour of our normal segments.
[Carrie]
Uh oh.
[Laura]
I mean, thanks for talking about this. I don't know if it was difficult, but I feel like we just scratched the surface, but cool.
[Carrie]
That's cool. It's a theme more than a topic.
[Laura]
Yeah. Okay. So now it's on the table. We can talk about it other times. It can come up, it can come up spontaneously in a conversation.
[Carrie]
Totally. Exactly.
[Laura]
Okay. Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of In the Kaleidoscope. See you next time.
Bye.
[Carrie]
Bye.