Trautism

How many times did I fall for my older sister’s “strawberry feet” prank when we were little kids? She’d repeatedly tell me her stinky feet smelled like that deliciously sweet red summer fruit, and despite having just had an atrociously sour whiff of them, I’d still somehow get hoodwinked into more sniffing. 

“Oh no, Christie, I’m sorry. I was wrong before, but this time they really do smell like strawberries! See, I’ll do it too!” She’d wiggle her toes and flare her nostrils, theatrically skimming her face over her foot as if it were a loaf of freshly baked bread. I too would lean in, with cautious curiosity – and then I’d squeal with surprise and disgust as my olfactory senses came under assault yet again. While we lack the data to know how common this actually occurred, the dynamic repeated often enough to create a running joke in our family, and our daughters get to laugh about it now. 

It’s genuinely hilarious… but admittedly, also rather pitiful. Being duped like this once is bad enough when we consider the practicality of what my sister was claiming. Because why would anyone’s feet smell like strawberries, ever? Except maybe if they’d recently finished a fruit-themed pedicure? And more importantly, if her feet didn’t smell like strawberries five minutes ago, and they have been sitting there in view without interference, how would their scent be drastically improved now? 

But she’d fervently assure me it was true, and I’d believe her. This brings to mind an old Italian proverb (the one that President G.W. Bush epically goofed): “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Basically this means that it’s your fault for acting like a jerk, but if you reveal your jerk-like behavior and I continue to let you get the best of me, then that’s on me. So why didn’t I learn from my sister’s initial deception? Or even her subsequent trickeries?

I do recall being gullible in other situations during my childhood, including ones that didn’t involve my only sibling. When a planetarium visited my school, two girls in my kindergarten class told me that anyone wearing a turtleneck would have to go topless to be admitted. And that’s exactly the type of shirt I was wearing that day. Horrified by the idea of exposing myself, I cried and told my teacher I had a headache so I could go home. (And it would be 30+ years before I finally saw the inside of a planetarium.) 

Unfortunately, in the turtleneck example, I had panicked so quickly and completely that I didn’t consider the reasonableness of the assertion from these girls or that it may be wise to get more official confirmation before reacting. The fact that they were lying solely to mess with me didn’t occur to me until I was much older… because why would they do it? We had no tension between us, at least none that I knew about. 

Since I was generally a kind and honest child, I seem to have assumed that everyone else was like that too. Right after starting first grade a month or two after the school year had begun – and despite being the awkward new kid from up north – I was thrilled to tell my mom that I had already been invited to a birthday party. One of my classmates had shared all the wonderful details of her upcoming celebration at a fun pizza joint, something like a Chuck E. Cheese. It sounded awesome! 

However, I never actually got an invite. Eventually I understood that she had just been bragging, which is apparently a very common thing to do. It’s not in my wheelhouse at all, though, so I didn’t recognize it for what it was as it happened. And I don’t know for sure if her intention was to be hurtful or if she was simply oblivious to being impolite, but when I think back to her tone and demeanor with the perspective I have now, I tend to conclude it’s the former. 

Experiences like these helped me better understand duplicity and malice as I became a teenager, but taking words at face value continued to create hardship for me, especially if those words were delivered earnestly by someone I’d decided to trust. I had a serious boyfriend throughout high school, and we said we were going to get married… which we symbolized by buying a promise ring. I interpreted those surface words and gestures as having deep literal meaning, and genuinely expected a lifetime together, without thinking through the most pressing realities: we were young, inexperienced, and lacking passion; I was a guilty Catholic while he was an unrepentant atheist; and in moves that foreshadowed our ultimate demise, he had repeatedly demonstrated a proclivity for enjoying suggestive situations with other girls. 

Why did I think we would last? Because we said we would, and that was enough for me. The possibility that we might feel differently in the future wasn’t an option, as my youthful naivete had begun mixing with a maturing sense of integrity. I seem to have understood that when someone makes such a commitment, they guide their emotions and behavior in ways to sustainably support their decision – instead of allowing their thoughts and impulses to run rampant, which may inspire one to undo their prior promises. In the case of my high school sweetheart, I remained steadfastly loyal and got blindsided by our breakup as I started college, when he announced his unshakable desire to live a typical college lifestyle and have lots of random sex. 

Despite this incredibly hurtful bait and switch during a critical social development phase, I continued to take emotionally-laden words over meaningful actions in my most intimate relationships. My first husband and I fought constantly over money, but because he would swear that he would spend or earn differently, I would repeatedly believe him, ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary. It became one of several ways I accepted what was unacceptable in the name of love and dedication to him and our life together. 

When our marriage finally collapsed, it was because a close mutual friend told me that he and I were soulmates. He professed his deep and passionate love for me and said he would take care of me. Most critically, he also insisted that we were so well-matched we could talk about anything – unlike any serious conversations with my first husband, which inevitably dissolved into abrasive arguing. 

I believed everything this new life partner said. Almost immediately, though, he proceeded to indulge his selfish whims, misrepresent himself, and manipulate and neglect me in a pattern that would continue for the next 18+ years. But as long as he’d still firmly say he loved me, and that his bad behavior was an accident and he would be different going forward, I’d continue to invest in him and us.

Ironically, before we got together, I knew that this guy had a history of mistreating women and being generally misogynistic. But not only could I empathize with his alleged mistakes since I had done stupid things out of ignorance and confusion too, he also swore that I was different to him, and that our bond was unique. His intensity for me seemed so real, and he was so adamant about our destiny together that despite all these warning signs, he ended up becoming my second husband. 

In some of the earlier stages of our relationship – and informed by the foreboding metaphor in Christina Perri’s pop song about a guy hurting and discarding a string of women – I’d ask him for assurance that I wouldn’t end up in his “jar of hearts.” He didn’t convince me with any logical specificity that he had recovered from whatever had driven his terrible behavior before, instead simply showering me with expressions of his radically profound love for me. He’d also speak eloquently and extensively about the undeniability of our beautifully cosmic pairing that we were so fortunate to have discovered despite our challenging situations (this time it’s Rihanna providing the soundtrack: “we found love in a hopeless place…”).  

Currently in my mid-40s and navigating a complex separation from this second husband, I can see the pattern in my life clearly: I’d consistently ignore intuition and my own feelings. As long as someone I chose to trust was confidently talking to me, I’d generally go along with what they were saying, even if their actions directly conflicted with their words. Even if their perspective defied reason. 

This paradigm was not limited to my personal relationships, either. It repeated in my professional life as well. One of the worst manifestations was believing wealthy business owners when they said they couldn’t afford to pay me properly, yet they sent their kids to private school and luxuriated in their mansions while my family and I crammed into a small apartment and shared one car for many years. Another was thinking that gossiping two-faced coworkers or creeping executives more than twice my age were actually my friends, both of which had consequences I’m still processing. 

So now I’ve identified this pervasive structure in my life, but why did it happen? What inspires a woman to make such foolish mistakes – to keep believing in fallacies and giving relentlessly to relationships that were not honoring her back? At this point my reactions seem less about being truly gullible and more about acquiescing for the sake of love, kindness, and cooperation. 

As elevated as that may sound, a lack of self-worth could have been undermining any nobility in my practice of it. Maybe I subconsciously believed I didn’t deserve to assert myself or that I wasn’t good enough for better treatment, and therefore needed to make the most of what got served to me. Or perhaps I thought such rude and harmful behavior was rather normal, because I grew up with limited influences outside of my family home where my distant and disturbed father fundamentally disrespected my mother whom I adored. 

Although, strangely, as I’ve lived through various difficult experiences, I thought they were not as bad in the moment as they were in hindsight. And often in the situations where I consciously knew I was being hurt, I can see now that I’d unknowingly detach from the depths of my pain, which masked the extent of the harm and often kept me locked in unhealthy situations. Conversely, I tended to be extremely empathetic to the plights of others. It’s like I was suffering from alexithymia or a type of emotional blindness that pertained primarily to my own feelings, which regularly skewed me in the direction of accommodating others more than myself.

None of this was very conscious until recently, but I can see how early life experiences taught me to view my feelings and reactions as far too intense. And if nobody else wanted to deal with them, then I might’ve concluded that they were intolerable for me too. While some of these behaviors look funny in hindsight – fearfully watching the temperature gauge in our family’s car to make sure it wasn’t overheating, or squealing with delight when I thought we were stopping for fast food (when in fact my dad was just changing lanes) – others were inadvertently offensive or downright dangerous. And almost all of these extreme expressions tended to garner exasperation, frustration, scorn, anger, or embarrassment from my family. 

Carrying this imprint with me over the years, I accidentally instilled a framework of disregarding or dulling most of my emotions, and replaced those internal guideposts with data from what I had deemed to be trustworthy sources. Whether from my parents, my sister, the Bible, classmates, or pop culture (which regularly served as a decoder for a social world that felt foreign to me), I unknowingly collected a library of what was allegedly appropriate to feel or do in any given situation, calibrating my internal state and behavior accordingly. Most people probably still feel their feelings and simply adjust their behavior, but I seem to have prioritized authenticity, going straight to the source and transmuting my natural feelings into determination to truly feel what was “right” instead of just acting on it. 

This outsized emphasis on integrity and justice can be common in autistic people. It’s born from the same rigid black-and-white thinking that probably affected my level of trust in the people closest to me throughout my life. Harboring discomfort with uncertain gray areas created a false litmus test where I decided someone was either completely trustworthy or not at all. 

Consequently, executing such a binary belief system required me to wear a pair of proverbial rose-colored glasses. I had to ignore signals of inadequacy and negative intentions in order to maintain the facade of “trustworthy” and thus feel safe in my relationships and the world in general. I was somewhat aware I was doing this as it happened, but I’d thought that my insistence on cultivating a positive mindset in this way stemmed from strength, faith, and tolerance when it was in fact rooted in weakness. I failed to accurately see the complexity of people and situations to my own detriment.

And the damaging blowback of all this blind trust and positivity is something I have yet to fully comprehend. The irony is that I seem to have thought I needed to believe those fictions in order to survive. To get along. To belong somewhere. I’d cling to the people who seemed to accept me and decide to love them and trust them no matter what. I demonstrated an ongoing willingness to ignore reality for the sake of bonding with someone I considered worthy, often solely because they were willing to give me some time and attention, which I interpreted as love and kindness. Because why else would someone want to be near a strange, emotional person like me, except to be nice or out of obligation? (And ugh, this phrasing is yet more proof of internalized viewpoints from unsupportive people in my life.)

The other reason would be if they needed something from me, in which case the kind thing to do would be to give it to them if I could, and being kind had become my default. But “could” is an interesting operative word here. What dictates what we can and can’t do? I seemed to take this very literally too, and I would give as much as I possibly could to whoever apparently needed or wanted it without thinking about the personal ramifications to myself. 

I became a background character, an afterthought, in my very own mind. Each time my pain or needs were disregarded, it reinforced this underlying concept that if my feelings and needs don’t matter then I don’t matter either. I may have subconsciously learned to believe that my primary role on this earth was to make others happy, honoring whatever it was that someone was trying to do. You can imagine how this had messy repercussions in partying atmospheres as I got older, but that’s a story for another post.

So, in closing, ideally my sister’s shenanigans with her “strawberry feet” would have safely taught me about the dangers of duplicity and how to set limits. Maybe that’s how a less wounded or neurotypical child would have processed it. Instead her antics may have reinforced a habit of pleasing others and going along to get along, even if it meant accepting foul play, because it would at least give me more interaction with someone I cared about.

I didn’t know it then, but I was clearly starved for a healthy amount of love, attention, and affirmation. And when that combined with these other dynamics and my naturally nice but autistically aloof personality, the kindness got completely overblown. It was typically the only card I felt comfortable playing, but it got weaponized against me for decades, and not just by others, but by myself too. 

Kindness is still a card I want to deal out more than any other, and I’ll probably always be compelled to indulge the desire, but I’m refining my strategy with it. A core feature of the new approach is to be kinder to myself instead of disappearing my needs and destroying my wellness for the sake of others. Another is to accept my internal state for what it is, as I’ve learned that I can recognize my extreme feelings without acting on them or being defined by them. 

It’s liberating to feel so much more accepted, even though it’s just me accepting myself. It’s also a bit confusing, though, as I thought I had accepted myself just fine… but we can’t accept what we don’t acknowledge. And it’s hard for us to acknowledge what others deny.