'People Always Think I'm Insulting Them When I'm Just Having a Laugh!'

Who's the problem in this picture?

Witnesses (1947), Dorothea Tanning

Hi Polly,

What advice do you have for a woman who constantly gets feedback that they’re too honest and blunt?

I never have bad intentions and always think I’m indulging in a bit of banter with people until I register their facial expressions and body language and realize I’ve said something wrong. Or, even worse, I hear later through the grapevine that they've held it against me. It would be one thing if I knew that I was pushing the envelope a little bit but I genuinely don’t realize it until I get feedback. I’ve got ADHD and I know that impulsivity / impulsive speech is one of the main symptoms.

I try to remind myself to talk less and be more mysterious but I get so energized by being around people that I forget. At this point the only solution I can think of is to stop being jokey and silly, because it definitely happens far more when I’m being playful.

A lot of people think I’m witty and have a great sense of humor but a good portion think I’m mean, too. For every two times someone thinks I’m funny, there’s one person who finds me jarring or mean.

Giving up alcohol for a year helped but didn’t eliminate the issue entirely. Now I drink again, although not as much as I used to. I like drinking, I don’t want to give it up because I savor a break from being so in my head sometimes.

I never used to care what people thought of me because I used to be best friends with the two people in the world who I thought understood and enjoyed me the most. My two older sisters. They always loved my intelligence and humor. They’re much more socially palatable than me and somehow when I was with them I just made sense, felt free, and enjoyed myself too much to take in any feedback from anyone else.

People loved having the three of us around. We were the life of the party. But when I decided to take a stand against our abusive father they sided with him and I’m now estranged from both of them as well as both of my parents. Being out in the wilderness of finding a new tribe has been hell, and has showed me so many of my character flaws that I had no idea about when I was running with my own family pack. I suspect we’re all neurodivergent because I’m constantly taken aback by how much attention the average person pays to how they come across and how others are coming across, too.

Possibly because of said neurodivergence or my abusive background I generally don’t keep score of others’ missteps and wrong speech. It takes a lot to offend me and it also takes a long time to register when someone is being underhanded or unkind to me. However when I say the wrong thing to others, it’s like a video game where I see myself immediately lose a life and just know that soon those people won’t want me around anymore when my lives are depleted.

Help?

Love,

Bitchy Loner

Dear Bitchy Loner,

First of all, I feel for you so much. Please know that I’m sending you all the love I have right now. I hope you can feel it.

I understand exactly how it feels to be a wolf who has always traveled with a pack of dogs. You look menacing to others when you’re away from your pack. With no adorable puppy eyes and wagging tails around, they take one look at your friendly smile full of sharp teeth and start to feel suspicious. You make an observation and they hear growling. You make a joke and they hear “The better to eat you with, my dear!”

This is the story of my life. I wish I could say it’s gotten easier, but most dogs don’t understand me at all.

In my defense, dogs prefer for most social interactions to be incredibly predictable: Don’t look me in the eyes, look over there instead, wag your tail furiously, sniff my butt when I’m not looking. But that’s not me. I look you in the eyes. I say whatever springs into my wolfish mind. I smile and make jokes.

Almost no one can tolerate this. But that’s not all. They also hate heavy subjects, frankness, digressions, and earnest attempts at deep connection. I rarely observe or comment on anything anyone else does or says anymore because it always goes wrong. I don’t know if it’s about my bad personality or my bad vibes or the fact that some people might know my work ahead of time and have preconceptions of how a person who writes the things I do should seem in person, but I tend to make extremely dramatic impressions on the kinds of people who distrust intensity and honesty straight out of the gate.

There are a lot of them out there.

I have made many adjustments over the years. I used to not care what people think, too. Then I cared way too much, and it was terrible. Now I’m somewhere in between, but mostly I don’t try as hard, because I can say nothing at all and I’m still encountered as too much. I’m too much via text. I’m too much over email. I took a class on Freud last month and my friend who was taking the class with me thought that my face was skeptical/ disapproving over Zoom.

The irony is that this particular friend is a wolf, just like me and you. She loves her first interactions with others to be extremely unpredictable and rife with heavy subjects, intensity, jokes, revelations, or earnest attempts at deep connection. She prefers for her second through fifteenth interactions to feature mutual analysis, mocking, shit talking, sweeping statements about the stupidity of every single human on the face of planet Earth, and granular assessments of what we’re each experiencing emotionally, physically, mentally, creatively, and spiritually at that particular moment. She sometimes wants her sixteenth through thirtieth interactions to feature hurt accusations, direct discussions of how we’re misunderstanding each other, and three long audio messages about what her physical therapist said about her shoulder injury. After this, there is a swift return to goofiness and long-winded commentary on the glory of ham and cheese sandwiches.

My friend is a handful at times. Two days ago, I said a few things about exercise (yes it’s even more charmless over the phone than when I write about it) and she felt that I was implying that she was lazy.

Laziness is next to godliness in my book. Why would I besmirch anyone with this concept? I was only making weak suggestions because I was coming down with the flu and I felt a little depleted from our first hour of intense therapy-like conversation.

Is my friend neurodivergent? Am I? Is my other friend, who called me yesterday from her parked car outside her house to yell at the top of her lungs about how she’s on deadline on a script but she’s too fucked up to ever be a real writer or be normal or join the real world? Or is she borderline or bipolar or some other category that a bunch of white guys in the 1950s invented, mostly to describe their recalcitrant wives and mercurial mothers?

I’m not that interested in the answer to these questions. I only know the much more informative terms I’d use to describe both of my friends: brilliant and traumatized and adaptive. They were in hell and they invented a million ways out of hell, and their very adaptive escape routes not only look maladaptive outside of hell, but in the process of digging those exit tunnels, they inadvertently rearranged the ways their minds and bodies worked. Now sometimes they find difficult things very easy and simple things very hard. They make friends easily and lose them easily, too. They are strange, gentle, loving animals that are repeatedly mistaken for predators.

Sometimes I think my main purpose in life is to remind those friends, and all of you, that all of your narratives about yourselves are inaccurate. You aren’t abnormal. You are extraordinary. That word sums up most of my favorite human beings on the planet — the ones who saw me coming and laid out the red carpet instead of running the other way, the ones who know I’m way too much and they’re way too much and that’s what we love about each other.

Many of us have a history of trauma, either because we experienced abuse, we grew up in volatile, harsh family environments, or we struggled wildly to navigate life with ease due to our particular traits and sensitivities. Many of us sound a little manic or reactionary or narcissistic when we’re very upset. Many of us are thin-skinned and accusatory when we’re stressed out. Many of us can be careless when we’re busy. So we’re working on all of that, every single day.

Here's the crucial thing you need to understand about all of my friends and everyone else like us: When you take shame out of the picture, it changes everything. They soar. They feel free, finally. They build real friendships and satisfying, trusting romantic partnerships. They have successful creative careers and — much more importantly — derive meaning from small, everyday satisfactions and connections.

So I don’t use the words ‘neurodivergent’ or ‘borderline’ that often. Sometimes I say, “You know that you’re an absolute lunatic, right?” But only to the friends who understand that I don’t mean that they’re crazy or abnormal. I mean that they’re relentless, ferocious, untamed, absurd, audacious.

I’m not taking a strong stand against certain terms or concepts. I’m just telling you how I see these things. My life changed dramatically once I finally cultivated true compassion for myself, learned to respect my unique needs and desires, and refused to allow shame and trauma-induced anxiety to keep me small and afraid. Now I offer myself exactly what I need to thrive every day, and I do it without apology.

That sounds lofty. What I mean is that I stopped calling myself ‘too much’ or ‘harsh’ or ‘selfish.’ I stopped questioning my own needs and emotional reactions. I started to stand up for myself without making a big deal about it. I began to speak more directly. And I’ve mostly stopped worrying about it when people don’t seem to like me or misinterpret something I say.

I’m not saying it’s fun. But being who I am requires a deep acceptance of the fact that I am illegible to many people, and legible but absolutely repellent to many others. It’s just an unavoidable fact of my existence. I smile and other people see sharp teeth.

I try not to take it personally. I don’t need a thousand friends. I’m not running for office. I just need to feel free.

So this is my advice to you, even though I understand that your circumstances are going to make this work very challenging at times: Your trauma formed you into a beautiful, brilliant, hilarious shape. Your job is to honor the gifts that blossomed from your difficult circumstances. You need to find ways to use your natural talents, so you can understand yourself as the artist you are. You need to feed your body what it needs to heal from the abuse you suffered — I mean nutrition and exercise but I also mean gentle attention and love and focus. Turn down the volume on your mind and let your body tell you what it wants. Respect its initiatives.

And most importantly, listen to what your soul wants for you.

The only way to do any of these things is by reframing everything you are in ways that remove all shame from the picture. This looks suspicious to those who don’t understand how it feels to live in a state of shame-induced anxiety. They’ll think you’re being fantastical or arrogant just for respecting your own brilliant mind. They’ll think you’re being selfish just for honoring and protecting your own body. They’ll think you’re being weird just for trying to access your soul, a part of each of us that humans have been talking and writing about since they painted on the walls of caves.

This world will heap shame on you for becoming who you are and standing up for that person. Don’t take it personally. Become who you are anyway.

Because you aren’t a bitch or a loner. You are brilliant and traumatized and adaptive. You’re a survivor and you have an artist’s mind and soul. Go out and find others like you. They’ll drive you crazy at first. Expect it and work hard to manage your wild feelings about it. Recognize that this is how it feels to have intimate relationships with other brilliant, traumatized, adaptive people. It’s normal to struggle to make deep connections with people who are just as smart, intense, funny, and over the top as you.

Isn’t that what you want, though? I mean, every wolf pack has a few dogs in it. Dogs are cute and they’re a little more predictable and comforting than wolves. But you can’t go live with a whole pack of dogs when you’re a wolf. And you deffffffinitely can’t live with a pack of wolves who are trying to act like dogs, or who actually believe that they’re dogs, like your family. Because those motherfuckers will rip you to shreds the second you point out the truth. You’re a threat to the pack, so you have to go.

It's hard to be a wolf. You were raised by wolves, but they won’t even admit that’s what they are. And the world is one big dog show, where everyone is preening and prancing. in absolute denial about the fact that they’re being led around on leashes.

It sucks to see the truth clearly.

But it feels great to be free.

Polly

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