“When are you going to trust me?”

That’s what M asked me one day when I told her that I want to compliment her on her looks and tell her how sexy she is constantly but that I have an apprehension that it will come across wrong because of my alexithymia (emotional blindness). It was a serious concern. So much of a concern that I had wanted to tell her WHY I don’t compliment her anywhere near as much as I wanted to.

Her response was rather dismissive. She said something like “So you think there’s a wrong way to compliment me” (or something.. I can’t recall her exact wording) and laughed it off. I reiterated that it’s a real concern for me because she means so much to me that I don’t want my words to be taken in a way might cause confusion about what I mean. She said I was overthinking things (a common refrain from her to me) and asked “When are you goin got trust me?”

I told her that “…my inability to access the full range of human emotional expression causes me considerable anxiety when interacting with people I care about. It’s not about trust in the person. It’s about my lived experience knowing how things have gone wrong repeatedly”. To which she responded “so you don’t trust me”.

I told her that I trusted her; that if I didn’t trust her I wouldn’t have been able to ask her about the Art Bar situation because people tend to take what I say and jump to conclusions all the time.

I thought, ok, she really wants me to trust her with reckless abandon. She’s told me that I am safe with her. I’ve told her that I process my feelings in the open. I’ve told her that I share where my head is in the process so that things aren’t a surprise when they are discussed and that my thoughts change as I consider different perspectives. So I start sharing with her the thoughts and feelings that I have. SHE demanded that I trust her. SHE told me that I was safe. What did she do when I started giving her what she demanded of me? She jumped to conclusions. Irony of Ironies she didn’t trust me. She started gaslighting me telling me that I’d changed my views on things that I’d never even thought about. Why? Because she dismissed my concerns when I came to her to tell her that my brain works differently. She was looking at me, my words, my behaviors through the lens of someone who is dealing with “normal” people. She read me wrong, jumped to conclusions, and discarded me because she didn’t understand that what I was telling her was important.

What I’ve learned from this is that I can’t afford to trust anyone with me being me. The woman I loved and gave a year of my life to rejected me for being autistic after telling me that I was safe with her and demanding that I trust.