I have had this phrase stuck in my head for many many years, and it has often helped me to understand human interaction better when growing up as an undiagnosed and unrecognised high-potential/high-masking/… woman.
It goes like this: sometimes, the words we communicate and the words we keep for ourselves, do not reach the person they are destined for. Be it because of physical, mental or emotional distance. Reasons may vary, but the words, the misunderstandings do not reach far enough. And so they fall. The fall into the space between two people, never going to their intended place, never reaching the understanding that was aimed, never communicating what was expected by the person saying or writing them. They are ineffective in their finality, grains falling on infertile ground or bricks falling from the sky into a ravine. They keep falling. In this space between people. This unnamed wasteland where misunderstandings, conflict, expectations and disappointment withers away. There is a certain tragedy in their falling, and in their growing and building.
When younger, I was convinced that this was the certain end of the relationship. That only under very rare circumstance would a clearing of this space ever be possible. Similar to a cataclysmic event that would sweep the wasteland from its debris and the building of what would inevitably become the first appearance of a wall between the two people.
A lot of people walk in this world that wish that this effect of building is to be avoided. That even the endless space between people can only be filled with positive sunlight and the final days of cherry blossom season. And so, we spend most of our adult days trying to avoid the build up, avoid the distance, and avoid the misunderstand by keeping things for ourselves. By not saying the thing that might fall in between, not seeing that the unsaid falls just as surely and heavily into the abyss as any other word.
Truth is, the only factor that will avoid the falling would be controlling the distance. Caring for the closeness. Entertaining the pathways, supporting the bridging and tending to the landscape that forms this in-between.
For… it is not the things we do or do not say, but way we build the space between us that will decide on the quality of our relationships.
I had not thought of this image for a while, but it came back to me this week and of course, I would wonder immediately how it relates to the autistic experience where most often than not, our verbal expression will be deemed unfitting, too loud, too wordy, too… anything, or incomprehensible, unadapted, and ever so often out-of-sync. To a neurodivergent person, human interaction often feels like the space between us is larger than for other people and that the chance of our words, our interactions and our reaching needs to cross so much more space… galaxies. But the rocket is never just right, or fuelled up to make the whole trip.
Without a conscious act of advancing charity, communication becomes predestined to break down.
It is wild to anybody that the pop-culture way of seeing the autistic experience goes into being unable to read social cues, being bad at communicating, when there is so much expected of us, when we need to learn to bridge these gaps, build bridges through our masking, but rarely is the same being done consciously by the people around us. And so, the debris of our lost relationships continue to build up in our inner landscape, where whole lost civilisations could be discovered.
I wonder what a world would look like if everyone tended to the landscape between their closest friends like beautiful gardens that could house shared memories and mutually held dreams. Where small shrines made of stone could remind of deep connection, and patches of flowers would remember the passing of time. Where fountains would mark times of renewal and each year would be celebrated like a birthday with a stroll and a song.
What would your landscape hold?
