I’m still musing about my dysfunctional family, and today I want to focus on the fact that everyone in my family has a bad memory, but for different reasons. In yesterday’s post, I talked about my truth and how important it is to me. Today, I’m going to talk about how difficult it is to hold onto my truth when my family doesn’t support that. At all.
Side note: One thing I learned about having autism is that people with autism can be easier to manipulate because they just assume that other people are right and they’re wrong (because they’re told so often, implicitly and explicitly that they are wrong). And because it doesn’t really occur to them that someone would deliberately lie to them. I have difficulty with sarcasm for that reason. The deadpan kind, I mean–when it’s out of the blue. I’m very used to reading people intently for clues as to how to react to them, but deadpan gets to me. My brother is really good at deadpan, which means I miss his jokes more often than I would with other people.
It took me a long time to realize that everyone in my family (including me now, to a certain extent) are really bad at remembering things–but for completely different reasons.
With my brother, he just has a bad memory. Could it be related to ihs neuroatypicalness? Maybe. Could it be related to his face blindness? Maybe. Could it just be a very bad memory? Maybe. But it’s something I’ve come to accept about him.
Here’s a recent example. About a year ago, I had an issue with Xfinity and my internet.
Side note (yes, again. Deal with it!): I fucking hate monopolies. It’s so fucking hard to get customer service at Xfinity unless you have a billing issues (which I just had–this week. Got a person then, right away. Funny, that), that it makes me actively angry.
Anywaay. It had to do with my data usage. One of the issues turned out to be my modem. I bought a new one and had my brother come over to hook it up for me. He spoke to the representative for forty-five minutes before we drove to the nearest store and talked to them there (that did it).
A month or so later, I mentioned to him that it had worked as a hack (not completely, but good enough), and my brother said, “Oh, you bought the new modem?” I was gobsmacked into silence. Several seconds later, I said, “You installed it for me. You talked to the rep for forty-five minutes.”
He remembered when I mentioned it, but he had completely forgotten it before that. And it had been at most a month earlier. As hard as it is for me to grasp, he truly forgets things soon after they happen. Not all things, but many things.
