Verity James Scheel

As I understand, although Iʼm not a topologist or a homologist, nor even a homotopy theorist, but rather an altogether different kind of beast as a homotopy type theorist, there is something in the general field of topology and homotopy theory and homology, which is usually about measuring continuously invertible connections and deformations between objects and lines and higher spaces, that instead measures where these lines fail to exist or be contractible – that is, that the holes characterize the space, topologically speaking. (For some insight, see “What We Talk about When We Talk about Holes”.)

I would like to draw an incredibly abstract analogy here and say that the holes in my experience as a person characterize me in an equally fundamental way. The holes that I will describe are things that other people see as fundamentally part of their experience of their lives that make no sense to me, that I canʼt envision; there exist no perfect paths between my experiences and theirs. Weʼll find that some of these holes have precise names, some of them have fuzzy boundaries but definitely exist as a hole, and some are an ontological or lexical hole as much as a hole in my own experience – we donʼt really have much practice in describing them as separate entities or modes of being, or maybe it exists but is neglected.

Note that I donʼt mean to use “hole” pejoratively, of course. While some people might view these as things that I lack that I should have (insert ableism here), I donʼt view them as deficits and I am proud of who I am and how my incontractible holes characterize me amidst others who are unlike me. Although I am focusing on how I do not understand others and vice-versa, I also donʼt want to demonize other people for their experiences, or portray myself as particularly special for my experiences. That is not my purpose here at all, I just want to point out how these kind of observations can be used as a study for how deep the differences between people and their experiences and worldviews can be.

With that out of the way, letʼs jump right in with my asexuality!! This is actually the easiest one to articulate, and itʼs also one of the ones that people often see as something “missing”, but please reread the disclaimer above if you need to. Itʼs a little difficult to characterize my asexuality precisely, because I do sometimes experience some forms of sexual attraction of various degrees, but most of it is pretty muted, infrequent, and, to the point of this whole article, I confess that I really do not understand allosexual people – like how does one actually experience sexual attraction to like random people, as a normal daily occurrence, is that really a thing??? Itʼs mind-boggling to me, and itʼs actually a common meme (and genuine reaction) within the asexual community to express surprise that people experience sexual attraction and stuff. Anyways, I suppose I can sort of relate, on the basis of the few times that I do experience sexual attraction, so Iʼm not strictly asexual, but itʼs also clear that Iʼm not allosexual either. It is lucky that there are many terms that can be used to help describe the gray area here – in fact, gray-asexual or graysexual is one such word! I generalize characterize myself as demisexual (experiencing sexual attraction only after establishing a close emotional connection, usually after literally years of knowing a person and being into them in other ways), but I think graysexual also fits well, given that I have long periods of my life where I donʼt experience it at all. (Standard disclaimer: (a)sexuality is about sexual attraction, and not about wanting nor about engaging in sexual acts.)

I confess that I canʼt really label myself as aromantic, alloromantic, or gray-romantic. This is another hole in my experience, but of a different kind: I literally donʼt understand what romantic attraction is, what defines or delineates romantic relationships from others. I saw a comic once that I thought explained it well, but it unfortunately didnʼt stick in my mind, and I lost it to the winds of time. So I will probably be in the dark about this for quite a while longer, unless I run across the comic again and internalize the definition in a way that I can relate to. But itʼs likely that I am not alloromantic. (Note that it is hard to learn from heteronormative allosexual society what romantic relationships are, because they are so heavily conflated with sexual relationships, so it is really the ace/aro community I rely on for my learning here.)

Another easy one to characterize, in terms of socially known labels, is that I donʼt really understand extroverts. (Confession: every time I use that in “proper writing”, I have to double check whether I should use extrAvert or extrOvert, and I acquiesce and use the latter.) It is so foreign to my experience, the fact that there actually are many people who can speak up and say lots of words without second thought, who enjoy saying words to people and interacting with them constantly, who donʼt have to constantly recharge after spending an hour with other people. Tangentially related to this, although not actually related to extroversion, I donʼt understand people who enjoy parties, particularly parties with loud music and dancing and drinking, and I donʼt understand why anyone would want to alter their mental state through alcohol or drugs, and that is partly because I love quiet, I love being in control of myself (and I believe the only way I can really be in control of myself is through having alone time/down time and working to understand myself and my mind better and looking to be consistent and methodical in my life), and my mind already experiences enough lows and scattered highs in a sort of cyclic pattern, that I know I can always return to some mental state in which I appreciate life, being alive, my life, and others, in an expansive way, and this is sufficient for me as a way of life.

I cannot understand how the world is structured, in ways small and large. I think a lot of this actually comes down to my experience as an autistic person: it is commonly said that autistic people live in a world thatʼs not designed for us. Iʼm afraid this is one of the areas that it is hardest for me to express the hole. Part of it is that the allistic/nautistic world often has terrible defaults (in the UI/UX conception of defaults, or psychological) that mean my needs are harder to meet. Another part of it is that I often ask myself why/how things are designed (which can also be thought of through UI/UX lenses, as well as architectural), and often there arenʼt good answers, other than “this is the way things are” and “it was convenient”, which are both terrible answers. More radically, I donʼt understand why capitalism is a thing, along with any number of other predominating socioeconomic organizational patterns. But thatʼs a whole nother essay to write, called “The Difference Between Video Games and Capitalism”, and regarding my general tendencies to want to radically recreate how the world was designed, “Burn the World, But Save a Plan for Redesign”.

Also in terms of my autistic experience, I cannot relate to many neurotypical experiences of the world. But actually, I feel like I donʼt even know enough about them to really write about it here. Maybe one place that I can start is that life without anxiety is unimaginable for me; it is so deeply embedded in my experience of the world, in my memories and perspectives, and it affects the decisions I make and the emotions I feel, to the degree that my life would probably look a lot difference without it, for better and for worse. Of course, this one cuts both ways: for people who donʼt have as much experience with pervasive anxiety, my life most certainly looks irrational to them, and in general, I wish people would be more understanding and accepting of anxiety, mental health issues and illnesses, autism and neurodivergence, in themselves and others.

I cannot understand people who are aggressive. Well, only a little bit. I understand people who are seen as aggressive in certain situations when they are overwhelmed and hurt and maybe melting down. (I think I shut down more than I melt down.) I also understand people who express righteous anger at oppressors and systems of oppression (cough, colonialism and systemic racism) and people who are frustrated when they are not seen/heard/understood. But thatʼs different from having an aggressive nature, and I canʼt understand people who make choices to be violent or violently aggressive, or who make that a core part of their personalities. My personality is very gentle, I love to express gentleness in the things I do, lavender and periwinkle are lovely colors, and I hope I can convey that in my laughter and love and even in my writing too. A couple specific ways in which I do that is that I phrase things very generally, and I avoid gendered language as much as possible and language that makes other untoward implications, and also that I leave room for shades of nuance: I will say that something “helps” something be the case, rather than making or causing or forcing it to happen. (This is especially true when Iʼm generalizing: of course there is no fixed/predictable/deterministic pattern for any sufficiently broad/nuanced/complicated aspect of human life!! This actually has a precise counterpart in computer science/mathematics, called Riceʼs Theorem: any non-trivial semantic property of a computable language is uncomputable.)

For a shift of pace, I also want to acknowledge my privilege here: there are many experiences that I wonʼt understand because there are ways in which other people are unfortunately marginalized by the status quo of global forms of oppression in which I was lucky to avoid, by virtue of being born white, male, into a middle-class family. I wonʼt understand what it is like to have to westle with systemic racism every day. I wonʼt understand what it is like to live in poverty, and the myriad ways that would have changed my outlook and trajectory in life, as it does affect so many other peopleʼs lives. So many expectations and assumptions are shaped by oneʼs social class, in ways that I still donʼt understand well. I have also seen some of the ways in which my opinion on certain things is accepted unquestioningly, seemingly because I am seen as a man. (Deception! Iʼm not!)

I suppose I should talk about gender here. Not because I feel obligated to, just because it is intensely relevant. One way I often phrase it, is that I donʼt understand why people would choose to be a man, that just makes no sense to me personally. Thatʼs probably a controversial statement, so let me say that I donʼt mean to imply that gender is a choice, and I do, of course, recognize that each exploration of identity is intensely personal, and I mean no disrespect to my transmasculine brethren. But for me, my intensely personal perspective is that being a man makes no sense to me, and it makes little sense that other people would continue to think of me in that way (other than assumptions and social conditioning and lack of awareness, blah blah blah). This is another issue that totally cuts both ways; in fact, I do believe that very very few cis people will be able to understand transness in more than a surface level way, one sort of has to be experience being trans (or at least questioning) to understand certain aspects of that experience (and even then, there is of course a lot of diversity among trans people, and I hope I have already made it clear that I donʼt necessarily understand trans people with different gender experiences than mine, which is literally everyone haha, but I absolutely support their right to exist in the ways that they see fit for themselves).

It actually goes further than that too. I donʼt understand gender norms in general. Itʼs not that I think gender should be abolished (I actually donʼt, plus the fact is that such a thing is beyond the condition of possibility), but I do believe that enforcing gender norms is senseless (and a [potentially] violent patriarchal means of exerting power). Itʼs obvious to me that gender norms have no meaning, they didnʼt arise from any particular place or reason, and, at least from my point of view, it serves no point to ask people to follow them.

I do recognize that I am incredibly naïve, but I am not incognizant of the state of affairs of the world, and I think this combination can be one of my greatest assets, in fact.

I confess that I actually think in such a logical manner that it is very difficult to understand when others donʼt, and so I get very confused and anxious when other people make decisions that seem illogical from my perspective (although it is usually just the case that they are simply weighing various factors differently than I would, or operating with different preferences and values and precepts). But of course how I think is not solely logical: I give ample room for my feelings and emotions to influence my choices. I think this is a kind of mix that is very perplexing to others. Again, it is something that should come across in my writing, especially as it is like my thinking. The words I choose are chosen firstly to mean the right thing, but also they need to feel good to me when I right them: have the right form, in relation to other words, and the right shades of meaning, and just an inexpressible but tightly felt sense that they fit for me.

I have a pretty particular value system, that makes perfect sense to me as the right choices, but of course is incompatible with others, as I am reminded of on a daily basis.

As I wrap up, I would like to include a note I made to myself that expresses the emotional sum of this piece: it's actually really disappointing, frustrating, and saddening to live in a world that doesn't reflect your values back, but I don't mean to sound negative about it, because I'm at peace with it right now, but it's just something I (re)realized right now and want to articulate as a way to reinforce my commitment to my values and recognize why I get frustrated at the world and so often feel powerless, especially when I feel powerless to embody my values myself ...

Sit with that for a minute.

How does it make you feel?

Do you relate?

Do you feel optimistic about it or frustrated?

Are there holes in your life that mark you as different from the norm?

I bet there are: I bet there is no one who occupies normative stances/experiences on everything, you just have to develop self-awareness of your position in society to recognize it. Then itʼs just a question of what you do with your knowledge.

To conclude, I might like to draw another abstract analogy, this time with (homotopy) type theory, my specialty. As far as I can, I like to live my life pretending like my type of experiences is all there is, because I truly do believe that my set of experiences constitute a full, self-contained (but predicative) “universe”, but it is inevitable – and usually valuable, though often exhausting – that I have to interface with other universes of peopleʼs own experiences, with their own holes. Whether itʼs having a partner who has a vastly different relationship to the sexual than me, or even interacting with others, I have to respect that they have different experiences that are also valid, although I hope we can find common ways of talking about it. And, more extremely, I recognize my need to educate myself about the history of violence that has been perpetuated and continues to occur as part of systemic institutionalized power structures that I can never ever relate to, and I probably wonʼt ever know the human experience of those who perpetuate it knowingly, but it is necessary to try and understand it and them, and I cannot shrink from that duty and responsibility, even when it requires me to interface with evil and violence that pervert and violate my ideals in unthinkable ways. It is through the interaction, the mapping, the functional relation of the things inside my universe (where my ideas originate) and things outside my universe (which is I guess where my ideas end up, on a good day) which determine their meaning with each other. And the holes in my experience give rise to non-trivial functional mappings. (Okay, that oneʼs quite a stretch, but thanks for bearing with me.)