Neurotypical Crystal Ball

 Herself speaks.

As we approach the anniversary of my lovely Daddy's passing from this earth, I find myself spending time thinking about my last visits with him and my mother. Sometimes, little snatches of conversation come back to me, and enlighten me in new ways. 

One evening, for example, we were talking about the various restaurants in the complex in which they live, and Daddy commented that the shuttle bus that makes circuits around the complex is a convenient way to get to some of the farther away ones (especially now that he was having some difficulty navigating the long corridors due to fatigue).  My mother interpreted his comment on the shuttle bus as a passive-aggressive statement about what needed to be done; I interpreted it as solely a factual statement about the available amenities. There had to be more discussion about the bus-the dinner places-the means of locomotion before things were ironed out. I professed my personal need to take statements at face value, and not be reading into statements because I was not a mind reader. 

It was a small moment. I am sure that it was a time that was hard for everyone -- for Daddy, who wanted more than anything not to be a burden on anyone; for Mom, who was extremely anxious about Daddy's declining health; and for me, too, as I was trying to balance their needs while also navigating being away from my own children and husband over the holidays for the first time ever. The smallest statements had the potential to inadvertently set nerves on edge. Best to speak plainly, was my modus operandi. Avoid misunderstanding. 

The insight I learned, in retrospect: some people impart information, and some people read in to information, and some people expect others to do the reading in to the information that they impart. 

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I am a slow thinker. 

I am absolutely terrible at reading in to information. Subtlety escapes me, every single time. (It's like sarcasm: it just FLIES RIGHT OVER my head.) It takes me forever to ascertain someone's point, and I need time, and contemplative space, and the absence of other distractions, in order to arrive at a conclusion that would take a typical person mere moments. I might never get there -- I might blissfully skip off into my own world, having missed some critical suggestion entirely. 

This is why I value words so highly. 

And why I use too many of them whenever I try to explain myself: let there be no misunderstanding. Let me repeat myself in a hundred different ways, upside down and backwards and forwards, until you can See Me clearly, in all my words. 

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I think that I might need to make Speak Plainly, my standard modus operandi.  After careful deliberation and contemplation, I would like to stop trying to read in to what other people say.  It is not in my skill set, and when I do it, I do so with poor results. No thank you. I turn in my neurotypical crystal ball for reading in to what everyone says. I'm not sure it has ever worked properly. I resign.

This will require certain changes to my behavior, no doubt. It will require more questions, for starters -- because I am not guessing what is happening or what I should be reading in to a particular situation any more, I will have to ask if it seems like there is a subtext that I need to be aware of. It will also require not taking responsibility for things other people do not tell me. For example: it's not my fault if I do not do something, if I didn't know it needed to be done because someone did not tell me so, and I did not think to guess or ask. I cannot go through life trying to imagine all possible permutations of every possible situation, in order to try to capture every conceivable scenario and read in to what is happening at every moment. Can you imagine the exhaustion? 

The hardest part will be trusting that others will provide explicitly, what they tried to suggest implicitly.

I cannot fix, what I don't know about. Can I absolve myself for the unknown?

I will try.