"Spacing out"

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Mostly I just miss my dad. I haven't seen him in person in about fifteen years because I moved across country and don't have the income to travel back 2000 miles to visit. The last time I spoke with him on the phone was Christmas Eve, thirteen years ago. I called and got to talk to him for about five minutes before my mother made him get off the phone. She won't let him use the computer, so I can't e-mail him. I've written him several letters but he's never written back. He was never much of a letter writer to begin with, but I don't even know if he's gotten the letters. I'm working on one right now to send him for father's day.

I don't know what things are like in the home now, but when I left town, my mother was very abusive toward my father. He used to have a good job as a chemical engineer but he got laid off 28 years ago and suffered a depression and had a hard time finding work because he was already 47 when he got laid off and no one wanted to hire an older guy whose engineering education was so old that he used slide rules in university. Never mind that he was a brilliant engineer and had an almost psychic ability for pinpointing what was going wrong with a chemical plant just by hearing a brief description and looking at a sort of blueprint of the plant. He could point right to the valve or whatever and say "check that" and it would always be the problem.

So he bounced around on temp jobs and basically had the same sorts of difficulties in holding down a job that I'd had my whole life -- I guess he was just lucky that he landed the job he used to have straight out of college and held on to it for about 25 years before they decided to lay him off. So, anyway, mom got tired of him and she had told me once that she first wanted to divorce him 8 years before the lay-off because my brother was dying and had gone into a coma and my father refused to sit with him any more because he reasoned that my brother was no longer "there" and didn't need him but my mother couldn't bear to leave him alone so she wore herself to a thread sitting with him day and night until he died and has never forgiven my father for that.

But she didn't divorce him and when he started having all the job difficulties, she took all the food out of the house and locked it in the trunk of her car and said he could eat again when he found another engineering job. I felt bad and I taught him how to sell plasma so he could buy his own rice and beans. Finally, after many years of failed attempts to hold any kind of job, my father decided to give up and just wait until he was old enough to collect social security (which he has now, as he is now 75.) I hear from my mother that he has diabetes and prostate cancer but that's all she will tell me about him and I don't ever hear from him and she has blocked off ways to access him like telephone or e-mail.

So I've pretty much forgiven him for how he was when I was younger because I mostly just miss him now and hope he's not being too terribly abused by my mother. Also, one of the last times I saw him in person he said that he had been working through a lot of his own issues about his father and his upbringing and in the process he realized that he was abusive toward me when I was a child (yes, he actually used the word abusive!) and he wanted to apologize to me for that. I think that's such a rare and special thing and couldn't have been easy for him to say so of course I forgive him completely and love him for being so brave and insightful, even with the emotional and social rigidity that a lifetime of undiagnosed asperger's has given him. He really does have a good heart and has tried to be a good man and it pains me to see how awry his life has gone from what it should have been.

it seems to be an unconscious coping mechanism for me. when walking, when driving, when other people are having conversations around me.

how not to space out is more the problem.

(edit) more ..
(someday i'll learn to read all the posts before chiming in .. )



i just mentioned this on another thread, but i've never heard anyone else describe it. i've stopped short of everything going black as you go on to describe, but otherwise this sounds like what i've experienced. the person "moves" farther away, like someone is elongating the room. it doesn't need yelling to induce, but hasn't happened too many times, thankfully, because it's pretty creepy.

Last edited by katzefrau on 22 May 2010, 2:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

I automatically "space out." I spend most of my time in my mind & it's hard to bring myself out of it a lot of times, especially when I'm not in my house where I can distract myself with things like the computer, books, & TV. Sometimes, I have to really focus to pay attention to what's around me. There have been times when I've walked into the middle of the street without looking & almost got hit & times when I've missed my bus stop because of it.

i do these things too (only i did get hit by a car once). and when i'm driving i frequently get lost or miss my exit.

I do a lot of driving around the block because I live in an area with lots of one-way streets and no matter how carefully I think through how I'm going to get somewhere I always end up stuck with one way to turn -- the other way than I intended to turn.

i spend a lot of time with MapQuest before I go anywhere, carefully planning how to get there and back (because I never seem to be able to just "do the same trip in reverse" like people tell me. I have to pre-plan the trip both ways.)

I'm glad you're okay after getting hit (or at least hope you are). I don't even have my drivers license & one of my fears is that when I do finally get it, I might not be able to pay attention to everything that's going on outside the car.