Recently, I found myself wikiwalking on Wikipedia. You know, looking at an article, click on an interesting link, find another link on that article, and before you know it you're nowhere near where you started.

I found the article on bipolar disorder. And I realized something, reading it - bipolar disorder is a mood disorder, and people with bipolar disorder have trouble controlling their moods.

A few days later, some pieces started to fall in place in my mind. I had known for most of our friendship that Albaster had bipolar disorder. And now I realize, there all these signs that suggested that he couldn't control his moods.

He had pretty poor inhibitions at times. Usually silly stuff. Like... Most of the time I sent him a link to an article hosted on a wiki, he would quickly deface it with a little trollish message. Nothing huge, and nothing too hard to revert. Most of the time it was a little funny. And then one day we were talking, and he suggested I not give him any wiki article links, if he didn't want me to deface them. I realize then that he had the presence of mind that he didn't have the tightest control over this habit of his.

And one thing all my friends can agree on, is that I can be annoying. Not intentionally so, but I have my own quirks I have little to no control over.

When I speak, I tend to always speak the truth, unless it's obvious sarcasm (which seems to work on a different mechanic altogether). I can often conceal information if I really try to. But even since sometime in my youth when I realized that lies are inherently hurtful to people, I had a moment of maturation that made me always empathize with its results, and I haven't really been able to deceive people since. I just can't do it.

But I also know there is a human construct called guile - little benign white lies people tell each other to spare one another's feelings, so as to conceal the potentially hurtful edge of what people are actually feeling. But with my inability to deceive, my guile is zero. I can try to sugarcoat things, but I can't tell people things I believe to be lies. This means that I am blatantly honest, even when doing so screws me over and makes people mad. For the most part, my lasting friends are used to this, and adapt to it as more of a quirk than any serious friendship breaker. But if they're not feeling well, or have had a bad day, or are otherwise feeling mentally/emotionally weakened, sometimes I do something annoying in spite of myself, and there's a moment of friction with my friends. This usually passes, as we both get over it and move on.

And because of my autism, with my frequent inability to rely on instinct to steer my social skills, I have to devote much more expensive cognitive-level thought to make social decisions. This in effect is usually inferior to instinct, because it's much slower to do and much more exhausting to my mental resources. Most of the time, I just wing it, and try not to think too hard. But there are times - especially following a moment of friction - when a friend wishes I'd think things better. Then, feeling bad, I enter a moment of intense emergency thought to consider the situation. Under pressure, my mind considers whatever logic it can, imagines as many theoretical scenarios it can, to figure out how to make this better. The problem is that, in doing this, I end up sitting there drawing blanks for minutes or even hours. This usually makes it useless as a social skill, because by the time I've come up with a tentative idea, the moment has already been lost. And sometimes I can learn from this mistake, but...not always. The weakness of the social instincts, as I mentioned already.

When it came to my friendship with Albaster, I tried hard to avoid the appearance of drama. And it occurs to me now, that he must have been trying hard to control his moods when I made a faux pas. I had always wondered why he was so allergic to a semblance of drama, and why he refused to discuss and workout problems, why he suddenly cut me off one day and found it impossible to so much as tell me why. He just couldn't control his moods well enough to sit still long enough to have a serious therapeutic discussion.

The ironic thing is that, that last thing that happened that provoked him to cut me off, was when he responded to something I said that was a pun. (I learned seven months later that he intended it as a pun.) But it was superficially an insult, and I told him it was a hurtful thing to say. In retrospect, I don't even think the pun rhymed in English, which may have been why I never saw the pun. His first language was Spanish, and his written/read English was fantastic, but in audio speech he would sometimes mispronounce English words - which is very understandable considering so many English words have ambiguous or irregular pronunciations. But it was apparently the last straw of many straws that broke the camel's back. He couldn't handle me.

After February of last year, when he told me off in the angriest way I'd ever seen him, I later spoke with one of our mutual friends. He had asked Alby if he hated me, and Alby told him no. And that friend told me. And for a long time, I didn't have a clue how Alby could do all those mean things...and not somehow despise me. But now I think...if he didn't have adequate control over his moods, his response to me was not out of hate, but out of perpetual anger and dread that he could no longer contain.

Ultimately, I can't easily know if the things I guess here are true. Alby and I haven't been able to hold a two-way conversation or any civil encounter for a year and a half. I can't ask him all the questions that have brewn within me. One of my friends likened it to Alby having suddenly died. In a way, that seems close to how it feels. Alby is still alive, but his ability to stand my presence died long ago, such that he's too paralyzed to speak to me even when he may have the opportunity to do so. And...I'm sorry that my actions led him to feel that way.

And I suppose I also have some mood issues of my own. My transition between interest and disinterest is hard to control, and even harder to disguise. But even more troubling is my hereditary anxiety disorder. If there's a mood that I can't control, it's my anxiety. If my anxiety is given free reign to feed back onto itself, I have a panic attack. So I starve it into submission by trying to avoid the mental panic triggers. I'm also medicated, which helps the situation moderately, but only by making it seem more manageable - I still have to manage the anxiety, which can be even harder under stress.

Unfortunately, since what happened with Alby, one of the panic triggers has been my musical creative ability. I'm still trying to get over it, because it would be a great shame and loss if I never made music again. Sometimes I wish Alby could help me with it and we could bring our friendship to a proper closure. But if the things I speculate here are true, I may never actually hear from him again for any reason.

Well, enough pondering for now. I need to get some sleep. See you all later, and thanks for taking the time to read this.