NLD and Wanderlust

A friend of mine sent me a Facebook message this morning with a video of Sedona, AZ and said that he will "go there soon." Like many people I know, he likes to travel to places he's never been and to do things he's never done before.

I am not like my friend in that way or in most other ways. I've long rationalized my indifference if not aversion to travel by telling myself that few places I'd ever want to go to are that different from where am I now and that places really different from where I am now are not places I'd enjoy visiting anyway, so why bother going anywhere?

The only reason I do bother to travel is to accommodate my wife. She seems to love to travel, and, when I'm with her, at least I have her to navigate and to handle the logistics of it all that I'd be clueless and powerless to handle on my own. But if not for her, I'd stay at or near home all the time.

But I think there's more to my not traveling any more than necessary to satisfy my wife than my aforementioned rationalization that every place is pretty much the same place. I think a big part of it can be traced to the same thing that so many other aspects of my life can be traced to--my NLD

According to the literature I've read about NLD, one defining characteristic of children who have it is that they don't explore their physical surroundings like their peers do. They learn about their surroundings primarily by talking and, later, reading about them. And I'm guessing the same tends to be true of adults with NLD. It's certainly true for me.

Not only do I shy away from physically exploring my surroundings because I seem to be able to learn more about them through words than through direct experience, but I'm just not that interested in them in the first place. I've generally always been more interested in the non-physical realm of ideas and ideals than I am in the things we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. That's just how my compromised brain works.

But I wish it were otherwise. I wish I could interact more fruitfully and potently with the physical world and enjoy it in all the ways that neurotypical people do. And I think that when I scoff at those, like my friend, who like to travel a lot, I'm really just trying to assuage my sense of inferiority to them by telling myself that I'm actually superior to them by not being lured by the baubles of the gross physical world, that I'm somehow attuned to a higher plane of existence.

But deep down, I know better. And so I find myself feeling a chronic mixture of envy and resentment toward normal people like my friend.