When are you most happy?
I am most happy when all my relationships are in balance. I do not expect perfection in anything, but I do expect excellence. I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I can pick out patterns that I do not like and ask to change them. If it doesn’t happen, I don’t keep hammering the point anymore, because people’s actions tell you their intentions. I have a larger tolerance for it the longer our relationship, but I do not feel guilty for setting boundaries. I am allowed to take up space in the world.
My opinion matters, even when it’s wrong, because I am not explaining something to be right. I am explaining something to be heard. The one way to truly piss me off= the quickest and shortest path to rage, is this conversation.
Neurotypical: Explain to me exactly how this happened.
Leslie: (starts explaining an AuDHD amount)
Neurotypical: I don’t need your fucking excuses.
What I have not done is actually call people on it. I could have said so many times, “you asked me to explain, and I did, so I am not getting why you’re annoyed/angry.” This conversation happens quite frequently with neurotypical bosses…. or in the kitchen, because there’s no time for an AuDHD-length explanation. I am at a loss because I do not know what neurotypical people do in the same situation, because I am not picking up what you’re putting down if you ask me for an explanations and then write me off as making excuses. I don’t do excuses.
For instance, with this blog I feel like I’ve made it clear that I’ve done a lot wrong. At no time have I excused my own behavior away, and I’m not using my entries as justification, either. These entries are all context, because behavior doesn’t come out of a vacuum….. and for me, context is important. I am not trying to merely understand a situation, but to grok it.
It is honestly how I am able to be so forgiving and loving in my relationships, because if I start with the axiom that I’m not perfect, it allows me to see others’ humanity as well….. particularly if I write about them. Writing allows me to see the ways I’ve been treated in both negative and positive ways, and that is the nature of relationships. No one is wrong or right all the time. You are often presented with situations in which both halves of the relationship are right to different degrees…. and instead of focusing on the 80% on which we’re agreed, we’ll fight tooth and nail over 20% of a problem. Or worse, we won’t tell each other our feelings at all, content to resent.
If someone says nothing is wrong, and it clearly is, the energy surrounding them pushes you away. It’s your body’s intuition saying something is wrong, and you have to believe your intuition over what people are saying. This is very much affected by depression, because someone else’s words will come across to you differently than they would if you didn’t have it.
The way I handle this is to acknowledge that my attachment style is anxious; all I ask is that people not irritate it. I choose to do this by communicating early and often, and to take people’s words to the bank and see if they cash. If they say nothing’s wrong, but there’s no concrete reason for them to be snappish and nitpicking, then they’re probably not telling the truth. So, you ask what’s wrong and if nothing changes, you don’t have the right to say “you’re the one that needs to change, because I’ve tried everything.” I can only control my actions, not theirs. I also won’t do other people’s emotional work for them. I have consistently found people with avoidant attachment styles and made them out in my head to be more emotionally capable than they are. It leads me to believe that people will rise to an occasion that just never will.
That’s because I don’t believe there are red flags, and I’ve never been wrong to hold onto a relationship with a deeply flawed person, because I am also deeply flawed. I don’t get the kind of love I need from unbroken people, because if you’ve never been through trauma, you will come to resent me. Here’s something really scary. I have never in my lifetime had to look for a girlfriend with trauma. It’s not because I chose the most toxic woman in the room, it’s because I was dating women.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
People who haven’t been through trauma treat PTSD like autism in that even if you don’t know someone is autistic, you know their reactions are different from yours and you somehow judge your own reactions less harshly than mine. But honestly, it’s not blame I can put on anything but the fact that neurotypical people have always believed they were more capable than neurodivergent people because workplaces reward all the things that come easily to allistic people and feel threatened by neurodivergence because we’re not “following the script.”
I believe that I could work out a two state solution for Israel and Palestine easier than I could make myself follow a morning and evening routine for any length of time. I have empathy for demand avoidance, because I’ve felt it down to taking a shower. I have empathy for executive dysfunction, because I panic when I have more than two things on my plate. The absolute worst feeling in the world to me is presenting my task list to my boss and asking which is the most important and them saying it doesn’t matter. What I have learned is that it means “it doesn’t matter if you’re neurotypical, because what you accomplish is not what I would have accomplished, nor any other neurotypical.” It is not that one is morally superior, it’s that an autistic person has different pattern recognition than an allistic one. Therefore, all autistic thought processes are going to seem ludicrous to a neurotypical boss.
To be fair, if I’m not doing something that 90% of people would do, it’s not all the boss’s fault. It’s lack of education. No one knows what to do with autistic people after they graduate high school. I have been lucky in that I have had some neurotypical bosses who have also been parents of neurodivergent kids. Therefore, they had experience in “being the boss of” someone neurodivergent and how to get them to perform what you need because the way of asking looks different. I also think that I get along better with female bosses than male, because that’s another communication style difference when it comes to empathy. Most female bosses- most, not all- understand the neurodivergent way of thinking even if they’re neurotypical because dollars to donuts if their kids aren’t ADHD, they’ve still been around ADHD kids their whole lives. Because which parent is usually the one who knows their kid’s friends?
Plus, there’s little discernable difference in being neurodivergent and being female, because violence occurs to all women to varying degrees. Not one of us escapes it, and one in four women have been raped. PTSD, particularly when it’s chronic (e.g. raped in childhood), will give you the same symptoms as ADHD and autism; the trauma rewires your thought processes and reactions. Most people make the mistake of thinking that going on medication and doing therapy will fix everything and it will all go back to normal. This is untrue.
If you had an idea of what your life would have looked like before trauma and you’re trying to get back there, it’s never going to happen. Give up. Slash those old dreams, because they’re the ones you won’t fulfill and think it’s “your fault.” You have to make a new dream starting from where you are, not where you used to be. That map marker fell off the day you were traumatized. We all tend to undercut the abuser on how much we were abused, and take more responsibility than we need. For me, it was always that I deserved to feel the way I did because I asked for it, and that’s not unique at all. Most abused children think this. I was never physically abused, and it didn’t matter. Emotional abuse hurts worse to someone who already has bipolar depression.
In my case, it’s not really bipolar depression. My downs are so incredibly profound that hypomania looks like a regular person amount of energy…. one on caffeine, I’ll grant you, but a regular person nonetheless. My biggest symptom of hypomania is insomnia. I have roughly the same thought processes in an up that I do in a down, I just don’t get enough rest unless I take sleeping medication, and even then sometimes it fails. It depends on how married to the idea of being awake my brain is that day.
Not sleeping well makes me focus on what’s wrong instead of what’s right. I self-sabotage a lot, because I attribute negative things that aren’t there….. and in a relationship with an avoidant attachment style, you won’t know whether your negative feelings are wrong or right….. because they’re avoidant.
Which brings us up to now.
Zac and Bryn are partner-level close to me because if I say I feel anxious, they’ll tell me whether I am right or wrong in terms of their emotions. They will not let the story I’m telling myself be that they’re avoiding something and don’t want to be close. I won’t let them tell themselves that story, either.
If you’re not emotionally avoidant, you have to ask yourself how long you’ll tolerate someone who is. That’s because good relationships don’t function with that kind of blame cycle. “If I don’t tell you how I feel, then I don’t have to express myself AND I can also blame you for not considering something you didn’t know.” I can assure you that your needs will never get met by me if you do not tell me what they are. To think that I should be able to root around in your head and find your feelings is crazymaking….. particularly when it comes to things like my relationship with Sam. She couldn’t say “I want you all to myself and I also don’t have time for you,” so she couldn’t let me deal with it and decide what I was going to do. So, when I told her that I had a date with Zac, it was during one of our very first conversations because I wanted my words and actions to line up. I knew Zac wouldn’t care what I decided, I just needed to give him more information, too. I would have been fine with it if Sam had said she wanted me to herself. I’m a writer. I don’t need to see people in person much to connect with them. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was because she didn’t ask for it and lashed out.
By lashing out, I mean that my first date with Zac was on a Wednesday, and we had plans for dinner the next Monday. She couldn’t wait that long. Breaking up with me had to be done while I was with him, apparently. She admits that things were going great and she just flipped out, so I’m not telling tales out of school. She thought she could handle it, and she couldn’t. But what she didn’t get didn’t come from something I couldn’t provide. It came from something for which she never asked.
I will not put up with any kind of loyalty test based on “if you really liked me, you would…” This is because you don’t say those things out loud, they’re societal conventions anyway, so it’s not like I’m not thinking the same thing…… No, I can guarantee that our thought processes are nowhere near similar. I have the rarest personality type in the world, literally a Christ figure because the historical Jesus is thought of as “INFJ,” then made even more rare with AuDHD. In fact, there is such a large crossover between autism and INFJ that I’m wondering if Jesus was autistic as well. His robes were all made of the same material, as well as his shoes, and he only ate like five things. I’m laughing, but really. The Sermon on the Mount seems like it was written by an autistic person. Who would wish more for the meek to inherit the earth?
That thought makes me the most happy, the Advent devotional that’s something missing from the diaspora. Maybe I’ll take it on, because if there’s female theology, queer theology, etc. there should definitely be neurodivergent theology. People who are mentally and physically disabled are very much part of the Disinherited (“Jesus and The Disinherited” is a relatively small book, always found in an inside pocket of Martin Luther King, Jr’s suit coat.). Liberation theology means more to those who need it. Not that all people aren’t worthy of having their wrongs forgiven. Not all people look at the resurrection in the light of Jesus having to struggle…. losing the battle, but not the war. His ideas got him killed, and it takes a strong man to say that these ideas will last forever even if I don’t.
It’s why I write digitally instead of in a paper journal. I know from The Wayback Machine that things on the internet don’t disappear. There’s the lesson. If you’re famous enough that dirt on you is a good thing, it doesn’t matter if you take it down or not. Whether you’re immortalized in the Wayback Machine before you take it down is directly linked to how fast you remove it. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that the Internet Archive has taken a snapshot of the server. For instance, Matt Rife will never be able to live down sending people to a web site for disabled kids’ helmets as an “apology” for his domestic violence jokes….. this is not problematic to me, that he will go away at some point; I never thought he was that great a comedian in the first place. Like, some clever lines, to be sure, but I took him about as seriously as I took Dane Cook. I’d rather see Matteo Lane than Dane Cook, because he isn’t a commercial for toxic masculinity and does the same kind of crowd work.
Crowd work makes me happy, whether it’s a brilliant comedian or rapper, because clever written lines are my jam. I feel like rappers tend to be more like Stephen Fry than anyone else, because in order to drop a verse, you have to know a little bit about everything. For instance, readers are better rappers than non-readers, just like novelists are better writers when they read, fiction or not.
Stephen Fry, rappers, and writers are all deconstructing words as we use them, and rappers do it faster than the rest of us. You don’t have to be smart to enter the arena (and bring a knife), but you have to be smart to win at freestyle verse. That’s because I believe it was easier for Billy Joel to write “We Didn’t Start the Fire” than it was to do the research for it. Imagine what you’d have to do to be able to think of something that clever on the fly….. and yet rappers do it all the time.
Listening to rap and hip hop is when I’m the most happy…. because the only people who come close are bloggers like me.
Stories That Are All True 