List the people you admire and look to for advice…
This is the first time anyone has ever asked me this question and I thought to put myself on the list. I have never been comfortable enough before in my own skin to think my opinion was worth anything. However, once I sat with my thoughts day in and day out, my discomfort at sharing those opinions went away. Mostly because I realized that no one is wrong or right. We are all making it up as we go along. I didn’t have to put people I admired on a pedestal because my opinions were just as good as theirs. It wasn’t hero worship. It was thinking something was wrong with me and that made them automatically better at opinions.
It is also true that when you’re physically disabled and mentally ill, other people assume they’re better with the thinking because they don’t have those issues. It is amazing to me that people think treated bipolar disorder and untreated are the same. So, you have a lot of people who tell you that your opinions aren’t worth anything because to them they aren’t. They have invalidated you by your diagnosis. People tend to be dismissive because they don’t think I’m in my right mind anyway. I don’t know what I’m saying.
In a very real sense, this is true. Accurate and dead on. I do not know what I am saying.
This is because I know exactly what I am saying, but through my autism and ADHD, I do not know what you hear when I talk. I know this because of the difference in what I mean vs. what people have angrily insisted I mean. This is because their brains process the order of my words differently than I do, which changes the meaning of a sentence.
What could possibly go wrong?
It leads people to put emotion where it doesn’t belong, because they’re, in effect, accenting the wrong syllable. Thinking I’m being aggressive, sarcastic, cold, whatever the emotion and telling me that- which is great. I need to know your experience of me. The problem comes in when there is no way to prove to you that I mean what I say and I say what I mean, so I am struggling against the way you perceived my words and not what they actually were. For instance, trying to prove I wasn’t trying to be aggressive when you are absolutely convinced I purposefully tried to anger you.
There is really no way to un-fuck that particular situation. I walk away from those relationships because the thing that’s harder than anything else in a relationship is proving you’re NOT angry. With autism, disproving any negative, really. It’s hard to prove you’re NOT anything if someone’s perception in their minds of you is certain.
Through being autistic, I have learned that I am a master manipulator while I sit there and wonder why people say that….. Or I did, until I learned I was autistic. That everything I say is probably going to come out wrong. So, I’m in a situation where people think I’m manipulating them and it’s supported by the fact that I’m bipolar.
I am not malicious and I am not mentally ill. I take medication every day for it. You don’t call someone blind when you can see the glasses on their face- their vision is corrected. You don’t treat a mentally ill person like they’re on thin ice for being put away.
You don’t focus on the fact that someone is an alcoholic. You focus on the fact that they’re in recovery.
So, if I know I’m not malicious and that I’m not trying to manipulate people, then obviously I am failing in my communication and need to learn new strategies for saying the same things. This is because I do not have a problem voicing needs anymore, but I don’t know how to talk at all without people telling me that I’m acting like I know everything.
However, it’s only a certain group of my friends that jump on me this way, so how they communicate plays into it as well. It is not a one sided communication issue. Because they have things in common, my pattern recognition on what they’re doing reads universal rather than personal to each individual relationship.
So, not only do I need better communication overall, I specifically need guidance on how to phrase things so that I don’t sound like I’m master of the universe. My self-esteem is so incredibly low (and I’m vulnerable about it) that I’m surprised people think I sit around and think about how great I am.
Coming into my own was hearing the child inside me say, “hey. You’re not THAT bad.” My trouble with communication made me reticent to give an opinion at all, because it always came out wrong. I have been told that the most fucking irritating thing about me in the whole entire goddamn world is that I’m always right, so take that for what you will.
One of the reasons I shut down and became a writer, basically talking to myself for incredibly long periods of time is that it came across like people tolerated me rather than genuinely wanting to be in my company. I jumped into writing because I wasn’t wanted elsewhere, and not in a “poor me” kind of way. It was “I don’t have to have friends, because I can entertain myself.”I do indeed have friends, I’m just saying that my happiness is dependent on them. I have the capability to bring myself joy; no one is responsible for making me happy.
I also think that writing reinforces what I think- I am not arguing with myself over how I feel in person because I’ve already written about it here. Therefore, people are deathly intimidated by me because I am deft in an arena where few people excel. My Achilles Heel is that I often have communication issues and end up beating the wrong dead horse instead of the right one…….. Because I interpreted someone else’s words putting the accent on the wrong syllable.
There are plenty of people that I look to for advice, generally my sister and Bryn are at the top of the list.
I ask Supergrover for advice all the time. It’s just that her responses are calculated on everything she’s already said. It’s the same way with Dana. I can’t go back in time, but their uploaded consciousnesses live in me. I talk to their characters. Their characters don’t grow and change, but it’s comforting nonetheless.
I am coming to rely more and more on myself because I realize that being disabled and autistic has led me to discount my opinions, buying into the view everyone else has about both groups. I realized when I was talking about people I go to for advice, it felt like I wasn’t even allowing myself to sit in the conference room with them.
I started taking up more space when I realized I wanted to define myself. That it was okay to take up room. It was okay if I didn’t swallow other people’s opinions whole in order to please them.
I’m not the expert. I constantly play tapes in my head of the things people have said about/to me and it sits in my brain like a rock. I defined myself by all the negative things that people placed on me, and thought I was a bad person because of it. I don’t mean recently. I mean I can tell you about feeling the exact same way at six years old. School is brutal for kids who can’t communicate. Having a neurotypical kindergarten teacher was the first time I realized that people couldn’t hear what I was saying and were putting meanings into my mouth.
I started releasing my demons as a writer…… Or at least, as I said the other day, exercising them. I hardly ever say “exercise” because I know they ain’t leavin.’ It makes me laugh to think of my demons in workout clothes. We are very serious. We are eating Starburst for breakfast.
Breakfast of champions.
I do not know what it is about the autistic brain that makes me insufferable. It’s funny because it’s true. But know that it’s not all me. Part of it is that I have a disability you know nothing about, and are choosing to believe I am not that different from you. The fault in this is not being able to predict my behavior and thinking you can because your heuristics are for neurotypical people.
I am taking responsibility for learning my half, but I can only meet you. I cannot go all the way to the other side and drag you to the middle. It is a disability. Worrying that I’m failing is a non-issue because it doesn’t matter. There’s no chance of winning. It’s miserable when that reality sets in.
I have found that I need respect for myself because I am so misunderstood. I am also not saying I’m not part of the problem. I haven’t known I was autistic since I was a kid, so I have to learn new coping mechanisms.
I think the thing that hurt me the most this week was a scene from “The Big Bang Theory” in panels as a meme on Facebook. It’s Amy telling Sheldon that his friends all hate his bad behavior and that the fact that he can’t do anything about it is the only reason they tolerate him.
I cannot be dependent on external validation. I write or pray. It’s a new development, but trusting in myself hasn’t backfired.
Stories That Are All True 