I do not like the social masking that comes with modern society, where politeness means that no one will actually tell you what is really going on. As an autistic person, I find myself living in my own little world because I do not understand the dance of intimacy that neurotypical people use as code. I say what I mean and mean what I say, often coming across as blunt to the people around me without realizing they think that because they’re too polite to just say, “can you tone it down? Ouch.” I am not a mind reader, and do not want to hurt anyone. But how do you know if you’ve hurt someone if they pretend they’re not hurt?
I have found that when I try to sugar coat things, the actual message is lost. When I say what’s on my mind, it is gravity’s rainbow to a conversation because people don’t know how to respond. I find myself seeking out other autistic people who have also stopped masking, because communication seems easier when neither person picks up neurotypical cues. They, too, just say what they mean and mean what they say.
It leads to a disconnect between neurotypical and neurodivergent society because only autistic people are taught to adjust. It is our job to learn to pick up social cues, it is our job to bend to the will of people who won’t bend toward us. A better way forward is to teach neurotypical people how to communicate with their autistic counterparts.
Right now, the axiom is “neurodivergents run in packs.”
I don’t think we’d keep to ourselves so much if there was a bridge between what we say and what neurotypical people hear. I find that when people ask me to explain what I mean, there is a jump in understanding quickly. If people take my words at face value, they’re generally interpreting them wrong.
This affects me greatly as a blogger because people will read me and the blowback will be vastly different than what I actually said, because their interpretation doesn’t match my thought process. It’s a natural give and take, but it doesn’t make me feel any better when people misconstrue my words and come at me when they’re angry.
For instance, saying that a friend wouldn’t understand me until her mother died, and she thought I was saying I wished her mother was dead. Absolutely not. There’s just no similar experience to losing one’s parent.
There’s no substitute for the process one goes through in the business of death. Trying to express that led the friend right to me being a terrible person because she thought I wished that on her. No, I wished for her to have a deeper understanding of me, and that’s all.
Once we got it cleared up, we were golden. But most people will not take the time to clear the air with me. They will just sit in their own perceptions of what I said and step away.
But they won’t step away from my blog. They just stop talking to me altogether. Because I can read stats by city rather than by country, I have stepped away from looking at them. I am making the modern society around me better by ignoring them, because I know where my friends (former and present) live……….
I don’t want to know if they’re reading, because my writing transcends them. I would rather believe that my audience is all strangers who don’t mind that I scream into the void. I know I am doing the right thing because everyone loves that I write about my real feelings until they’re the ones in the crosshairs.
My writing loses value to them, but strangers take home the actual message.
In that way, I do not belong to anyone. I belong to everyone. I want this blog to reflect my modern society because I am not a subject matter expert on anything but me.
I feel that I am not the best person to write about society at large, just to make my own voice heard in the darkness, one among many. I have the opportunity to record my life as it happens, so that hundreds of years from now, people will see how I lived. My blog doesn’t matter because I’m popular, it matters because it’s here.
There are many anonymous people that have contributed to museums, and that’s how I feel about my digital life. It’s not a goal to be well-known, it’s a goal to have contributed to the legacy that all bloggers will leave behind when they die.
I don’t think about my blog in terms of fame and popularity, which is good because I haven’t had as much success as people like Dooce and Jenny Lawson. I have watched both of them, along with Wil Wheaton, climb the ladder into the stratosphere and it’s not a life I think I want, particularly since Dooce and I both share the same diagnosis and it killed her.
I don’t want to be an influencer or a mommy-blogger, though if I have stepkids they’ll know I’m a writer and be included when they want to be. Some of the best entries I’ve written have been inspired by the children in my life, and I wouldn’t want to give that up. But thinking about it is long into the future because I’m not bound to anyone. I may be single until I die just because my first priority is writing.
I don’t think that my duty is to change modern society as a blogger. I think it is my duty to record it.
I am already holding a mirror in front of society, because my microcosm represents everyone else. People read me because if it’s true for a hundred people (my on the ground reach), it will be true for a thousand. If it’s true for a thousand, it is a good indication that everyone will find something they can relate to written by me. That’s because I’m a bisexual man wrapped in a lesbian’s body, a minority who is trapped in the majority (I’m white), with spirituality and religion weaving themselves into the themes of my life.
I am always spiritual and seeking an audience with God. I am sometimes religious. I enjoy church and miss it, then go back and see why I don’t go anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in organized religion. I believe in it so much because it has the power to change you if you let it. It’s just different for me because I don’t find God there anymore. I find God in other ways because I know how the sausage is made. It’s like being a musician and a line cook. Everything changes once you’ve been on stage, sat in the orchestra pit, and worked in the kitchen. I enjoyed being a lay preacher of all the jobs I’ve had in church, so I lay out my thoughts here as if I was preaching.
Every entry has a thread of that preacher persona running through it because I’m making connections through a library of images collected from every piece of media I’ve ever consumed. Very few entries are so stream of consciousness that I forget to tie it up at the end. It is short sighted AND impressive that every entry I write is one shot, hit post, go back and fix typos. When I go back and read something from five years ago, I am astounded at how quick I am at writing sentences that will flatten me emotionally and other people say that as well. My marriage entry, the one that was shared all over the world, some of them celebrities? It took about half an hour.
My blog is the very best example I can give you in terms of why I was terrible at school until I got to college. It all looks like the ADHD kid who stayed up all night trying to finish a paper. In college, you can do that because there is no daily homework to be checked. English and Language Arts didn’t eat my lunch, but remembering to turn things in sure did.
Blogging is how I know to use my ADHD superpower. I have been capable of thinking very deep thoughts and writing them down since I was a child. I have not been so capable at remembering the minutiae of life. I can best be summed up by Rhythm of Love by The White Ts, because this is a conversation that makes me laugh in terms of several relationships where I’m this man……..
My head is stuck in the clouds, She begs me to come down, Says "boy, quit fooling around."
No one likes a dreamer. Even fewer like what happens when our creativity is cut off or managed. Russian and Chinese TV is an extreme example of it, but it’s the best illustration I can think of at the moment. They are held back by strict standards. I would be lucky to find some.
I tell people I like the view from up here, and their constant quest becomes telling me why I’m wrong. I don’t write because I’m talented. I write because no one will ever understand themselves without being able to read themselves later with a dispassionate eye. Journaling is so important whether you let others read it or not. I am glad that’s the message the church instilled in me that stuck. Praying gets your ego out of the way, but it will creep back in when you think about a situation in retrospect and you can’t fact check anything. If someone tells you you’re being unfair, you have no way to check and see if they’re right. You won’t know when you need to yield, and dollars to donuts you won’t figure it out immediately because it takes so long to convince you that you might, indeed, be fallible.
You develop a more acute sense as to whether people are listening to you, because you have concrete examples of where you did and did not take in love or justified anger. If you grew up in a family that doesn’t fight and you’re terrified of it, that’ll be something I need to know up front, because I know it will make you run from every conflict for all time and to be gentle. Also, to learn when you’re running too much of the time and decide whether I want the relationship to continue. I can stop doing your emotional work for you at any time when you refuse to show up.
I see so much on the Internet about how women are not hospitals for broken men, and yet we are. We so are. Men can’t emote for the most part and you become their entire emotional support system within three months flat. It’s not because they’re not capable of having multiple relationships so they’re not putting everything on you. It’s that they won’t emote in front of anyone but you. The best thing you can do is encourage your partner to go to therapy and get their shit handled. You cannot do anything more. You can only notice when you’re not seeing results and move on. You get to decide how tired you’re going to be from getting your needs constantly ignored while they think nothing of trauma dumping while not being able to take it when they dish.
Men, 99% of the time it’s your fault. Period. End of story. You were not socialized to do anything but be angry all the time and it’s a lifelong battle to be whole again. It is not that you are generally wrong in your beliefs. It means that you are really bad at communication because you fear other people so much. If you open up to a woman and she breaks your heart, then what are you going to do? Who do you tell about those feelings? Why do you need another emotional support person/rebound right away? You can’t handle your emotions on your own. Everything stems from that one issue.
You can’t handle a household, either, because you weren’t taught those skills because why would you ever need them? Your mother’s frustration doesn’t mean shit to you, Holmes. She’s not going to be there forever to wipe your ass, but she loves you enough to do it even though you’re ungrateful because you’re not taught to look around and notice women’s contributions to your life, either.
You need to be able to communicate your needs and wants so that we don’t have to take care of you physically or emotionally. If you want a woman to cook and clean and raise the children and stay home all the time so you can be with others, you are free to be that for someone else. I’m not playing. There are going to be certain times when you’ll submit or I’ll walk away, and you’ll have those dealbreakers as well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to be in any serious relationship, and men are treating all their relationships with women as if they matter so much less. That’s because their way of doing everything is better according to them. I don’t have rights because I shouldn’t need them, etc.
If I wanted to get my tubes tied, in a lot of states I’d have to marry Zac to get my tubes tied, because I need my husband’s permission…. and then we’d have a marriage that didn’t mean anything to either one of us, I just needed health care.
This has no place in society at any time.
My happiness and survival shouldn’t be dependent on whether I’m working, and I don’t mean whether I can be lazy or not. It’s whether I can afford health insurance on my own or walk away from a job with really good benefits because my boss is a walking nightmare.
Proving that you have a disability severe enough not to work is a nightmare for many people. That’s why you have to get a lawyer and it costs money to be different. It is severely ableist and makes people live check to check because it’s not enough to generate savings. The one thing that’s sacred about disability is that they can’t take it away from you and make you dependent on your own money again. In order to live paycheck to paycheck, there cannot be an end in sight. A gap will drown you immediately.
If you have to go to the ER without health insurance, you will almost certainly be fucked for a number of years. You have to pay a lot of money to get Band-Aids and ibuprofen, because women’s pain doesn’t mean as much as men’s to doctors. They’ll think nothing of prescribing another white man enough oxy to down an elephant, but you’re suspicious or needy for being hysterical when you’re in pain.
They need to cut that shit out if they’re going to say Tylenol and Advil are strong enough to compete with narcotics after surgery and/or childbirth. It will work in the days and months after, but never immediately. That’s not your first call when you’ve sliced someone open, ever, unless the patient is an addict and are self-aware enough to know they need nerve blockers instead.
If you can’t get narcotics after a serious injury that all people with eyes can see, your arm’s off, you’ve cut your bleeding leg off, etc., it is not merely a flesh wound. Your doctor’s just an asshole.
Ibuprofen is right out.
I am not pushing for giving out oxy like Tic-Tacs. I am saying that narcotics have a time and place, and that place is in the delivery room, the ER, and the recovery room. It takes more than your hospital stay to heal, and most doctors are very concerned that Karen is going to become a frequent flyer while ignoring Chad’s warning signs. Chad gets what Chad wants. If not, it’s time to call Daddy.
Daddy will think his daughters’ lives are worth less and not with words. It will play out in actions. Boys get condoms and a later curfew because their dad is just as excited about the loss of his son’s virginity as he is, while shaming the women that provide the outlet.
The whore/madonna complex is real and it’s deep.
Either we’re the ones that wipe your asses or the dirty sluts who will actually sleep with you.
It’s why I’ve dated women so long. I don’t have to deal with your bullshit. I can live around it.
Here’s the take home message that really ties the room together:
Modern society is only going to change when men realize that they’re just as emotionally needy as everyone else, while blaming women for being hysterical. This will not change in my lifetime. I can only get more men to see what it’s like for women from an outside perspective.
It’s the difference between getting the ticket to La Boheme and playing in the pit. We’re just “the help.” It’s the same issue with media. You love Succession and Archer while shitting on arts grants. All of it stems from having your creativity and humility quashed.
In order to change society right now, start getting there faster and keep up.
“When my coach said ‘you run like a girl,’ I told him that if he picked up the pace, he could run like a girl, too.”
Stories That Are All True 