Skip to main content

You Can't Fire Me. I Quit

I experienced a lot of rejection between the ages of 9 and 20.  I felt rejected by my peers, teachers, and family.  In many cases, it was made explicit that I was thought of as inferior.  This hurt and it was confusing.  I felt cast out by everyone.  It seemed as if there was something about me that made people reject me as a matter of course even before they spoke to me.  I became bitter.  I decided that if everyone rejected me then I would reject everyone.  "You can't fire me," I thought.  "I quit."  What I quit was hope for acceptance, and I quit it in small ways at first.  Now I have abandoned that hope entirely.  I remain bitter, and I feel alone.

In the 90s, kids in Southern Indiana weren't thinking about autism.  If they had ever heard the word, they thought it referred to a child who couldn't speak and screamed a lot.  If you seemed weird but you could walk and talk and you didn't look deformed, then you were either gay or stupid.  Those were the only two options.  Many people assumed I was one of those things.  It would be nice to say that things have completely changed since then, but those attitudes are still very much around.  I still feel as if I will never fit in anywhere.  I don't face anything near the naked cruelty that I did as a child - now that I'm an adult I can choose who I associate with - but I still feel as if there is something about the way I'm put together that makes me impossible to assimilate.  I can't integrate.  I decided a long time ago that I wasn't interested in integrating because it was impossible.  It's a good bet that the reason I feel so alone now is that I decided in my youth to reject everyone.  I still see rejection, though.  When you're having a normal conversation with someone and you tell then you have an autism spectrum disorder, you can see their demeanor change as they begin talking to you as though you're handicapped.  You can feel them putting you in a different box away from all the normal people - away from everyone they want to talk to.  You can tell when they go from listening to you to humoring you, and it's very upsetting.

So the rejection is still there, too.  It's enmeshed with my bitterness, which seems to perpetuate it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Save the World

The following isn't related to autism.  It's an edited transcript of my side of a conversation with an AI.  I'm including it here because I think it's important. It should be pretty easy to arrive at the notion that, if we want to minimize our environmental impact, we should look back at a time when we were making a minimal impact and return to that. But that is not a suggestion anyone is making, and I don't think it's a suggestion anyone is likely to make, wherever these conversations are being had.  The conversation about conservation always begins with the tacit question, "How can we continue breeding unchecked forever, and how can we continue to deplete natural resources indefinitely?"  If you start from the idea that what we are doing now must not be impacted by whatever solution we come up with, then you're not going to come up with a good solution. This issue seems complex.  I don't think it's actually complex at all, however. I thin...
Post a Comment
Read more