Skip to main content

Uber VS Unter

I went to the law offices of Schad and Schad to meet with the legal professional who is helping me with my disability claim.  I used Uber to get there and back.  I waited in the parking lot for the driver who would take me home.  The driver called me, angry.  He'd gone to the wrong address and blamed me.  The app had given him the wrong address but because it didn't matter I apologized anyway and said that I had made a mistake.  He and his GPS spoke Spanish, so I did too.  I said "Soy autista" so he would know why I was being quiet.  I was so anxious that I didn't notice until there was no way off the bridge that he was taking me to Louisville.  We were going the wrong way, into the wrong city, but I couldn't say anything.  I was paralyzed with anxiety.  I was ready to be deposited in a strange place.  That seemed better than correcting him.

He changed course before I could say anything and returned over a toll bridge to Indiana.  I was relieved that the situation had resolved itself but it's definitely bad that I froze.  If he had stopped somewhere in Kentucky I would have thanked him and then contacted Uber after he left.  I told the legal professional and he found the story relevant and he reported it to the SSA.  My anxiety and my communication problems present real personal risk.  I could end up in a bad situation because I'm afraid to talk to strangers, which is funny because as a boy I was told the opposite.

I can hear now people asking why I couldn't say anything.  The situation was urgent.  Why couldn't I fight past shyness?  I don't have an answer for that.  I'm sorry.  I can't tell people how to consider others.  But I should try to make an explanation work.  Here: I legitimately lack certain significant musculature of thought, or the muscles are deformed, nonfunctional, not having attained normal maturity.  But my thoughts are strong in other ways.  I'm pointing to neurobiology.  Simpler: my house has one story and yours has two.  Why don't I just go upstairs?

I know that there are things I can't do and I'm still learning what's possible. What's real about me.  Both denying what I can be certain about and starting from a position of certainty lead me to no discoveries.  All I can do is consider and reflect honestly.

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

The Human Protocol

Humanity is a spectrum. Some people move through human society without ever belonging in it. I'm such a person. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, everything your internal organs do, your balance, your muscle tone, your proprioception, every experience you have, from the big ones to the little ones, corresponds to something that happens in your brain: a neural event. Most neural events are beyond our direct control. Every neural event has a trigger. Someone says your name and you turn. You like a song, so you turn it up. What triggers neural events is determined by things like your genes, your upbringing, your culture, and your values. Many neural events are reserved for human-to-human interactions. If you encountered a mosquito that spoke English, you'd recategorize it, and you might change the way you went about trying to keep it from biting you. It would qualify for a kind of consideration that we don't usually offer mosquitoes. It would be more than just an ...
Post a Comment
Read more