Skip to main content

How To Climb Walls

Mental health workers sometimes encourage neurodivergent people to imitate some of the behaviors of neurotypical people.   The aim of this is to foster learned prosocial behaviors; mimicking an attitude may lead to adopting that attitude.  "Fake it till you make it" is one way to describe this strategy.

I see in this the implication that neurodivergent people like me should learn to integrate with neurotypical people who in turn have no social responsibility to accommodate us.  Because we are the ones with the differences, we are the ones who must adapt.  Not integrating presents significant obstructions to the pursuit of happiness.  If people think you're weird, they won't meet you halfway.

In order to accept the idea that I must pretend to be a certain way in order to ingratiate myself to people who aren't likely to help me otherwise, I must admit that the World of Others is hostile toward me.  This doesn't make me want to win anyone's favor.  The existence of outsiders seems to suggest the existence of an outside.  But is it inevitable that we exile the Other?

There is value in learning to surmount the walls before us.  Part of the value comes from accepting that people want to keep us out.  We are outside their walls to begin with not because of molecular chance but because those walls exist to keep us seperate from them.   And the number of neurotypical people working to dismantle the barriers to neurodivergent success in their world is far too small to warrant any hope that said success will come easily to us.

So the onus is on us to suppress our differences in the hopes that eventually acting normal will come easily.  And the people we must strive to be like have no responsibility to try to be more like us.

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