Far Removed

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....

My grandfather died recently.  He was sick for a long time with multiple myeloma.  We had no kind of relationship, and I am no more grieved by his death than I would be by that of a rank stranger.  He was intelligent, stalwart, and aloof from me.  And he was proud of his life. His was a military funeral because my grandfather was a veteran of the Korean War.  My wife and I attended.  Rituals are strange to me; I watched the death ceremony with some curiosity.  What did it mean to others?  How was the symbolism important?  Which emotional expressions were genuine and considered, and which were Pavlovian?  There were no answers in the proceedings. I don't fear death.  I do fear pain and as an anxious person I am prone to dread, so I would prefer to die suddenly, having no idea what was happening.  But I have no dread of my own annihilation.  In fact, I'm trying, through philosophy, to affect it now while I am alive.  ...

I lost my disability case. The hearing is over, the decision is made, but the fight goes on. Now I have to sit down with my legal counsel and talk about the ruling. The court sent me the Decision Rationale.  In four two-sided pages this document explains the judge's finding of "not disabled."  Given among the reasons for this finding are the fact that I can play video games, that I am married, that I use social media, that I am able to eat in public with my wife, that I can feed my cats and myself, and that I have "been able to work through difficulties with social interaction as [I have] been able to push through this way through [sic] the situation when there was no alternative."  The document describes as "allegations" my reports of real experience, which I suppose isn't unusual but which makes me feel dehumanized nonetheless. My chronic insomnia, a well documented symptom of PTSD, is dismissed as an allegation that can't be corroborated. ...

Autism puts us behind walls.  Some we can move beyond.  Others form the permanent boundaries of our capability.  The territories of specifially allistic neurotypy, while they may not extend in the same directions, are larger than those of autistic people.  Autistic people face challenges that allistic people do not. There are many and diverse ways to be challenged.  I continually discover nuances to my disability.  I learn every day more about what I cannot do.  I search my boundaries to find the ones I can redraw.  I see from different perspectives that my boundaries are more fixed than an allistic person's are likely to be.  It's easy to become frustrated. But there are many in the autistic community who are displeased with descriptions of autism as a disability.  They focus on the places within their smaller territories which aren't accessible to most allistic people.  That is: they look at what they can do well that allis...

I am a lot like an android.  I wish that I were artificial.  Will and emotion are obstacles or burdens.  I am weary of them.  I want to want nothing and to watch the world around me without judging it.  Looking in the world for satisfaction is counterproductive and I would rather stop.  I am vexed in that I have much ado to know myself. The only experience available to me is physical experience.  My needs vis a vis my quality of life are all real, physical, limited.  And how disappointing that anything must be real.  Would that I could be in an unworld divorced from such ideas as value. Imagine an unreal reality. Imagine observing a world whose objectivity is fluid.  I want to be transient, if I must be at all; in the world but not of it, if I must be either.  This is the appeal of being a machine: I would have suites of purposes and nothing to judge or to do between tasks.  My intelligence would be a utility and nothing mo...

I am not emotionless.  I am far away from others, but I am not infinitely distant.  I do have some insights into people.  At least I think I do. People are patterns.  The self is a neuroanatomical process that is limited by the organization of neurons and by available experience.  Insofar as the self can be defined, these limits define it.  Any limited system can be learned to some degree with close, dispassionate observation; thus its functioning can be anticipated.  People are predictable up to a point, and generally beyond that point they drown. As I may have said before my therapist has suggested that my art isn't well received because I can't connect with people emotionally.  But why should that be?  Because I have no emotions?  No.  Because I process emotion intellectually?  Perhaps.  But I assert that considering emotion through logic doesn't mean that my emotions don't register. Maybe other people are having ...

Lying is important in allistic conversation.  But lying confuses me.  People often lie to be polite.  But it isn't polite to lie to me. This isn't a moral or an ethical issue.  I already have significant communication impediments, and lying adds another barrier to understanding.  It destabilizes interactions by introducing unpredictability.  I can't guess whether or not someone is likely to lie, and I can't begin an interaction if I don't know how it's going to proceed.  If someone lies once, maybe they will always lie.  Or maybe they never will again.  Or maybe whether they might lie depends on a system of factors so complex that I can't hope to understand it.  Lying to me, even to be polite, will always cause a misunderstanding.  I cannot be led along a path of lies to the truth.  I will always lose my way.  That is: I will make the wrong inference.  Knowing this, when confronted with implications I refuse to infe...

I went to my disability hearing.  I sat in a room with my legal counsel and a stenographer.  The administrative law judge was in another state, so she appeared on a large TV monitor.  In the room with the judge was a phone with a vocational rehabilitation expert on speaker. The judge asked my legal counsel some questions.  Then she asked the voc rehab expert some hypothetical questions.  Then she asked me some questions.  I don't know how I did.  I wish I'd had the opportunity to prepare what I would say.  I tried to be clear and concise.  I entirely forgot to address her as "your honor."  My legal counsel said afterward that he thought the ALJ wanted to decide in my favor.  As of this writing I am still waiting for her decision to arrive in the mail. The thought that I might be denied what I deserve because I mispoke or failed to explain something adequately is disquieting.  I am grateful though that the hearing was recorde...

Once, I saw outside my window a child whose shoelace was stuck in the crank of his bicycle.  It was raining and I left my apartment to help him extricate himself.  I act compassionately, and I care about fairness.  My therapist has suggested that this is a contradiction in my character, since I don't have strong emotions and usually don't form attachments to people.  After a therapy session,  I was thinking about the contradiction that seems to arise from my apparent empathy.  I believe I have an explanation.   As a child I had to decide how to interact with people.  I observed that people often treated me differently, and I observed that I felt there was something different about me.  I presumed there was a causal relationship of the latter to the former: that people treated me differently because I seemed different.  I wanted that to change, so I tried to figure people out.  I observed that people wanted things and that b...

My therapist once said to me that he wondered why autism hadn't evolved away.  He reasoned that it must have some Darwinian benefit.  I believe he was talking about ASD on an experiential level.  There is some evidence that whatever genes are involved in autism are also involved in increased iron absorption, which is particularly beneficial during cell growth.  Having cells that absorb iron better might be a benefit worth the risk of developing autism, but that isn't what psychoanalysts want to work with.  So what benefits of autism do I experience consciously? It's hard to say.  Autism is like a small glitch in a single component in an electrical system that causes seemingly unrelated glitches to pervade the system at large.  It's difficult enough identifying all the subtle problems that come with my ASD.  If there are benefits, they're whispers in a storm.  And autism isn't all I am.  It's no mean feat to identify which aspects of my...