@actuallyautistic
The event of this week, and if you need to know what, there's no hope for you, has led me to realise again how insidious and dangerously stupid one of the myths of what autism can be like, is. That we can be robot like and unfeeling. Over-rational, logical, the rock in a crisis, in the unfeeling way that we can cope and react. Because we have no empathy, no way to understand, or connect, with anything and especially the emotions or feelings that others are experiencing at that moment.
NO!
Yes, many of us do prioritise our logic, or ability to reason our way through situations and circumstances. And yes, through years of masking, especially when we didn't know that we were autistic, we learnt tricks to cope. To deal with overwhelm, to deal with intensity, and to cope. Mostly, I can't help thinking, through learning how to disassociate ourselves from these things, of persuading ourselves that we couldn't be experiencing them. Or by pushing the debt, the price to be paid, somehow into the future, in order to do what needed to be done.
But, that's not because we were never experiencing the emotions, or that we are not empathic. But, that we experienced them too much. I believe that we connect far more than most, and I certainly won't say all, people. We experience too much, not just through our senses, the way the intense world theory explains so well, but through the ways we connect with the very world itself. We see the connectiveness, we bond deeply with objects and things, even things that the world has decided are irrelevant. We connect in ways that most have forgotten how to do, immersed as they are in the illusion of the human world and what it means. We connect spiritually and emotionally. We see and understand and feel things that don't always have words to explain them, or explanations that make sense. We feel, so, so much.
This isn't because we are better, or worse than anyone, just different. Specialists, in a sense, in how to do this. In this world, it comes at a hell of a price and cost. In others, we come into our own. And at the moment it means that we are hurting, weeping for the future and the children born into in. Weeping for the world and those caught up in it and what it and we will become. That we might not show it, that we might be trying to help others to cope, doesn't mean that we aren't. That we are being logical and just trying to get on with our lives, doesn't mean anything, beyond that this is perhaps the only way our experience and the world has taught us how to cope. Inside the pain is only too real and the fear and the uncertainty. And yet also the hope, those of us who have always been beyond the raggedy edge of humanity, whether we knew it or not, have always known how to nurture that, always in our own way. It has always been an essential part of us, as misguided and unlikely as it has often seemed. But now is the time to remember hope, whether we can see it or not. These are going to be "interesting times" and we need it now, more than ever.
#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic
#Neurodivergent
The event of this week, and if you need to know what, there's no hope for you, has led me to realise again how insidious and dangerously stupid one of the myths of what autism can be like, is. That we can be robot like and unfeeling. Over-rational, logical, the rock in a crisis, in the unfeeling way that we can cope and react. Because we have no empathy, no way to understand, or connect, with anything and especially the emotions or feelings that others are experiencing at that moment.
NO!
Yes, many of us do prioritise our logic, or ability to reason our way through situations and circumstances. And yes, through years of masking, especially when we didn't know that we were autistic, we learnt tricks to cope. To deal with overwhelm, to deal with intensity, and to cope. Mostly, I can't help thinking, through learning how to disassociate ourselves from these things, of persuading ourselves that we couldn't be experiencing them. Or by pushing the debt, the price to be paid, somehow into the future, in order to do what needed to be done.
But, that's not because we were never experiencing the emotions, or that we are not empathic. But, that we experienced them too much. I believe that we connect far more than most, and I certainly won't say all, people. We experience too much, not just through our senses, the way the intense world theory explains so well, but through the ways we connect with the very world itself. We see the connectiveness, we bond deeply with objects and things, even things that the world has decided are irrelevant. We connect in ways that most have forgotten how to do, immersed as they are in the illusion of the human world and what it means. We connect spiritually and emotionally. We see and understand and feel things that don't always have words to explain them, or explanations that make sense. We feel, so, so much.
This isn't because we are better, or worse than anyone, just different. Specialists, in a sense, in how to do this. In this world, it comes at a hell of a price and cost. In others, we come into our own. And at the moment it means that we are hurting, weeping for the future and the children born into in. Weeping for the world and those caught up in it and what it and we will become. That we might not show it, that we might be trying to help others to cope, doesn't mean that we aren't. That we are being logical and just trying to get on with our lives, doesn't mean anything, beyond that this is perhaps the only way our experience and the world has taught us how to cope. Inside the pain is only too real and the fear and the uncertainty. And yet also the hope, those of us who have always been beyond the raggedy edge of humanity, whether we knew it or not, have always known how to nurture that, always in our own way. It has always been an essential part of us, as misguided and unlikely as it has often seemed. But now is the time to remember hope, whether we can see it or not. These are going to be "interesting times" and we need it now, more than ever.
#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic
#Neurodivergent
Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 •
Kevin Davy •
Thank you, that means a lot to me, to hear that. Especially the part that spent five decades alone and frightened to be seen.