{\ this uses i/me/my/mine/myself bc it's from a Facebook blog}
The more i've found harmony between my belief system about life & my approaches TO life, the more i need to build on that increasingly fortified sense of clarity but the less I'll put myself through "learning the hard way". yay, less bad choices!
on the flip side, it's difficult to see how many good choices (learning the wise way, which doesn't always mean the most emotionally traumatizing) you actually have to get what you need.
so I have to be more diligent & remember more about my inner harmony when my life experience has kinda checked off the list of "the hard ways" for someone in as precarious a life as mine. what am i trying to say?
all of us to varying degrees deal with this, bc of how hard ppl like me/you have to extend, expand, etc.. for ppl to understand stuff about you that they may not have ever deigned important to learn about any person.
and they may care about you but not know how to care about your circumstances bc those circumstances challenge their preconceptions about ppl in general or ppl in your situation—including stuff which your situation reveals about society, stuff that they don't know how to come to terms with & may rather think is not important or that you're "blowing out of proportion" like differences in neurology or ability for stuff that's actually based on real things about you, or stuff like prejudices completely in the minds of others and how prejudices that reinforce generational trauma & remind you of a truly inharmonious society (discrimination, injustice, etc) can and does chip away at your battlements or even straight out traumatize you & systemically resist change.
idk how to explain that "less good choices relative to bad ones depending on how much you have to fight past people's preconceptions" & how that itself varies based on societal standards of what ppl are taught to expect & what they're/we're taught to misunderstand or oversimplify.... but that does mean that i don't have as many accessible inroads to building a meaningful life as other ppl have without having to learn "harder ways" than other ppl can learn, bc of how much less ppl know about something as basic as my neurology or what they wanna see when it's hidden from view as systemic oppression is—or how many ppl think you've been brainwashed into thinking you're experiencing a **particular** societal refusal to understand that life is indeed harder for ppl based on what ppl are willing to hire & not willing to accommodate or understand—there are "cracks" in the way we're provided for & the ppl who believe they avoided those cracks feel they're entitled to more basic needs bc they "earned it" when they can't prove that..... They would rather completely discount basic facts of my existence as "a bad attitude" or me learning some life lessons poorly, bc to them they're not oversimplifying—to them, I'm overcomplicating my view of what's been hard in my life and think there's particular oppressions rather than just "life is hard for everybody", and then the only way they feel they can do me "a favor" at all is to fundamentally refuse to acknowledge that I'm capable of figuring out which aspects of my suffering have been internal and which haven't & pinpoint the source of the problems accordingly when necessary, and instead just approach me with a general refusal to even understand my neurology (hard wired) or my hardships bc they think either one of those (neurology or trauma) has me twisted up and "making myself out to deserve special treatment" when im saying that I've gotten especially bad treatment bc the groups *actually* receiving demonstrable special treatment (bc our system runs off luck, archaic familial property standards, a deadlocked resource management system that does play favorites based on who already owns shit, land, etc.... & that ruthlessness gets you to the top more than actually treating us like a social species that are threatened by inequality & can't just bootstrap or Stoicism our way out of it without becoming cruel & unjust in the process.
how do i "make good choices" when the best choices left are for me to learn and grow WITH ppl who'd more than likely rather just assume i could never feel that discounted, indignant (about indignity) about the world or have trouble trusting ppl except if i had an attitude problem rather than just a balanced response to an unbalanced situation that they don't believe is a balanced response?
that takes a toll of relationships, and often only leaves me with the option of checking the fuck out & learning things about myself without the mirror of society & the benefit of social support held up to me. and SO MANY PEOPLE honestly believe that social support & mirroring was only a small contributor to their thriving, as if living in more frequent contact with challenges (that they can only truly have faced bc of that very support that they take for granted bc they wanna see themselves as "strong") robs them of the ability to even comprehend that the relative LACK of support or your chances in life are rigged based on inadequacies held in place by physical, financial & mental warfare by leaders of industries and governments guaranteed to be incompetent in caring for others & the planet bc they're chosen by the most ruthless or lucky (neither trait lends itself to empathy, instead lending itself to arrogance & paranoia) .
and then there's not a way for everyone to be communally strong so only a subset of ppl receive the care they need and then that subset takes it for granted & tells you you're either making up your own oppression to feel better or that you just need to make better choices, when they dont realize that you would if you could but not everyone can & we don't deserve less full and enriching lives and we don't need to "un brainwash" to change how much we need, and that's not wrong or something we can willpower away without doing more damage to ourselves that not everyone even has to deal with.
it's either they get it or they don't, so when there's enough ppl who don't get it, that's even more restrictive than a general working class experience of people not having enough time for each other, but the added isolation of ppl not wanting or knowing how to make time for you without demeaning or discounting your life experience & ability to assess inner and outer limits
and then there's the truly heinously antisocial people who think "limits are all in your head", spitting in the face of anyone in their lives who holds up their support systems, and that ungratefulness itself is a huge red flag for ppl who face repetitive traumas that are only repetitive bc they're systemic, and who'd rather i just trust them without those extra reservations or have a "better" attitude when "better" to them means i agree with them about the causes of needless suffering in my life & they also have to truly believe that my needs are met just as well as theirs or could be if i just stopped believing in the particular types of oppression i didn't even wanna acknowledge in the first place.
but they think i actually WANT to see things that aren't there to "take less responsibility" when what I'm doing is being more responsive to a broader and more detailed picture of life (which leads to more gratitude AND accuracy about society) of my fellow human beings, the ones in my support system or not, and even ppl who refuse support me bc they think they know better & think they'd be supporting "delusions about society" bc they just assume they're so much stronger and independent when they're really just being less grateful and more cold than will ever help anyone but the lucky, self centered or ruthless, and that's gonna just lead to more ppl like me resisting them & it'll eventually come to blows if the ppl with more continue to refuse to look at why they have more:
because they have more good choices than some ppl, and they didn't earn it on their own.
and i use the way autistic ppl are treated as an inkblot test for whether i can trust ppl to understand anything about how to listen to ppl when they talk about oppression (whether you agree about its existence or sources, or agree about neither), bc autism is hardwired and trying to act and think non-autistically is demonstrably proven to be deadly just like trying to rewrite anyone's neurobiology at that level would make anyone so distressed that it would be hard to function....
so when someone can't get on board with my very neurology & trust that i have enough self awareness to be describing it (and separating the stress of being human from the added unnecessary and avoidable stress of being autistic, or let's get real here, queer too) i have a hard time trusting that someone can understand stuff i know to be basic facts about our world, the way ppl i love and care about are affected by leaders, business owners, landlords, militaries, crime-"fighting" systems, etc and ppl making the furthest reaching decisions in this world (capitalism is unjustifiably inadequate & breeds discrimination and indignities and poor management of resources and services in ways other systems can avoid, yada yada, let's see if you believe me).
and so i experience a deeper breakdown of trust in more situations that can't just be boiled down to individual "trust issues", when ppl can't even pony-up the humility to believe my life might actually be harder bc experiences like mine have been simplified, conflated with intellectual deficits (which also means that they don't understand intellectually disabled ppl who are cheated out of "good choices" by cynical ppl in ways that autistic ppl *don't* always face bc our differences are about different traits than our "mental age" and even that is a flawed concept but i don't know what to say bc I'm not intellectually disabled except for my working memory bc I'm a savant and my verbal processing is much much faster than my procedural memory, i just trust people with more intellectual disabilities than me when they tell me that they're oppressed in ways I'm not) or they believe ppl can "become non autistic", in which case, why don't they just BECOME autistic to throw me a bone ...? (the answer is that think the world would be better off if i wasnt autistic, or they're selfish enough to want me in their life but don't want me to be autistic, bc they think my autism is why they're dissatisfied with me, or they have no clue either way bc they think it's chargeable whatever it is they dislike about me....).... or they just flat out don't think neurological differences exist unless they're "deficiencies" to be charitable towards on a case by case basis, rather than a way of processing the world that's perfectly able to be harmonized with other humans when given equitable amounts of good choices, which they believe I'm already provided so again we're back to the problem of ppl assuming the problem is my attitude as if oppression, being unemployable unless i take risks most ppl can't fathom, etc aren't a factor in my life or are fucking me up & making me a problem when it's the other way around. I make them out to be a problem and then they're done with me or will only keep me around if i pretend entire systems of injustice don't exist so my attitude is better or so I've got more energy to make up for the lack of support they won't even acknowledge matters in the first place
vicious cycle. It also applies to my sexuality and gender, so i can bet my white ass that it applies to race assigned by culture, "biological" sex assigned by oversimplification of actual biology, age and the inevitable disabilities we all currently face as we age, ancestry, origin, types of things ppl will collectively disable you for, things that are inherently disabling & need the help and social care we can't currently give bc our systems don't even grant that ability to care to us in the first place without a fight, etc...
would you be able to trust a person to acknowledge shit that's done to others for specific things they can't control if they won't acknowledge how YOUR life is impacted by things YOU can't control? i doubt it—unless you're around a lot more ppl who do acknowledge yours than don't, and from my experience ppl would rather see autism as something to be made into a problem instead of realizing they also have a neurological "type" array of traits they can't control but are currently the majority traits & they need to have more empathy for ppl down to the level of neurology, which shatters their fantasies of being able to change things about themselves that they'd be better off embracing, but then that's just them refusing to stop learning the hard way when they DO have other options that autistic ppl currently don't, and that flips the script on them bc then they need to get over themselves and meet me halfway, not shut down what i say with the unproven bullshit like "everyone's autistic" and "you sound like you just want special treatment, systemic oppression doesn't exist" or worse "get over it" when their way of getting over injustice is the turn their compassion down and their willful ignorance up.
impossible empathy gap? no. I learned how allism (the other side of the continuum that autism sits upon) in all the various forms works, and i think ppl hate that bc then they can't feel unlimited.
but just like more super rich can't exist in conditions of scarcity (artificial scarcity within actual abundance at this point) without making more ppl poor, ppl who delude themselves into thinking they can transcend their bodies in every situation if they just try hard enough absolutely require more ppl be disabled and have their genuine efforts/trying dismissed.
some ppl only care about how individually "light" every aspect of their life feels, so they tell the ppl best able to describe real oppression to "lighten up" when it's them that need us to remain in the shadows so their weak & flimsy light can keep shining uninterrupted by things bigger than themselves
I'm sick of it. And autistic ppl are actually theorized as having trouble reciprocating with non-Autistic (“allistic”) people, but the thing is it goes both ways and we can ALL, regardless of neurological traits, empathize more of other harmless traits. And learn about whether oppression is real or not and what causes it.