An interesting exchange from Game of Thrones:

“Tyrion: Let me give you some advice bastard. Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.

Jon: What the hell do you know about being a bastard?

Tyrion: All dwarfs are bastards in their father's eyes.”

I’ve had one good Mormon friend for the last twelve years. I had two good Mormon friends, but I got the other one to my view of things pretty quickly. We’re still friends. I keep the stubborn one around, though, because we’re friends and it transcends religion.

However…

I don’t like how he uses my disclosures sometimes. He doesn’t mean it malevolently, just Mormonly. He pushed me to get an ASD diagnosis, and my paranoia tells me he just wanted a convenient way to dismiss me.

He doesn’t dismiss me though. He stays by me. Should I care how he does it? I can get myself all worked up over this if I want to. Thing is, he wasn’t the one that went and shared my diagnosis with my dad quack parents: that was my baby brother who left the church with me. He doesn’t understand how annoyed I am by that. He may dismiss my feelings harder as neurodivergent social inadequacy and paranoia than my Mormon friend does, but he still respects me too.

Still…

I was warned not to go this route many times by this board. At the time, though, I was fighting for the legitimacy of my perceived reality in a very intimate way — with my bishop/father knowing all of my bullshit and my fear that he was cynically using it against me to protect the sheep from the wolf. That is a drama I have been consumed in for years, even before I resigned the church and even before I tried on godlessness for size. I’ve been drowning in spiritual self-loathing since I was twelve, since my invasive bishop’s interview for by deacon’s advancement went sideways and triggered anxiety on a whole new level for the next twenty years. And I’ve been trying to understand how the mass of humanity thinks since I can remember anything and relate to them for certain in almost any way.

“Radical transparency” is something I learned from a Mormon shrink when I was 21, and it saved my life.I should have been diagnosed back then: hell, I should have been diagnosed when I was in grade school. The red flags were obvious enough to a trained eye, but my folks didn’t “believe in medicine” or psychology. And I took their side in those days, trusting they knew how to solve whatever these feelings were that I was different or off the beaten path of humanity somehow. I may not have learned as much about myself, humanity, and the world as I did if things hadn’t happened the way that they did.

I wrote a poem about what autistic mind blindness is like from the inside.

*****

The prodigal son was blind


There once was a young man
who hid from the world
Alone
That dreamed of coming out
into the light to,
For the first time,
Find love and recognition
and a feeling of
Home.

In the darkness
he planned his great move;
In the loneliness
he plotted his rise.
He pictured his greatness
And kept it always
Before his eyes.

He gathered knowledge to aid himself
He observed who might be his friends
He played along until the time was right
For him to achieve his own ends.

Then the day came. He sprang to his plan,
Which was not a plan but a sentiment, really,
That he deserved to own everything—
Which he already had in modest portion
But never found wherewith to enjoy it.
For some strange reason,
The reason eluded even him.

How does a lord who stands above his peers
In wealth and station and fame and potential
Become so arrogant as to want more
And while putting his mother to tears,
Lose all his inherited prestige
in a fortnight?

And for that matter,
Why was the war
he planned in his heart
For so long
So ineffectual
when it finally came time?
Was he not sharp?
Was he not bright?
Yes and yes,
And so the mystery
compounds
With more mystery.

Why did he rage like he did
When he should have been happy?

It wasn’t until he had wasted his honor
And until after he was abandoned alone—
Or rather banished himself to be alone,
Not to brood or to atone
But to simply enjoy his own kind—
It was discovered that he was blind
And had been the whole time.

It was not a blindness affecting the eyes.
His lenses were clear
And his optic nerves were fine.
It was a more profound and more tragic kind
Affecting the pathways which come after
Which help the young lord tell
What he is even looking at.
The blindness was in the mind’s eye,
Hidden from his own sight—
And even that of his family
Who loved him best,
But he didn’t know how to tell
And they didn’t know to look.

And so the lord, wound up with the years
Of grandiosity and praise of his brilliance
Used his social capital to piss it away
And become a despised pauper,
Cast out of home and comfort.
Why? Why on God’s earth would anyone—
Because this way he can at least know,
Perhaps,
His location in social/emotional space
Vía a process of intellectual elimination
And when there is no other possibility,
The last remaining one must be
What is real.

The mad secretly blind lord
Was not mad at all, turns out.
He was lonely, not even having himself
For comfort to ease the anxiety
he daily suffered,
Because he didn’t know
which version of himself
Was true,
But now he knows,
For he conspired with use of his intellect
To use his inheritance
To test the people around him
And silence the competing versions
Of his story one by one
Until only one remained,
Which story must be his,
He thought maybe
he would glimpse
his own heart
Accurately
At least one time.
He just wanted to know his own heart
And to picture it on his face
The way he saw others expressing
Their hearts on their faces
And if he could just see himself like that
Once
Just once
He would gladly be cast out
And disinherited
To enjoy his own company
picture-accurate
In his mind’s eye
for the first time
And die content.

So, his war was a feint,
Just like his whole life
had seemed anyway.
He was warring with his life,
Which had always baffled him
And robbed him of joy.
The preparation for the war was
Where the real war was fought,
And he had already won his victory,
But he wanted to feel it too,
So he gleefully burned it all down
In mock drama
To force everyone
to leave him alone.
For behold,
he had never beheld himself before,
And he had years to catch up on
To establish this new relationship
And he didn’t want
to be disturbed anymore
In this enterprise
Like before.

********

I’ve always been told I was wiser than my age, and nowadays I’m told I understand more than I should given my disabilities. Well, there’s a certain way I’ve come to my understanding of the world. I whistle in the dark, even though it gives me away to friends and foes alike. I refuse to live in darkness, darkness being the ignorance of how most people think and feel that my neurotype often enforces on me. But, I’m using the most intimate parts of my soul as a kind of socio-emotional sonar, which can backfire sometimes. It makes people think I’m crazy. Why would anyone do this? They don’t understand what my life has been like. How could they? But I’ve learned enough from my method of choice to be able to explain it finally: if there are any left who care to hear it.

My tbm friend has a cousin who has what I have: a nasty ADHD/ASD mixture. He has been using what I have taught him about mine to convince her that he gets it more than she knows. He’s trying to save her from burning down all her bridges with her tbm mother, but they already haven’t been talking for over a year. He was trying to save my relationship with my parents in the same way. It’s very easy to accuse him of simply wanting to defend the church, and he does defend the church, but he extends the olive branch as far as he physically can without falling out of the ship Zion. He deserves commendation for what he does. He is the kind of tbm we all wish we had to deal with. He’s a good dude, and he keeps me informed of and empathic with the diversity of feelings among tbms. He even helped me get a very good job recently that is going to financially save me.

I don’t think I regret wearing my vulnerabilities as armor and also using them as social echo location. I’m sorry that I get hurt and it sets me back. But my rich awareness of my condition and how my perception and thought processes differ from others wouldn’t be what it is otherwise. What thinkest the board?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/21/2022 04:46AM by Cold-Dodger.

If they can't take a joke, fetch 'em!

I think you're just going through the normal thing 30 somethings go through when they are figuring out who and what they are. Some people are happy to drift along but others are more curious. I suspect that after a while, the subject will lose some of its interest for you. You will always be aware of your unique nature, but it won't likely loom as large a position in your life as it does now.

If you are relentlessly honest with yourself, and fully own your "failings" or weaknesses, then others can't use those weaknesses against you. Age and experience help with that, too.

I had to learn that in my career field, because teaching (particularly urban teaching) is subject to so much criticism. For instance, a couple of colleagues in my school district recently said that if a student loses control and thoroughly trashes your classroom, that it's due to the teacher's failure to "control her class," a frequent complaint of administrators. My response is, "-ish happens," particularly for children experiencing trauma and the resulting mental health issues. So basically, I refuse to own other people's judgment of me. I've been doing this job long enough that I know my strengths and weaknesses, and what I have to bring to the table. You can't shame me because I refuse to be shamed.

So I would say it's a matter of knowing yourself and building your self confidence over time.

Religions can be very good at unnecessarily shaming people, and the internalized sense of shame can build over time. It can take a long time to work through this, and to be able to say, "Yeah, no, I'm not going to buy into that."

whether it becomes a weapon depends entirely upon the wielder

For some, your reveal may be like watching a very long movie in quadruple time. It's a lot to take in. Make sure there is some popcorn and Junior Mints at hand. The real you should not be a weapon, but a gift. Some will still walk out but that's okay. They may do better with the re-runs.