This is a handle I used as a teenager, revived for serious Devil's Night discussions.
I'm autistic.
I was also diagnosed with C-PTSD once I escaped my home state, C-PTSD instilled by teachers and paraprofessionals who'd engage in who'd engage in malicious compliance, poised to punish, because they believed I was "faking" -- I'd be told I'm so charming, I must be a sociopath.
I'll share with HN when I told one of them who was so bald as to show up and try to disrupt my open mic in a show of intimidation:
>OK honey... let's say every professional with more education than a middle school teacher's assistant is wrong, and I'm a bald 160lb sociopath who might crash the internet and/or greater civil society because he feels his precarity is engineered by those with more means and less lateral thinking than himself. Why would you disrespect such a person, when if it is truly "Bellum omnium contra omnes" he's shown you how much can shown and told within two weeks of a man like me using his free expression to it's fullest, without firing a shot?
In my experience, if I'm not parroting the ideals of neurotypicals, or lifting others more diverse than "just" being a queer, lower middle class abuse survivor, people will coflate "being autistic" with "being pendantic" or "difficult" as an excuse to keep you precarious.
Meanwhile, those same people will turn on their TV and whine about mass shootings and other horrors by those more mentally ill than you or I, shootings that often stem from a sense of anomie and precarity that feels engineered in a society bordered by one with universal health care and respect for the declaration of human rights.
My own pet theory is that many cases of "autism" where one is "high on the specrum" are actually just generalized anxiety or C-PTSD, because no one is gonna tell a parent "Your kid is constantly traumatized by you and your Opus Dei weirdo woo woo friends", so it's put onto the child to de-escalate folks less rational, sane, or smart than themselves, and by the time you can articulate this... you're an adult, denied the childhood others good, forced into wage slavery if you don't want to rely on abusive "allies".
A lot of people carry the kind of slaveowner mentality they have when speaking to a barista or bookstore clerk into every interpersonal interaction -- they conflate being "threatened" with feeling so when someone responds with the spirit and vigor they communicate THEIR annoyances.
I'm autistic.
I was also diagnosed with C-PTSD once I escaped my home state, C-PTSD instilled by teachers and paraprofessionals who'd engage in who'd engage in malicious compliance, poised to punish, because they believed I was "faking" -- I'd be told I'm so charming, I must be a sociopath.
I'll share with HN when I told one of them who was so bald as to show up and try to disrupt my open mic in a show of intimidation:
>OK honey... let's say every professional with more education than a middle school teacher's assistant is wrong, and I'm a bald 160lb sociopath who might crash the internet and/or greater civil society because he feels his precarity is engineered by those with more means and less lateral thinking than himself. Why would you disrespect such a person, when if it is truly "Bellum omnium contra omnes" he's shown you how much can shown and told within two weeks of a man like me using his free expression to it's fullest, without firing a shot?
In my experience, if I'm not parroting the ideals of neurotypicals, or lifting others more diverse than "just" being a queer, lower middle class abuse survivor, people will coflate "being autistic" with "being pendantic" or "difficult" as an excuse to keep you precarious.
Meanwhile, those same people will turn on their TV and whine about mass shootings and other horrors by those more mentally ill than you or I, shootings that often stem from a sense of anomie and precarity that feels engineered in a society bordered by one with universal health care and respect for the declaration of human rights.
My own pet theory is that many cases of "autism" where one is "high on the specrum" are actually just generalized anxiety or C-PTSD, because no one is gonna tell a parent "Your kid is constantly traumatized by you and your Opus Dei weirdo woo woo friends", so it's put onto the child to de-escalate folks less rational, sane, or smart than themselves, and by the time you can articulate this... you're an adult, denied the childhood others good, forced into wage slavery if you don't want to rely on abusive "allies".
A lot of people carry the kind of slaveowner mentality they have when speaking to a barista or bookstore clerk into every interpersonal interaction -- they conflate being "threatened" with feeling so when someone responds with the spirit and vigor they communicate THEIR annoyances.
(Just my two cents.)