Sometimes people on Twitter tell me to get therapy. Not because they actually care about me or mental illness, of course, or because they agree with the best practices of the mental health profession. But I did just go to therapy for a few months. I got it from an unlicensed USU student at a huge discount because I live in poverty. Like everyone else in that building, she was irreligious and politically progressive, the opposite of these Twitter people - not that she pushed any of that on me, but I made the assumption and she confirmed it. I mentioned on my blog when I started therapy, and then I thought I'd have a lot to say about it, but I didn't. Now I'm done for the time being because we ran out of things to talk about and also because I live in poverty.
At the beginning, I was just so excited to have a captive audience that I wanted to talk to her about all the deep intellectual things that I'm starving to talk about. I'd half-seriously considered hiring a prostitute to pretend to be interested in the things that interest me, and I assume this was cheaper. But she wanted to have actual therapy goals and stuff. She had the idea to read and discuss a chapter of The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspective of Autism by Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron each week, and since it's available to borrow for free on archive.org, I agreed. I went through a suicidal patch last summer when I realized that the loneliness I've experienced for my entire adult life is never going to go away. Now it's daunting to even think about trying to have real relationships. I'm still not sure if I will. I've been a fan of Temple Grandin for a while. I'd never heard of Sean Barron. They bring very different perspectives to the book. It seems that Sean wants relationships for their own sake, while Temple just sees them as a thing she has to do to advance her career. Sean sees autism as a disease and thinks he's been cured of it by learning to think differently, while Temple just sees it as the way she is. I have some mixed feelings about their approach to teaching social skills in the book. I agree that people on the autism spectrum need to understand how to be polite and hygienic. I think I've already benefitted from some of the principles they explained, like showing interest in people and knowing when it's okay to break the rules or lie. At the same time, though, neurotypical people should learn not to be ignorant assholes about things that don't matter. Sean tells the story of how he started to make friends with a boy in his class, but then he blew it, and the boy started bullying him like everyone else. The entire focus is on his lack of social skills, and at no point does he acknowledge that the boy was wrong to bully him. Temple mentions that she got a new boss who wanted to fire her for being weird, but she changed his mind by showing him how much she'd contributed to the company. She doesn't seem to recognize that her boss was in the wrong legally and ethically. She says she learned not to do certain mannerisms in public. She shouldn't have had to. The other day, an anonymous Twitter account told people that I was always weird, even in the Mormon singles' ward. I asked him what I did that was so weird. He said, "Dude you wandered around shoeless muttering to yourself." He seems to have remembered wrong or conflated me with someone else, because I've never been in the habit of muttering to myself in public, but the first part is accurate, although he could have just as easily said "walked" instead of "wandered," but that wouldn't have sounded derisive enough. Walking around for exercise is entirely normal behavior. Doing so without shoes isn't, but so farking what? I didn't harm him. I didn't harm anyone. He just thought I was harming myself and needed therapy because it was different and therefore made him uncomfortable. Not that he ever expressed that to me in person, of course, though he claims that he knew me pretty well. (He's not the first anonymous Twitter account to make that claim. It's actually pretty creepy.) I wonder how many other Mormons just pretended to be my friends while having no qualms about telling people behind my back that I'm weird. It's funny how they think drinking coffee is a sin but being two-faced isn't. So that was kind of depressing, but I'm used to people unfriending or unfollowing me all the time, so it wasn't very surprising. And I read enough of his Tweets to confirm that he's an asshole and I don't want him as a friend. The last chapter had a section on anger management which, unlike all the other chapters, included several comments from other adults on the spectrum. It was the first time I ever heard of a correlation between autism and anger. I've wondered sometimes if I'm just an exceptionally angry person. But Jerry Newport validated me by saying, "ASD folks are no strangers to anger. They have lots of reasons to grow up into angry teens and angrier young adults. Put yourself in their place. Imagine yourself being teased, constantly misunderstood, abused in the name of therapy and often genuinely confused and overwhelmed by it all - not just a few times, but hundreds, if not thousands of times. It is no wonder that I know many adults with ASD who are literally paralyzed by their anger." Then, I might add, people just blame you for being angry and tell you it's entirely your responsibility to make something edible out of the shit sandwich that they gave you. I, for one, get angry about injustice whether it's against me or anyone else, and this world has no shortage of injustice. That's basically its defining trait. I'm angry about how I was raised and about how my entire generation has been royally screwed over by the preceding ones so that I'll never be able to own a house or retire, but I'm also angry about people murdering children in Ukraine and Palestine, people oppressing women in Iran and Afghanistan, people fighting against LGBTQ rights in my own country and too many others to count, etc. I think average Americans ought to be a lot angrier than they are about all this bullshit. It's called empathy. Some members of my family still believe that anger comes from Satan, and I think that's a really immature an unhealthy view. But since I'm also powerless to do anything about anything, my anger goes nowhere, and the only way to deal with it is to stop caring and escape through entertainment. I prefer music and movies. I hope to try mushrooms soon. I take some comfort in knowing that someday we'll all be dead. Between Temple and Sean, I think I have more in common with the latter. Temple thinks in pictures. I think in words. My mind is constantly running an inner monologue, and the pictures I get in my head while reading are vague and unfocused. I just came to realize this about myself when I needed to put more description into my novel. Sean struggled more as a kid and had more anger. Before, I assumed that Temple had twice as many obstacles to overcome from being autistic and female, but from her description, it seems like those things canceled each other out to an extent, and she was treated better and learned more easily than a boy might have. (She has high praise for the structured, polite society of the fifties and sixties that she grew up in, so that's some white privilege too.) Sean mentions that he struggled with humor, that he tried to be funny by repeating funny lines from TV out of context until everyone was sick of him. This is where I differ from him. Somehow I've gleaned underlying principles of humor without even trying. I often forget to put them in my blog posts, but my novel is very funny. Please read it. Amazon Associates link:
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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