I’ve realized that one of my strategies, when I’m getting flustered or upset, is to try very very hard to explain myself calmly and in detail. https://twitter.com/aspiehuman/status/1338656999635095552

It’s hard work; I’m trying to manage my breathing and the tone of my voice, because I don’t want to be rude. I’m trying to break the thing I need to communicate down into the smallest pieces I can, so that everything is clear.

My sister pointed out to me about a week ago that some people read these calm, detailed explanations as patronizing.

Which explains a lot of the shit I get from people. It surprises me every time—because I know how hard I was trying to be polite and helpful.

I try so hard it harms and hurts me. And the blowback hurts more than I can explain, because of all that fucking effort.

I have had too much faith in people, I think. I have seen genuine misunderstanding where there was immovable cruelty—or at best a rigid belief in authority—and I have believed that everything would be okay if I could just explain things clearly.

It’s never worked. I’ve been explaining myself to the wrong people.

And these people, by pretending that they were reasonable and would hear me out if I’d just _____, have gaslit me into believing that I was the one who needed to try harder, work harder. That I wasn’t clear.

Perhaps some of them saw that, by the time they met me, I had already been convinced that I wasn’t trying hard enough. “If I could just _____”, floating in my head, waiting for somebody to fill in the blank.

When really they’d decided, for reasons that had very little to do with me, what they were willing to hear. I could be honest and vulnerable; I could smile and smile; I could give them a million footnotes. It wouldn’t mean a thing, because I couldn’t control the balance of power.

Because, for the record, I barely understand this kind of power. I’m like a piece of aluminum in room full of angry magnets. I can’t react to the right push/pull, so the magnet just start throwing things at me.

This is how you 1) make an autistic person literally want to die* and 2) give somebody crippling writer’s block.

(* not acute; don’t be alarmed)

I do not know how to get out of the teeth of it. Do I just—decide to speak only to the right people? Assume malevolence everywhere?

Because I think there is something here that I could transcend, if only it didn’t all hurt so much.