[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#6: "I Am A Fundamentally Broken Person."
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greyweirdo, I'm pretty sure, is the person who first played Blues Traveler's "Mount Normal" in my hearing. The lyrics are about someone who hopes to ascend the titular mountain, although they don't reach the summit through the course of the song, and during the song, they realize they're not the only one on the mountain, either. The chorus, of course, is the thing that comes immediately to memory. It makes a lot of sense for me, and possibly for you, if you're reading along:
It is, one realizes with time and experience, a Faustian bargain to seek normalcy. To have yourself brought into the realm of the normal, to have other people acknowledge that you are in the normal curve, that is usually a better goal than to actively seek to be like the normal people. There are childrens' stories that warn of seeking normalcy and the costs, of carving off parts of yourself to want to fit in better. There are stories that celebrate the differences between different people, rather than encouraging the person with the loudest opinions to get all the power and dictate what reality is to others. There are also children's stories about not standing out that much or about giving away yourself so that others can feel special. They're "classics," often times, which makes them harder to get rid of because continuity between generations is often prized more than a collection with messages that are worth passing on to the next generations.
( Continuing the riff, but also, the pain of not being normal, and eventually, the benefits of having a framework to explain your not-normality )
On good days, I no longer believe I'm broken. I've got frameworks to help explain things, and those help me give grace to myself when things happen that are explainable by that framework. And that the amount of success that I have had up to this point is proof that things are going okay and I can treat mistakes as mistakes instead of yet more evidence that all of those mistakes are going to resurface in an ugly way, get thrown in my face as proof of being broken and that everyone around me only tolerated me and has now run out of tolerance, and it's going to mean the end of my job, my relationships, my friendships, and everything else that I've built so far. On bad days, the weasels bite hard and I'm convinced they're telling me the truth and everyone else is being polite when they say anything other than how much they hate me and wish I was normal.
And then I read Meg Egan Kuyatt's Good Different, a novel in poetic form, about a young girl with interests and Rules and who would like to be a dragon if she could, and a Normal face she puts on for others which is taxing and exhausting, and no framework and a lot of people blaming her when she has sensory overloads, including one where she strikes another girl who was braiding her hair without her permission. It is a novel where I went, "Oh, little dragon," so, so much, because while her autism is not my variable attention, we both understand how difficult it is when you lack understanding and many of the people around you also lack understanding. And how sometimes when you get your understanding, other people's lack of understanding becomes outright malice. She knows the feeling of being fundamentally broken, and what it takes (and often, who it takes) to start climbing out of that feeling.
#6: "I Am A Fundamentally Broken Person."
greyweirdo, I'm pretty sure, is the person who first played Blues Traveler's "Mount Normal" in my hearing. The lyrics are about someone who hopes to ascend the titular mountain, although they don't reach the summit through the course of the song, and during the song, they realize they're not the only one on the mountain, either. The chorus, of course, is the thing that comes immediately to memory. It makes a lot of sense for me, and possibly for you, if you're reading along:
And I am scaling up Mount Normal / And I get higher every day / And I dream to be somebody else / And every night I pray / That I will stand atop Mount Normal / Proudly survey the land and sea / And have happy endings if I grasp / And cling to normalcy
It is, one realizes with time and experience, a Faustian bargain to seek normalcy. To have yourself brought into the realm of the normal, to have other people acknowledge that you are in the normal curve, that is usually a better goal than to actively seek to be like the normal people. There are childrens' stories that warn of seeking normalcy and the costs, of carving off parts of yourself to want to fit in better. There are stories that celebrate the differences between different people, rather than encouraging the person with the loudest opinions to get all the power and dictate what reality is to others. There are also children's stories about not standing out that much or about giving away yourself so that others can feel special. They're "classics," often times, which makes them harder to get rid of because continuity between generations is often prized more than a collection with messages that are worth passing on to the next generations.
( Continuing the riff, but also, the pain of not being normal, and eventually, the benefits of having a framework to explain your not-normality )
On good days, I no longer believe I'm broken. I've got frameworks to help explain things, and those help me give grace to myself when things happen that are explainable by that framework. And that the amount of success that I have had up to this point is proof that things are going okay and I can treat mistakes as mistakes instead of yet more evidence that all of those mistakes are going to resurface in an ugly way, get thrown in my face as proof of being broken and that everyone around me only tolerated me and has now run out of tolerance, and it's going to mean the end of my job, my relationships, my friendships, and everything else that I've built so far. On bad days, the weasels bite hard and I'm convinced they're telling me the truth and everyone else is being polite when they say anything other than how much they hate me and wish I was normal.
And then I read Meg Egan Kuyatt's Good Different, a novel in poetic form, about a young girl with interests and Rules and who would like to be a dragon if she could, and a Normal face she puts on for others which is taxing and exhausting, and no framework and a lot of people blaming her when she has sensory overloads, including one where she strikes another girl who was braiding her hair without her permission. It is a novel where I went, "Oh, little dragon," so, so much, because while her autism is not my variable attention, we both understand how difficult it is when you lack understanding and many of the people around you also lack understanding. And how sometimes when you get your understanding, other people's lack of understanding becomes outright malice. She knows the feeling of being fundamentally broken, and what it takes (and often, who it takes) to start climbing out of that feeling.
