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silveradept[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."
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.
It is a glib response to say "being normal is overrated." It is often uttered by someone who has never experienced hardship because of the things that distinguish them from other people, but equally as often, perhaps more so, by someone who is all too familiar with the hardships that come from being different. It can be spoken as a way of acknowledging and minimizing the pain, possibly even with laughter. It can be spoken as the decision someone is making to forego even trying to get anywhere near normal, to decide to be Weird and be okay with people saying this behind their back and to their face. That's the way I went when I was a youngling, because the Weird certainly wasn't going to go away at any time. I was a smart youngling, the kind that was doing the worksheets in elementary school while the teacher was explaining the concepts. To the point where my teacher was concerned I wasn't learning anything at all, because all she saw was a child reading when the other children were doing the worksheet. (But also that I turned it in and things were okay, so at least some amount of learning was going on.) I tested well, where the supposed weak point was a sixth grade level in a subject. So that was part of the Weird. This was the kind of Weird of succeeding at high school level subjects as an elementary school child. Which is also the kind of weird that gets you made fun of by other younglings when you stumble or when, as all younglings do, you have to learn the social aspects of getting along with other younglings. When you're a sensitive child and a nerdy child, and the Smart Kid, and you don't make all that many friends in your school, normal definitely starts looking like something very far away, indeed. And if all the hostile forces arrayed against you are "normal," then fuck normal.
That's the spot, you see, where the manosphere types start getting their footholds, where the fascists start sounding reasonable, the anti-feminists and the queerphobes have solutions, and the racists have frameworks. If you're having trouble being normal and fitting in, it's only your fault for as much as you don't follow their system. Once you learn to place the blame on Them and say that They are the reason you're not succeeding, then you're welcomed in as one of the normal ones, who sees the world as it truly is, and you can go to work to make your viewpoint seen as the accepted normal by everybody else.
I don't remember exactly where I saw it first, but in my travels on the World Wide Web, there's someone out there who posted that Gifted and Talented is a subset of neurodivergent, and every kid who ended up in Gifted and Talented, formally or informally, or who was known as the smart kid in school, should also automatically get tested for neurodivergences. I think the implication of the post was that we should also be completely unsurprised when many of those kids who were praised for being the smart kids in their school (and perhaps especially the smart kids who didn't otherwise fit the stereotype of the clearly neurodivergent boy) turn out to have other things that came along as part of the smart kid package. In my particular case, had I been assigned girl at birth, I would have been right in the pocket for diagnostic criteria. Even though, honestly, at that time, the only people who would have been recognized as neurodivergent were boys with a very specific pattern of acting out in classrooms and being disruptive. (This might be the earliest time in my life where there were things about me that would have been classified as womanish, but there's certainly been plenty of them over time. My membership in manhood has always been suspect by the rules of those who proclaim themselves the guardians of manhood and masculinity.)
What being a smart kid did for me, though, was essentially hide the things that weren't going as well for me and made it so that the overworked education establishment didn't have to pay much attention to me. I always got the "best student" or "academic achievement" kinds of recognitions, when those were distributed, I graduated with high honors and high distinction from my undergraduate, and I went through grad school with a perfectly respectable grade point average. The structure of the educational environment worked for me, and I was generally on top of my assignments, even if I would occasionally stay up a little later than I wanted to playing a game that had me engrossed. I usually compensated for that by not playing engrossing games if I had things I had to do, like assignments, or if I had to get up in the morning and do something like band. Sometimes a day got burnt in doing something distracting, while my brain worked on the problem in the background. It also helped that because of the untreated, undiagnosed sleep apnea, I was pretty good at being able to fall asleep, even if my dorm room was where the Smash Brothers tournament was going on. Even when I found myself needing to come up with an outline for a paper that I had totally spaced on what the deadline was for that, because I had at least given it some thought in the back of my head, when I needed it, I was basically able to pull it out and make it seem like I had actually kept it all in my head and just forgotten to write it down. (The paper turned out fine, too, because it was a perfectly good outline and I just had to write it.) Being able to improvise my way out of situations and put that smart kid stuff to work made it possible for me to cover for so many things that might have otherwise been a land mine for someone else.
I got a job out of education, and that was the spot where I ran face-first into situations where all of my smart kid skills weren't going to get me out of what trouble I was getting into. Because, it turns out, when you're doing work, you have to work with other people, and other people don't always communicate their expectations clearly, or think that your occasional mistakes are mistakes, or decide to ask you about what you're doing, or what they've heard you're doing. And there's not a whole lot that you can smart kid your way out of when you have a partner who is either unwilling to admit or unable to understand that when you change partners, you have to change your expectations of what's possible to meet the partner if you want to keep the relationship healthy. With time, experience, and some new frameworks, I can look back on this time and go "Yeah, I can see where the problems were, and I can also see more clearly how the people who should have been better at finding ways that worked with me refused to do that, and instead let me blame myself or actively blamed me for the problems that happened." At the time, I didn't have any of that help. (And, again, we're still in an era where neurodivrgence, as a diagnosis, is limited to boys who act out in specific ways in their classrooms. Adults who have gone beyond their classrooms couldn't possibly have such things…yet.)
It's entirely possible that my manager was set against me right from the beginning, for showing up to work too casually dressed for her liking on my first day. It's possible my manager was set against me for being a dude-looking person working in children's services. She certainly was set against me for the mistakes that I would make, when I forgot some of the more esoteric parts of eligibility for a library card, or when she would listen to the gossip network that said I wasn't managing my programs but working on other things, and never actually ask me what I was doing or take an interest in it enough to say "That's interesting, but you need to do more interaction with the kids rather than assume that because they're managing themselves well, they'll continue to do so." Or who would be unhappy with me when I didn't communicate things on the schedule she wanted me to, even if I thought I had or I was communicating on the schedule of realizing that things were not on the schedule that should be, but who also didn't then set up regular meetings or opportunities for me to remember that there were things I needed to tell her were happening or to ask her permission to do. (Because I believed I had latitude in a fair number of things that didn't cost money, silly me.) There was also the undiagnosed sleep apnea causing problems with falling asleep at inopportune times (and the compensation that happened for that), and also the undiagnosed neurodivergence that occasionally has me crashing hard after eating food or when I'm sitting after having been on my feet and moving around or concentrating or doing programming or public service. All of these problems were preventable, or likely could have systems built to accommodate the weaknesses and compensate for them, had they been seen as the imperfect bits of an otherwise excellent worker. Instead, they were seen as disrespect and moral failings and problems that were the responsibility of the employee to solve to the manager's satisfaction, with the threat of being dismissed from my job as the impetus to get me to figure out how to fix myself. "Why can't you just be normal?" was never uttered at me, but that very much was the message being sent.
So I spent six months in a panic attack, knowing that any reason at all could be used as a dismissal reason. Other people seemed more sanguine about it, and told me to hang on and that I'd make it through. I did make it through, but the cost of making it through was essentially trying to make myself always stay not just within the boundaries of what was set before me, but about three meters in from the boundary, so that I could be absolutely certain that I wasn't doing anything that might get me fired. Even though the way I thought of it was that I might show up to work one day, my boss would say "I don't like your shirt. You're fired," and, as best as I could read what was happening, that would have been seen as a perfectly legitimate reason to fire me. Things that I didn't know how to control, things that I didn't know I had done until after I had done them, or anything that sounded like it might have been negative about me could have sunk me. Lacking a framework of understanding or a clue of what would actually help, I probably survived those six months because the bad boss retired in the middle of the time, and I went through a shuffling rotation of managers for the rest of the time (and some time afterward), most of whom were not interested in causing that kind of disruption, until we ended on the current boss, who has done a lot of passing competency checks that he may or may not have known were set in front of him.
Even after the probation, though, I've still had to contend with the gossip network, and at least one coworker who has been actively trying to get me in trouble with my boss, usually by complaining directly to them about me or things that I'm doing. And occasionally she would tell me about behaviors that would annoy her. Behaviors that I now recognize as stimming kinds of actions, but since she wasn't the kind of person to put on headphones to block out unwanted sounds, I ended up being the one who changed. (See #4, "It's always my fault.") And I did my best not to be in a situation where a stimming behavior might annoy her. And to be helpful when she ran into computer problems or when she needed to know how to do something and it wasn't in the place she expected it to be, because I try to be helpful in perhaps a misguided effort to get people to like me more. (Fawn, remember?)
Well, I guess it didn't help that much, because she complained to my supervisor, back when we were all in office again, about a day that I was having a gas attack, and even though I was trying not to fart loudly at everyone, any time things weren't carefully sealed, it was loud. I was embarrassed and apologized and tried to remember what lunch was, so I didn't bring it again and have the same situation. Even though my supervisor said it wasn't going to result in any issues, and suggested maybe some enzyme things to have on hand if I think I'm going to get gas again, it was enough to put me into another panic attack, because this was a complaint that was literally about something I didn't have all that much control over, any more than I was going to try and exert, and my supervisor was passing it along to me, even though he didn't see it as a problem. But because all of the situations that I've been in where there have been complaints started as things that weren't individually large issues (or so I thought) that then exploded into disciplinary matters, the trauma response was the strongest one, and I spent a fair amount of time having a panic attack with some different symptoms this time around. After the possibility of actual bodily symptoms were ruled out, the conclusion was this was an anxiety issue, and when we went to work on that, then things calmed down enough to move back toward equilibrium. Of course, if I didn't have this exact history of a bunch of people not accommodating, not asking, not being willing to try and find good solutions that work for everyone, I might have been able to believe my supervisor when he said it wasn't an issue. It wasn't an issue. He was right about that, and the coworker who made the complaint retired some months after. Her retirement has made the entire workplace better, so that's at least validation that the conclusions I had drawn about that co-worker wasn't all in my head.
The bad relationship at home wasn't really helping any of this, either, since I was involved with someone who was upset about things happening to me at work, but also wasn't doing much to work with me, either. She got upset when I told her no, she would get combative when I was trying to explain the reality of the situation to her, she'd accuse me of flying off on tangents when she was trying to talk to me about specific issues and that she couldn't follow me through all of it. (They were related issues, or necessary context, or the background to the issue she wanted to talk about that was necessary for a fuller understanding of where I was coming from. Yes, I engage in long-form and long-winded storytelling, as you can see from these and other entries, but I try, at least, to make sure that everything that's in the story is related to the story.) This was on top of the regular belittling about "always needing to win" and the complaints about how trying to play games together didn't work for us. (Trying to drive a Katamari together is a collaborative enterprise, absolutely, but apparently it was too much for me to describe that I wanted to go toward the objects in the background, and instead I had to give her directions on how to move her controller so that it would go in the direction we went. I think she might have been jealous that when I played co-op Katamari with my sister, who admittedly has more experience in the matter, I could use that kind of direction and things went vastly better than they usually did with my ex. Because it was an exercise in frustration to have to juggle both the strategic parts and then also give base-level explicit directions every single time, even if this was the fifth time we were going on the same route that we had been the last four times, I let her lead and give directions when we did things collaboratively. And not just in gaming, because she was much happier when she was leading and I was just there to help her when she needed me to do it.) So I was getting the message that my problems were my fault at work and that I needed to be more normal and I was getting the message at home that my problems were my fault and that if I couldn't handle them, I should give them up to her and let her handle them because she could handle them. (No, she couldn't.) And that, you know, I should be more normal (more like her) to help solve some of my problems. (She didn't have a clue about what might be affecting me, either, even though she also had some of those same traits, which sometimes clashed horribly when I/we had places to be and her difficulties with time would often result in us getting out late or not going at all.)
None of the things that I encountered were explicit or obvious ableism, not of the kind of thing where someone who is low vision or Deaf/Hard of Hearing gets accommodation refused. At the same time, none of the disability is obvious, either. There are no consistently outward and obvious signs that someone might be neurodivergent, especially if their type of neurodivergence doesn't cause obvious social issues. Or they've successfully learned to mask, or compensate, or otherwise present a "normal" face to the world around them because they get people around them asking "Why can't you be normal?" when they show that there's something different about them. And for most of this time period, even from the very beginning, I didn't have the framework. The society didn't have the framework, and we certainly hadn't figured out that neurodivergence extended much farther out than specific boys acting out in class. The conclusions that I could draw, essentially, were that my problems were my fault, that the systems I was designing to try and prevent problems from happening again would only work in retrospect, after the problem had surfaced itself and someone else had said it was a problem, and that the problems would keep happening, both the ones that I had tried to fix (because they would return as soon as the system faltered or I forgot to use it) and the ones I didn't know were problems until they were going to be pointed out to me. There was no way that I could manage to climb Mount Normal, no matter how hard I tried, and therefore, the best thing to do was admit that I was fundamentally broken and adjust accordingly. This admission might have also kept me in my bad relationship for longer than I might have otherwise stayed in it. After all, if you're a broken person, nobody is going to want to willingly take you on and you should be grateful for what you have in your life. Or that the person you've managed to get who is at least tolerating you is the best you will get ever, and that's how it is.
Breaking this idea has been hard. Several professionals have been involved, as well as the decision I made to end the bad relationship and the fact that I have had good friendships and relationships since with people who have understood what's going on in my brain (at least some of them because they've got the same thing, or something similar enough that it rhymes, even if it doesn't manifest exactly in the same ways). Those people also helped me get the framework that I needed (and that has, in the interim, advanced to include girls and women and to look for things that are outside of the boys in class and who are wiling to acknowledge that even successful professional adults might still struggle with it) and that also have helped me get to a space where I can more effectively manage the shortcomings, and be able to admit to them and ask people to help me with them. Even with that, though, there's still a weasel or two lurking around, planting doubt about whether this is really a brain chemistry issue, or whether it's a convenient explanation so I can avoid acknowledging my unwillingness to use my willpower and/or moral fortitude to bootstrap myself into being normal. That the things I'm asking for to help me (like "would you please send me an e-mail to remind me I've agreed to do this? It might slip my mind after an hour on the desk helping people.") are because I'm lazy rather than because that's the way that actually works with me, and I can ask people to do things that help both of us achieve what we want (especially things that shouldn't require a lot more effort from them.)
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.
It is a glib response to say "being normal is overrated." It is often uttered by someone who has never experienced hardship because of the things that distinguish them from other people, but equally as often, perhaps more so, by someone who is all too familiar with the hardships that come from being different. It can be spoken as a way of acknowledging and minimizing the pain, possibly even with laughter. It can be spoken as the decision someone is making to forego even trying to get anywhere near normal, to decide to be Weird and be okay with people saying this behind their back and to their face. That's the way I went when I was a youngling, because the Weird certainly wasn't going to go away at any time. I was a smart youngling, the kind that was doing the worksheets in elementary school while the teacher was explaining the concepts. To the point where my teacher was concerned I wasn't learning anything at all, because all she saw was a child reading when the other children were doing the worksheet. (But also that I turned it in and things were okay, so at least some amount of learning was going on.) I tested well, where the supposed weak point was a sixth grade level in a subject. So that was part of the Weird. This was the kind of Weird of succeeding at high school level subjects as an elementary school child. Which is also the kind of weird that gets you made fun of by other younglings when you stumble or when, as all younglings do, you have to learn the social aspects of getting along with other younglings. When you're a sensitive child and a nerdy child, and the Smart Kid, and you don't make all that many friends in your school, normal definitely starts looking like something very far away, indeed. And if all the hostile forces arrayed against you are "normal," then fuck normal.
That's the spot, you see, where the manosphere types start getting their footholds, where the fascists start sounding reasonable, the anti-feminists and the queerphobes have solutions, and the racists have frameworks. If you're having trouble being normal and fitting in, it's only your fault for as much as you don't follow their system. Once you learn to place the blame on Them and say that They are the reason you're not succeeding, then you're welcomed in as one of the normal ones, who sees the world as it truly is, and you can go to work to make your viewpoint seen as the accepted normal by everybody else.
I don't remember exactly where I saw it first, but in my travels on the World Wide Web, there's someone out there who posted that Gifted and Talented is a subset of neurodivergent, and every kid who ended up in Gifted and Talented, formally or informally, or who was known as the smart kid in school, should also automatically get tested for neurodivergences. I think the implication of the post was that we should also be completely unsurprised when many of those kids who were praised for being the smart kids in their school (and perhaps especially the smart kids who didn't otherwise fit the stereotype of the clearly neurodivergent boy) turn out to have other things that came along as part of the smart kid package. In my particular case, had I been assigned girl at birth, I would have been right in the pocket for diagnostic criteria. Even though, honestly, at that time, the only people who would have been recognized as neurodivergent were boys with a very specific pattern of acting out in classrooms and being disruptive. (This might be the earliest time in my life where there were things about me that would have been classified as womanish, but there's certainly been plenty of them over time. My membership in manhood has always been suspect by the rules of those who proclaim themselves the guardians of manhood and masculinity.)
What being a smart kid did for me, though, was essentially hide the things that weren't going as well for me and made it so that the overworked education establishment didn't have to pay much attention to me. I always got the "best student" or "academic achievement" kinds of recognitions, when those were distributed, I graduated with high honors and high distinction from my undergraduate, and I went through grad school with a perfectly respectable grade point average. The structure of the educational environment worked for me, and I was generally on top of my assignments, even if I would occasionally stay up a little later than I wanted to playing a game that had me engrossed. I usually compensated for that by not playing engrossing games if I had things I had to do, like assignments, or if I had to get up in the morning and do something like band. Sometimes a day got burnt in doing something distracting, while my brain worked on the problem in the background. It also helped that because of the untreated, undiagnosed sleep apnea, I was pretty good at being able to fall asleep, even if my dorm room was where the Smash Brothers tournament was going on. Even when I found myself needing to come up with an outline for a paper that I had totally spaced on what the deadline was for that, because I had at least given it some thought in the back of my head, when I needed it, I was basically able to pull it out and make it seem like I had actually kept it all in my head and just forgotten to write it down. (The paper turned out fine, too, because it was a perfectly good outline and I just had to write it.) Being able to improvise my way out of situations and put that smart kid stuff to work made it possible for me to cover for so many things that might have otherwise been a land mine for someone else.
I got a job out of education, and that was the spot where I ran face-first into situations where all of my smart kid skills weren't going to get me out of what trouble I was getting into. Because, it turns out, when you're doing work, you have to work with other people, and other people don't always communicate their expectations clearly, or think that your occasional mistakes are mistakes, or decide to ask you about what you're doing, or what they've heard you're doing. And there's not a whole lot that you can smart kid your way out of when you have a partner who is either unwilling to admit or unable to understand that when you change partners, you have to change your expectations of what's possible to meet the partner if you want to keep the relationship healthy. With time, experience, and some new frameworks, I can look back on this time and go "Yeah, I can see where the problems were, and I can also see more clearly how the people who should have been better at finding ways that worked with me refused to do that, and instead let me blame myself or actively blamed me for the problems that happened." At the time, I didn't have any of that help. (And, again, we're still in an era where neurodivrgence, as a diagnosis, is limited to boys who act out in specific ways in their classrooms. Adults who have gone beyond their classrooms couldn't possibly have such things…yet.)
It's entirely possible that my manager was set against me right from the beginning, for showing up to work too casually dressed for her liking on my first day. It's possible my manager was set against me for being a dude-looking person working in children's services. She certainly was set against me for the mistakes that I would make, when I forgot some of the more esoteric parts of eligibility for a library card, or when she would listen to the gossip network that said I wasn't managing my programs but working on other things, and never actually ask me what I was doing or take an interest in it enough to say "That's interesting, but you need to do more interaction with the kids rather than assume that because they're managing themselves well, they'll continue to do so." Or who would be unhappy with me when I didn't communicate things on the schedule she wanted me to, even if I thought I had or I was communicating on the schedule of realizing that things were not on the schedule that should be, but who also didn't then set up regular meetings or opportunities for me to remember that there were things I needed to tell her were happening or to ask her permission to do. (Because I believed I had latitude in a fair number of things that didn't cost money, silly me.) There was also the undiagnosed sleep apnea causing problems with falling asleep at inopportune times (and the compensation that happened for that), and also the undiagnosed neurodivergence that occasionally has me crashing hard after eating food or when I'm sitting after having been on my feet and moving around or concentrating or doing programming or public service. All of these problems were preventable, or likely could have systems built to accommodate the weaknesses and compensate for them, had they been seen as the imperfect bits of an otherwise excellent worker. Instead, they were seen as disrespect and moral failings and problems that were the responsibility of the employee to solve to the manager's satisfaction, with the threat of being dismissed from my job as the impetus to get me to figure out how to fix myself. "Why can't you just be normal?" was never uttered at me, but that very much was the message being sent.
So I spent six months in a panic attack, knowing that any reason at all could be used as a dismissal reason. Other people seemed more sanguine about it, and told me to hang on and that I'd make it through. I did make it through, but the cost of making it through was essentially trying to make myself always stay not just within the boundaries of what was set before me, but about three meters in from the boundary, so that I could be absolutely certain that I wasn't doing anything that might get me fired. Even though the way I thought of it was that I might show up to work one day, my boss would say "I don't like your shirt. You're fired," and, as best as I could read what was happening, that would have been seen as a perfectly legitimate reason to fire me. Things that I didn't know how to control, things that I didn't know I had done until after I had done them, or anything that sounded like it might have been negative about me could have sunk me. Lacking a framework of understanding or a clue of what would actually help, I probably survived those six months because the bad boss retired in the middle of the time, and I went through a shuffling rotation of managers for the rest of the time (and some time afterward), most of whom were not interested in causing that kind of disruption, until we ended on the current boss, who has done a lot of passing competency checks that he may or may not have known were set in front of him.
Even after the probation, though, I've still had to contend with the gossip network, and at least one coworker who has been actively trying to get me in trouble with my boss, usually by complaining directly to them about me or things that I'm doing. And occasionally she would tell me about behaviors that would annoy her. Behaviors that I now recognize as stimming kinds of actions, but since she wasn't the kind of person to put on headphones to block out unwanted sounds, I ended up being the one who changed. (See #4, "It's always my fault.") And I did my best not to be in a situation where a stimming behavior might annoy her. And to be helpful when she ran into computer problems or when she needed to know how to do something and it wasn't in the place she expected it to be, because I try to be helpful in perhaps a misguided effort to get people to like me more. (Fawn, remember?)
Well, I guess it didn't help that much, because she complained to my supervisor, back when we were all in office again, about a day that I was having a gas attack, and even though I was trying not to fart loudly at everyone, any time things weren't carefully sealed, it was loud. I was embarrassed and apologized and tried to remember what lunch was, so I didn't bring it again and have the same situation. Even though my supervisor said it wasn't going to result in any issues, and suggested maybe some enzyme things to have on hand if I think I'm going to get gas again, it was enough to put me into another panic attack, because this was a complaint that was literally about something I didn't have all that much control over, any more than I was going to try and exert, and my supervisor was passing it along to me, even though he didn't see it as a problem. But because all of the situations that I've been in where there have been complaints started as things that weren't individually large issues (or so I thought) that then exploded into disciplinary matters, the trauma response was the strongest one, and I spent a fair amount of time having a panic attack with some different symptoms this time around. After the possibility of actual bodily symptoms were ruled out, the conclusion was this was an anxiety issue, and when we went to work on that, then things calmed down enough to move back toward equilibrium. Of course, if I didn't have this exact history of a bunch of people not accommodating, not asking, not being willing to try and find good solutions that work for everyone, I might have been able to believe my supervisor when he said it wasn't an issue. It wasn't an issue. He was right about that, and the coworker who made the complaint retired some months after. Her retirement has made the entire workplace better, so that's at least validation that the conclusions I had drawn about that co-worker wasn't all in my head.
The bad relationship at home wasn't really helping any of this, either, since I was involved with someone who was upset about things happening to me at work, but also wasn't doing much to work with me, either. She got upset when I told her no, she would get combative when I was trying to explain the reality of the situation to her, she'd accuse me of flying off on tangents when she was trying to talk to me about specific issues and that she couldn't follow me through all of it. (They were related issues, or necessary context, or the background to the issue she wanted to talk about that was necessary for a fuller understanding of where I was coming from. Yes, I engage in long-form and long-winded storytelling, as you can see from these and other entries, but I try, at least, to make sure that everything that's in the story is related to the story.) This was on top of the regular belittling about "always needing to win" and the complaints about how trying to play games together didn't work for us. (Trying to drive a Katamari together is a collaborative enterprise, absolutely, but apparently it was too much for me to describe that I wanted to go toward the objects in the background, and instead I had to give her directions on how to move her controller so that it would go in the direction we went. I think she might have been jealous that when I played co-op Katamari with my sister, who admittedly has more experience in the matter, I could use that kind of direction and things went vastly better than they usually did with my ex. Because it was an exercise in frustration to have to juggle both the strategic parts and then also give base-level explicit directions every single time, even if this was the fifth time we were going on the same route that we had been the last four times, I let her lead and give directions when we did things collaboratively. And not just in gaming, because she was much happier when she was leading and I was just there to help her when she needed me to do it.) So I was getting the message that my problems were my fault at work and that I needed to be more normal and I was getting the message at home that my problems were my fault and that if I couldn't handle them, I should give them up to her and let her handle them because she could handle them. (No, she couldn't.) And that, you know, I should be more normal (more like her) to help solve some of my problems. (She didn't have a clue about what might be affecting me, either, even though she also had some of those same traits, which sometimes clashed horribly when I/we had places to be and her difficulties with time would often result in us getting out late or not going at all.)
None of the things that I encountered were explicit or obvious ableism, not of the kind of thing where someone who is low vision or Deaf/Hard of Hearing gets accommodation refused. At the same time, none of the disability is obvious, either. There are no consistently outward and obvious signs that someone might be neurodivergent, especially if their type of neurodivergence doesn't cause obvious social issues. Or they've successfully learned to mask, or compensate, or otherwise present a "normal" face to the world around them because they get people around them asking "Why can't you be normal?" when they show that there's something different about them. And for most of this time period, even from the very beginning, I didn't have the framework. The society didn't have the framework, and we certainly hadn't figured out that neurodivergence extended much farther out than specific boys acting out in class. The conclusions that I could draw, essentially, were that my problems were my fault, that the systems I was designing to try and prevent problems from happening again would only work in retrospect, after the problem had surfaced itself and someone else had said it was a problem, and that the problems would keep happening, both the ones that I had tried to fix (because they would return as soon as the system faltered or I forgot to use it) and the ones I didn't know were problems until they were going to be pointed out to me. There was no way that I could manage to climb Mount Normal, no matter how hard I tried, and therefore, the best thing to do was admit that I was fundamentally broken and adjust accordingly. This admission might have also kept me in my bad relationship for longer than I might have otherwise stayed in it. After all, if you're a broken person, nobody is going to want to willingly take you on and you should be grateful for what you have in your life. Or that the person you've managed to get who is at least tolerating you is the best you will get ever, and that's how it is.
Breaking this idea has been hard. Several professionals have been involved, as well as the decision I made to end the bad relationship and the fact that I have had good friendships and relationships since with people who have understood what's going on in my brain (at least some of them because they've got the same thing, or something similar enough that it rhymes, even if it doesn't manifest exactly in the same ways). Those people also helped me get the framework that I needed (and that has, in the interim, advanced to include girls and women and to look for things that are outside of the boys in class and who are wiling to acknowledge that even successful professional adults might still struggle with it) and that also have helped me get to a space where I can more effectively manage the shortcomings, and be able to admit to them and ask people to help me with them. Even with that, though, there's still a weasel or two lurking around, planting doubt about whether this is really a brain chemistry issue, or whether it's a convenient explanation so I can avoid acknowledging my unwillingness to use my willpower and/or moral fortitude to bootstrap myself into being normal. That the things I'm asking for to help me (like "would you please send me an e-mail to remind me I've agreed to do this? It might slip my mind after an hour on the desk helping people.") are because I'm lazy rather than because that's the way that actually works with me, and I can ask people to do things that help both of us achieve what we want (especially things that shouldn't require a lot more effort from them.)
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.
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Date: 2023-12-11 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-12 09:17 am (UTC)