no one survives

Somewhere along the line in the last ten years or so, I changed my mind. I used to think survival itself was to be lauded. Life is scary, dangerous, and traumatic. Just getting through it was supposed to mean something. Especially if you could enjoy yourself along the way, the good cup of coffee, the beautiful weather, enjoying a good book, movie, or video game.

What has any of that accomplished? The pleasure of eating a donut falls behind me immediately, while the consequences can be far more lasting. I used to think in terms of the moment but have come to think more in terms of the broader picture of my life and what I've done with it. Who have I become, because of how I've lived?

I have a range of theories as to what caused this. It could just be the evolution of my thoughts and experiences over 49 years, but it could also have been spurred by the endocrine shift that began almost a decade ago. Another possibility is that it's the product of being more social, being around people, coming to appreciate them and care what they think. Seeing myself from their point of view and realizing something has gone terribly wrong.

I've shed the notion of meeting someone "like me" as I've realized that was all a defense, a fantasy of meeting someone who would see me the way I saw myself. I've realized that I can like people who are all sorts of different and we are judged on what we have to offer each other, not our autobiographies. I've realized that this is as it should be, because of course we want our connections to be positive.

Who I am doesn't matter. How I live is what matters, and defines who I really am, no matter what I may think about it. I can say it's not my fault, because life keeps being mean to me, but the fact of the matter is that my life has been an abject failure. I have very little to offer. I can't find the motivation to do much of anything, anymore.

Yay, I'm hanging on, getting through it? What are we getting through? This is life. When you get through it, it's over.

rationale

So much is a matter of perspective that it's very easy to present who we are as a product of our own entirely reasonable interests, worldview, and ethics. To some extent, almost everyone should be able to relate at least a little to the old adage, I'm not crazy, it's the rest of the world that's crazy.

From our perspective, on a very basic level, yeah, that's why we are the way we are. I refer to my difficulties relating to people in neutral terms, but for the longest time, I let myself believe it's because I don't like them. What is the difference really? They are different interpretations of the same experience. 

It's easy to point to things that are wrong with people, by our standards of course, framing our feelings of alienation as only reasonable. Easier still, if you then avoid them all your life so as to make people into abstract concepts, easier to manipulate in our heads. This is basic othering behavior, extended to everyone other than ourselves.

Instead of calling myself disabled for not working, I could focus on how fucked up the whole system is. I'm capable of work, in the most direct sense, but what I'm not capable of is all the bullshit involved in getting and holding a job, aside from doing the work itself. I'm also disgusted by the whole proposition that we have to sell half our waking lives to make some pig rich, just to survive. Cut the bullshit, give me a job, and maybe I could work part time. I'm not disabled, I just hate capitalism, right?

In this country, a part time minimum wage job isn't enough to live on and in so doing, I'd make myself ineligible for disability, including healthcare and everything. It's a fucked up system, but the reality of it is that other people do it and seem to have much fuller lives due to being functional adults with value to society. Framing the problem as a dysfunctional system might be better for not only my self-esteem, but how I present my situation to others. Framing it as a disability wrecks my self-esteem. That's to say, I can't live like they do. I can't be a part of what they do.  

I've been feeling painfully left out my whole life, and getting close to people has made it worse, but training has allowed me to play with them. The longer I've been at it, the more I feel accepted and a part of what they're doing. Maybe with enough perseverance, all the way up to competing myself. Then doing some teaching. This would go a long way towards counterbalancing my deficiencies, and it seemed to be a challenge but within reach.

I was moving in that direction, but now I'm feeling more left out than ever. I've tumbled back into the lonely darkness where the best I can do is go stand around awkwardly in a gym full of strangers. Too much of what was working for me was predicated on all the people I'd spent years building rapport with. It takes me a long time because I am different.

They don't have a concept of how these things can change. They have no motivation to help me change. It's just who I am, so they have no interest in helping, aside from being condescending.

It's so easy to conclude that people are just assholes, but from their perspective, their behavior only makes sense, too. Let myself get too close to them and realize they're not really assholes at all. I realize that I want to be able to live as they do, striving to achieve things in the world. I realize that I don't do these things because I can't. I'm disabled. I'm not good enough. When I finally stand up, ready to show that I am good enough, they tend to smack me down. And now, really compounding it all, I'm getting too old. 

I realize that I want them to like me, but they can't, because they perceive the deficit. Especially once I've been cornered into explaining that I'm disabled. Nobody calls them disabled for not being able to live the way I do. That makes just as much sense, but of course society is going to be built around norms and not what fringe weirdos think.

That's just the reality of it. Apparently, it's neurodivergent of me to care more about material reality than appearances and feelings. To be more delusional would be less disabling.

i had a life

I don't know what it means to have a life. We all have a life, right? What kind of value judgment is this? Right? I'm not sure, over the past few years, I've come to feel that I have one. For all the years prior, I felt that I did not. In Vermont, I finally had goals and ambitions, in such a way that was socially connected. I felt socially connected.

It's not a value judgment, but an important component of good mental health. Introverts are no exception. Rather they just need to be more careful and measured about it. During the pandemic, studies showed that it was actually introverts who suffered the most from the social regulations. Our careful measured connections can be more fragile, more easily thwarted, and far more difficult to replace.

Throw a wrecking ball through that, and it's introverts who start hanging themselves. Extroverts don't have a greater need, they're just far better at meeting it. When you're so much of an introvert that you're on the spectrum, it's all the more severe.

I complicate everything trying to understand it, hoping that understanding empowers me, but it's not always so complicated. I had a life. I don't have a life here. To go from having a life back to not having one is massively depressing. Of course I'm having trouble getting to the gym and everything else. Nothing I can do is going to help, so I'm just trapped in a downward spiral of drifting further and further away from what it felt like to be alive.

Depression is like acid. We're forced to watch everything we are slowly burned away. I was beating it, but now I'm back to drowning in it. That life that I left behind was all about beating depression.

abject misery

This whole situation has been catastrophically horrible for me, and I don't know why it's so difficult to explain why. It's so easy to lose sight of the details and in turn how they conspire to destroy my mental health. It's so easy to not think about it, so as to conclude I should be ok and just need to keep going.

I'm not ok. I will never be ok here. I will never get over this. What I was accomplishing in Vermont has been my life's work. Everything I was doing was about repairing a lifetime of damage. It was a long slow arduous process, obliterated by being forced to leave. Everyone who thought making me leave Vermont wasn't a brutal miserable thing to do can fuck off forever. Literally. Not to mention forcing me to throw out everything I owned. My family in Vermont is dead to me.

I keep trying to pick up the pieces and stay focused, but the only thing that motivates me being what I can accomplish that will serve me when I'm back in Vermont. Any progress I make at the gym is all about how it might help me perform at my old gym. I have no interest in accomplishing anything here. My only motivation is what I can bring back with me, when I get my life back. 

I don't know when that will be, if ever. This is a feeble immiserating sort of motivation. I'm torn between clinging to it, because it's all I have, and letting go. I can't do this anymore. I can't function in spite of how much pain I'm in. I want to collapse into survival mode where I have no ambitions but easing the pain, knowing damn well that only brings worse pain in the long run.

I miss having ambition. I miss having goals. I miss everything I was trying to do. I miss all the people I was trying to do it with, everyone I was trying to do it for. I have nothing left but this vague hope for a future where I can get it back. I can't live like this. 

I hate myself for not being stronger, more resilient, more independent. I hate that all I can do is suffer, desperately hoping someone will save me, because I have nothing else to hope for. I hate that I never formed enough of a connection with anyone to stay in touch or turn to for help. All the people I left behind just carrying on with their lives, neither knowing nor caring how much they mattered to me.

so much pain

Corrosion of Conformity was a band that caught my eye as a teenager, exploring the fringes of the punk/hardcore scenes. Before they became generic alternative metal band, they were a lousy hardcore band. I wasn't a fan in any case, but I liked the name and their nuclear skull logo. The point of the reference being that this "on the spectrum" bit is a different way of framing what has been a lifelong theme for me. My distaste for the band making it all the more apt.

What we have in common, in this grouping, is a negative. Not a value judgement, but the absence of a function neurotypical people have. As such, it says nothing for what we might have in common with each other. It says very little about who we are or who we might relate to.

I can't get to the gym here. It's one problem after another and then I get sick and my immune system is crap because I'm so depressed, so I can't get to the gym some more. I worked out on my own today. I keep trying, but I keep failing. Life just goes wrong and then more wrong. I'm drowning and no one can do anything but watch.

It took me years to get where I was in Vermont. I don't adapt to moving, because I'm alone and fragile, desperately trying to form roots such that I make progress against both of those problems. Only to be uprooted and tossed elsewhere, again and again. Now I'm stranded here. Failed and broken, crying when people from my old gym post to Instagram.

That was more progress towards feeling connected to people than I've made ever, but now it's just more pain. I hate myself for being helpless to do anything but suffer at the mercy of such a clearly uncaring world.

corrosion of conformity

The problem with looking for like-minded non-conformists is that they're all over the place. Conformity goes a long way towards keeping everyone on the same page. Conformists naturally find each other. That is arguably the central point of the conformist impulse. We don't want to impede social functionality by having a whole other viewpoint. This is bad for both survival and the likelihood of reproducing, such that evolution has made most of us conformists.

I've always been opposed to the fundamental notion of conformity. It's by definition constraining. Why shouldn't everyone be different, of course. Should this, shouldn't that. This is just how evolution works, and how socializing works. The reality of it is that socializing is of critical importance to most of us, such that evolution selects for conformists.

I didn't like it, because my viewpoint was different. I was different. I don't have the impulse to conform. I adapted to this fact by adopting a worldview deeming conformity a bad thing. It's something that has its pros and cons, but what is good or bad, should and shouldn't? It was something that would have benefited me, were my brain not wired differently.

Some people are calling this autism now. If you aren't trying to imitate the behaviors of others from an early age, this can cause a wide array of development problems. It is essentially this dysfunction of our instinctual impulse to stick together. To be gregarious, to form a herd, to find a sense of social connectivity. It is a way of thinking differently. 

A way of thinking differently, how? Just differently. In all sorts of ways. I question the utility of calling it autism, but we should be calling it something.

gaza

Karma is when we contribute to the environment, and thus have to live in that environment. Israel has used their disproportionate position of power to enforce their will, without compromise. They use their power to then aggressively punish any resistance.

Without regard to ethics or fairness, backed by the American empire, Israel embraces the nihilistic doctrine, might makes right. Israel shows no respect for their opposition as equals, or as human beings, but dangerous pests to be crushed.

Power dynamics in the world are always changing. Those on top never get to stay there. When they find their adversaries one day strong enough to stand against them, they will do so in the cold brutal world they've created.

I used to stand with Israel. I used to believe all the west's drivel vilifying Palestinians and their leadership. Israel was brutal and oppressive because they had to be.

 

For me, the turning point was the Great March of Return, where Israeli snipers gunned down thousands of unarmed protesters in Gaza, including medics and journalists, that I realized, Israel is a monstrous evil waging perpetual war. A tool of western imperialism, our military foothold in the middle east. All the bombs, the bulldozers, the apartheid and blockade - none of it is about necessity, but domination and oppression of the indigenous population and their neighbors.

Israel has no right to defend itself, because Israel is the aggressor. A bully does not have the right to murder someone for standing up to the bullying. It is the Palestinian people who have a right to defend themselves. Even against impossible odds and certain death, I stand with those who fight back.

sparring on the spectrum

When people talk about someone who is more unambiguously on the spectrum, like OG autism, I start thinking, yeah, this is silly. Of course I'm not autistic. The word doesn't have a solid enough meaning to end these arguments in my head.

When someone has depression or anxiety, we look at the symptoms and that defines the condition. It doesn't matter if you're depressed and anxious due to trauma or genetics. The symptoms are straight forward and if you have enough of them, that's depression. With autism, it's just like, problems socializing. limited and repetitive interests, and being hypersensitive to sensory input.

Do I start screaming and crying when the smoke alarm goes off? Not always. How severe are we talking? 

A student coach comes up to me after class today, going on about how if people are going too hard on me, it's ok to tell them to lighten up. Some people think they have to be macho and take it, but that's nonsense, he says to me. He was just being nice. He was just concerned about me. I know.

happy birthday to me

Accepting my fate here in this strange new city, I might as well start devoting myself to this new gym. I decided this weeks ago, but it's taken some time to implement the decision by going more often. I finally got to the advanced sparring class today, all full of anxiety because I had no idea what to expect, and it was underwhelming. Advanced, like Han Dynasty's 10/10 on their spicy scale is all that spicy.

I had Chinese food with my aunt. It's a decent restaurant, but nothing is all that spicy anymore, except my own cooking. Northstar MMA is a decent gym, but their advanced sparring class seemed kinda basic to me. I got some good sparring in. It's more regimented than the open sparring system I'm used to. We all just spar for round after round for about an hour. It was fine, but my jaw doesn't even hurt.

The BJJ, OTOH, has been frustrating. I'm getting my ass kicked by almost everyone. Some of them tap me out over and over like I'm a complete newbie again. I don't know if I'm rusty or not trying, due to being in unfamiliar territory, or if a lot of them are simply a lot better than most of the people at my old gym.

The instruction does seem a lot better. The gym itself is lacking in a lot of ways, but both the BJJ and Muay Thai instruction has been more technical and difficult. In theory, I could go back to Vermont in a few years, having greatly improved and impress everyone, but I never seem to get the upshot of anything. Somehow it won't work out that way.

ableism

My whole life, I've had this sense that people think I'm autistic or something. It seems entirely plausible that between my endocrine issues, my cerebral nature, and my social anxiety, I appear autistic or something. Maybe that is autistic or something. If social anxiety represents an irrational fear that people won't like me, autism represents the reality that people have never liked me. Even my own family freaks out over the prospect of me living with them for a few months. I've faced discrimination everywhere.

Social anxiety is all about fearing what others think, but it's only pathological when it's irrational. I'm not concerned about what autism is and what it means, in terms of understanding myself. I don't find it to be a solid enough concept, but I don't lose sleep over that. What hit me so hard was the realization that other people see me as deficient. We are not peers. Some will try to be supportive and say that others don't hate me or dislike me or otherwise think terrible things about me. Some will point out that most people I encounter won't think about me much at all one way or another.

I find it so peculiar that this would ever need to be explained, as it seems so indisputable. So many near universally lauded aspects of life are built on getting a positive reaction from others. The realization that I'm what they call autistic is not about understanding myself better, but understanding why the world treats me this way. This is what they see. This is what they think. This is why they do what they do. 

They may not know or care what autism is, per se, but they see me as mentally handicapped, and it turns out to be true. I can't work or function well enough to find a place to live. Maybe I don't have an irrational fear of people, but a quite rational awareness that dealing with them never goes well. I've spent my life in this fantasy world sequestered from humanity, where it wasn't that important, not my fault, or whatever it took to dance around the reality of it. Humanity is not entirely wrong.

This is about realizing that people really do see me as deficient, even as they do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid framing it that way. We don't like to talk about the disabled that way, but while we may have nothing against them, we also want nothing from them. We don't want them to suffer, and we don't want them to be a problem.

Do people hate me? No. Do they enjoy my company? Do they admire me? Respect me? Want to be with me? No. The autism I'm all upset about doesn't explain to me who I am, but it explains why people react to me the way they do. It legitimizes something I'd thought wasn't real, all these years. It isn't real to me, but objectively explains what they think they see, and I know what it's like to see that in others.