hurt, power, and disability

Fasten your seatbelts because this is LONG.

In high school I enjoyed reading flamewars between anti-s/m people and their targets, just because it never failed to make me irritated in a comfortably predictable way. It's only natural that I grew up to be fascinated by "but my child smears feces" and other ableist shock arguments, given that I spent my adolescence reading the arguments of anti-s/m people which often seem to consist of listing sex acts that, while enjoyable to the participants, sound gross or upsetting to the average person.

I think what makes me able to derive masochistic enjoyment (ha ha) from anti-s/m arguments, while ableist arguments just destroy me and break my heart, is that there’s less of a sense of immediate danger. A lot of the time, people who are making ableist arguments are in a direct position of power over disabled people, as parents, professionals, heads of an organization, etc., and are actively working to put their beliefs into practice. People who are making anti-s/m arguments often seem to be talking in this weird philosophical way about what sex acts other people should engage in or fantasize about.

I don’t mean to sound like I think s/m people don't get discriminated against, but when it comes to flamewars on the Internet my response to anti-s/m people is one of being annoyed and baffled rather than afraid. Because most people grow up liking whatever they like, sexually, so anti-s/m people seem to be implying that certain people just shouldn’t have sex, which seems like such an obviously douchey and ridiculous demand to make of another person that I can’t believe they spend so much time saying it and feeling as righteous about it as they do.

That said, if I was going to engage with the argument that people shouldn’t do s/m and/or d/s because it’s bad for your politics and your health, I would say that, in an alternate universe where people could choose what sexual acts they were into, there would be very good reasons for a disabled person to think about choosing to be into s/m and power exchange. As an inhabitant of the real world, I just think the intersection of s/m and disability is a happy accident for the people who experience it, rather than something anyone can or should “try” because it can destabilize and alleviate some of the bad parts of being disabled. But I want to write about what those destabilizations and alleviations can be, in the context of stuff like Failure Theory and The Classic Disability Catch-22. A few of the things I’m saying are specific to autism but many of them are not which is why I’m using the term “disabled,” throughout.

One by one I’m going to discuss hurting someone, receiving hurt, dominance, and submission, and what engaging in each of those four things might do, mean, or bring up for someone who is disabled. Most of what I write will be in the form of questions because I’m talking generally, and even if I wasn’t there probably would still be no cut-and-dry meaning or effect or answer.

Hurting Someone

(I’m talking about “hurt” instead of “pain” because I don’t want to imply that I’m only talking about physical pain. I do think hurt is a problematic word for me to have chosen because it seems to imply actual harm, which I obviously don’t think should be present.)

People with psychiatric and developmental disabilities are constantly living against the expectation that we’re going to be physically violent or, in the more “harmless” version of developmental disability stereotypes in particular, that we’re going to offend people and otherwise misunderstand what they want and need from us. Some of us experience police brutality due to being read as "dangerous" just because of the effects of our disability. The idealized behavior for a disabled person is that of working incredibly hard to fit ourselves around and into other people’s desires. If we don’t do this we risk various stigmas, some merely insulting and some negative enough to cause us to lose our job, be arrested, etc., when we haven’t actually hurt anyone.

So, if you live your life having been taught that you could hurt someone at any minute--or maybe you know that’s not true, but you still know that other people think that and you have to manage their reactions to you--what does it mean to decide to hurt someone, and do so carefully and in a way that’s enjoyable to them? What does it mean to realize that, actually, you are not on the verge of exploding and killing someone like in Of Mice and Men--that you can actually be in control of how you hurt someone, and do it “correctly” (for them)?

What does it mean to throw out your usual mindset--be nice, apologize a lot, don’t talk too loud, don’t move too fast? What does it mean for your concept of being a socially skilled person, being polite, or being a good person, if you interact with someone by a completely different (or even opposite) set of rules from your usual set, and this pleases them? Actually I do think there’s an answer to this one, but I’ll spare you the boredom of hearing it from me again.

This is something that I’ll come back to in every section, I guess, and it’s one of the things that is fairly autism-specific. What does it mean to work hard to affect someone in a certain way, and have them appreciate that and see it as something that takes energy and skill, instead of just expecting it?

Also--and this is a topping/hurting-specific thing I guess--in some people’s dynamic, you could even hurt someone in a way they don’t like, and that would be fine; within limits, their feelings are irrelevant to what happens. What if the way you and your partner/s do sex is that you do whatever you want and they’re expected to adjust to you?

Receiving Hurt

One of the most important qualities for a successful disabled person is the ability to bear pain quietly; and not only should you bear pain quietly, but you should bear pain quietly, quietly. The most perfect disabled person receives emotional and physical discomfort and pain with a complete poker face, and this is in the service of a goal: appearing to experience the same amount of pain as non-disabled people, and for the same reasons. Which is to say that the most perfect disabled person appears non-disabled and is not admired by anyone for her stoicism because, if she’s doing it right, no one knows she has anything to be stoic about. If you’re disabled, you deserve to have pain as an invisible constant force in your life, and you deserve it so much it’s not even worth mentioning.

While I’m at it I should mention that some disabled people don’t know what we want, or what hurts us, or what harms us. This can be because of cognitive and language aspects of our disabilities (not being able to sense we’re in pain, or articulate it), or because we have chronic pain and become inured to the sensation, or because people are always telling us what a normal person would be feeling or wanting in our situation, or a combination of those things.

What does it mean to say that you want pain, when you’ve spent your whole life pretending pain doesn’t exist because the expression of pain is so horrifying to people? What does it mean to be able to tell someone that you are or were in pain without this being something that makes them either pity you, or resent you because they see you as lying or exaggerating your pain to get pity?

What does it mean if someone actually enjoys your reaction to being in pain, and wants you to say and show them that you’re in pain? Conversely, what does it mean if you can be very stoic about pain, and someone actually appreciates that about you and sees it as a special skill, instead of a prerequisite for being respected as a decent and competent person?

Also, what does it mean to have it actually be important and expected that you try to figure out what level of hurt is harm, and what your limits are? What does it mean to have a word that means “this isn’t okay it has to stop,” and the other person’s actually supposed to listen?

(I just realized that I was using the word pain instead of hurt for this whole section. I still meant it in the broadest possible way.)

Dominance

In The Classic Disability Catch-22, I wrote that in order to be seen as the kind of disabled person who deserves to be successful, you must make it appear as though there’s nothing you can’t do. This means that you have to perform beyond your means, damaging yourself in the process, and/or lie and trick people into thinking you’re doing things you’re not actually doing. Because of the dishonesty and recklessness involved in fulfilling this requirement, no one who is perceived as belonging to this elite class of disabled people actually feels secure as a member of that class. This is Failure Theory. Of course, people who aren’t perceived as belonging to that class of disabled people have it a lot worse; they have shown the wrong kinds of weakness and impairment, and barring some extraordinary feat of illusion or strength, they will not be seen as deserving the support or acceptance they need to achieve their goals.

There’s also the issue of “body language” and what that means about your sense of power, authority, and control in the real world. If you look disabled, you look like prey. You may look, to some people, like you shouldn’t be out on your own. Your eye gaze or the way you speak may cause people to read you as shifty, incompetent, frightened, or shy--and given the way people read you, you probably do feel shifty, frightened, and shy, and may be beginning to wonder if you are incompetent.

You may be told that in order to deserve respect, or to be seen as a competent or smart or secure person, you have to have the ability to speak in a certain way and look at people in a certain way; or, as discussed in the “receiving hurt” section, you may have to be able to be stoic about things that you simply can’t be stoic about.

When someone decides to submit to a person who is stuck on one side or the other of the Classic Disability Catch-22, is regularly mistaken for a child, starts crying on the subway, needs help getting dressed, can’t speak loudly enough to be heard by most people, etc. etc. etc., this is a dissolution of standards about what kind of person is supposed to be allowed to have authority and control, whether by the standards of society or by the person’s own standards (in the case of people who are read as non-disabled or successful disabled people, but suffer from Failure Theory).

Submission

Obviously submission doesn’t have to do with whether someone is “weak” in a pervasive sense, but for a lot of people being submissive involves doing and saying things that are associated culturally with weakness and vulnerability. It also sometimes involves letting go of control and doing what someone else says.

So if you’re in a position, in real life, where you have a chance to be successful only as long as you never show weakness, then what does it mean to be able to express weakness with someone and not be destroyed by it? To have someone actually like and enjoy that part of you, and want to see it, and still respect you when they see it? On the other hand, if your real life position is one of being fucked over because you’re read as weak or because there are things you can’t do--again, what does it mean to express weakness or inabilities to someone and have them think it’s cool, and have them respect you regardless?

Performing weakness, or allowing yourself to sincerely experience weakness, is an act that is comparable to the act of deciding to hurt someone. It involves a similar controlled reversal of the values and goals you usually hold yourself to, and an embrace of the person you’re afraid of being.

I find it astoundingly privileged when anti-s/m people talk about how, for example, doing power exchange is “bringing in” all these terrible things from the outside world into your relationship. When you’re disabled, lack of power is such a huge part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine that not being a part of any relationship you have. So, like, that would be really cool to be worrying about “bringing in a hierarchy” or “bringing in brokenness” into a relationship. It sounds like a charmed life.

I haven’t come across much discussion of the s/m and disability intersection; staticnonsense’s Kinky Disability posts, which I love, are really one of the only attempts to address the issue that I have seen on any disability blog. Before the Disability Internet, of course, there was Bob Flanagan, but I haven’t done enough research to know if he was part of any kind of movement. I feel nervous about posting this because it is so long and I haven’t really written about any kind of sexuality before, but I just think this intersection is a really fascinating one and worth talking about.

who does sadness belong to?

I was just rereading the transcript of the May 30 IACC meeting and I came across a particular saying that Francis Collins used in his not-especially-sensitive comments.

"A parent is never happier than your saddest child."

Now, what does this mean? Is autism the same as sadness?

And if Autistic children are sad, does their sadness belong to their parents instead of to them?

Collins, who amused me by saying, "I know this is a tough time for anybody, any family, any individual who is going through the experience of raising a child with autism spectrum disorder" (bending over backwards to include all family structures, but forgetting that actual disabled people might be having a tough time), probably does think that. What does it mean if you don't even have the rights to your own sadness?

A few months ago I was consumed by the idea that my parents would have aborted me if they had known I would have ASD. Despite knowing it would lead to a lot of drama, I couldn't help but ask my mom if this was the case. She said that she wouldn't choose not to have me now that she knows me, but that if she hadn't known me but had known "how sad you would be," she might have had doubts about bringing me into the world.

The thing is I don't think of myself as a sad person. Obviously there have been occasions when I've been really sad, but I'm a pretty dissociative person (which is scary, but I guess it happens because I need it) and I also tend to produce a lot and be very spiritual when things are going badly. I'm not saying I enjoy being sad but I just don't think of it as being a big part of my life; it doesn't happen that much and when it does I focus more on the byproducts.

The worst thing about times when my life is going badly is that my mom won't stop talking about it and basically criticizing me for wanting to do other things than emote about how bad things are. I feel like she doesn't understand that if I did constantly do that, my life would be terrible. I couldn't think that way, so I don't. The way things are, I'm more guilty about how sad she is about my "sadness" than I am actually sad myself.

It becomes an affront to her that I am not worried and sad in the way she thinks I am or should be. It also becomes insensitive for me to be uncomfortable with the idea that I maybe shouldn't have existed because of my sadness--it's insensitive to her, because my sadness doesn't belong to me, it belongs to her.

It kind of reminds me how fans of Jerry Lewis and his telethon will accuse his opponents of being "bitter" or "hateful" when in fact the opponents are the ones being positive, and the telethon is negative. Even though Jerry Lewis doesn't have muscular dystrophy, he has ownership of it and gets to decide how it feels. If people with MD don't consider their lives to be tragic, then they're taking away something that belongs to Jerry Lewis. Somehow, they're the ones being mean.

Two YouTube things

I love the Internet:

I have a mildly autistic daughter. She's 11, and she shares a great many of your reported behaviors and, I think, feelings. We also have a hard time telling what's autism and what's just the unique brand of weirdness that every individual person has. I wouldn't worry about it too much. (I know, easy for me to say!) By the way, I hope my daughter turns out as self-possessed and self-aware as you seem to be. Thanks for posting. Stay shiny, Browncoat!

However, what I came here to say was that if you aren't watching Dave Hingsburger's videos about working in institutions at the beginning of his career, you should be. They're...well, I don't think "great" is the word exactly, but I think they're important. I should warn you that this particular video made me cry a lot, and that they're all pretty disturbing so far.



Here is a very good transcription.

Henry Darger was a person

Henry Darger was an ASD person who lived in the Midwest, like me. Like me he enjoyed praying and arts and crafts.

He was treated badly when he was a kid and he wanted very much to help kids. He tried to adopt kids sometimes, but no one would give a child to someone like him. He had one friend. He was a janitor and he spent a lot of time writing and going to mass. He collected pictures of kids who had been murdered, but his favorite disappeared. He said it was a huge calamity and disaster. He wrote 15,145 pages of a book about kids rescuing other kids from monsters and adults.


Everyone says that Henry Darger probably wanted to hurt kids and it’s lucky he never got to be around them very much.

Also everyone looks at his pictures and doesn’t read his books.



Henry Darger had one friend and his dad died when he was thirteen. He was put in an institution for being creepy, jerking off, or I suspect stimming. Henry Darger’s friend was worried about kids, too.

People are into naming their bands after him, but it’s already my name without even trying. I’m not sure why ASD people don’t feel more excited about Henry Darger. I like him a lot. My dad and I like going into Henry Darger exhibits and buying postcards with credit cards that have our name on them. My dad always tells people about Henry Darger using a worked-out series of phrases.



I think it’s important to remember that he wasn’t happy. We can’t think that arts and crafts is more important than happiness. Henry Darger is in a better place and probably doesn’t care, but he never got any of the money that people spend to get his arts and crafts in their exhibits.

The coolest/saddest thing ever

this morning I was talking to my friend Ralph when I left to get a soda. When I returned to my computer Ralph had gone to bed (he lives in California). Before signing off, he'd written:

so two asperger things
8:54 AM 1. a guy in my program has it and everytime I talk to him I remember that and go "FUCK! I WANT TO HANG OUT WITH AMANDA"
2. DId you hear about the kid who ran away from home and spent a week living on the subway in NYC?

I had not heard! But I have now. The kid is named Francisco Hernandez Jr. and he lives in Brooklyn. He's 13 and was diagnosed with Asperger's three years ago. When he's under pressure, Francisco (in the words of the doctor who diagnosed him) "freezes in confusion because he does not know what to do or say." On October 15, he was yelled at for not completing an assignment, and the school called his mom. When Francisco called his mom to say he was coming home, his mom told him that she wanted to have a serious talk with him. He was so anxious that he got on the subway and continued to ride the subway for 11 days, using his bag as a pillow and using the ten dollars he had on him to buy junk food at subway stations.

His parents feel that the police didn't work hard enough to find Francisco because they are immigrants and didn't "understand how to manage the situation [or] speak English very well." A detective told his mom that Francisco was probably staying with a friend--but he doesn't have any friends. Francisco says he "stopped feeling anything" while he was riding the subway. When asked what he thinks about the fact that no one noticed him or talked to him for eleven days, he said, "Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”

This story is both the saddest and the coolest thing ever. Like many ASD people, I love trains, and living on a subway train is the kind of thing I made up stories about when I was a kid, writing up elaborate plans of how I'd survive. Francisco has accomplished a feat of E. L. Konigsburg proportions. There's also something iconic about the unselfconsciously gloomy statements he made to the New York Times--"nobody really cares about the world and about people"? I'm pretty sure he could become the next Edward Scissorhands or Jeff Mangum.

But while it's nice to imagine Francisco bragging about his adventure to his friends when he's 19 or 20, the time when this will be just an awesome story is a long way away. The time when Francisco will have friends is, probably, a long way away, and I bet it seems so far away that he doesn't believe it exists. He said he was planning on staying on the subway forever; he lost all sense of time. I think people lose their sense of time when they think that things are so bad they'll never change.

The words "eighth grade" are the two most painful words in the English language, at least for me. But I still believed in a better future, sort of; not with all my heart, but enough that I didn't try to disappear from life altogether. I held on. It breaks my heart that Francisco didn't believe there was anything to hold on for, that the world was just too scary for him to stay.

I want to write him a letter. I want this period of his life to be over. I want him to go the school where his doctors want him to go, where he can be with other kids who have disabilities, instead of staying at the school that claims he's doing fine but terrified him into disappearing for two weeks. I just want him to be older, playing video games with his friends and saying, "hey, did I ever tell you about the time I ran away and lived on the subway?"

I am writing a paper

I’m tempted to say “it was easy to be a martyr,” but that isn’t what I mean. It was very hard to be a martyr, but it was equally hard for everyone, because the qualities required to become a martyr were faith, bravery, and ability to bear pain--qualities that were just as likely to be present in a slave or a woman, if not more so, as in a high-status man. So it happened that many people who became martyrs, and therefore became celebrities in their communities and were held up as examples after their deaths, were people who would not normally be considered important in Roman society.

Once I had a root canal and I loved it because it didn't matter what my face looked like. I was considered a good patient because I was quiet and didn't cause any trouble by getting antsy or upset. I love getting shots because I'm good at that too. When I am feeling bad about myself, I wish I would get injured more frequently.

I haven't gotten a direct support job yet, although I've tried a few times. I think part of it is that I don't have experience working with people who are violent and I don't know how to explain that I know it will be easy for me. I don't know how to explain that I don't care if a person yells or tries to bite me. I wish all people were as easy to deal with as that--if people would just occasionally try to bite me, and that was it, my life would be swell.

I think I will have to edit my paper so it doesn't have the word I in it. I think they're harder on that stuff here than they are in America. But I really like those first two lines.

What kind of kid do you want?

One of my first posts was about this but the gaslighting post made me think about it more. Functional people cannot just yell when a noise makes them feel upset. They can't just say what they think and they can't just talk about their interests all the time. But at the same time, you don't want drones and you don't want incredibly submissive Asperger's people who don't self-advocate, and end up in abusive relationships, and so on.

What you want, I guess, is to raise your kid to be really aware. Not just of what's wrong with them, but what's wrong with everyone.

So you want a kid who thinks of himself as disabled both personally and politically. He knows he has impairments and thinks about how to manage them. But he is also aware of the disability rights movement, and he knows how many of his problems come from the medical model of disability. He knows that sometimes he can improve his situation by faking facial expressions, say, but he knows that it is unfair for the world to require that of him.

You want a kid who can recognize his own discomfort. You don't want your kid to start moaning in the supermarket but you also shouldn't reward your kid for keeping silent in the supermarket because then you end up with a kid who just doesn't express feelings that still exist. You talk to your kid about what's going on. You ask the kid to try to be quiet and you tell the kid that if it gets too bad, or if he thinks he's going to start yelling, to tell you so you can take him outside. Then when he's older, he will be able to understand himself and take himself outside when you're not there.

You want a kid who is anti-meanness and judges his and other people's meanness the same way. He tries to figure out if people are interested in what he's saying, because it is mean to make someone listen to something they're not interested in. He is very conscious that other people might be in pain and he has learned the appropriate reactions, because it's mean not to help someone who's in pain. If someone hurts him with ignorance or laziness, he knows that's just as mean as if he hurt them the same way. If someone bullies him, he knows that's them being mean, he knows that's not his fault for being different. He just sees meanness; he doesn't see normal and not normal. He doesn't feel that he is trying to be normal and they are cracking down on him when he doesn't succeed. He knows that he is trying to be kind, and other people don't always try as hard as he does, and that's wrong.

This is all I can think of so far, but you get the idea hopefully--clearheaded awareness of self and others and social norms, not privileging any of those things over the others.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is when you try to keep a person from standing up for herself by making her doubt her own perception of things. The term comes from a 1938 play in which a guy lives below the apartment of a woman he murdered for her jewels. Every night, he goes into her apartment to look for the jewels, causing the lights in his own apartment to dim. His wife notices this, and wonders where he goes every night, but the guy tells her that she's just imagining the lights dimming, and that it's weird for her to ask him where he's going. He almost succeeds in convincing her that she's mentally ill. Not all gaslighting is so calculated, of course; for example, Don gaslighted Betty on Mad Men when he wouldn't admit to cheating on her. He wasn't intending to psychologically torture her, but he did take advantage of her internalized sexism and history of emotional problems in the hopes that she wouldn't make him face up to something she knew he'd done.

I used female pronouns in my definition because it makes grammar easier, and also because gaslighting is easier to do to a woman. Women apologize more, are more self-deprecating, try harder to adjust ourselves to other people's needs. As a result, it is easier to convince a woman that her perception of something is wrong.

Gaslighting is a confusing phenomenon because it's hard to think about how to prevent it. I don't really want to live in a world where everyone assumes they're right all the time. The world is too much like that already. But as things are, the people who are confident that their perceptions are the right ones have such an easy time manipulating people who don't. That isn't good.

I guess the solution to gaslighting is to teach confidence to open-minded people. Being self-deprecating and willing to suspend disbelief are good qualities but we live in a world where they're turned into weaknesses. I guess we have to find some kind of middle ground where people are open to the idea that they're wrong, but also aware that someone might be fucking with them.

Obviously, I'm bringing up the issue of gaslighting because it is such a big issue for me, and I think developmentally disabled people in general. In ABA schools, they mark kids down for "non-compliance," even if non-compliance consists of a kid wanting to stim, or being too tired to do work, or arguing with a teacher's idea of the "right" way to say something. People in workshop and group home settings spend their whole life being told not to complain, to be quiet, to be pleasant. And this does create a lot of nice people, but it also means that, for example, developmentally disabled people often don't speak up if they are sexually abused. And for ASD people, I think it can lead to meltdowns because we are encouraged not to express discomfort so we hold it in as long as we can.

I mentioned in a previous post that pretty much every time I've had something medically wrong with me, it's taken a while to be diagnosed because the symptom has been pain and I've been trained since I was a kid not to express pain. When I was a kid, getting my hair brushed, washed, blow-dried, or cut caused me incredible discomfort and I would cry and yell and complain, but I was always told that I was overreacting and it wasn't really that bad. So I figured it wasn't. So when I had appendicitis I figured it wasn't really that bad. And so on.

This is interesting because in terms of the appendicitis I was, on the surface, gaslighting myself. And also, the reason I wanted to write this post is because someone posted in a disability LiveJournal community about how their mom said they were "eating oatmeal over and over" and they wanted to know if they were actually eating an abnormal amount of oatmeal. A community member, presumably visibly disabled, commented asking what this had to do with disability and why the person didn't make their own decisions, since they were an adult. Well, the reason I perceived the post as disability-related, and I assume the reason the OP chose to post it in that community, is that the OP has an ASD. For a person with ASD, "over and over" can be a trigger that makes the person think, "Shit! I'm doing something that is a symptom of ASD and therefore is wrong! I better change what I'm doing to something normal!" I identified with this a lot because when my mom tells me I'm doing something "obsessive" or I'm "cycling," I react with quite a bit of anger and shame, a lot more than an ordinary person would if their mom told them the same thing. And then in the future I feel bad about doing the thing my mom said was "obsessive."

So here I'm also gaslighting myself, right? As is the poster. It's just an innocent comment about oatmeal, right?

Even if it's not, even if their mom is intentionally trying to fuck with them because she knows how they'll react as a person with ASD--well, you can't really tell the difference, can you? If some person tells me I'm eating oatmeal over and over, and they aren't thinking about my history at all, I'm just gaslighting myself when this makes me feel sort of embarrassed and apologetic and forced into submission because I'm an Abnormal Person and as a Normal Person they know what I should be doing. It's my fault, sort of.

But it's only sort of my fault, because it's privilege. Privilege is invisible but everyone keeps it going, conscious or not. And it's usually only the people who are negatively affected who have to be conscious. The other people can be like, "Hey man, what are you freaking out about?" Which, in this case, ironically amounts to gaslighting about gaslighting.

I'm a fake person.

Niyatee asked me another question. I like how I'm setting her up as this strawnormalperson, who exists to ask me questions so I can shed light on things in an interesting manner, like I'm a classical philosopher. For the record, she is much smarter than I am. And the reason she was asking me questions is that she's a neurology student and she works with people who have PTSD, and I think she was thinking about whether stimming is similar to the thought processes of non-stimmers who are under stress, whether it's a physical manifestation of something other people do invisibly. But for some reason, we/I got off track enough that I ended up telling her about this time when my friend told me about something really awful that had happened to her.

My immediate reaction was of a piece with my standard social interaction persona, which is, as I might have mentioned, a poor imitation of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. My voice is kind of soft and little-girl-ish, I am solicitous to the point of sometimes going too far, I interject, I tease. Not that I teased my friend when she told me what had happened, but I reacted the way my MPDG persona would react. I said, "Oh no! That's terrible! I'm so sorry!" in this breathy little voice. But then I thought: what the fuck am I doing? What she just told me is heartbreaking and infuriating; she deserves more than a shitty, cutesy performance of sympathy. So as she continued to tell me about her experience, I went and sat next to her at the table where she was sitting, and I looked at my hands, and I spoke the way God intended--in soft gray lines.

When I said this, Niyatee said some disclaimers about this being a personal question and she wouldn't be judgmental--but how do I actually feel when a person's in pain? Really. Because I had been saying, I guess normal people sense what other people are feeling, and feel what they feel, right? Is that how it is? Implying that I don't sense what other people are feeling. But when she asked me how I feel when someone's in pain, I felt myself starting to respond, "Oh no! That's terrible!"

Which isn't a feeling. And I just said it's an act.

What do I feel, actually? Maybe I feel interested. When I was a kid, I got bullied a lot and other kids didn't seem to respond to my expressions of pain, and they didn't seem to respond to logic. So I kind of believed other people didn't have an inner life. Even now, before I get to know people I tend to have a sense that they're different from me, inside. I can only be attracted to girls after I've seen them in a visible bad mood; I need physical evidence that they have feelings too. My immediate reaction to someone telling me that they're depressed or upset is that I feel closer to them, and more interested in them, maybe. Does that make me a bad person? I'm not really sure.

But I'm a behaviorist, maybe, when it comes to myself--I tend to think it doesn't matter what I feel. I might as well feel "Oh no! That's terrible!" Does it matter how I feel if I respond correctly? Not that I respond that well. My MPDG persona is a mess, I know I act like a silly little kid, but I couldn't talk in class or make friends without it. I need someone to be. "Be yourself" is the stupidest thing you could say to me, because I don't really remember who I am, and if I do find out, it won't matter, because who I am is not someone who can function in the outside world.

Something I know is that I'm not really a girl. I'm not saying I'm repressing transgenderism, because I don't think I really have a gender identity on a deep level like most people do. But when I was a kid, I definitely remember that my brain felt like a boy's brain. There was just something about it. When I read about how men and women don't get along with each other, I always thought the man's point of view made sense. I remember being scared someone would find out--that when I woke up in the morning, when I thought the word "me," when I wrote, the first image that came was always, I'm a man. There was something wrong with me.

But when I grew up in my mid-to-late teens, and started trying to work out ways to be functional, the idea of being male (and the fact that I thought of myself as maybe trans, and read about transmen, and wanted to look like a boy) was something I just didn't have room for anymore. I didn't have the spoons to transition, that was for sure. And besides, the MPDG box was the only one I could even halfway fit, and like the name says, it's a girl's box. And I wouldn't pass, anyway. I'm sure not tough enough. So now I'm a girl. Okay. Who the hell cares what I feel?

See, I am definitely not a classical philosopher because I'm not shedding very much light. I'm out to prove I've got nothing to prove, like Napoleon Dynamite. And what can I demand from the world that would make this stuff any different? What would the world have had to be like for me to not have had to learn all these fake reactions? And besides, it really is an innate good for me to notice when someone burns their hand on the stove and how to help them. Can I separate that from the emotional performance that I learned as part of that reaction? Also, I know that I have to batter my way discreetly through tiredness and executive dysfunction and shoes that are too tight and questions I don't understand, and can I really separate that from the injuries and illnesses that have either gone untreated or been diagnosed quite a while after they first appeared, because I didn't make enough of a fuss?

I feel really fucking sorry for myself, I know. But I just feel like I'm not really anyone, and that gets to me from time to time.

The Sound and the Fury

"It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing."

Even if you haven't read The Sound and the Fury, you probably know it is named after a line from a Shakespeare play. But if you haven't read the book, you might not know that one of the protagonists is a literal "idiot"--that is, a severely developmentally disabled person who expresses himself with loud, wordless moans.

I'm not sure Faulker thought about the title of his book, beyond thinking it was a clever literary reference. Because it doesn't really fit where you would expect it to. It's clear upon close reading that Benjy's wails and rages don't actually "signify nothing"--they make at least as much sense as any other Compson's behavior, if not more. Benjy lost his beloved sister, one of the only people who was kind to him. Her name is a very common word, and whenever he hears that word, he gets upset. It is popular to explain this by saying "Benjy has no sense of time, and doesn't understand she is gone"--but in fact, if he didn't understand she was gone, he wouldn't moan when he heard her name. It is very easy to understand why Benjy acts the way he does, and anyone who would describe his behavior as senseless is simply too lazy to engage with him. Instead of claiming that he doesn't understand time, it would be more accurate to say that Benjy feels the events of the past very keenly and hasn't gotten over them. This is true of most of the characters, disabled and non-disabled.

When ableist people try to argue that ASD rights advocates are worlds away from "real autistic people," they invariably invoke people like Benjy--archetypes of violent, nonsensical children and adults. This is supposed to make high-functioning ASD people see low-functioning people as the Other. We're supposed to feel guilty and disgusted, and rush to separate ourselves from them.

But the truth is, violence is a perfectly understandable reaction when you are in pain and don't know what to do. I was a violent kid, in large part because I hadn't learned to cope with my ASD. If I had been more severely affected, I imagine my pain would have been worse, and I would have had more trouble figuring out how to cope. So I imagine I would have been more violent, and violent for longer. I would have needed more help. Hopefully the people around me would have understood what kind of help.

Because I understand where developmentally disabled violence comes from, the fact that someone is violent doesn't make me think they're an "idiot," baffling, irrevocably different from me. Benjy's sound and fury signified that he was in pain.