Thread by @erikaheidewald

it’s annoying when people are like “you used a double negative! you didn’t speak directly, you make no sense.” sometimes a double negative is true and the positive would not be true. if you need to read or listen more times to consider it, that is okay.

some ideas are too complicated to understand the first time you ever hear them. not everything can be simplified past a certain point and still be true. if i said a double negative, it’s because the double negative is what is true. i didn’t do it by accident.

it’s also okay if you consider an idea for a while and still can’t make sense of it. put a pin in it. screenshot or bookmark it for later, or move on with your life. go get more context. many ideas require base knowledge to understand and that doesn’t make the ideas bad.

i’m willing to simplify what i say but then it takes longer and will have more steps. if you’re not willing to start at step one, no you can’t jump in at step ten and expect it to make sense and it’s not my responsibility to help you do that.

when people ask questions that demonstrate a lack of base knowledge i tell them to go get that base knowledge and if it’s my idea, i’ve already explained that base knowledge elsewhere - but people simply don’t want to go consume that content first.

someone said “imagine if a medical journal said ‘go do your research’ instead of citing sources” but no dude, imagine if people kept asking a medical journal to define basic concepts because they refused to go to medical school first before reading it.

neurodivergent people are done a disservice by people who tell them that if they don’t understand something, it’s because it wasn’t communicated clearly. i communicate clearly and i detest it when people tell me they’re ND and i should be more clear. i’m ND and direct as fuck

it is a good thing that some ideas are complicated and nuanced and require a certain level of knowledge to understand. that is valuable. you are capable of learning it from the beginning. you do not need every sentence spoonfed to you - your brain does not require that.

i actively do not want people to have to make inferences and read between the lines, which is why i say things a very specific way. ND brains are being fucking broken by this NT education system that doesn’t teach rational thought when that’s the way autistic people think.

i know how complicated it is to understand radical theory, i learned a lot of it on twitter over the course of many, many years. some ideas are new and big. you don’t have to learn the whole thing today. not everything that’s challenging for your brain is bad.

the problem is NDs are taught in a way that makes no sense to us, so many of us aren’t taught how to learn the way that actually works for us. a lot of people don’t know the difference between a good mental challenge and an impossible, infuriating one.

i do know the difference and if the way i teach something is impossible for you, that’s ok. you don’t have to learn it from me. but i am teaching it in a clear, rational way that a ND brain can learn. that won’t necessarily make it easy and easy is not always better.