Baldwin wrote about how our pain and struggles are universal. How the oppressed, along any axis, share some of the same identity-shaping forces.
But even beyond oppression - suffering is suffering. Oppressors and oppressed alike suffer, because to live is to suffer. And on that axis, we ARE all one.
Our work is to remove our own capacity to oppress, even ourselves.
You’re the main character, but you’re also the story.
The story is the main character in a story about itself, which is itself.
See?
What kind of story are you?
This is kind of what therapy helps with. Talk therapy is about telling your story over and over until the contradictions and compromises fall out.
In a very real way, getting your life together is a question of getting your story straight.
We are narrative animals. It’s the fundamental truth of our nature that we exist as characters within stories that exist within the confabulator running on our brain hardware.
No wonder we get confused! Reality is virtual, and those dynamics are non-obvious!
It took me a long time to realize that. I was 34 when I learned I was autistic, 35 when I first considered myself disabled. It took a long time to get comfortable with that word.
Ableism in society means we internalize contempt for the disabled.
So many disabled people don’t know they’re disabled, because they feel like normal human beings and they think “disabled” means something other than that. I was in this camp forever too. It gets programmed into us by society.
Alcohol made him uninhibited, and girls liked him, and he just… used them up. With no regard for their humanity. Serial cheater when in relationship, serial creep when not.
Ultimately he really hurt someone I cared about, and I cut ties with him. But I did it slowly and casually without making a big deal out of it, and I regret that.
ME is one of the most debilitating conditions you've probably never heard of. Learn this today:
Most people with ME consider the CFS part to be dismissive and outdated. "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is such a misleading term that the doctor who coined it later apologized. #pwme
ME has always been with us -- some people, after they get a virus or have certain other kinds of trauma, experience ongoing symptoms that disable them for the rest of their lives.
During pandemics, we see waves of ME sweep across populations. Lots of #LongCovid patients have it.
But here's the catch: despite 9000 different biomedical findings in ME patients and despite ME being classified as a neuroimmune condition, there are still tons of doctors who treat it is as psychosomatic. Why?
What if you wrote a database that didn't store state? What if you only tracked changes, via append-only logs of (hypernode) events carrying relational data between different nodes in your hypergraph?
What if state could be derived at any time from those changes? So you could pre-populate a downstream SQL database by parsing the changes and turning them into SQL writes. You could group events by target for quicker queries.
I’m having Interesting Thoughts based on some excellent replies.
What if what we call masking is a response to dealing with shame, and autistic people mask so much because we are taught to literally be ashamed of who we are?
Everyone masks a little, maybe. But we hide so much.
My advice to people who want to stop masking has long been “your shame is a map to those parts of yourself you were taught to hate, and so need more love.”
What if it IS that simple? Autistic trauma leads to toxic shame leads to masking.