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"Embrace your weirdness. It's okay to stand out." (hexbear.net)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[CW: Internalized Hate]

Something I'm being told even though I literally receive hate on a daily basis for said "weirdness."

Just when I thought I was learning to accept myself for all the things I have a long past of hating myself over (gender, sexuality, race, and neurodivergence), it just really hasn't gotten to that point where I can truly embrace this. I'm afraid that the one life I was given was as an autistic, black, pansexual enby, and there's nothing I can do about that.

I will never be normal, and no, that's not okay. I don't believe I will truly ever be able to be content like this. I'm far too different from the norm for life to be compatible for someone like me. I feel like I'm not actually meant to exist. I feel like I'm an experiment where I'm intended to be everything that a human being is not supposed to be.

As long as I will continue being this way (and, unfortunately, I will), there's gonna be a reason to question how much comfort I can find in life, and when it hits me that the world will never be for people like me, I question how I can make my life work.

I'm forever to be disgusting, filthy, broken, freakish, incompetent, abnormal, inferior, and a detriment to society's own comfort, and that's just in my nature, so no, I don't think I can make my life work.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Autism spectrum here. I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

It's gotten easier as I've gotten older, though. High school was the absolute worst because largely unsupervised teenagers are experts in casual cruelty and I was a constant target of people I physically could not get away from. Adults, even if they find you offputting, are less (emphasis less) likely to go out of their way to antagonize you over it and it's much easier to physically remove yourself from their presence in most cases (God help you if you work in customer service).

I know you're despairing at the knowledge that you will never change, and that's a perfectly valid reaction. For me, though, finally coming to accept that was liberating. I no longer feel guilty for how I am, and I no longer waste time with people who demand I be something I can never be.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What's actually wild is that when I have an awkward moment as an autistic person that makes neurotypicals bullies me, the question I always ask myself is:

Did it seem like I fucked up specifically because I'm autistic and misunderstood or did I actually fuck up and their bullying was justified?

I never can tell, and this is why my internalized ableism was always the hardest form of internalized bigotry for me to overcome. I feel like anti-autistic sentiment is so socially acceptable as long as you don't explicitly make it about autism, i.e. you can get upset with someone for displaying supposed "autistic tendencies," but you can't call them a slur or directly poke fun at the fact that they're autistic for doing so. This is actually true for a lot of forms of bigotry, as I used to work a job where I was the only black person there, and I got harassed in ways that I found very hard to disconnect from how my coworkers may have been perceiving me on the basis of my race. Looking back at these microaggressions, I genuinely believe that if I were white, things would've gone a lot better there, but that's only a hypothetical, so who knows?

I also have this very powerful tendency to feel like my emotions aren't valid in the context of people getting upset with me, especially if it's a neurotypical person. If a neurotypical person shouts at me for something and it makes me sad, then my gut instinct tells me "It's you. You need to stop being sad. The way they treated you is fine. You just need to learn to stop being sad, which is an irrational response on your part."

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

I never can tell, and this is why my internalized ableism was always the hardest form of internalized bigotry for me to overcome. I feel like anti-autistic sentiment is so socially acceptable as long as you don't explicitly make it about autism, i.e. you can get upset with someone for displaying supposed "autistic tendencies," but you can't call them a slur or directly poke fun at the fact that they're autistic for doing so.

yea 10-15 years ago, we didn't even get that much. Even in left-wing spaces I would regularly see people calling us slurs, using our condition as an insult, and using us as punchlines.