#no it is not ridiculous to say 'ostracizing a group of people and being downright evil to them based on the actions of other bad people wil

[nowoyas]

"sorry I disagree if you're a bad person it's because there's something inherently wrong with you" I Am No Longer Asking You To Read Eichmann In Jerusalem By Hanna Arendt

[valkyrieofvalhalla]

My life is empty

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for months now; something that’s been difficult to confront, difficult to articulate, difficult to accept. But here I sit – I’m unable to continue ignoring what’s been whispering to me from the depths of my mind. I don’t want to say it, but: I am unhappy. Unsatisfied with my life. Disappointed in who I am. I want more. I want to be more. I want to be someone else. I see the missed opportunities of my life over the years, and I can’t help but feel a sense of bitterness and anger. It’s been within me for years now, tainting my very soul. And it’s not right either. Why do I feel this way? I’m young. I’ve got a lot of good things that many don’t have. And yet… The truth remains: no matter what, I am unsatisfied.

I was seventeen when I first read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, but the words have stuck with me in the years since, and I find myself reciting one particular verse nearly daily now. He says

“… I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Vast and empty the sea.”

I think it’s downright terrible that I understand precisely what he means. My life has always been horrible. I am the daughter of old Muslim immigrants, who grew up in a country so drastically different from the United States that in their raising me, they turned me into the weirdo, the strange girl. Everything about me, every trait – physical and personality – is something to be lamented. Right from the beginning, I was different from everyone around me, even my own family. My whole identity is outcast, my name is Black Sheep, my story: that of ostracization.

I don’t know who I am, and I hate that so so much. I feel like my entire life has been an identity crisis. I know who I want to be but I fall short of actually being that person.

To begin with, my name is foreign. All my life people have made fun of my name (among a plethora of other things about me). I was, and am, the token minority of token minorities. There’s been a deep sense of loneliness in my heart since the early years of my youth, that’s simply gotten worse over the years. For more than ten years, I didn’t meet another person of my race at my schools. I was also alone in religion for a long time too. I was the only Muslim, the only person of my race. And to make matters worse, my parents raised me as if we were still living in their ass backwards country.

I remember being five years old, and telling my mom that I had a boyfriend. If you don’t know, in Islam it’s forbidden for men and women to even be friends, let alone lovers. The funny thing is, I didn’t even mean ‘boyfriend’ in the traditional sense. My five year old self had heard adults referring to my female friends as my girlfriends, so I made the logical leap that my male friends must be my boyfriends.

My mom beat me for that.

I, a five year old child, was a whore, and needed to be taught a lesson.

So, because of this upbringing, which instilled in me a manner of behavior and a set of beliefs and morals that Americans had largely been unfamiliar with since the eighteen fifties, I was always considered weird by my classmates and neighbors. I had few friends who could tolerate me, even as a kid.

My family, both immediate and extended, didn’t offer me solace either. They also thought I was weird, and thought lesser of me for it. But they thought I was weird in different ways. Funnily enough, I was too Americanized for their tastes. The most pronounced example is that of their ongoing reaction to a lifelong hobby of mine, one that is intrinsically a part of who I am: I’m a bookworm. An extreme one. In the years of my adolescence I would read for hours daily. It was often the case that I would rent a book from the library after school, go home and spend the rest of my day reading it, only to be finished by dinnertime. I always have a book with me. I’ve literally been that way since my early childhood. No matter what I’m doing or where I’m going, I would bring a book with me to read. Family gathering? It’s there in my hands. At school, during class? You bet your sweet ass I finished all my work and I’m reading. Going over to a friend’s house to hand out? You’ll see me leaving with a book in my hands.

I read every chance I got, and my family has given me hell for it. It sounds unbelievable, but please try to understand: they’re Muslims, many of which grew up in a country where plenty of people are still illiterate. They’ve said a lot to me over the years about my “hobby”, but there a few comments that were so ridiculous I remember them even now.

From an aunt: “You’re too smart for a girl.” From the same aunt: “You read too much. Girls need to socialize and be seen.” From an uncle: “No man wants a wife who reads as much as you do.” From a different aunt: “No man will love you if you stay this way.”

And a cousin once insinuated that my reading made me too curious and questioning. She told me that if my parents wanted to keep me from “straying from God’s light, they’re going to have to marry you off when you turn eighteen.”

My cousin was right of course, in that my reading made me insatiably curious and in that it also made me question everything. Reading cultivated my imagination, gave me such a supreme sense of wanderlust that I consider it a part of who I am, something that is inherently and utterly me. Reading showed me heroes and heroines who did amazing things, and I wanted to be that, to do what they did. I desperately wanted to be a hero, to go on a grand adventure and discover or do something remarkable. But the heroes in the stories I read weren’t like me. They held western morals and ideals. The years of my life where I went from a child to a young teenager were rife with questions about my own ideals and morals and who I was supposed to be versus who I wanted to be.

I wanted to be the hero who goes on a grand adventure and sees the world. Who I was supposed to be, the woman I thought I was destined to be, was a housewife, slave to her husband’s whims. For a long time I hopelessly believed that there was no saving me from my “fate”. My destiny was pre-determined.

What a load of bullshit.

But the fact that I questioned at all was enough to set me aside as someone to be shunned in my family. And, when I turned fifteen and realized that I could chose my own fate, I absolutely could make my own damn decisions and take my life in whatever direction I wanted to, they hated me even more. I’m not a proper woman. I’m not normal to them.

Sadly, I wasn’t (and still am rather not) considered normal by my peers. My classmates hated me for my bookishness as well, but for different reasons than my family. They hated me because I was nerdy. Reading was weird. I was weird. All of my elementary school years were spent being the only bookworm. Then, in middle school, I met someone who enjoyed reading! I was elated at first, but then became heartbroken when I saw that she wasn’t like me. Yes, she liked reading, but she didn’t read every day like I did. She didn’t start and finish books in a day. She didn’t have the same wanderlust I did, the same sense of wanting more out of life. From the very beginnings of my youth, I have been alone in this regard.

It got worse for me.

In my early teenage years, I was embracing western ideals, determined to become normal. Unfortunately, something happened to me which stunted my emotional growth: I was beaten and molested by a group of boys at school. They were all several years older than me, but in the same grade as me because they had been held back several times. Taller, bigger, stronger. They caught me after school and didn’t hold back.

I was irrevocably changed.

Of course, the event made me even “weirder”. I – an already isolated young woman – became even more of a hermit. I couldn’t stand being in crowds or crowded places. I loathed being touched. I constantly picked at my skin because I felt dirty. I had open sores on my arms, hands and face because I would keep my nails long and sharp and tug and dig and peel away at the skin far past the point of having blood-drenched fingers.

Even before this, I was teased by my peers, told by my family, that I was/am rather ugly. After the event, when I began picking at my skin and eating to cope with the stress, the teasing and cruel remarks only got worse.

I remember bending over to pick up a book I had dropped, and boys pointing and laughing at me. One was making a gagging sounds, pretending he was throwing up. Another was covering his eyes, opening them for a split second, then screaming as if the sight of me caused him pain.

I remember another time, where two boys were saying something about ugly girls needing photoshop. I turned around. They immediately started laughing and ribbing each other.

My family told me I’d be prettier if I straightened my hair. Curly hair is wild and ugly. I’m wild and ugly.

My own mother once told me that I was too ugly to be her daughter. She was also fond of telling me that I was so fat that no one would ever want or love me. “No man is ever going to marry you!”

More than once, teenage boys asked me out as a joke.

I remember going to school once with my hair down. I was always being told how ugly my curls were, but for once I was trying to embrace them. Accept them. It was going well, until someone decided to play with hair and then tell me that my hair was really ugly when he pulled the curl down and watched it bounce back. I went back to ponytails and buns the day after.

My aunt said to me, verbatim, “Your lips are really fat. Especially you’re bottom lip; it’s huge. It’s ugly.”

Despite all this, I’ve tried really hard to be a good person. To be steadfast in my scruples. To have honor and integrity and to do right by others. I’ve tried so hard to be good to other people, to be the kindness that was denied me in my youth.

I have had my efforts shat on.

They’ve been utterly worthless. People are still cruel to me. People still treat me terribly. I’m actually sitting here crying because this question has been bothering me for so long. What is it about me that just makes me so hate-able? Why is it so easy for people to be cruel to me, to hate me and treat me like I’m worthless?

About ten months ago, I got a new job. Almost right from the beginning, my coworkers were absolutely, utterly, heartlessly cruel to me. They hurt me, they hurt me deeply and I can’t move past it. I don’t know why people hate me enough to be like this to me, when all I try to do is be kind and considerate.

They actively excluded me. The three of them would have conversations among each other in Spanish; they know I can’t speak Spanish. Even when they spoke in English, if I tried to join in, they would just ignore me or roll their eyes at me. They were incredibly hostile to me and spoke down to me as if I was stupid, an idiot, beneath them. One of them was fond of screaming and yelling at me. Even if I wasn’t doing something wrong, as long as I wasn’t doing it exactly how she’d do it, I’d get yelled at. The other two didn’t say anything to her. They heard and saw everything but they didn’t care.

I have difficulty hearing. They know this, and yet still they would get angry at me, yell and roll their eyes at me if I didn’t hear them, or asked them to repeat themselves. Once, the same woman I mentioned earlier even scoffed and laughed at me, rolling her eyes at me as she did so. I also have a bad memory from brain damage from the event, and sometimes forgot what I was doing in the midst of doing it. Or forgot where I was heading. They gave me hell for that as well. They thought, because of my bad memory, that I was an idiot. And they thought that me being an idiot made it okay to treat me like I wasn’t a person.

They made me feel like I was worthless. Like I was nothing. They held me to a different standard, an unfair one. They would sit down doing nothing for the majority of the day. They would blatantly be on their phones or surfing Amazon or Facebook. But god forbid if I sit down to write something. No, I should’ve been doing that outside of the office! It’s a capital punishment for me to bring out my phone. How dare I make a mistake, or question them, or break a rule that they consistently and constantly break throughout the day.

It got so bad one day, them screaming and yelling at me, laughing at me, talking down to me, acting as if I was subhuman, that I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I cried. I cried and I couldn’t stop and it just kept coming. I quite literally cried for the last two hours of my shift. I tried so desperately to stop; it’s shameful. No one wants to be seen crying like that, or at all, at work. It’s unprofessional. It makes me weak.

Believe me, I’m not a sensitive person. I don’t cry very easily. And believe me, I tried with all my will to stop.

But I couldn’t.

I just kept crying and crying, so much so that I found it hard to breathe, hard to see without wiping at my eyes every few seconds. Two of them ignored me, pretending it wasn’t happening. The other one acted concerned. Asked me what was wrong. Asked me if something bad happened to my father (my father’s been having health problems for years now, and by this time has been living in a hospice). All I would say was that I was okay. I, obviously, didn’t want to say anything.

I few days later, I felt the need to “explain” myself. I told them about the reason for my memory problems. Ever since then two of them have been cordial to me, polite. Sometimes nice. The other always looks at me with something in his eyes that I can’t describe. I don’t know what to call it. I’d like to think it’s sorrow, or shame, but honestly? I can’t tell. He doesn’t even look at me that much anymore. What little communication we had at all has dwindled to practically nothing. If he has to speak to me, he makes sure to look at anywhere but me. He refuses to look me in the eye.

It bothers me immensely. It shouldn’t, but it does. He went from speaking harshly to me, yelling at me, to saying nothing at all. Looking at me with anger and hatred in his eyes to something… which I simply have no words for. If he even has the courage to look at me at all. Goodness, I mean, just a few days ago we were working alone in the office. My other two coworkers called out. He quite literally did not speak to me once all day, except to tell me to take my lunch. And, true to fashion, when he said, “X, take you’re lunch after you finish this.” he said it without even looking in my direction. Even at the end of the day, when he needed me to sign off on some papers, instead of asking me, he just left them on my desk. Didn’t acknowledge me at all.

I don’t know why people treat me like this. I just don’t understand. Once, maybe three or four months after my getting hired on, the coworker who was especially fond of rolling her eyes at me was crying at her desk. I found her there, and I gave her a hug and told her she could come to me any time to talk if she needed to. I remember that, in the split second after I saw her crying, but before I made the decision to give her a hug and some kind words, I told myself to ignore her. To be unkind and not to try to help, because she’d been a downright cunt to me nearly every single day since I’d started. Almost immediately, I admonished myself. I was ashamed at myself. It’s wrong to treat someone badly. Kindness is a virtue. Be good to people. I should’ve listened to my initial instinct. I was wrong. Being kind is not a good thing. Within a few days she was back to yelling and screaming and treating me like shit.

I just don’t understand why my life has to be like this. It seems like I’m meant for sorrow, destined for unhappiness. All my life I’ve been told that I’m ugly, that I’m too smart or too dumb, that I’m not right for anything or anyone. I’ve always felt out of place, never belonging to anyone. I’m a stranger to myself. I want to be normal. I want people to be kind to me, like I am to them. I wish that just once, things would go nicely for me.

I tried to have hope. I tried to believe that it gets better for people like me. Maybe I was an ugly duckling who would become a beautiful adult. Maybe I’d learn to enjoy hugs again, or stop tensing up whenever someone is walking behind me. I tried to change. To make myself prettier, to make myself normal.

But I’ve lost that. In these past months my morale has withered away into nothingness. I feel as if there is a void where my emotional strength should be. I have no self-efficacy. I worked so hard to make myself believe that I could succeed and become someone of worth, of importance. But my time at this job has had me reflecting on the past, and remembering events that I’d rather not remember. Now, every time I go to work, I hear a voice whispering in my head, saying, “They know, they know! They know what happened to you!” I hate people knowing about the event, but they forced my hand. I had to tell them. I hate that so much. I despise it. They even had the gall to blame me for not telling them. “You should’ve said something!” “You should’ve told us when you were first hired!”

My favorite poem is Invictus by William Ernest Henley. I know the entire poem by heart. I would recite it to myself whenever I felt weak, whenever I felt like I couldn’t keep going. Now, all I can bring myself to recite is Eliot.

Truly, the sea is barren.

[psychotherapyconsultants]

I’m on the Spectrum and Autism Awareness Month Is Complicated

April is Autism Awareness Month. Every year, people on the spectrum get a month to bring “our condition” — that is, that of being, thinking and communicating differently than agreed-upon social norms — to the attention of a culture that might just as soon forget our existence. We are told that the problems we as spectrumites face — discrimination in work and school; brutality from professionals, service providers and parents alike; social ostracization and ridicule — will be mitigated if only people were more “aware.” This is complicated.

On the one hand, the growing movement for “acceptance not awareness” heroically championed by self-advocacy networks is right on. The loudest voices in the “autism awareness” arena, particularly Autism Speaks, have been exclusive to non-autistic people in harmful and invalidating ways. They propagate misinformation about the real experiences of autistic people and create environments where sympathy for parents who murder their autistic children is encouraged and cultivated. They limit the ability to communicate to verbal or written language and advocate for “treatments” or “interventions” such as ABA or social skills classes that force people on the spectrum to contort themselves to fit in and come as close to neurotypical functioning as possible while disregarding the human beings they are. The idea people on the spectrum are human beings with human feelings needs to be met with acceptance, not simply awareness.

More broadly, though, I think much of the “apathy” we’re seeing in public life — low voter turnout, sputtering activist movements, that so many seem to simply be burning their heads in the sand — is actually “awareness fatigue.” We don’t have too little information; in a global society with a 60-second news cycle where we have access to more information every moment than we could possibly digest properly in a lifetime and the technology to remain connected to it all day every day, I think we’ve got too much information. “Autism awareness” diminishes an entire group of people’s daily, minute-by-minute, reality to a cause. A single month for “autism awareness” can make it seem like the experiences and lives of one in 68 children, to say nothing of the adults who may or may not be diagnosed, is an optional topic to get involved in or not.

On the other hand, as I’ve sought services and support after being diagnosed with ASD at the age of 28, I have come across deep ignorance and downright denial on the part of professionals claiming to provide said support. Social workers, employees at vocational rehabilitation agencies and even highly trained therapists are stumped by my mix of gifts and needs; I am often educating professionals and service providers even as I am paying for their help. Many people, especially women, are misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder or even schizophrenia when they really are on the autism spectrum.

So awareness does still seem to be lacking and this lack, particularly among professionals and service providers, creates even more hurdles for those on the spectrum. But “raising awareness” as practiced by well-established and well-respected groups like Autism Speaks, requires autistic people to justify their experiences and existences simply because they are not readily understood without effort by neurotypical folks. One damaging stereotype of autistic people is that we “lack empathy” but who, in the above-mentioned scenario, lacks empathy there?

“Acceptance” above the present form of “awareness” seems like the more healing and inclusive approach, especially because, the way the most magnified voices are engaging in “awareness” paints autism not as something to “be aware of” but autistic people as folks to “beware” of.  But we autistic people are asked to bridge the gap created by neurotypical/ASD differences every day we want to be out in the world; “acceptance” doesn’t feel like it goes far enough in asking that neurotypical people return the effort. I’m also not for “acceptance” as a handout or a favor. Acceptance literally means “the action or process of being received as adequate or suitable, typically to be admitted into a group;” one of the definitions of “awareness” is “concern about and well-informed interest in a particular situation or development.” From this autistic person’s perspective, it’s time for both.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/04/17/im-on-the-spectrum-and-autism-awareness-month-is-complicated/