7:46am December 15, 2014

How do you handle it…

… When you genuinely believe that everything around you is alive and can be communicated and interacted with, among many other beliefs…

… And you come from a culture that has long been stereotyped by white Westerners as having some sort of vaguely similar belief? It’s bad enough being autistic and getting this Crystal Child bullshit blown up my ass by penile who think it’s a compliment. But if I were indigenous as well, it’d be even worse. Especially if my culture didn’t even believe that. Especially if my culture did believe something like that, but not the way white people think.

In my teens, I met a female Horace Slughorn/Gilderoy Lockhart combination. Yes, horrible. She didn’t collect people who would one day become famous. She collected disabled people and indigenous people and gave us an overlay of holy fool and noble savage before taking from us whatever spiritual knowledge and wisdom she thought we had on offer. And then taking credit and writing books where we were never acknowledged as the source of her information (some of which sounded so bogus that I think some of the tribes she visited were yanking her chain to see if she’d notice).

One time she showed me a photo of a young indigenous man and said “this is (name redacted), he’s my very own Hopi medicine man”. She didn’t say my like my doctor, my boss. She said it like my child, my pet, or worse, my knickknack, my toy, my collector’s item.

I felt sick.

Unfortunately I couldn’t hold my own in conversations with her. She was made of words. I was just starting to solidify my written language skills. As in, for communication rather than regurgitation. My spoken skills were disappearing and the parts that remained were 95% regurgitation. I had no communication device yet.

Luckily she was one of those assholes who thinks that problems with “negative energy” (for lack of any better term) were the person’s own fault. It’s a common New Age view due to a misinterpretation of karma, with a big whopping heap of just world hypothesis thrown in. So just as people blame physical rape victims, people also blame victims of spiritual abuse (including things that are more similar to physical rape then you’d think, only there’s no court in the land who would ever try sometime for it – physical sexual assault victims receive very little help from the system, especially if disabled or of color. Mental, emotional, and spiritual sexual assault victims get laughed at and turned away, at best, if we even dare to try and report it. And for me, spiritual rape (which one of my spiritual rapists even called it later, so I’m not making this up) was far more violating and devastating than any kind of physical sexual assault ever was for me.

Anyway, I didn’t intentionally drive her away but I was more than happy to do it accidentally. I began talking about spiritual rape and the giant holes it left in my defenses, and subsequent problems with invisible nasties.

I was naive enough to believe that a woman who traveled to high mountains on weird spiritual quests, watched her friends sicken badly or even die of altitude sickness, and bragged about how invigorating the thin air was and how spiritual this made her… I expected compassion out of someone Ike that. Instead she became both afraid of me and hostile, as if I had purposefully brought it on myself and could now damage her. When I went into detail about a fairly tame, non-sexualized bad experience I’d had with negative energy, I heard a click on the other end of the line. Calling back in case it was a mistake, she let her answering machine get it. I was at first annoyed at her rudeness, then overjoyed I’d never have to speak to her again.

But at any rate. I have a very strong spiritual relationship with the small patch of land I was born into. I talk about it in my poetry a lot. Same with the way I relate to objects even though I don’t see that as spiritual – newage people always do.

I know from experience that some people will respond by saying autistic people can’t be spiritual. But that others will go all Autism and the God Connection on me. And I imagine if I was indigenous it’d be even worse, and it’d be bad regardless of whether I got my beliefs from my culture or not. Lots of autistic people experience the world the way I do regardless of culture, so I imagine being autistic of the sort I am, and being indigenous, both at once, would be its own special version of hell when it came to dealing with white newage liberals.

Notes: