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10:16pm July 1, 2013

josiahd:

People certainly can and do think they have autistic traits that they don’t have, out of confusion. Because they don’t have the concepts they need, and they use the closest approximations the are available.

People can also have functioning problems that aren’t apparent because they’re good at passing.

That’s not the same as getting ego from having a self-image as the most s person in the room, though.



Yeah I think the confusion here is actually because you can describe two very different things with the same words. And on the surface they look similar.

But beneath the surface, there’s no comparison.

Also, ego doesn’t mean being big headed. It is something we all have. But it’s frequently destructive and leads us away from reality.

Like for instance, loving publicity is an ego thing. And everyone knows that. But being terrified of publicity to the point you won’t use it even when it’s vitally important for helping people. That’s just as bad as getting an ego high off of seeing your name in print. And just as ego driven. The second thing is the way I lean and I’ve had to work hard to overcome it. So when I say ego I don’t just mean puffed up with pride. Cowardice can be an ego thing too. So can lots of things.

I don’t think I can convince anyone just by using words. Because words can mean the opposite when looking the same.

All I can say is…

This wasn’t a situation where it looked like she was making errors about people’s abilities. It was like everything in her entire life revolved around lower functioning than thou. Her every action, emotional reaction, words, lies, etc. It wasn’t a one off thing, it was constant.

She was abusive. People got hurt. One person was hospitalized multiple times. She put my life at risk multiple times.

And it’s not like I jumped to conclusions. I’ve been misjudged before about things like this. So I bent over backwards to avoid judging her.

But my instincts were screaming at me, they said this person is different. This person is a rare example of someone who wants to be more disabled than anyone else in the room. Her entire identity revolves around it. She could turn dangerous if provoked on the issue, or even in other ways. She cares nothing for your safety. Stay away.

When my instincts scream, they’re rarely wrong. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Even when she lied about her IQ.  Even when every sign in everything she did and said pointed in bad directions.

By now I’m not writing this to convince anyone I’m right about her. She’s a stranger to you. You don’t know her. I can’t expect you to take my word for it.

But one thing is really important.

Just because two situations look alike in the surface didn’t mean they’re the same. Just because you can use the same words to describe them, doesn’t mean they are the same.

And just because you could be wrongly accused of doing something, doesn’t mean nobody does it. There are subtle differences. Learning to recognize them is a survival skill.

Knowing what people value above all else in their life can tell you a lot about how they might react to you.

Which can save your skin.

She abused me. She abused my friends. She exposed us to life threatening situations. Much of this had to do with her refusal to believe we had deficits she didn’t have. Not just refusal - intense emotions that had to do with LFA being the center of her identity, that, taken together, had no other explanation.

I’m not going to make myself vulnerable by putting out there the exact nature of the abuse or neglect she engaged in. I don’t want horrible parts of my life up for debate.

But it is important ..

In a way it doesn’t matter why she was abusive and grossly negligent towards humans and animals, but especially towards humans she was feeling competitive with about disability. What matters was that she was. And that people who get competitive about who had it worse, often are abusive or neglectful.

And you have a right to get out and save yourself.

You don’t have to have a clear reason.

You don’t have to be able to justify it in an internet debate.

You can act on instincts that you’re unable to justify and explain.

You don’t have to give the benefit of the doubt when it’s your safety at stake and your instincts screaming at you to get out.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt for over a year. I went along with crap you wouldn’t even believe, because I was so afraid of judging the way I’d been judged.

It turned out I needed to use that judgment. I needed to trust those instincts. I needed to understand that just because you can judge someone wrongly didn’t mean that sometimes those judgments couldn’t be right.

And in the end it doesn’t matter if I’m precisely right about her motivations or not. I do know that whatever was happening was not an innocent misunderstanding, even if there’s no way to prove that online. But whatever it was, I was in danger, my instincts said danger from the moment she came within five feet of me. And I ignored it because I was so afraid of wrongly judging. And that’s dangerous.

I should also be clear. Her personality was very similar to a stereotype so I had trouble believing it for a long time. Turns out that very rarely people somewhat match up with stereotypes.

I actually don’t talk about her often for that exact reason. Because a lot of people think one example proves a stereotype.

She actually thought like that. She’d tell me about seeing a black person who looked stupid or lazy, and how that meant she was right about her racism. Other people might see her and the way she exaggerated her disabilities (like claiming to have an IQ of 30 when, if she worked hard to get a low score, she got 30 points higher than that) and say she’s typical of people scamming the system. In reality people like her are so rare I practically never run into them, and she really was disabled, just not to the degree she claimed.

But I’m always afraid taking about the rare existence of people like her will cause them to claim it’s common. It’s not. Lower functioning than thou is more common than people like her are, but the other things, the lies and exaggeration, not common do not want to spread stereotypes.

But it’s important to know this can happen. And disabled people are especially vulnerable to being hurt by people playing those games. So if your instincts say run and hide, then don’t stick around trying to be fair. You might end up with someone leading you into moving traffic that you’re unable to perceive until it’s too late. Or wearing your spoons down until you end up in the hospital, or sleeping for days, or unable to breathe. So be careful. People who won’t respect your boundaries or limitations can do you harm and it’s up to you if you want to risk that.

My biggest problem was she was so defensive around the fact that I had limitations she didn’t (and she had limitations I don’t, btw, because unlike her I think it’s impossible to have one person definitively lower functioning than the other)… that she refused to acknowledge them. I’ve had people not notice. Refusal to notice is different from a cognitive limitation, it has very specific patterns of emotion surrounding it. And she was upset by anyone having a limitation she didn’t have, so she went into denial about it, which meant not accommodating it, even when the accommodation was a matter of life and death. And that’s why it can be important to be aware when someone is doing the LF than thou game, if they take it too far they may put you in danger rather than acknowledge what’s going on.

I’ve seen both higher functioning than thou and lower functioning than thou played out online and offline. Usually it’s a nuisance, but if people become really wrapped up in them to the point their ego or identity is highly wrapped up in it, then people can get hurt. That’s really all I was trying to say. Just be careful.

Because like..  yes mistakes and stuff can happen. But this can happen too. And it doesn’t look like having a big ego. It looks like an entire life being wrapped up in the question of who is higher functioning than who, and it looks like becoming very distressed and defensive and angry and lots of other intense and out of place reactions, if their standing as the highest or lowest functioning person in the room is challenged. And that can turn ugly or dangerous fast. And it just… it looks different than a mistake, if a person’s entire identity is tied up in that. Because it’s a whole huge giant pattern of responses with functioning level at the center of them.