3:54am July 31, 2013

➸ Janna's weird crap: I don't know if this nausea is because...

karalianne:

youneedacat:

Of gastroparesis?

Or of reading this horrible new age crap that’s just… like an overdose of cotton candy. And self-serving as hell.

(It’s all that garbage about generations of special special children, who only decide to get born to special special parents of course. And who…

Yes yes yes THAT feeling. I get the same one. And it’s evil masquerading as the opposite.

Some of it has even infected the autism world under other names. I have books that I felt obligated to collect, but that I can’t even touch without feeling sick in the same way. They don’t mention crystal children. But they’re about the same concept.

And the nausea is real. Not a metaphor. I really feel like throwing up when I read this stuff.

There’s a new kind of kid they talk about now, rainbow children. Each generation more spiritually evolved than the last, because this comes out of a very recent cultural focus on “generations" as the force of change.

And the website talked about how she just happened to go into this tiny restaurant in another country where a mother just happened to call her son a rainbow child and he was telepathic (because psychic == spiritual in these people’s world) and stuff. And why would this just happen to happen to a woman who’s been writing about indigo and crystal children for ages?

I’ve been exploited by people like this before, I think maybe that’s why it makes me feel so sick. But I can’t describe why, or all the zillion ways it’s plain evil packaged as the opposite.

This is one reason it’s taken me so long to publicly describe some of the ways I inwardly interact with the world. Because people once put me on a very nasty pedestal very akin to this stuff. And I finally had to decide people will be wrong about me no matter what I do, and I’m older now, I can avoid being sucked in by people like that wanting to…. yuck. But at any rate I can get away from them now, they can think what they want about me, they’ll just be wrong.

Ugh I still feel sick. I won’t read about that again in a hurry. But it’s interesting we both get that awful feeling around the books and websites and stuff.

It is interesting. And for me it’s not because I’ve got a bad history with any of it, either. And yes, it’s a literal nausea, not a metaphor or something. I literally feel like I’m going to throw up.

But the people who like these ideas, or who at least are into New Age type stuff, if I tell them that this particular ideology quite literally makes me feel ill because it is evil, they can’t understand it because they usually have no room in their belief system for the existence of actual evil. And it’s not evil = a being in charge of evil, it’s just evil. It’s not a mistake, it’s not confusion, it’s not any of these relative kinds of terms that people use to try to soften the idea that there may be actual true evil in the world. It’s just actual true evil. Right there, in that book, in that ideology. And the person who writes this stuff may not herself be evil, but the ideas she is writing about are full of evil.

But people can’t understand that distinction I think, especially not when their spirituality doesn’t make room for the existence of actual true evil.

Yeah and also I think they don’t understand because if some part of them does believe in evil, they’re thinking more like… something out of horror fiction… than books about how special their children are.

You know what’s interesting…

I get a very similar nausea when I read things like “Autistic Adults at Bittersweet Farms". Which is a very different genre, but the feeling it gives me is the same. I’ve described it as “spiritual poison" before.

They both have a kind of white fuzz around them too. The quality of the fuzz is different in each case, but it’s still white fuzz.

The book I just described, by the way, isn’t about autistic people being special. It’s about a pseudo-utopian farm mini-institution thing built for autistic people. One of the overriding themes of the book is, “This is the best life they can hope for, poor things, so let’s make it as good as we can for them, even though they’ll never be, you know… normal. The poor dears.“

I wonder if evil masquerading as a great good is the thing that links the two, despite huge differences?

There’s also tons of what I call “view from above” in that bittersweet farm book, but I’m too worn out to describe what I mean.

Okay I’ll try.

It’s like a view of the lives of autistic people (substitute any kind of people). Where the person talking had the full, complete understanding of the world. And the people they’re talking about have only a limited view that they will never go beyond. Coupled with a hefty dose of otherwise looking down on the people in question, whether or not it’s conscious.

Oliver Sacks does it. Anthropologists do it to cultures they call primitive.

I sometimes see parents of cognitively disabled kids do it, both autistic and not. Like when they do this thing where…

The parent is sitting around putting their child’s disability in all this cultural context, citing philosophers and sociologists and psychologists discussing the human condition in general. But while the parent can do all this expensive thinking about the human condition, they make it seem as if their child can’t ever think so expansively, or put their own disability in any context other than the extremely limited cognitive context in which they live.

So the view from above thing usually involves the speaker as being able to encompass this huge big world, and the person they’re taking about can only occupy this tiny corner of it.

…like the writer is standing over a giant map, looking at it from above, while their subject is contained within one tiny dot on the map and unable to get the level of perspective the writer has. With the assumption that the perspective the writer has is, in general, bigger and smarter and all around better.

Wow holy crap. I described it.

Anyway the bittersweet farms book is dripping with view from above, in addition to the other sources of nausea, whatever they might be.

But the Crystal child etc books, when I get near them, in my head it looks like I’m being blasted I’m the face by near-white fuzzy stuff. the bittersweet farms has something white and fuzzy in it too, but it’s more subtle.

I used to think that was my personal synesthesia, but other people get sensations too similar, so I assume it’s some other cognitive process that’s more identical between people than synesthesia is, when people do perceive it.

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