Theme
5:08am March 11, 2014

lichgem:

I once played a poem game with a friend and together we made two really good poems. That was a lot of fun.

Last time I played a poem game I got chewed out for it.  And at the time I had so little confidence that I actually just sat there and let myself get chewed out.

It went something like this:

Other people chose titles for me and I had to write a poem within a day.

Another autistic person got very angry at me for doing this.  He told me that I was basically turning myself into a spectacle, letting myself get exploited, and that I was somehow sending the message that it was okay to turn autistic people into spectacles.  Then he told me all about his poetry-writing process, how he never put any work into it, that the poems just came to him, and that this meant that his poems were “sacred”, and that I was somehow like… desecrating the act of poetry by turning it into a game.

Thing is, most of my poems just came to me like that, too.  But I was trying to improve.  And I was trying to just let loose and have some fun.  And I’m now angry at myself for not chewing him out for holding me to a higher standard than ordinary people are held to, and for treating me like he knew all about how I did and didn’t write poems all because I wanted to have some fun with poetry.  (He also told me my poetry wasn’t real poetry because it wasn’t good enough.  Which, yeah, it wasn’t great poetry, but it wasn’t supposed to be great poetry.)

I really wish I’d had the ability to stand up to him back then.  I wish I hadn’t internalized a lot of what he told me.  But at that point in my life I was living in constant fear because of the pressures of being in the public eye, and my stalkers, and everything, and I felt like I couldn’t afford to alienate anyone who might otherwise be on my side.  Which led to my becoming quite a doormat for awhile.  (He also criticized me very harshly for allowing myself to be put into the public eye, and treated me as if I should have magically been able to predict the way the media responded to me.)