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4:18pm May 28, 2014
queenshulamit asked: Thank you for responding so nicely to that message it was bad to send it and I am sorry. I will do what I can to make my brain behave better, I am sorry for bothering you with this.

chavisory:

withasmoothroundstone:

You haven’t done anything wrong.  I’m just worried about you.  And worried about what in my writing gives the impression that I’d want anyone dead.  But mostly worried about you.

Ditto, wackyshenanigans.  And also…can I just note how very, very unsurprising it is that there are people feeling that way?  And I would bet my bottom dollar that wackyshenanigans is not the only one.  Because there is a really, really common and fashionable variety of discourse in this community that goes along the lines of “You’re trash,” or “You’re garbage,” if you believe a wrong thing, or have done certain kinds of things out of sheer ignorance, or hold some kind of a prejudice.  Where you’re just worthless as a person if you don’t have all the right opinions.

And it’s not what probably most of us stand for, but it can be really intimidating to stand up against.

And with the number of people, loosely, in the community I’m calling “this” one…there are a lot of autistic people, and that means there are probably a fair number of people who are literalistic with language.  And there are a lot of people with a history of depression and abuse and self-worth issues.

And then there’s a lot of this dynamic where if you don’t believe all the right things, people feel free to say “You’re trash.”  Or that “If you [fill in the blank], you should go die in a fire,” or “…walk in front of a car.”

What is the surprise that some people, on some level, BELIEVE IT when they’re told that, given many of our histories?  

But people aren’t trash.  People don’t stop being worthwhile people when they’re ignorant or wrong about something.  I don’t know anyone who isn’t a work in progress.  No one holds all perfect opinions and viewpoints.  And I feel like I’m a fairly secure person…and the kinds of devaluing of people for being fallible that I see on a regular basis are getting to me.

Yeah I was thinking about that while I was in physical therapy today.  What I found strange was that I’ve been trying to very explicitly counteract this idea that people have to be perfect.  (Had just made several posts on the matter.)  And yet I can still have this effect on people.  

I see a lot of it in the autistic community, a lot of in in what people would variously call SJ (and also anti-SJ, which just looks like a mirror image of SJ to me) communities.  It’s like this idea that you can’t ever be wrong or disagree or be different without being bad on such a deep level that you shouldn’t even exist.