Theme
4:04pm June 2, 2014

I used to hate the idea of telling our stories.

Maybe because I always came across it in the most condescending disability-related contexts.  Maybe because I remembered that Frederick Douglass got in the most trouble when he stopped just telling his story, and started doing the philosophizing that the white abolitionists had said to leave to themselves alone.  "Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.“  The nondisabled ‘allies’ of the developmental disability movement seemed very similar, they wanted us to tell our stories, and then they wanted to frame our stories politically and socially.  We were too stupid, you see, to do it ourselves.

So whenever anyone has told me there’s tremendous power in telling your story, I’ve shut my ears off and shut my mind off and tuned them out until they started talking about something else.

But I’ve come to think they’re right.

Sometimes.

For those of us who exist outside the walls, outside of what everyone expects to exist?  Our stories are what tell us we exist.  They tell us we exist.  They tell each other we exist.  They tell the whole world we exist, if we can get them to listen.  And sometimes they even create inroads to those communities that have shut us out for not fitting in with the ideology of the week – if we want those inroads at all, once we get them.

And when we tell our stories, we don’t just have to give the facts.  We can philosophize all we want.  We can talk about what things mean, not just what they are.  We aren’t limited to what others might want of us.  We can say whatever we want.

There are parts of my story I’m still afraid to tell.  Lots of it, in fact.  Nobody’s obligated to tell any of their story unless they want to, no matter who else demands it.  But when we do want to.  And when we do it.  It can be incredibly powerful.

Because it says "Hi, I’m here.  And I’m telling you I’m here in my way, not yours.  And I’m interpreting myself, nobody else has to interpret this story for me.”

In echo chambers (and it’s possible for them to form even out here, even outside the walls, we can form new walls, if we’re not careful) what happens is that everyone starts telling the same story.  Or roughly the same story.  Everyone magically knows which bits of their story to leave out, and which ones to emphasize.  Even if you think you’re outside an echo chamber, always beware of that impulse.

It’s one thing to leave things out because it’s not safe to say it, or because your privacy, or someone’s privacy, needs to be maintained.  It’s another thing entirely, to leave things out because you know that they go against the community norms of an echo chamber.  Mind you, that can be a matter of safety too – just be sure you know what you’re leaving out and why, and think hard about the consequences for you and others.

I’ve collected autistic people’s autobiographies for years.  I have over a hundred books by autistic people.  And you can tell when they’re written, because different times have different trends as to what people will leave in, and what people will leave out.  I love some of the earliest books – “Emergence”, “Nobody Nowhere”, and “Soon Will Come The Light” – because few people would dare, these days, to write about having multiple personalities, or hearing voices, or other experiences that are not “strictly autism”, in an autism autobiography.  But people did back then, because there was no norm yet.  Once norms became established, then you saw people writing to the norm, instead of writing their own experiences.  I mean their experiences were in there, but they were heavily filtered towards what people expect of an autistic person.  And the books got a lot more boring and a lot less revealing about what life is really like for autistic people.  I’ve gotten to the point where I like one of these books more for whether it stands out from whatever the norm is at that point in time, than for any other consideration.

But it’s not just in formal autobiographies written specifically by autistic people that you see this.  You see people self-editing all the time.  I know a lot of people on tumblr who refuse to tell their whole story in public because they know how it’d be received.  They stick to the expected bits, whether that’s expected bits about being disabled, or trans, or American Indian.  Then they talk about all the unexpected bits in private with the few people willing to meet them outside the walls.

I’ve made a decision that I’m going to start trying to tell stories from my life, as part of the little packages that I leave outside the walls for other people to find.  I may not tell everything that happened, but I will tell things differently than I am “supposed” to tell them.  I’ll also be reblogging any stories I find that seem to be little packages of their own.

I know that seeing things like this, from others, is part of what keeps me sane.  Maybe doing this will help others stay sane as well.  It’s only scraps, really.  Only little scraps of stories.  But it’s better than nothing.