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11:38am June 3, 2014

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

I didn’t think this should need any explanation, but apparently it does.  I’ve explained it before I think, but it couldn’t hurt to explain it again.

Sometimes I vigorously celebrate certain qualities that I have, certain experiences I have had, certain things I have done, certain ways that I do things.

This does not mean that I am putting down the way anyone else does things.  This is true even when I point out the flaws in other ways of doing things.

Most of these things that I celebrate like this?  Are things that I have been told all my life make me bad, defective, wrong, stupid, horrible, and broken.  Most of the things that I may end up criticizing in the course of all this, are things that have been held up to me all my life as perfection, as how things should be, as how people should think, as how everyone’s brain should work.

If your brain happens to not work like mine, I am not putting you down in any way.  Even if your brain works in a way that it does things that I criticize to some extent.  I am just trying to take a tiny, tiny bit of space in the world where I can say that who I am, the way I have been built, the way my brain works, is not horrible, and in fact can do some things better than the usual ways.

You’re being defensive in a way that scares me. I’m worried about you.

I’ve meant to write this post for awhile.  For years, people have reacted to my celebrating traits that have always been deplored in my life, as if I’m putting their traits down somehow.  And I’m sick to death of dealing with that.

Like I created the idea of ‘mental widgets’ in order to explain something that my brain can’t do.  And to explain that because my brain can’t do it, people think I’m incapable of discussing politics and ethics in any meaningful way.  So I tried to describe all the highly meaningful ways that my brain can do politics and ethics without using mental widgets.

Then immediately this guy accused me of being “abusive” for coming up with “pejorative words” for the “only way he could think”.  Then he went on to tell everyone what a horrible abusive person I am for using the word widgets.  Even though most people use widgets, and all I was doing was showing how my brain differs from the majority.  His brain happened to be in the majority in that regard.  

And that’s one of a long long list of crap like that, that I’ve gotten over the years, every time I try to celebrate anything about who I am.  I’m tired of it.