3:52am June 5, 2014

And where were the LGBT autistic community…

When he-whose-hate-shall-not-be-named threatened to send me and my friend an exploding two-way dildo in the mail so that he could kill us both off, quickly?

Note:  My friend and I are not dating.  He just found out we were lesbians, and proceeded to assume we were.  Because all lesbians in sufficient proximity will fuck each other, obviously.  And we were fat, ugly lesbians and that made us worse.  I still remember the rape threats.

And where was anybody?  During the rape threats, during the homocidal homophobic threats, during the other rampant displays of homophobia, during the explicit descriptions of what sex with someone as fat and hairy and ugly and incapable of hygiene as me would look like?  During the descriptions of how if I had kids I would abuse them by means of Munchausen by proxy, or else be an unfit parent because catatonia makes you an unfit parent (because it’s traumatic to have a parent who can’t move sometimes)?

Where was anyone?

And why did anyone wade through all that bullshit and say “Maybe just this once, when he’s defaming an autistic person, just this once, he’s right?  He’s always been wrong before, he’s always just spewed hate, but maybe this time he’s different?”

I never felt so alone as I did then.

Perhaps I wasn’t alone.

Perhaps I was too afraid to let anyone in.

Because people had called themselves my friends, only to get information out of me that they could relay to my stalkers.

And people I had known and trusted for years had turned against me for things as little as “She doesn’t rock in the same pattern I’m used to seeing people rock in.”

And it seemed like there was a perception-distorting filter set up all around me, so that anything I did made me look worse.

And I wasn’t supposed to care.

I wasn’t supposed to care about losing parts of a community that had sustained me my entire adult life.

I wasn’t supposed to care about lost friends.

I wasn’t supposed to care, because the moment I cared, I was weak.  And the moment I showed weakness, they used it against me.

But if I did not show weakness, they would say “See?  She is so inhuman that she isn’t affected by any of this!”

My health crashed during that time period.  Knowing what I know now.  Knowing that it was severe adrenal insufficiency.  I hold every single one of them partially responsible.  Because when you have severe adrenal insufficiency, severe stress can knock down all of your health at best and kill you at worst.

I remember being unable to turn over in bed, yet finding ways to post on message boards day after day, to maintain at least a little presence, at least a little something, so nobody would know how bad it was for me.  Because I felt if they knew how helpless I was physically, they would use that as their moment to attack relentlessly.

I gained weight because I couldn’t move.  My stalker lost weight.  She showed this off to everyone – “Look how ragged I have become, look how badly she is affecting me, that I can’t even eat!”  I wasn’t eating either, a lot of the time, but I still gained weight.  And she gleefully pointed that out.  And said that because I was such a horrible person, I’d earned the right to be taunted with such schoolyard chants as “fatty fatty two by four”.  She enjoyed every minute of my weight gain, and so do her friends, who sometimes pop up in my anon hate.  But I can lose seventy pounds and they’ll still say I’m as fat as ever.  I’d have to be skinnier than is humanly possible for my body type, before they’d stop making cracks about my weight.

But this was a horrible, lonely time.

I hope none of you ever go through anything like it.

It has taught me not to judge autistic ‘celebrities’ too harshly.

At least, not to judge the rumors that fly around about them.  Because being in the public eye makes really nasty people enjoy fabricating totally untrue rumors.  Or half-truths that are worse than the totally fabricated ones, because the half-truths point back to something real, or half-real.

Learn to spot true malice and avoid it.

When someone comes to you and offers you something that you badly want, and all you can smell and feel is malice, stay away.  You don’t want what they’re offering.  And if you take what they offer, you will hurt someone innocent.

Because I was innocent.  Not in the sense that I’d never done wrong.  But I’d never done more wrong than anyone in the position I’d been in, had.  I’d never done more wrong than the average confused autistic teenager in the psych system surrounded by bullies masquerading as friends and manipulating me into acting like I was something I wasn’t.  These aren’t crimes.  These are only the actions of confused, desperate people.

And oh I got emails.  I got emails from people who had been the confused, desperate people.  People who had done exactly what I had done – tried to fit in, tried to pass as what the psych system would want, instead of what the outside world would want.  When you try to pass for what the outside world wants, they call it progress.  When you try to pass for what the psych system wants, they call it pathological, at best.  The one, they see as honest and brave and wonderful.  The other, they see as a form of dishonesty that marks you as a liar for life.  Even though they’re both the same thing – trying to comply with outside expectations that you can neither predict nor understand.

And people would write to me saying they’d been there.  Saying they were afraid to write about their experiences in public, now, because they were afraid they’d be shunned by the autistic community, like had happened to me in parts of the community.  Do you know what that kind of fear is like?  To finally find a place that may take you in and let you feel at home, and then to be faced with the threat of it being taken away because you were once a confused teenager and did confused teenage things to try to survive an unlivable situation?

My stalker knew about unlivable situations.  She knew about them so well that she manipulated people using the knowledge she’d gained from living through them herself.  I have some idea what she must have done to survive similarly unlivable situations, and a lot of it was far worse than anything I’ve ever done in any situation in my entire life.  Because unlike me, who was just confused, she just plain didn’t care about people.

I am glad for the support I got during the time that I was being the most heavily targeted.  And I know I got support I couldn’t see.  But I felt like I should be getting more support – where were the LGBT parts of the autistic community when I was getting homophobic and transphobic violent harassment?  Where were the people who were willing to step up without stooping to the level of the bullies?  (This was very important.  I had to tell one guy to stop trying to defend me, because every time he did, I had to clean up his mess.  He’d threaten people on my behalf, when threatening people was the last thing I wanted.  And then I’d have to prove that I had no control over him.  Supposedly, according to my stalkers, this showed I was prejudiced against people with certain communication styles.  Threatening people is not a communication style, it’s a threat, and it’s wrong.  And I shouldn’t have to tell people that I’m the one who takes the crap for it if someone threatens anyone on my behalf.  Nobody will ever believe I didn’t put them up to it.)

Anyway… I just remembered the exploding two-way dildo remark today.  The rape jokes.  The graphic descriptions of sex with this short hairy ugly smelly person who farts and belches.  The lesbians telling people that people like me only become lesbians because we’re too fat and ugly to get a man.  The guy pretending to be my ex, who lamented that I’d gotten fat because I no longer made good jerk-off material.  And the people who could read that, read all of that, and still believe that the man who wrote that and made these discussions possible, was at all worth listening to – just this once, you understand, just this once, he was right about someone he defamed.  What kind of a distortion field do you need, to say all that and still come off as credible to anyone?  And I mean truly decent people, people I used to hang out with on the web boards.

But that was their aim.  Make it so I couldn’t hang out on the web boards anymore, not without a fight.  Not without at least three people showing up to tell everyone what a horrible fraud I was because I tried to pass for what the psych system wanted of me.  They’d write long posts in which they dissected my every word.  They’d call me obsessive, repetitive, and yet not autistic.  Never autistic.  Obsessive and repetitive and other references to autistic traits, were framed in a way as to show how twisted and fucked up my mind was, and some people somehow fell for it, couldn’t tell they were using my own autistic traits against me.  Obsessive.  Repetitive.  Long-winded.  Doesn’t shut up, ever.  These are autistic traits, or they can be, and in me they are.  And it did, it disrupted my ability to communicate with other autistic people.

I’m not even scratching the surface of those couple years.  Which were years lived in terror.  Years lived feeling as if I was a small animal being watched by a giant eyeball, no matter where i went or what I did.  And I kept going anyway.  I made conference presentations even though I collapsed and turned grey afterwards.  I had a massive meltdown on national television, and allowed them to run it because they promised me they’d show more of the autistic community than just me (they interviewed tons of people and then just used me… leaving me feeling used and the other interviewees feeling betrayed.. by me of course).   I kept trying to do my part for the autistic community no matter how much it hurt me, because I thought I could make a difference.  

And maybe it did make a difference.  But I was terribly scared, and terribly lonely, and I had very few people to turn to who knew where I’d been.

And I hope that if it happened again, people would have my back.  As in, not people who would fire nasty vitriol back at them, because that helps nobody and reflects on me.  But people who could help at a time when I was my most vulnerable.   People who would tell me I was real.  People who would stick up for me when I wasn’t around.

People who will do this for the next autistic person to fall prey to such concentrated attacks.  I did it when Michelle was attacked.  I have stuck up for Donna and Jim Sinclair both when remnants of their old attacks surface.  There will always be this kind of attack against autistic people, and we will always need people to help us, we can’t go it alone.

And the autistic people who get attacked in this particular way?  Are disproportionately likely to have something else going on that makes us an easy target:  Being LGBTQ, having a psych record, having done something that “looks bad” but isn’t really that atypical unless you take it out of context, being fat or ugly, etc.  And every single one of these things will be used against you.  Even your autistic traits will be used against you, reframed as traits of some ~scary mental illness~ (and there have to be ways to combat that without making psychiatric disability into a Bad Thing).  

And until it’s you, you won’t know how awful and lonely and heartbreaking it can be.

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