4:25pm July 30, 2014

And one thing that puts me and other ‘fours’ at a disadvantage…

…about being whatever is represented by “a four” (see this other post).  I’m just going to use the term Four because it’s the only term I have and I have a language disability and fuck it if you can’t deal with that even if I don’t like the Enneagram as a system.

Is that for so long I was a very “unhealthy” four, with everything that goes along with that:  Trying to run from reality.  Trying to run from myself.  Trying on all sorts of identities that didn’t fit me.  Having a hard time being who I was or accepting anything about who I was.  Having a hard time seeing myself as more than a bunch of shifting and confusing emotions and motivations.  Being watery as hell, in all the worst possible senses of watery (but also the best ones, but not being able to see that).  

And that’s how people saw me.  And it was very visible.  And it made me look very unstable and I was known as crazy from the time I was a kid.  Like literally one of my friends, I made friends with her because she saw me spinning in circles at the edge of a dance, totally alone.  And she saw that as intriguing, so she asked someone “Who is that person?”  And the response she got was a dismissive “That’s Amanda, she’s crazy.”  And that intrigued her more so she arranged for us to swap roommates for a night so that she could get to know me better, and we got to be extremely close friends.  But it all started with a reputation for being “crazy”, which I had by the age of twelve.  Which is when that all happened.

When people see you as unstable and crazy, they see you as not a credible person.  Not a person to believe.  Not a person to accept.  And they see you as eminently hateable.

And that is the reputation that my stalkers and bullies have banked on the entire time they have tried to discredit me.  Because “everyone knows sie’s that messed up unstable person who doesn’t know who sie is and tries on identities like other people try on hats”.  I mean people didn’t know much about me, most of the people who have tried to discredit me and claimed to know me didn’t know me even half as well as they have claimed.  Many of them only knew me in passing and never even had a conversation with me.  But they all knew my reputation.

And so it’s easy to go from that to “Well sie doesn’t know who sie is, the poor dear, so sie one day decided sie was autistic.  It’s obviously a delusion, and you shouldn’t listen to anything sie says about hir own history, except in the context of wanting to understand the content of hir delusions in a psychiatric sense.”  Which is one of the lines my bullies use on people, when they think they’ll be sympathetic to the “This is my oh-so-lost friend who doesn’t know hirself and never will, poor thing” angle. 

(Of course it’s harder for them to pull that on someone when that someone has also seen their writing about me that takes a much more antagonistic “Sie is evil and doing evil things and must be destroyed at all costs” spin on things.  Their problem is that they change their story to suit the person they’re talking to, and my lawyer keeps documented evidence of every type of spin-doctoring and manipulation they use.  So if I need someone to see what’s really going on, I can point them to her.)

But at any rate, what they try to do, is convince everyone that I’m still an “unhealthy Four”, basically, and that anything I say or do about myself is merely another identity I’m trying on.  This doesn’t work very well for anyone who’s even remotely capable of sensing how solid and real I am these days compared to the mess I used to be.  And, of course, even if I was still a mess, it would not justify what they are trying to do to me.  At all.  But the idea of the “unhealthy Four”, the image that promotes in people’s minds, is a very easy one to spin-doctor into “hateable and untrustworthy”.  Even though I’ve never been worth hating or distrusting in the manner they want people to do it.

I have a feeling that Fours (I’m just using that term because I have no other, sorry) are quite vulnerable to being misrepresented and bullied in this manner.  It’s very easy to paint us as people who don’t really understand ourselves and shouldn’t be listened to when we talk about ourselves.  Especially when we’ve really gone through periods where we badly didn’t understand ourselves, couldn’t find ourselves, tried to be someone else in order to try and find ourselves but ultimately failed for obvious reasons, and things like that.  If we’ve ever in our lives gone through a period like that, and anyone has seen it, it’s very easy to paint us as if that’s who we always have been and that’s who we always will be.

And I think it’s teenage Fours, possibly especially teenage Fours assumed to be female, who get most easily targeted as ‘special snowflakes’ and the like.  Because a lot of Four stuff is also teenage stuff, and the two amplify each other.  Teenagers are often unsure of who they are and try on identities for size.  So do Fours.  Teenage girls (and people presumed to be girls) seem to be disproportionately targeted for this sort of thing in general.  So teenage Four girls and presumed-girls… it doesn’t bode well.

Anyway, I really think a lot of what my bullies do sometimes is go “Look at hir, sie’s a Four FFS, how could you possibly trust anyone like that to know themselves or represent themselves accurately?”  Except, actually, I’ve moved on since I was a teenager, I literally haven’t even seen any of these bullies in person since I was 15 years old.  I’ve become a lot “healthier”, in the terms they use to describe different ways to be a Four.  But the way they treat me wouldn’t be right even if I were still as confused as I was when I was 15.  It’s just especially inaccurate when I’m not that confused, when I’m actually showing the equally strong Four trait of increased self-knowledge because I’ve learned and grown and changed since then.

Years ago, one of my bullies, when trying to get someone to do the “pity the poor lost soul” thing, described me as being “lost”.  One of my closest friends and a mentor figure in my life, commented after reading that, “Actually you couldn’t possibly be more found than you are now.”  I am constantly growing and learning and knowing more about who I am and what my motivations for things are, both good and bad.  And I know more and more that I am not and will never be and have never been the person they have painted me as.

But it’s so damn easy to paint a Four that way, and it pisses me off, because I know it must be happening to other Fours.  And autistic Fours in particular… I’ve gotten so many letters from them, people who share in common with me these same qualities that get me put into that “Four” category, and who are also autistic, and who are now afraid to share their stories in public because their stories are too like mine, and they saw what happened to me.  And that is more a triumph for the bullies than anything that they could possibly do to me.  I’m tough enough by now I can handle them.  But watching other people get silenced because of how I’ve been treated, that makes me so furious.  Fours tend to be extremely sensitive people, and that makes us vulnerable, especially when we haven’t 'found ourselves’ yet.  And I’ve gotten so many letters that basically amount to “I am now afraid to share my story with anyone, so I’m going to share it with you because I know you’ve been through something similar.  But I am afraid to reach out to anyone else because I saw what happened to you.”  That makes me angry because it’s yet another way that people who need a community are shut out of communities.  And Fours need communities, we need people we can relate to, especially when we’re feeling “unhealthy” and confused about who we are.  The autistic community is not something that I’m overfond of now, but I can’t overstate the fact that at one point it saved my life.  The people I met through the autistic community are why I’m not dead or in an institution somewhere – dead, more likely.

I don’t know what it is that makes Fours so easy to be hated, but I suspect it has something to do with psychiatric ableism, prejudice against people with psychiatric disabilities, because 'unhealthy’ or even often 'normal’ Fours are so readily perceived as 'crazy’ or 'unstable’ whether we technically are or not.  But we seem to be a magnet for bullying.

And I worry for autistic Fours and other vulnerable Fours.  "Sharkbait", a friend called me when she first met me.  Luckily there are ways to become less “sharkbait”, and I am far less than I was then.  But Fours seem especially vulnerable to becoming sharkbait, and all the sharks just circle in and have a feeding frenzy.  And it’s horrible that this happens.  I wish I knew some way to stop it other than speaking out and making sure people know that I don’t consider it okay to hate or distrust someone just because they’re 'unstable’/'confused’/'crazy’/whatever other label people stick on them.  And making people realize this dynamic happens, so that when they hear someone being maligned in this way, and see that the person seems 'fourish’, they don’t automatically assume that the gossip/defamation they hear is true just because the person is (or, at some point in their life, was) 'different’ in these ways.

13 notes