2:48pm September 9, 2014

“
“I don’t want to be special bad or special good,” I explained to Bryn, hoping I’d get through to him that I didn’t want to be outstanding and I didn’t want to be put on a pedestal. “I just want to be an anybody anywhere.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” said Bryn jokingly. “You blew it in a big way.”
”

—

Donna Williams, author of the autobiographies Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere, which is where the words “anybody anywhere” came from. This quote comes at the beginning of her third memoir, Like Colour To The Blind.

And boy does it sum up everything about my life. I may not be as famous as Donna, but like her, I became well-known before I knew what was happening, and was thrust into a world that I didn’t understand as a result, all the while with people insisting I must have entered this world on purpose because nobody gets famous by accident. It happened to us in our mid-twenties, a time when we were just barely getting a handle on functioning socially or physically, and when we were sent off to distant hotels and the like, nobody understood that we couldn’t just function there, to the detriment of our health.

My protestations that I didn’t even consider myself truly famous, and that even my fifteen-minute variety was more than I wanted, were not heard at all. "Everyone wants to be famous,“ people told me. I didn’t. My life’s dream was to find one tiny corner of the world where I could exist anonymously with myself and a few close friends, and live a life there. It’s still my life’s dream. I’m a Hufflepuff at heart, not a Gryffindor, even if I have strong Gryffindor tendencies.

But doing prominent advocacy work makes you into a leader whether you want to be or not, and when everyone starts calling you a leader, people take notice, and it all spirals upwards onto the pedestal from there. And you go from being a nobody nowhere to a somebody somewhere, and nobody will allow you to be just an anybody anywhere. Which is all I’ve ever wanted to be my whole life. Not special – not special bad, not special good, like she says. Just me. Just who I am. Just me, and my cat(s), and my human friends, and just barely the amount of possessions I need. I would live in a tiny house if I could make it work. (Tricky with the amount of large medical equipment I need, but I know one could be built according to my specs, if I had money I don’t have, if zoning laws weren’t what they are.)

I can’t impress upon people enough the beauty of being ordinary. The fact that ordinary people are every bit as varied and diverse and wonderful, if not more so, than the people we hold up as a society and call extraordinary because they’ve performed some feat we don’t think of as ordinary. The way we idolize human beings seems downright pathological. The fact that people can’t imagine not wanting to be famous scares me. The fact that there are people who are literally jealous of me for having a spotlight on me for a few minutes, scares me even more. And I tried so hard to get them to shine the spotlight on the whole community, only to have it come out "And here is how all these autistic people are inspired by hir.” Meanwhile they misquoted me a bunch of times – I was scrupulous about giving detailed credit to people I quoted, but several different media people were not so scrupulous, or didn’t think anyone would care, so they put words by D. J. Savarese, Sandra Radisch, and one other person I won’t name because he’s a bully, into my mouth. Then the bully whipped up a manufactroversy over my supposedly taking other people’s words as my own. When I contacted media outlets saying “You’re not attributing the quotes properly,” I was basically told “Who cares, nobody’s going to notice.” The people quoted sure noticed. One of them I haven’t heard from, one of them blamed me very vocally, and the other one had enough experience with the media that he understood what had happened.

The media does do fact-checking, but they can still get very basic information wrong nonetheless. It reminds me of my medical records: They say that I lived (at the time the records were written) in two different cities, places I’ve never lived in my life. Those cities were relevant for other reasons (my mother’s workplace, where my family lived before I was born, and where I went to school) but I had never lived in either of them. And that’s the sort of thing that both medical records and media people get wrong. It’s not that they necessarily get the big things wrong (although they can), it’s that they get weird, little things wrong that you’d think would be caught in proofreading. And that sort of thing tends to make me very uncomfortable and upset. Especially because when the media gets something wrong about me, I’m the one who gets blamed, if anyone, and the media’s account will be believed, because it’s the media and I’m just me.

Anyway… I completely identify with the above quote. Completely.