Tag: just don’t
This is an important thread on Twitter, looking at some of the history of collective racial violence in the US. And why racist mobs aren’t harmless–which shouldn’t really need to be pointed out, but here we are.
I can’t help but get kind of frustrated and disappointed again, though, at the absolute lack of mention some other recorded instances get.
Including things like the Paxton Boys mess (which is still getting described there as vigilante retaliation). There’s plenty more, but I was reminded of that specific example because of the murderous mob marching on Philadelphia. Plenty more recent than that too, of course.
Definitely not interested in getting into some kind of gross one-upsmanship game, or suggesting that the history talked about there is somehow less important. Not at all. There’s plenty of ugly history to go around, unfortunately.
But, it doesn’t seem helpful to ignore other large chunks of ugliness. Especially with a view to recognizing some worrying patterns.
Sometimes I look at posts and feel like Auntie Bootstraps about to give a useless motivational speech, and sometimes I look at posts and think, “Well, hell, you condescending weirdos, guess I’ll never recover. And recover from what???? The way I am????” and none of this is a contradiction.
Autism isn’t a mental illness in the first place. Unless you’ve got autistic traits, or something else, you consider ill or dysfunctional then you aren’t being addressed at all in “recovery positive” posts. The main intended audiences there are the people suffering from the huge chunk of mental illness caused or drastically aggravated by the madhouse of contemporary society and those with congenital mental illness that include symptoms that cause a lot of difficulty and struggle that one needs to learn to deal with as effectively as possible to live a life more on their own terms.
The latter isn’t even really recovery, of course, it’s adaptation, and would be a lot easier with a less heartless society, but recovery is the buzzword for people with mental illness improving themselves or their situation.
I know autism isn’t a mental illness. I do have mental illnesses on top of autism, although one is probably related (OCD) and two are results of being treated like shit for it (anxiety and childhood PTSD).
But yeah, it’s adaptation, and I like that word a lot better because adaptation is something feasible that I can do on my own terms instead of GET BETTER OR YOU’VE FAILED which is what recovery sounds like to me.
And you have to keep in mind 8 year old me when you use buzzwords, and of course people generally don’t because people don’t usually look at adults and think “this used to be a child and some particular things might have been done to said child”.
Child me heard recovery in the context of GET BETTER OR YOU’VE FAILED and simultaneously heard NO CURE, YOU’RE BAD FOREVER. My mother yanked me out of therapy for good at 8 years old because ~**they didn’t cure me**~ so I got the correctional “you’re doing everything wrong” therapy as a child without getting the attempts at building someone back up therapy as a preteen and teenager. I didn’t get the latter there until I was an autonomous adult, and I don’t know how good that is that late in the game. That last statement sounds unnecessarily pessimistic, though.
Anyway, child me’s attitude was “if you’re trying to help me, GET LOST” aaaand to an extent I never grew out of that. Get lost or at least ask permission, and it’s not like anyone would have asked permission when I was a minor (unfortunately).
I don’t like ultimatums. GET BETTER OR YOU’VE FAILED is an especially bullshit ultimatum, and when you’ve been raised to see yourself as Wrong™ all your life, when that’s not a new thing, then you’re more likely to take a Piss Off approach to the concept of recovery.
That doesn’t, to me, mean giving up and never trying to improve yourself – although I have some issue with the idea of “we never stop improving ourselves!!!” either. Like give me a break, that‘s so easily manipulated into “you’re never good enough”. On the other hand, it’s true we never stop improving ourselves. But there needs to be a clear message in that message that one is already enough.
We’re enough. We can trust our own instincts to adapt.
“But Demeter, what if your instincts fail you over and over?” says the hypothetical person reading this, probably not the person I’m replying to.
1) They don’t. Not on bloody everything they don’t. You still have had instincts that were right.
2) OH WELL, YOU LEARNED THINGS. You’re ALLOWED to learn things in real life. Everyone’s instincts fail them, you just don’t hear about the people whose instincts fail them boringly.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 