These Terrible Times
We do live in interesting times. Unfortunately, these times are creating havoc with the human condition. They may be fatal. It is not just the pandemic, climate change, and political upheaval, and the barbaric attack on the Ukraine, there are giant elephants in the room. There is a destruction of personal sense of value. I live with a high degree of anxiety due to my autism. In writing about my anxiety also must include a discussion about values. A lot of cultural definitions of success may not be the right fit for us. For people on the autism spectrum we must think more critically about some accepted assumptions. I have found one can succeed for a time despite oneself. One can blunder into success while seemingly doing all of the wrong things; it is the hallmark of my life. But these terrible times are depleting and testing our values and resources.
However, I believe the constant pursuit for positive experience is itself a negative experience and the opposite is true because one learns from negative experiences. Negativity is the rocky and only path to positivity. Of course, it is tough, I have been crushed and broken many times. I have the physical and psychological scars to prove it and now I have ageing to contend with. While most people just want sweet positive experiences from life, it is actually the tolerance and acceptance of the terrible stuff that leads to more positive experiences. My experiences have made me different not indifferent. One must ask the hard questions; you know those elephants in the room. When I was young there seemed promise of a world changed for the better with technology and knowledge. Now we have religion coupled with weapons of mass destruction, a burgeoning world population that cannot be fed, autocratic governments that will kill its citizenry, failing economic systems and their institutions, technologies that have gone wrong, and declining worldwide mental health.
However, without this adversity people do not grow, nothing changes. I have been told by some awful types that I should not be concerned about anything, everything is good? People suffer and it is good from things like HIV/AIDS, housing shortages, and poverty? Meaning they wanted me to accept life on their terms only. It is not that I care what some stupid people think about me or any subject, because I have plenty of better things to think about. That really annoys those that must control me. Such people have the problem they do not have anything better to worry about. If I am making a fuss or am concerned about an other’s behaviour it is because being a little bit anxious all the time, a little bit stubborn, a little bit angsty at the world around me makes me determined to fix what I can and survive.
Telling me to think that one should not have to ever feel unhappy or discontent is not just misguided, it is sadistic. Difficult feelings have an inherent purpose to them as they help us to understand and describe anxiety. My autistic brain is signalling me to do something, something different, to escape bad people and misery, and move to something else. Acting as though you have no problems in your life is at least disingenuous and worse, dangerous. Meaning may come of one’s struggles. After all many people do not know how isolated I have been throughout my life. I found myself returning to doing things that have deeply resonated with my long-past best times. My life is being determined by answering what I need now. My needs have always been simple. Basics like a clean quiet place to live, a garden and pet to care for, and room to make artwork and crafts. However, the rising cost of living has replaced simplicity with issues that further exclude me. Art has always been expensive if you need to use quality materials and pottery is extremely difficult to do now because of regulations. A little research will reveal this. I struggle with these basic needs, not only because of financial limitations but with autistic social interaction issues. My sense of trust has been diminished and how can I believe in values if I cannot trust people? I have found my answer.
Through my many dilemmas I have understood I strived most of my life to please all the wrong sorts of people. People who thought they deserved to be happy without sacrificing for it are childish or deranged and they hurt me. Some of these crazymakers believe any type of stress, responsibility, and negative feedback are symptoms of abuse. For example, setting reasonable boundaries for dialogue. Instead, they deserve special treatment. They deserved my undeserved attention? My poor executive functioning as a person with autism meant I became too easy to use and abuse. People have delusional beliefs about their place in the status hierarchy. Many are completely self-absorbed; they think everything and everyone should be altered and catered to them which is so boring! This can be seen particularly with social media, cultural groups, and consumer culture, made worse by the manipulations of elites and bureaucracies to secure votes. Creating an attitude of entitlement makes an impossible situation unbearable before it becomes a meltdown. We have seen it around the world and repeated throughout history those who have mocked critical thinking and ensured an entitled cohort of stormtroopers. They created delusional beliefs that their supporters are somehow the exception, that the world is made for them. Do we choose what we become?
The idea every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness is crazy. It demeans life by creating nonsense beliefs like just thinking about something will magically bring it to you. A whole business has been created on this magical thinking and this includes religion. To think critically requires the ability to find what is plausible amongst the plethora of verbal assault. I had a pushy parent who became a number of pushy people who thought I should do extraordinary things for their benefit. I was never designed for this strange success and nothing I did would ever be good enough because they had unreasonable demands. When I accepted the ordinary and everyday truths of life, I was considered mad, bad, and dangerous to know because I was thinking for myself. It is not that nothing matters, some things are worthwhile fighting for, but one’s life will have lots of mundane bits and that is fine like long working hours, digging gardens, studying, and learning about art materials the hard way. I find things to do I like as well as I can.
Working hard, sometimes without reward or recognition, is a worthwhile sacrifice. Envy is not in my makeup. It makes life more meaningful and produces a more consistent sense of contentment. So, what else is worth valuing? Those elephants in the room suggest good values are reality-based, socially practical, and manageable. While the opposite is for bad ideals based on magical thinking and uncontrollable social conditions. For example, creating an illicit drug culture that undermines all levels of society, believing in the rhetoric of endless economic growth at the cost of the environment, destroying countries to gain control through nefarious means, and misusing media technology for misinformation and propaganda. The choices one makes to believe in unverifiable news or disinformation, to dismiss sensible science, or follow unreliable, flaky people even if it means lying to yourself and others means one is choosing the battles and problems that undermine a civil society. Dealing with the terrible times means accepting one can act. Many believe they have no control over events. The thing you are choosing from all the information is how to value each experience. Recently, for me, a simple but sensible choice was to be triple vaccinated against Covid, another was to endure an invasive cancer surgery even though I have a wall of multiple sensory issues. I have accepted a state of nothingness into my life and have given up people pleasing. People abuse others because they have no humane values.
It really helps to be less stuck to labels, I define myself loosely because the less defined one is, the harder is for others to build unreliable narratives or profile me. It is overcoming the idea of personality which is able to be wounded. I may be autistic, but it is a spectrum and I am good at masking. I am an artist, but I am an Outsider too, glamour has never appealed to me. However, my autism is real and my artistic endeavours followed a timeline which suggests a beginning and an end, allowing me to shift in my commitments. I am wary and I do not trust other’s crazy beliefs. In fact I reject a lot of what society tells me. Rejection can be uncomfortable, but in order to value something, you have to sink the fleet. That means I need to be able to reject lots of stuff and attitudes. I reject other’s idea that I am going to become famous, I mean the number of people who wanted that from me were not focusing. Instead I am prioritizing what is important in my life. The expectations of others never considered my needs for a sizable space-bubble as social interactions are hard for me. Many cannot accept my loner status. People who cannot accept or say no are very confused and they do not know what they want from themselves, so they project it onto others. If you want good boundaries, say no, and mean it. By doing so one is telling others what you do not want, informing people what your values are, be willing to disappoint the other person. Naturally, there will be impossible situations where escape may be delayed, so consider which small factors you can change instead of focusing on the ones you cannot. Reacting quickly to bad events is not effective, rather how one thinks about the event is what can be controlled which means one can control how to react. Sometimes, I have to leave a difficult place as I do not do shouting matches. Maybe accepting that nothing is the best option too. Some decisions for change are hard to make, especially those who want an endless status quo. Which is weird. I am an observer of life and that is enough as I was not born to build private or public empires. Some people are impossible to reach, they may be narcisstic or schizophrenic, or have other mental health conditions that preclude reasonable communication. So, leaving them is not defeatist; it is self-preservation and sensible.
My autism and my artistic natures have a commonality in commitment; they stay fixed, although will be expressed with variations with ageing and circumstance. Some things for a while are more important than others, but keeping one’s values open is flaky, backhanded people are never worth supporting or is accepting jokes at one’s expense. Complicating life too much overwhelms me with sensory overload. But as soon as I prune the mental hedge; I am free. I do not easily understand the feelings of others, or my own. The processing of feelings takes time in an autistic brain and frankly I was never overwhelmed with understanding offers that considered my needs. Just a lot of strangers who made ill-informed assumptions based on ignorance who decided I needed to be put in my place? I seldom reacted immediately. Alexithymia is when an individual has difficulty identifying, describing, and expressing emotions. I received a lot of judgement and cruel treatment which underlines that life is not fair.
So, there is a destruction of personal sense of value, sometimes I am really knocked out and people will believe this means guilt or regret on my part. Living with a high degree of anxiety due to my autism means I have to use critical thinking to evaluate the rough times in my long life. I am not interested in being around overly demanding or weak people who only consider their own needs, no sharing or sense of community value there, I pack up my dignity and skills and move on. My successes are not measurable in a lot of cultural definitions of accomplishment. I have succeeded despite myself and the intrusions of others. As in all invasions there are consequences; people who tell lies suffer permanent mental damage and taint all those who come into contact with them. No values to be found there. The victims who survive will process their feelings to re-evaluate and establish worthy values to move on. I have. In the end, what is so important? Who remembers? Everything ends in nothingness.
