[CW: Internalized Hate]
Something I’m being told even though I literally receive hate on a daily basis for said “weirdness.”
Just when I thought I was learning to accept myself for all the things I have a long past of hating myself over (gender, sexuality, race, and neurodivergence), it just really hasn’t gotten to that point where I can truly embrace this. I’m afraid that the one life I was given was as an autistic, black, pansexual enby, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
I will never be normal, and no, that’s not okay. I don’t believe I will truly ever be able to be content like this. I’m far too different from the norm for life to be compatible for someone like me. I feel like I’m not actually meant to exist. I feel like I’m an experiment where I’m intended to be everything that a human being is not supposed to be.
As long as I will continue being this way (and, unfortunately, I will), there’s gonna be a reason to question how much comfort I can find in life, and when it hits me that the world will never be for people like me, I question how I can make my life work.
I’m forever to be disgusting, filthy, broken, freakish, incompetent, abnormal, inferior, and a detriment to society’s own comfort, and that’s just in my nature, so no, I don’t think I can make my life work.
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Relevant comic
This is my fear. You’re not alone in this.
all neurotypical people are sentenced to big cartoon mallet bonking them on the head until they understand how to actually be accepting of others
The second part they never tell you is that you absolutely should embrace your weirdness, but that requires you to be surrounded by other people to actually accommodate you and understand you. People re-iterate it over and over again as almost a chant, but never seem to realize the material effects of constantly suppressing all abnormal behavior are far stronger than just telling someone to “like, just fly your freak flag exhales from bong”. End result is that people internalize the idea that it is up to THEM to tolerate others intolerance of them… the goal is to create a mindset in you like the one you’re saying now. And that isn’t any form of judgement on you- It’s absolutely normal and valid to experience discontent and self-hatred when exposed to this sort of situation. It’s not a form of weakness to experience these emotions or to feel this mindset. But the proliferation of that mindset is a form of social control.
The reason these two things (the validity of feeling it and the fact it is a form of social control) can coexist is because it isn’t actually the emotions that are the issue (sorry if I’m kind of overexplaining obvious things here) but the fact that we internalize them as our fault as well. I think this is a side-effect of a general ideology that’s been making the rounds pretty much everywhere that all of our emotions are our fault and entirely our responsibility, a pretty insidious ideology given it’s seemingly reasonable exterior but outright ableist reality (not everyone can control a meltdown, not everyone can control sensory reactions, and the idea people can control things like that comes entirely from an allistic viewpoint. Not to mention the classist concept that people can just like, ‘overcome’ stuff like hunger or thirst). Ultimately I think autistic people, and people oppressed in general, are shamed far too much for making reasonable demands of others. It’s utter bullshit and the longer I’ve thought about it the more I’ve seen it absolutely everywhere.
Which is to say, everything you’ve said here is very relatable and reasonable but the thoughts and self-hate aren’t true. It’s about time people start getting very, very angry at the kinds of people who are putting those kinds of thoughts in our heads.
There is much truth here.
This explains exactly why these kinds of feelings were even worse and even more frequent before I started using Hexbear. Most people I had interacted with in my personal life beforehand were very invalidating of who I am with no exception. I come from a devout Catholic family, and their misunderstanding and hatred of trans people could comparatively make Matt Walsh look like the biggest trans ally (very exaggerated, I know, but you get the point). I joined Hexbear shortly after going no contact with family members I worked with for roughly 6 years in educating them on how to accept me for who I am. In these 6 or so years, they hadn’t made an iota of progress, and that’s because they didn’t want to. They wanted to either neglect the issue as if that’ll make it go away, and if they couldn’t do that, they wanted to discourage me from embracing my truth because the RCC just didn’t let them do otherwise, so knowing that my truth being embraced and my relationship with these family members were mutually exclusive, I proceeded in the only way I knew how.
There is so much vague messaging thrown out about “accepting yourself for who you are,” but if “who you are” is just too damn beyond what society is okay with you being, then you have to take a step back. You are encouraged to repress these parts and just conform to these standards that society had set out for you from the get-go.
I have dealt with people telling me: “Why do you have to identify as non-binary? Why not just identify as a feminine cis man?” while also, somehow, having people tell me “Why do you have to identify as non-binary? Why not just identify as a trans woman?”
Boxes, boxes, boxes. I’ve been identifying as non-binary for years now. Not only is this identity very accurate for describing my experiences (which are simultaneously very different from what feminine cis men go through and what binary trans women go through), but it’s home. For some ignorant, manipulative bozo to come at me with “identify differently because the way you perceive your identity is too complicated for me and most of society” is such an insultingly unaware take. It is too complicated, and that’s why I cannot simplify it for the sake of appeasing small-minded people.
If I could truly be absolutely content with rejecting my non-binaryness, I would, but I can’t. This always takes me back to finding the whole cursed “non-binary people just do it for attention” take. I have never gotten positive attention for being non-binary. In fact, the closest you can get to describing this is people having to support and comfort me as a response to negative attention I get for being non-binary.
The intersections make it worse and worse and worse. Non-binary identity is hard enough for many people to get on its own, but the fact that it has to be paired with me being black, raised in an immigrant household, neurodivergent, and effectively everything that comes with what being Angel in particular entails means that I have to feel double, triple, or even quadruple misunderstood. Misunderstanding seems to manifest as malice the most. So many people are caught up in believing that they must despise someone’s existence, simply because that existence is not in alignment with what they deem palatable to their sense of society, the world, and human beings. I sit far beyond those things in the context of most people’s minds.
I can’t separate these intersections, and that’s why they’re intersections. When I get people telling me that “being non-binary is a white, western liberal trend,” this is nothing short of proof as to why I can’t help but feel like the bigotry just stacks more harshly than it would if I were merely non-binary but white or if I were merely black but cis. I don’t experience enbyphobia and racism separately. They actively work together to dehumanize me to the highest degree possible, and that’s the issue generating this internalized bigotry the most.
No one wants to listen. They want to use misunderstanding in bad faith. They say “I don’t understand people like Angel,” not because they’re opening the door for someone to explain to them, but because they want to set that as their foundation of why they want to hate me, all while not understanding that this hatred of me benefits no one, not even themselves.
Autism spectrum here. I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
It’s gotten easier as I’ve gotten older, though. High school was the absolute worst because largely unsupervised teenagers are experts in casual cruelty and I was a constant target of people I physically could not get away from. Adults, even if they find you offputting, are less (emphasis less) likely to go out of their way to antagonize you over it and it’s much easier to physically remove yourself from their presence in most cases (God help you if you work in customer service).
I know you’re despairing at the knowledge that you will never change, and that’s a perfectly valid reaction. For me, though, finally coming to accept that was liberating. I no longer feel guilty for how I am, and I no longer waste time with people who demand I be something I can never be.
What’s actually wild is that when I have an awkward moment as an autistic person that makes neurotypicals bullies me, the question I always ask myself is:
Did it seem like I fucked up specifically because I’m autistic and misunderstood or did I actually fuck up and their bullying was justified?
I never can tell, and this is why my internalized ableism was always the hardest form of internalized bigotry for me to overcome. I feel like anti-autistic sentiment is so socially acceptable as long as you don’t explicitly make it about autism, i.e. you can get upset with someone for displaying supposed “autistic tendencies,” but you can’t call them a slur or directly poke fun at the fact that they’re autistic for doing so. This is actually true for a lot of forms of bigotry, as I used to work a job where I was the only black person there, and I got harassed in ways that I found very hard to disconnect from how my coworkers may have been perceiving me on the basis of my race. Looking back at these microaggressions, I genuinely believe that if I were white, things would’ve gone a lot better there, but that’s only a hypothetical, so who knows?
I also have this very powerful tendency to feel like my emotions aren’t valid in the context of people getting upset with me, especially if it’s a neurotypical person. If a neurotypical person shouts at me for something and it makes me sad, then my gut instinct tells me “It’s you. You need to stop being sad. The way they treated you is fine. You just need to learn to stop being sad, which is an irrational response on your part.”
I never can tell, and this is why my internalized ableism was always the hardest form of internalized bigotry for me to overcome. I feel like anti-autistic sentiment is so socially acceptable as long as you don’t explicitly make it about autism, i.e. you can get upset with someone for displaying supposed “autistic tendencies,” but you can’t call them a slur or directly poke fun at the fact that they’re autistic for doing so.
10-15 years ago, we didn’t even get that much. Even in left-wing spaces I would regularly see people calling us slurs, using our condition as an insult, and using us as punchlines.
You are beautiful. It’s society that is sick. You are made in God’s image, and nothing can take that from you. You are passionate about a better world, and we love you for that.
Stay strong. Revolutionary optimism unites us, from Vietnam to Gaza.
I don’t know if you’re in the mood to read theory, but if you are, I would recommend Stigma by Erving Goffman to better understand/contextualize these feelings
Thank you a whole lot for the recommendation. I only briefly read around the description tonight, but it sounds like an incredible fit for helping me process this pain and isolation, and I will get to reading sometime after I wake up most likely.
I think you’re pretty cool, actually
🥺👉👈
Even if that were true, which is a super massive if: you’re a good poster and a comrade so that would AT LEAST balance it out. If you call it a wash you’re still braver than every troop. You’re not a cop or a landlord. Your takes aren’t cringe (except the one about being disgusting, etc). So you got something special going on there.
It most certainly is more special than the approval of bigots. If there’s anything good being this way offered me, it’s the ability to have a based outlook of opposing oppression, since I experienced so much of it firsthand.
I don’t have much to say apart from I feel the same way every day and I’m sorry. It makes me very sad that we all can’t find each other and lift each other up in the way that we need.
