Why am I expected to change the world? Asperger's, sexuality

Post Reply New Topic

I am in a ceaseless struggle over my self-esteem. Heck, simply saying this is an understatement because my problems are a triple whammy of Asperger's Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and a curious sexuality. With these three combined I have turned into an obsessive mess of self-pity and social resentment.

I've been trying to become so much more self-assertive with my curiosity towards my sexuality. I've grown to the point where I will not allow anyone to condemn me for who I am no matter what reason. I tried explaining to some people just recently why other people's ignorance and prejudice is their problem and not mine and that it's not my duty to go around trying to change the world when I can just be me. I was very angry at the time and asked why should be respectful when someone says something negative about my sexuality. In return, those two people came up and told me that I was a close-minded whiny baby who needed to grow up.

I know that I can't allow other people's idiocy to get to me, but how am I close-minded and immature for getting angry by it? I apologize for not having enough self-esteem to make a stand for myself, but I just don't know how to do it. I don't know to put myself out there and take what I want without someone projecting their ignorance that they've had all the time in the world to cast off onto me and calling me the real bully.

Why am I the bad guy here?

You can consider me part of an ostracized group of certain people and I used to have this group's back 110%.

But I was lied to this whole time...

The thing is that this group doesn't know how to live the way that makes them happy and always bend over when the other side wants to keep them in there place. Instead of standing up and deciding what is right for themselves, they choose to save face and show "respect" for the other side. They always listen to what the other side says and let them have their way instead of taking what they can because it is nobody's business and they have the power. I don't know why on earth they feel they have to allow other people to oppose them when they never had to do that.

All because of who they are.

There are a lot of things that drive me up the wall, but nothing has done it more than the idea that people can be hateful towards me for who I am when I have done absolutely nothing warranting it. What is worse is that a great number of people who I thought had my back when I had theirs apparently seem to agree with and even promote it.

It just feels so traitorous.

Again, I know that can't let other people's close-mindedness control me, but how is getting angry at others for treating me like a lesser just as close-minded? I have gotten into countless arguments with my mother over this and she doesn't have the ability to help me. So is so much more that I want to say but don't know how to put into words.

I see neither why I have to be obligated to bow down to something that I feel is hindering towards me in a certain way nor why I have to take responsibility for other people's ignorance and prejudice since it's their fault to begin with. I tried explaining this to a two certain people who took issue with my mindset and had a few choice words for me. One called me the hateful person that he had ever met and the other seemed to try and enforce some sense of duty and morality onto me that I felt was unnecessary.

So, again, what makes me the villain in all of this? Why does it always have to be about picking sides, changing minds, and right and wrong when I can just be me and living my life? What is wrong with invalidating the prejudiced and leaving them to live with their own shame?

Is that really just as hateful?

There are number of my own kind who even apparently believe that, too, despite this having absolutely nothing to do with politics whatsoever. There are more people who let what other people say about them dictate their lives instead of just shrugging it off and standing up for themselves. This is what my mother and have argued about the most the best she offer is that maybe it's just really easy for people to give up. I personally hope it is that instead of trying to fulfill an alternative agenda, because there is nothing more soul-crushing than seeing someone who you thought had your back against all the bigotry of the world suddenly turn around and even advocate letting other people have their way. An honest defeat from fatigue is a thousand times better than a betrayal for desperate survival.

be who you are and say what you feel, for those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter.

My problem is that there are people who have it all wrong.

Those who do mind do matter to these people and they don't know how to evolve beyond that.

If they "have it all wrong," just educate them gently, and in a noncondescending way.

You have to allow other people to be wrong if you're ever going to have any peace.

It seems to me that they're the way they falsely described you. They're the close-minded whiny babies who need to grow up. I think you've just been unlucky to find yourslef in a group of complete idiots.
What you said here is a very popular opinion, "I tried explaining to some people just recently why other people's ignorance and prejudice is their problem and not mine and that it's not my duty to go around trying to change the world when I can just be me".
So like i said, you just got unlucky. Friends support each other, especially when it's about being true to yourself. And this is coming from someone who can't stand ignorance. If people wouldn't be so damn ignorant all the time, the world would be a better place. But like you said, it's not your duty to change the world. Just be yourself and try not to make the world any worse than it already is. And by not being an ignorant douchebag like these people, I think you're doing alright.

I don't know if it's Stockholm Syndrome or what, but there are a growing number of people in my group who would rather, instead of standing up for themselves fully capable humans and bringing bigotry to justice, they roll over and let it happen for the dumbest reasons. It's their problem they are so bigoted in the first place; they have nothing to "disagree" with because it has absolutely nothing to do with them. It's always about that with them, it's all about agreement or disagreement what they have nothing to do with. Instead of reminding the bigots that they do speak for them...well, they let hem speak for them.

You know, you honestly can't change the world.

You can't make ignorant people learn, and you can't make hateful people reconsider.

All you can do is live your life and try to be decent, and hope that maybe by your example they will have an OH s**t MOMENT and decide on their own that they need to reconsider.

That's the reason for being respectful-- because frankly mouthing off might make you feel like you made a statement, but it generally just makes bigots retrench.

That, and those plentiful jerkwads that want to bait you into a fight, because they like fighting.

You can't change the world. All you can change is how you let the world make you see yourself, and how you live in it.

Depresses the s**t out of me some days, but it has taken a load off my shoulders.

QFT

Why does it always have to be about morals?
Why does it always have to be about right and wrong and taking sides?
Why does it always have to be about agreeing and disagreeing?

What is the the point of contesting and upholding all of these "norms" if others did not grow up with them?

What is the point of glorifying, upholding, and respecting all of these egotistical little things?

Last edited by LoneSword7878 on 26 Jun 2014, 10:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because people, especially say extremely religious people, tend to couch their personal comfort zone in terms of moral/immoral. They grew up hearing it, and it's how their brain codes stuff. What they are used to and comfortable with is moral, and what they aren't isn't. It has the added benefit of giving them the warm, fuzzy glow of being on the side of morality.

Same with right/wrong. For most people, it doesn't mean "correct/incorrect" or "accurate/inaccurate." It means "fits with my view of the world/doesn't fit with my view of the world." Or "gives results that please me/doesn't give results that please me." I am guilty of the same, especially when I start opining about equal rights for minority groups, neurodiversity, the extractive economy, and/or the dissolution of the extended family.

Basically the same with agreement/disagreement. People who agree cause others to feel comfortable, at ease, and right in their positions. People who disagree cause them to feel uncomfortable, and as if they must 1) defend and justify their position, 2) reconsider their position, or 3) belittle, discredit, or otherwise dismiss that which is counter to their position. I deal with this more often than I would like, both with my mother-in-law's stridently different opinion on when to send kids to daycare/school (ASAP in her opinion, no sooner than you have to in mine-- but she HAD to go to work when DH was 2, they would have been homeless if she didn't, and she invested a lot in making her choice not only OK because it was necessary but also objectively and absolutely correct) and in terms of Mommy Wars. Ugh, how I despise Mommy Wars.

What's the point of upholding it all?? Suffice it to say that Aspies aren't the only ones who dislike upheaval, uncertainty, things we aren't familiar with, and change. It makes most people uncomfortable-- the only people I have found who enjoy flux are ADDers who fully embrace their nature (and then it isn't change, per se, so much as the flood of dopamine that adventure releases-- new toy, new friend, new car, new job, new address are all adventures, the difference seems to be an order of magnitude). Some people deal graciously with change even if they don't like it. Some people do not deal graciously, but eventually learn to cope. Some people refuse delivery. Very few people who aren't on the extreme losing end of the status quo are like, "Yeah!! Let's change it up!!" If they are, ask them if they had trouble paying attention in school.

Even in loving, tolerant, Welcome-To-Mainstreet America, where they think Rush Limbaugh is an ass and were secretly a little bit glad when Jerry Falwell went to whatever eternity he went to, things like racial parity and gay rights were a looooooooong time in coming (and still aren't quite there yet). People in Barrackville, WV weren't exactly thrilled when an Italian lady moved into the big house on the corner back in the 60s...

...and Grandma (said Italian lady) wasn't exactly pleased when an Iranian guy bought the house below her in the 90s. Now she calls the Iranian guy up in California, and talks to me about how she's not exactly thrilled that he's renting the house to a young, African-American single mother. A year from now, she'll be calling that woman by her first name, chirping "Good Morning, Susie!" and baking the kids cookies.

Her opinion on gay rights changed real fast when it went from being "Those People" to being "David, the guy who's been cutting your hair since Helen retired, and oh by the way very possibly also your grandson, seriously Grandma he's thirty and has never so much as mentioned a girlfriend."

We don't need to discuss the conversation we had about "People with that Asperger's thing" two days after Sandy Hook, do we?? Suffice it to say that it started off with her being terrified of this scary new disease and ended with her practically painting a puzzle piece on her roof and making a personal effort to sit by and be friendly to the non-verbal redheaded girl at church (and being very flattered to find that all that flapping and twirling and jumping the kid started doing when she saw Miss Katy coming after a couple months probably means "I like you! I like you! I like you A LOT!"). Swear to God, when that child speaks for the first time, it may well be to Grandma or at least in reference to Grandma, and I pity her mother trying to drag her through Sunday service after "Miss Katy" kicks off.

I digress. It's because it went from "People who are unfamiliar to me" to "The man I spent fifty years of my life with, my prickly stepdaughter who I don't think of as 'step', the son-in-law I loved even after the divorce, possibly my grandson who may or may not be gay but is definitely having an impressive career as a stock analyst, and the granddaughter I raised from the time she was in diapers until the time she was in maxi pads, who still calls me up on the phone two or three times a day, tells me funny stories about my great-grandkids, and cross-references the possible side effects of my medications."

Eh, maybe you can change the world. A little bit.

Autism Speaks is still out there spewing stuff that makes us WISH that all autistic children were incapable of self-reflection...

...but, in north-central West Virginia, a redheaded autistic child now spends her Sunday mornings buffered by Mommy on one side and Miss Katy on the other. She's bouncing and flapping instead of screaming and doing yet another runner.

So the world changed. A little bit. In one little corner, for one old woman and one little girl and one child's mother, in one church in one small town in one state. Notwithstanding, it DID CHANGE. Not exactly a seismic shift (unless you're the kid's mom), but one of 1,000,000 tiny movements that might add up to radical change between now and the next generation.

But-- it happened with patience and understanding. Getting mad at Grandma that morning back in December wouldn't have changed anything. The fact that I didn't has to do with two things: Patience and compassion for my old Granny, who changed my diapers and took me to the reservoir above Morris Park to feed the ducks and gave me government cheese boxes to play with and called up my friends' parents when I was too scared to do it (at 12) and played Kitty Cats with me every evening for four years straight irrespective of how many socially-constructed, social-climbing, rotten-ass things she also did. And dumb luck-- because if she'd answered the phone an hour earlier, I would have been cussing and crying and it would have been a different discussion altogether.

Everyone is always projecting their morals and such on everyone else. If they were real people, they would all realize that they do not apply to everyone and that people are intelligent enough to define themselves instead of advocating some sort of "golden standard." What is especially infuriating is when that supposed standard is disregarded, the people who do disregard are considered radicals, bullies, and other horrid things. I don't see how any worse the side that wants to break free can be than the side that is always persecuting what is different, except for maybe letting their anger get the better of them.

Also, don't you think things would be so much better if people stopped giving issues names and public attention and just let other people fight their own battles and speak for themselves? Stop calling it this and stop talking making a big deal out of it so people won't be so divided and upset. Those in power definitely would also not be able to inject their morals and look down on everyone who wanted to break free. Plus, If only some people could learn to quit considering the opposition in matters that don't call for them and just assert themselves for their own sake, they would be unstoppable and so much happier. I don't see how being yourself, rejecting standards, and following your own path calls for dissent, yet everyone seems to to be jumping all over it. I've actually grown to hate that word because when I tell other people that they can't tell me how to live my life and I'm called intolerant.

Everyone is always projecting their morals and such on everyone else. If they were real people, they would all realize that they do not apply to everyone and that people are intelligent enough to define themselves instead of advocating some sort of "golden standard." What is especially infuriating is when that supposed standard is disregarded, the people who do disregard are considered radicals, bullies, and other horrid things. I don't see how any worse the side that wants to break free can be than the side that is always persecuting what is different, except for maybe letting their anger get the better of them.

Also, don't you think things would be so much better if people stopped giving issues names and public attention and just let other people fight their own battles and speak for themselves? Stop calling it this and stop talking making a big deal out of it so people won't be so divided and upset. Those in power definitely would also not be able to inject their morals and look down on everyone who wanted to break free. Plus, If only some people could learn to quit considering the opposition in matters that don't call for them and just assert themselves for their own sake, they would be unstoppable and so much happier. I don't see how being yourself, rejecting standards, and following your own path calls for dissent, yet everyone seems to to be jumping all over it. I've actually grown to hate that word because when I tell other people that they can't tell me how to live my life and I'm called intolerant.