On Relationship Standards: Is Reliability a Necessity?

I'm on the autism spectrum, and I have kids on the spectrum and with ADHD and former partners with ADHD. I love them all to bits, but it can be tricky to navigate what behaviours should look like without an attainable standard of comparison. 

People who are neurodiverse are a minority in society. We perceive and think differently, so we will behave a little differently as well. It's a bit similar to being left-handed. We used to force people to write with the right hand which caused all sorts of problems. Now we're in a place where we accept this difference and have accommodations in place, like left-handed desks. But ND is different from left-handedness, of course, in that it affects our basic personality -- who we are, and some traits common to ND brains are overwhelmingly seen as undesirable.

Like being unreliable.

About twenty years ago, I had a partner who commonly got distracted from tasks. The only time he wasn't distractible was when he was engrossed (hyperfocusing) on something of specific interest to him. This is a common ADHD issue -- or a common way of being for a specific group of people. One day he offered to make dinner for me as I marked final exams on my front porch: fresh fish on the BBQ. I watched him leave for the market and then return. A few hours passed, and I went to get an ETA for dinner only to find the fish unwrapped and sitting on the counter, covered in flies because the back door had been left open. I found my partner under his car changing the oil. It had occurred to him on the ride home with the fish that he hadn't done an oil change in a while, and something in his brain told him it's vital to do it RIGHT NOW. Not after dinner, but immediately. When I asked him about his choice, he insisted that the problem is that I just don't understand cars. It's kind of hilarious, if we're allowed to laugh at idiosyncrasies, but also kind of annoying. It didn't always happen like this, but it did just often enough to make it hard to trust that he'd follow through. 

CAN'T OR WON'T

How do we best live with people who just can't do what they say they'll do? Part of the problem is what it means to us when people let us down. We associate caring and loving with remembering things: our likes and dislikes and what makes us feel cared for and special dates. I have a mind like a sieve, so every recipe card has a list of who likes and hates it, with many crossed out as their tastes change, and I have an ongoing list of potential gifts for people, which often end up returned anyway, so it's complicated. Our level of memory for detail is sometimes used as proof of our level of care, when it might be more of a fluke. Some people are just better at keeping those facts in mind, so they appear to be more invested in us when they might not care about us at all. It's not always clear evidence of affiliation, yet we can't let go of it as evidence.  

Embracing Fallibility

Many of us live in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It's an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much loneliness. We can't connect when we're working with blind determination to find our place above the rest. We can't connect when we don't dare show an ounce of vulnerability for fear of being taken down like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. Our quest to rise to the top for the security we think comes with status and money is completely at odds with our very real need to feel authentically known, within the security of a community.  

We're no longer following that love and forgiveness bit from Christianity, if we ever really did wide-scale. And we project our fear of losing on anyone who has suffered through difficulties, no matter if it's a natural disaster or massive layoff. We distance ourselves from the suffering of others by convincing ourselves they must have done something stupid to be in this position, and, therefore, we're safe as long as we keep on going hard. It's just a trick to make us feel safer, that unwittingly keeps us from too consciously noticing the floods and fires, layoffs and illnesses lapping at our heels.  

Realistic Faith: Strength for Those Who Look

It can be hard to keep working to show people that N95s and cleaning air will actually significantly reduce the number of sick, disabled, and dying in our communities. Here are some words of solace to keep your fires stoked this winter: 

Sue J. from Cleaner Air Collective wrote a lovely, poetic epistle to everyone working hard to keep us all safer. 

"Finding a way to not give up is the ability to hold being realistic and being resilient together in face of huge challenges. It may seem hopeless and too difficult, but if we keep going, we may prevail. If we stop, we can't.

I’ve mentioned before, I spent six months tearing my hair out trying to convince my vulnerable elderly parents to mask, “but no one else does.” Providing masks, modelling, explaining, lecturing, challenging, pointless … til it wasn’t. They’re the only ones masked at church now. 

The other day my young adult, at risk youngest daughter sighed as she put on a mask to attend a crowded outdoor market with me: “I hate wearing a mask outside, but I’ve been making good choices for so long, it’d be stupid to stop and get infected today.” 

On Hearing Others

Louis Cozolino's beautifully written book on neuroscience has an explanation near the end about our necessary interconnectedness. 

Communication from one body part to anther happens when messages throughout our body are transmitted by neurons, but the transmission doesn't happen inside the neurons but between them, in the synaptic gap that separates the dendrites of one neuron from the axon terminal of the other. 

Then there's this bit that I love from Cozolino's book: It doesn't stop at our epidermis. The communication continues outside of our individual bag of bones into others nearby. The space between us, you and I, is a synaptic gap. The transmission of messages is continuous, not just inside our bodies but between them. So, maybe it's silly to think of ourselves as separate beings. We're one giant blob of a being, but some of the transmission circuits are damaged. Inside the body, damaged circuits manifest in a variety of ways, like Alzheimers' and Parkinson's. Between bodies, it feels to me like our systems are struggling to function from the lack of dendrites able to receive our signals. 

Cozolino says,

I Needed This Today

Another curious human behaviour: Just by chance, I posted every day for over a week last May rather than my typical range of anywhere from one to twelve posts in a month. Then I wondered how long I could keep it going. And now I'm at a point that I make an effort not to miss a day, for no other reason that to see if I can. More frequent posting has had almost zero effect on the number of readers and commenters, but there is so much going on that it's pretty easy to have something to say every day. I have about 20 tabs open to articles or threads that I want to think about more. I often write before I get out of bed in the morning to get all the online detritus off my chest before starting my day, then spend a bit of time looking for some useful or entertaining images to add while I drink my tea. Image curating sometimes takes longer than writing, taking me down so many rabbit holes!

I got a late start today, so here's a nice thread amid the horror show of the news and social media. It's from biorisk consultant Conor Browne:

"I think almost everyone who is still taking active steps to avoid being infected or re-infected with SARS-CoV-2 is tired at this point; I know I am. Having said that, late last night it occurred to me, with considerable clarity, that every single person I have had the pleasure of meeting through this platform [Twitter], every single person still trying to avoid Covid, form, as a group, the most compassionate and resilient set of people I have ever met in my life. These shared qualities are not a coincidence. 

The great conceptual mistake that the individuals and organisations who attack our stance (ranging from individual written or verbal abuse, all the way to the enactment of structural policies at national levels designed to make avoiding infection more difficult) is this: we don't take precautions to avoid infection just to protect ourselves, but also to protect everyone else. 

The science is very clear at this point: It is unquestionably a wise decision to avoid infection. It speaks volumes about the world in which we now live that something so obvious has to be stated. 

I will end with this: all of you are doing the right thing, from the standpoints of health, ethics, and, quite frankly, common sense. You are all outstanding human beings, and, I assure you, you will not regret your ongoing decisions."

Bless you all for continuing to protect others and yourselves, leading the charge with caring and compassion. 

Breathe, Grieve, Love, Repeat

We have very little direct influence over one another but we do affect one another in myriad ways that we often don't even notice.

I had a student once, about 15 years ago who I thought was a delight, as I did almost all my students. He was bright and funny and curious about history. He was also known to have significant gang involvement and may have killed someone by now or have been killed. Who knows. I can't barely remember anybody's name of the over 5,000 students I taught, so there's no looking him up. I likely had little impact on the general trajectory of his life, but I taught him a bit about the last century and solidified some writing skills. And maybe the fact that I warmly welcomed him into class on the rare times he showed up had a bit of an effect on him. I hope he's doing okay. 

About seven years ago I got into a big online argument about the meaning of a film, and it's was beautiful. We each had points and tried to persuade the other, and neither of us budged, and it got absolutely nowhere, but it was a delight to debate what we each saw in a work of art. Neither of us even considered name calling or threatening one another's life or getting all our buddies to destroy the other online. 

Remember those days?? It wasn't that long ago.

Because we can't always see how our actions will affect others in future, we have to take care with what we say and how we say it and watch for the direct effect on others. We have to be more careful online where we can't see one another's facial expression to check if they got that we were just joking or to notice the first sign that we're upsetting them. That concern with caring is waning -- I think largely because we don't get immediate facial feedback. But it's vital we get it back for the coming years. 

The Winning Mindset: Billionaires in Bunkers

An article from a year ago came my way, about how the super-rich 'preppers' are planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. Douglas Rushkoff was hired by some über rich men to field questions about, basically, what they need to do to survive in a bunker. One of their biggest concerns was how to ensure that their security--vital to keep out the masses-- doesn't turn on them! Plato had a similar concern. He solved it with an excellent education that provokes the warrior class to care more about the city than themselves. It's too late for that here. 

"The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where 'winning' means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. . . . The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making."

Then he met J.C. Cole:

On Maintaining Firm Categories: Do Labels Matter?

This link about people on the spectrum came to my FB feed as "Sponsored Content," so I'm wary at the get go, but they present this argument to be addressed: "Autism is a neurological difference in processing, and simply having a collection of traits or quirks without this difference in processing does not make someone autistic." They argue that "there does need to be some clarity, to get away from the ‘We’re all a little bit autistic aren’t we…’ phrase."

My position: But, why?

And, right before that came one of ContraPoint's latest video in which Natalie's characters argue about who counts as trans with a gender dysphoria anti-trender argument countered by a more fluid gender performativity stance.

I'm going to mesh the issues together here because of some similar arguments. I lean towards 'why does it matter?'. Whether someone's got dysphoria or is trending, it takes minimal energy to use whatever pronouns they asked to be used (while, of course, forgiving the forgetful who mean well). What's the harm in letting people try on the other gender or non-gender to see if it fits better? What's the benefit of doing brain scans on people to get some illusion of certainty about how people feel instead of just trusting how they say they feel? Similarly, who is harmed when people acknowledge their struggles with adhering to behavioural norms by latching on to a recognizable diagnosis? With ASD or ADHD or any other checkbox of symptoms that we've rolling into together under a label, why is it important to delineate who is in and who must stay out via an often expensive and sometimes questionable process? When one of my kids was diagnosed (incorrectly, I believe), the very reputable psychometrist badgered me to find that one thing they're obsessed with when one didn't immediately come to mind. Curious.