If I have to pay people to listen, it sort of sucks. Plus hiring people to listen tends to give them unearned confidence in the value of their unsolicited opinions. I’m not buying your words, I’m buying your time. If you want to pour words in me I want to be paid for my time. Or refunded. Mostly what I want is to hire a translator, a liaison, a spokesperson. A buffer between me and other people, someone excellent at both listening and speaking. Someone who mostly listens to me and talks TO other people. Takes my information and needs, clarifies, and then goes forth and delivers this information effectively enough to meet the needs. And would be rewarded to the best of my ability. Extroverts hiring themselves out to introverts to make phone calls, network, schmooze, do what they love for someone less privileged, in order to help other people. Rather than acting on us, act on our behalf with people like you. Neurotypical other neurotypicals on behalf of the neurodiverse. Speak for those who have no voices, either literally or because we go unheeded, misunderstood, ignored. I have a voice but it might as well be a random nonsense generator for all it helps me when I need help the most. That is the time I most fear. When stress ravages my confidence and triggers all my symptoms and shuts down my brain. When I most need help is when I’m most pinned down by what makes it impossible to call out for, negotiate, secure. Mostly what I get is more pain, threats of imprisonment, because people listen with their madness, their perceptions, not to the bare meaning of words. People listen for tone, and react more to what they see, than to content. Understandable. As a survivor I understand that the same words spoken by different people, or in different manners at different times, can mean very different things. Stripped of inflection and context, words on a page feel all but meaningless. We can read the same tweet a billion different ways filtered through a billion different perspectives. But more context isn’t necessarily better, sometimes it’s just more. And people tend to shut down. Too long, didn’t read. Someday that will be every book report, and the bell curve will adjust for a post-attentional world hooked on urgency. I’m the one with ADHD? Maybe it’s that people give of their attention most to what matters to them, and for the most part that’s what rewards them — money, or comfort. How does one give attention, mindfulness, when it’s tough? When it hurts? When it seems all in vain? When you don’t see the point, and there’s a cost? We don’t stick with things after they get uncomfortable, or we stick too long to what’s sinking with us, alone. Like everyone abandoned ship at the first sign of seasickness and now there aren’t enough people to crew the boat so it’s sinking. And the story they’ll tell is, “It’s a good thing I got out of that hot mess when I did.” Justifying abandoning others by the way their life falls apart when completely abandoned. Every snowflake claiming innocence in the avalanche. Seriously. It wouldn’t take everything from one person if you could draft & conscript others onto the life-support squad, but it takes one person to help start a chain. Like George Carlin I’m nervous about groups of people, but it seriously does take a network, or group of hands, to catch a falling human. Making everyone solely responsible for building and maintaining that network, when it’s like herding attention-deficit cats, is killing us. We are each responsible for our own needs, but also responsible to each other for creating the support and ease we each may need. And we’re wasting it fucking around with small talk and fun, vanishing when stuff gets hard. Like life’s a party, and the important thing is to skip out before cleanup and consequences. Gotta work in the morning… who’ll be there if your job goes away? I am fed up. Preaching to the wind.