Radio Dada

I want alone time. I think even extroverts and neurotypicals — everyone wants, at some point in their day or week, time to themselves. Maybe if only to poop, or shower. Time to ourselves to be ourselves. Yet this is a luxury devoutly to be wished, won be massing enormous amounts of money or privilege or both, in order to carve out a space for oneself. I need profound amounts of it to self-regulate. I have precious little privacy with disability, doctor’s visits, applications and recertifications for benefits, and the indefatigable nosiness of people who should really have ‘mind your own business’ educated consistently into them. We need each other, need other humans, yes. But we need choices even more. Oh, but the world would go to rack and ruin if we could CHOOSE what we do, and with whom, and where we go, and when. Work would grind to a halt. Professions, economies would collapse, dirty and unpleasant yet necessary jobs wouldn’t get done, trash and waste would be everywhere, systems would fail, governments would fall, and anarchy! Long before we had machines, and jobs, and salaries, and even before money and timekeeping, people made things, did things, built things. Modern conveniences prolong life, make things easier, mechanised, and yet in many ways make things harder, and destroy trust and connection, motivation and drive. Yet we humans invented all these things that force other humans to do things, hoarding resources and basic needs and little by little inventing increasingly insane and complicated systems that now have become more self-complicating. Things that create disparity, crime, and after-the-fact justification for regulating and reserving those things we need to survive. Without trust, without risk, without tolerance for failure and mistakes, we have no trust, and have lost love and giving without expectation. We have made it nearly impossible to get to ‘yes’ through rigid thinking, prejudice, and habits formed around them that no longer feel like choices, but compulsions. We blame and abandon the needy as toxic and dangerous, as we have been abandoned by generations of emotional neglect in favour of hyperfocus on ever-insane amounts of speed, hustle, frantic work to make money to survive and strive to get to some mythical place of financial stability so that life can finally be enjoyed, except by that time stress and lack of connection and love have taken their toll and most people are either dead inside or straight-up dead, in exhausted bodies and minds. In ‘WarGames’ Professor Falken, broken by the death of his son Joshua, withdrew from the world and the human race, unperturbed by any thought of humans being wiped out, ready for nature to start over with whatever insect or life-form survived the nuclear holocaust. Who knew the apocalypse would not be like it is in ‘Mad Max’ or zombie shows, or even ‘The Stand,’ but somehow still have too many living people being as cruel and cold as ever, now turned up to 11? In times of uncertainty we cling even harder to the familiar, and feeling out of control, we try even harder to control everyone and everything around. Not just governments — individuals. Policing each other’s every nuance for signs of threat. No trust. No love. No sense of value or worth, or meaning. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

My brain eats itself. I trepan my skull to let bloody words pour out until it alleviates the pressure on my brain. Maybe after, I might be able to bear contact with neurotypicals (or at least neurotypical-conforming human behaviours) without having a total raving meltdown. All my social batteries are drained by enforced contact with people who seem to have become illiterate by allowing reading/writing parts of the brain to atrophy whilst overworking the charm/social dominance muscle group. With increasing frantic compulsiveness as age creeps in, and lack of control unsettles the mind, leading to a tightening of the grip on controlling and demanding from others. Really. Seriously. The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. The older and lonelier and more isolated Boomers get, and the less relevant or desired their input, the more controlling and verbally compulsive they seem to me. Maybe just the ones I meet, though. Children learn how to listen before they learn to speak. The elderly forget how to listen before they forget how to speak. Is this a reflection of me that I see? Unheard and disregarded most of my life, being understood by others was never a priority or achievable goal. Nor influencing others through communication. Having lost the sense that communicating with others gets me anything but punishment, invalidation, isolation, hostile attention, loss of basic needs, I talk to myself. Verbally stim, self-soothe. Give myself my wishes in fantasy for someone who understands me, listens to me, lets me speak, cares about what I say. Makes for me as much time as it takes to work through distressingly INTENSE feelings, experiences, memories, thoughts — without judgment. Holding me through the pain, with radical acceptance. Listening to learn, and to add, rather than ‘win,’ dominate, argue, debate, feel justified and correct, validate life choices at the expense of judging and condemning others. I hate hierarchical connection. I hate hierarchical socialising. I hate everything about a system that dehumanises, hurts, and kills people for reasons almost entirely out of their control. Gender. Skin colour. Neurotype. Appearance. Persuasiveness. Class. Background. Ethnicity. History. Religious traditions. Physical ability. Mental ability. Overall health. Conversational style. Personal preferences. Personal interests and passions. Skills. Habits. Pastimes. Weight. Height. Eye colour. Clothing. The things I care about get buried in layers and layers of pretence and demographics that say fuck all about the measure of a soul, how someone behaves in a crisis, whether their unique mind is a podcast worth subscribing to or the auditory equivalent of corrosive chemical fumes to the brain. Life is short, can we skip the act and superficial approval and human equivalent of doggy butt-sniffing? I don’t care where you’re from. I care how you handle being told ‘no.’ I care if you can see me as a separate whole human person, distinct from you, with my own world inside me, unknowable and strange as your own.

People learn how to talk and don’t learn how to stop. How to listen. This makes everyone frantic to be heard. Even if I model good active listening, I’m taken advantage of and don’t get the same in return. We’re creating the very frantic noise we’re struggling to be heard over. If we weren’t so reactive and defensive it wouldn’t be this Cold War of verbal battery and arms reaches. If we could actually stand to be wrong, and forfeit a rap battle to declare truce and risk connection… now I sound poisonously positive: “Can’t we all just get along?” This is a standoff. Except my weapons and resources are meagre next those of the people I’m talking to. I used to not understand what was going wrong, and got frustrated but gave up. Now I understand more of the nuances but it hasn’t made me any more empowered to cope or solve this communication SNAFU. I want a translator. I’m exhausted from trying and failing. I’m bloody fucking tired. Where, oh where, have the smart people gone? Behind walls of intellect and politics, of sad head-shaking ‘yes it is such a shame, a crime, this inequality and oppression, I’m going to go organize’ instead of risking doing something on a human level and possibly failing a real human person, a human face to a systemic problem? Yeah, I get it, it’s terrifying and heartbreaking, but your fear and mine are making this so much worse. If I can get some basic needs met I can relax and calm down enough to communicate better. But this needs to be trauma-informed, autism-informed, which means the other person needs to concede, and meet me eye-to-eye, and let me take the lead on saving my life. It shouldn’t have to be either ‘do it all yourself,’ or ‘I take over entirely’ when it comes to saving someone. It should centre the person experiencing the difficulty, give options, trust them, let the one who lives with the consequences decide which risks to take. Forcing someone to make a particular choice should obligate the enforcer to take responsibility for the consequences and shoulder the cost or the burden of repair. Whoever makes the choices pays the price. So let it be me, if it’s my life, who makes the choices. You can’t have it both ways — tell me what to do but then I have to pay the price and take the fallout alone. I feel like a prop or a toy in situations like that. If you’re going to make the choices, you need to pay the price, otherwise there’s no risk to you and you can wind up damaging or destroying people in haste and ignorance. Argh I hate how much effort it takes to try to work this shit out, probably because I’m in bad-faith situations with people who ‘mean well’ but may subconsciously have a more important personal ego-driven goal that is undermining every discussion and action. One that only seems clear in hindsight. Maybe if I weren’t listening exclusively to the 10% that is the content of what other people say, and could better tell from how they look and sound whether they’re trustworthy, I could save time and effort. Trouble is, neurotypicals are such fluent liars, with every move and costume. And the neurodiverse are expected to perform and conform. Where’s the actual sheep among the wolves dressed in wool? Anyone? …Bueller?

Not rare, not fun meltdown re: either help or don’t, but I am as human as you. I’m not going to help you feel better, nor force you to feel bad, all I ask is that you choose based on who you want to be in this moment. We are our choices. Make it a good one. Oh, I long to be an RSC thespian who could, in iambic pentameter, unfold my deepest soul instead of strut and fret my moment in someone’s attention. I long to freestyle my aria, my testament to my pain without dealing with adolescent interruptions and solutions and (frankly) heckling of how I am Doing It Wrong. This abstraction to y’all is my life, my survival. You have feelings, I believe in them, but they are locked in the basement and closets unless you decide you are safe to feel. What’s a dude to do? I don’t even know. I have so much in me that’s real and alive and true, and so little attention and time and access to anyone who might set aside their apathy for a chance at human connection. Ironically the Information Age comes with the time of deepest disconnection from self + others. We have seen too much, felt too little for too long, practiced too well the arts of giving no fucks, ever. Who has the courage, the chutzpah, the wisdom to take a leap of faith? Survey says: absolutely no one! I so stupid!

I’d love to connect with people who aren’t knock-down drag-out exhausting. I reject the idea that we’re only alive to work and hurt. This is not enough. If I’m living in the most beautiful place in the world but so dissociated with stress and unbearable pain that I can barely even see anything outside my bubble of agony, what the hell is the point? Holy forking shirtballs, THIS is the Bad Place. Where I SHOULD be happy, and glad to live in a place that’s warm with abundant fruit and dogs and flowers, absent of lots of sirens and light pollution at night, but it comes down to who’s pulling the strings of resources for basic needs. Inhospitable on account of inhumanity. The dearth of performing arts here doesn’t help. The Isle of Learned Helplessness. This was an almost fatally painful learning experience. I want more.

Facing down fears together with someone else makes them less. We are more than the sum of our parts together, when we are connected. When we take a leap into faith together, let go of needing to win or control, see our difficulties as things we face together. Like jumping down a hole to help out a friend stuck there, because we’ve been down there before and know the way out. Do you remember? Do you remember a time you were down a hole, and all the help you got was prayers, platitudes, and prescriptions thrown upon you like an avalanche of sympathy cards until you couldn’t breathe? Do you remember fighting to hang on one more day, hopeless with bleak despair, watching people hurry past, averting their eyes from your situation, the shame, the fear? Do you remember feeling abandoned, like an unwanted child, less than human? Do you remember someone stopping, seeing you, reaching out to you, genuine concern etched on their face for your terrible predicament? Do you remember feeling heard, held, loved by someone who had no reason to, other than wanting to? Wanting to help, more than they wanted to fear you?

Gave it my best shot. I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory. Time to be rolling on.

Orientation: political + apolitical. Antipolitical? Possibly alien. I still love John Glover Surprise, where the actor suddenly appears out of nowhere in something I’m watching. It’s like being run over by a stampede of golden retriever puppies. Can I explain why? Nope! Do I care? Hell no! I’ll never look gift joy in the mouth.

“Yup.”

Moral of the story: be a buddy, and get a buddy. In-person support means absolutely everything to someone like me. I’m not alone in feeling like this. All well and good to tell someone “you’re not alone,” but don’t tell — SHOW. Show up to show me I’m not alone. We make time for what and who is important to us. That’s how we show what and who we value — what we choose to spend our valuable time and attention on. Showing up is important. So important. It’s risky, but what isn’t? It’s hard sometimes, but what isn’t? Act as if one cares, and it may turn out to be true, later.