As a teenager, I baby-sat for a neighborhood couple. One clear, brittle January night, the husband walked me home. I commented that I could smell the cold.
"Oh, you can?"
In hindsight, I can hear the "wow, that's bizarre" tone in his voice.
"Yeah," I continued, oblivious, "It smells like shiny metal."
"Huh."
I hope I live to see the day when the "huh" is banished and replaced with "cool!" or the like. We on this far end of the human spectrum deserve better than the leaden "huh"---NT-speak for "I'm blaming you because I don't understand you."
I don't care where people dwell on the human spectrum. I care about their character. Their place on the human spectrum doesn't determine that, any more than their skin color or their ethnicity. People reveal their character through their actions. People who taunt, bully, ostracize, and otherwise deny acceptance to those they deem The Other, the different, show a lack of character. I accept people as they are unless they act to hurt other people, knowingly. I think less of un-accepting people.
Who are we of The Other breed hurting? What is our offense? Those are my questions when I'm coming away from a messy mix-up with some conventional, unremarkable petty tyrant who couldn't abide my asymmetry. How did I poison their world?
When I told my NT friends that I'd been diagnosed an Aspie, they asked me what they---NTs---could do to make my life less trying. Often, they added that we should accept people as they are. In asking what they could do, and in calling for acceptance, they did make my life a bit less trying. I know I'm among accepting friends. That goes a long way in offsetting the nerve-wracking skirmishes I face with lesser minds.
I get the "what" of these lesser minds. They don't accept we "off center" types. We arouse revulsion, aversion, and scorn in them. But for what it's worth, I want to hash out the "why." Why do they ostracize, bully, and harass us? I suspect that they feel threatened by us. It could go deeper than that, though. Their hostility toward us could also be a smoke screen.
Fearful people lash out at those they deem "different." I've been on the sharp end of their abuse all my life, so it's an effort for me to offer compassion for them, but I've learned to understand them to the degree that I know they vent their fear on me when I don't meet their expectations for conformity. But I chafe at the binary, NTs vs. Aspies approach we fall into so often. We've got a human spectrum of complexity and richness that we ought to try to understand. We can't do that unless we ask what motivates an NT to react, at times, with hatred toward Aspies.
I've got an amateur's guess. I have no background in mental health. But a possibility strikes me when I follow politics. I suspect that those who target Aspies so viciously borrow a tactic from closeted gay politicians, religious leaders, and activists who out-homophobic everyone within earshot of a microphone or a TV crew. Consider Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, and Roy Ashburn, among others. Outspoken public homophobes, all were caught engaging in homosexual activity or alleged homosexual activity. My hunch is that their fire-breathing rantings of disgust at homosexuality were designed to deflect suspicion from their sexuality. They made a choice. They would succeed in the straight, sometimes gay bashing world by passing as straight.
I think of this sorry practice every time I read about another instance of cruelty toward anyone who is different---and let's be real, Aspies don't hold the patent on difference. The most vicious "NT" tyrants out there may not be so NT. They may be closeted "weird" and "off center" people who opt to succeed in a not-so-neuro-tolerant world by passing as normal, average, unremarkable, conforming, and typical---as the neuromajority defines all of that. They deflect suspicion from their own "weirdness" by targeting people who haven't got the hang of hiding it. No one suspects that they've got "weird" nuggets of their own hidden away.
That's as much charity as I can manage to conjure for conformists who are on the attack. Through my six decades of life they have mocked me (behind my back and to my face); ostracized me; bullied me; harassed me; set me up for humiliation; and driven me out of jobs, all gleefully. I don't think I've left anything out. I do find comfort in knowing that we who are The Other have NT allies. To answer their query, "What do Aspies need from us?" I say, expand your psychic skin to accommodate me---and us. But it looks like they're already doing that.
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