The Reason For It All

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I apologise if this is not the right place to post this.

I was thinking today, as I do many days, about all the times I have been at odds with people and offended people and people have misunderstood me and all the horrible things that have happened in my life which come back to being on the autism spectrum.

Some of it was pretty darned awful. It nearly drove me to suicide.

The main thing I felt growing up was a great sense of unfairness. Why did other people seem to be getting away with murder and yet still be liked and have lots of friends while I seemed to be hated by everyone when I just made a simple mistake or did something unexpected?

For years this got me down - this crazy discrepancy of human attitudes.

Then I realised - with the help of this forum (I love you guys!) - that the reason all of that happened was for a great, big, mofoing purpose (excuse the crudeness) and that is that one day, I would use all of this as fuel to help blast this Mother Ship into the outer stratosphere and get the cause of the autistic person HEARD in the universe...by whoever had the heart to listen and respond.

The reason I'm posting this is because I want to ask for spiritual buddies on this quest. If anyone reading this has felt the same way, has wondered "Why me?" and wanted to curl up in as little a ball as possible and just DIE because the world seemed to hate you and want you off the freaking crust forever, and if you have also come or are coming to the realisation that it all happened for a GOOD reason, to make you into a hero who would one day go out and help raise awareness of the plight of millions of people going through a similar thing, and help bring JUSTICE to these people...then I invite you to reply to this post and let me know you're with me. I need to know you believe your life counts for something GREAT. I need to know that NOBODY else out there will be tempted to go the route I almost went. ... because that is a FUTILE path - not for us winners!

To quote one of my favourite songs: I'm sending SOS from this tiny box... Are you out there?

I started a thread but I think autistics need some kind of civil rights movement in order to make an impactful change in the world. I mean I feel like training for a run to Washington DC in order to make it happen. I also feel like we need to get organized to make this change happen.

I think it would be awesome if we used Wrongplanet or some near offboard as something like a job skills exchange. We have a lot of knowledge and could use of that to help each other up. With financial success, and us financially looking after each other, would probably come more political clout.

What really gets me about my life, as I understand it, is that I feel like I have a gun to my head telling me to both become my age in every respect (ie. learn how to rebuild cars, spend more time at the gun range, buy late 30's early 40's business casual attire for social events, get more interested in scotch, cigars, golf, outdoor grilling, buy a house, having a wife and a few babies to keep us up at night, etc. etc.) and conform in as many respects as possible or be instantly identified as something of an inferior social stratum no matter where I go and have that be something that the substance of who I am has no hope whatsoever of winning against. It's like you're not even allowed to have interesting things to say, I tend to blab off about ideas here because it's one of the few places I can without caring whether I'm in fatal breech of conformity.

I don't know if much can be done for the world around us, the conclusion I'm forced to is that most people really don't try as hard as we might think (ie. the gulf for us to become something else seems unbridgeable and we all to easily imagine them just trying harder at it) and I see it in so many examples where people's preferences for things are quite literally set in a particular hormonal state (like music taste at 13 or 14), beliefs and opinions somewhere in their teens and 20's, and most people after that point seem like they're non-negotiable to change in light of facts. It's almost as strange as being one of the few 'live people' in a world of organic machines and semi-zombies and where your relative freedom walks you into one evolutionary atavism after another latent in the beings around you.

Op, you are not alone. And while I can't see anything that I can do which will impact the world, I have found a niche in which I can go to bed each night and know I have improved somebody's life. It may be very small, or it can rise to the level of forcing Medicaid to pay for some supplies they are legally required to pay for, but weren't, etc. It always involves working with the skills and cooperation of others. It took a long time for me to get there.

Techstep, I think you will find more people with greater wisdom in their 60s and up. It is a developmental stage of human lifespan to begin giving to and caring for younger generations. People who have not changed (as you pointed out) develop new points of few, take more things into consideration, and even admit they are wrong.