Post #3677389

I dictated this to my phone early this morning before I learned that my cousin had passed. I'm really having one of these deep thought days today, and now these thoughts are compounded by grief. I'm considering turning this into a video. Let me know your thoughts on that. Thanks! ******* Let's talk about Neurotypical authority and entitlement. Have you ever noticed how neurotypical people just assume mastery in a subject even if they don't have it? Because they have been put in a particular social position, they assume that they know everything about what they are doing. On the flipside, my experience as an autistic person has been one of constant imposter syndrome my entire career, even though I have hundreds of certificates and thousands of hours of training and thousands of hours of real world experience in what I'm doing. The difference is, I know what I don't know. I feel like Neurotypical people go through life not knowing what they don't know, and assuming that they know everything. Especially if they're given a title, certificate, or a role, they just assume that mantle and think that hey, they know everything that they are supposed to know, so they are an authority on whatever it is that they do. I feel like that could not be further from the truth! I've been in my profession for almost 40 years and I still know that there are tons of things that I don't know. I watch people decades younger than me assume "mastery" of my profession and start teaching classes or making up their own modalities or whatever, and I'm looking at the whole thing thinking hell, we called that "XYZ" in the 1990s and now you're repackaging it to make a buck? It's frustrating because even at almost 4 decades in my profession, I'm still seeking validation through certification and training and I will never stop doing that. But it's difficult to take certification and training from people who have only been in my profession five or ten years, don't have the same neurotype as I do, and honestly, don't know what the fuck is actually going on with the human body. There's a reason why my business cards say trust in the hands of experience. Yet I don't even trust my own decades of experience and decades of training to be enough expertise to actually handle everything that might come my way. I know my limits, the scope of my training, and I stick to my professional boundaries. I also know when I can't help somebody and when I'm going to have to refer them out to somebody who might be a better fit for them. I feel like a lot of Neurotypical people don't know their limits and some of them are even doing actual harm in the world, and there's even a level of harm happening in my profession because of this. When I taught, I always tried to instill my own level of boundaries and ethics in my students, but I have no idea if it ever did any good. I also tried to instill a lifelong love of learning and curiosity about what we do. I still have that. I still seek knowledge and understanding, and I still examine my boundaries, my ethical codes, and look at what I don't know. I don't think very many people do that in relation to anything they do in the world and I find that very frustrating. I think one of the points of being a human being on this earth is to learn and grow and change and be good at what you like to do, or even multiple things that you like to do, but overall, especially to endeavor do no harm in the world. Skills and hobbies don't all have to be monetized. But apparently, that's not how normal people work. For them it's all about social hierarchy and structure and their status and who other people think they are and then trying to make a buck off of everybody else based on that. That's part of the reason why, as hard as I've tried for my entire life to blend in and fit in with society, I still don't. I can be excellent at a particular skill that might integrate me into a particular group for a while, but those connections don't last because I'm the weirdo, I'm the oddball, I'm the odd man out. And sometimes my level of mastery of something, because I have deep dived it in order to know everything I can about it, is offputting to normal people who really just function on what their social status is rather than what they can actually do to make the world a better place. In my life, so many Neurotypical people have taken up so much space that I probably should've been in rather than them, basically by just bullying their way socially into those positions. Entitlement is a thing, and it's rampant. I've had people and positions and connections taken away from me by pushy, and even sometimes jealous, entitled NT people who wanted what I had and who felt I was weak because I'm weird, so they just pushed in and took whatever it is that they wanted that I had away from me. I've never had that strong sense of entitlement that I should own a piece of the world, be in a particular position, or even be in a particular relationship, especially if it brings harm or discomfort to other people or beings. Often this ends up bringing a lot of harm and discomfort to me, but the people who are doing these things, because they're seeking social status and they can't process their own emotions or recognize what they're doing to other people in their attempt to push through and claim territory, never acknowledge the harm they are doing -- and never apologize. When and if I get to the point where I'm able to explain to them what they've done, what has happened, and how I feel, I'm labeled as a whiny baby who just needs to shut up and take my lot in life and move on. Even though words are my lifeline, because I can't create mental pictures and I have delayed emotional processing, once I find the words for things, everybody else has moved on and they don't want to look at the harm they might have done to me or the world by their actions in grabbing up space. It's also been incredibly rare in my lifetime for anybody who said they cared about me to actually go to bat for me. It's been a very lonely journey, even when I've been partnered, and, as it turns out, almost every single one of my long-term partners was also undiagnosed neurodivergent of some flavor. I guess we stick together, but my path in life feels like a solo one now. I have to go to bat for myself, and I need to learn to take up space, finally, and stand my ground. It's exhausting to think about. I don't want to be part of the society that has passed me by, but I still need to interact with it in order to do my profession and make money to survive. Yet, I can't go out and market myself the way normal people do even though I have decades and decades of experience in what I do. I've been in burnout for at least 10 years, and I keep having to push and poke and prod at the things I know how to do that will bring in a little bit of money so I can survive. Yet I've never crossed my own Professional and ethical boundaries in order to do that. I never just seek the buck because I'm desperate. I've never been like that. I've always put the welfare of the people I'm working with and for first over my own needs. That's the only ethical way to approach what I do because it is a one-on-one, close, therapeutic setting. I have tons of training and tons of expertise, but the way my mind works, I focus only on what I don't know and what I can't do. I don't just assume that I can do everything and then go blunder my way into the world thinking I'll be a success. In all respects of the word, especially according to society, I'm not a success at all! Yet, I can sleep at night knowing that I've held my boundaries, I've kept to my professional and personal codes of ethics, and I am doing as little harm as I can in the world, and probably doing some positive good. When I step back and realize that a majority of people don't operate in this way, it astound me. I guess that's my own bias, but I couldn't operate in any other way in this world. Do no harm, do positive good. Always be humble, always be able to say I don't know, and always be open to learning. I don't necessarily think this makes me a better person than anybody else; it's just one way of being. But I do know that it has been my survival strategy for my entire life.