amorpha

(written by Riel)

This post is an attempt to describe a philosophical concept that has been floating around in our general headspace for... a very long time, which has taken a long time for us to codify and find words to describe. The word "spirit" here isn't being used in the sense that we consider it an actually spiritual thing, although some of us do incorporate it into spirituality (reminder again in case anyone reading this doesn't know it: in-system, we can vary widely between each other in spiritual beliefs and philosophies. We always worry when we mention this that people will consider it somehow impossible, and start looking for a commonality or "true" belief under all of them in the same way some people look for a "true self," but nonetheless, it is how we are.)

( Lots of detail on this. Warning for long post. )

Anyway. This concept is also, I think, going to be basic to our attempts to articulate various other perceptions we've had of things and people, and, well, to understanding how we work in general really. So it will show up again in future posts, I'm pretty sure; so we can refer back to this post if someone doesn't know what we mean when we talk about this concept.

An interesting and potentially highly useful term coined by TVTropes: Dead Unicorn Trope. (For those who don't want to get sucked into six degrees of TV Tropes, we'll summarize: What distinguishes a Dead Unicorn Trope from a Dead Horse Trope/beating a dead horse is that the "straight" form of it never actually existed in the first place. Or at least nowhere near as widespread as it was claimed to be. "The butler did it" is a classic example, because there never actually was a trend of mysteries in which the butler did it being a hugely overused cliche.)

...the overall concept reminded very much of some of the things we were trying to describe in this post. Particularly the spreading around of claims like "this person claims to be LFA!" until they got to what we described as having the status of an urban legend, the only difference being that they were about real-life things and not concepts in fiction. And a lot of beliefs like that seem to accumulate around disability in general-- both about what people with various types of disabilities do and don't say about themselves, and what they ask for/want/think is a reasonable accomodation. Ideas about the Americans with Disabilities Act leading to some massive wave of frivolous lawsuits filed by people who just wanted to get rich, for instance. And of course the whole idea about "people just say they have Asperger's because they want an excuse to be rude/because it's cool/etc!", and we've... already explained our position on that in great detail in the replies to this post.

...oh yeah, I guess it wouldn't hurt to mention that the posts by someone called "farmwifetwo" in that thread are potentially triggery for how they describe an autistic child, and claims of all autistic participants in the thread being "too high-functioning" to know the real reality of autism, etc etc blah blah. Which is made all the more ironic by the fact that later in the thread she's going "zomg your parents destroyed your medical records omg that's so horrible what kind of person would do such a terrible thing!" Um... welcome to the real reality of being an autistic adult? As Larry pointed out further down in the replies, it's not uncommon for medical records to be lost and destroyed for any number of reasons. And we know just based on anecdotal evidence-gathering that we're far from the only autistic adults whose parents went to extremes to, in some way or another, hide their childhood "strangeness" and any associated diagnoses from them and the rest of the world. We can't tell anyone what statistical rate it happens at, we just know that we're by no means any kind of unique, isolated anomaly when it comes to that.

(Meanwhile, we also wonder, in an abstract sort of way, what kind of parent could do a terrible thing like declaring that their own child will never have any skills and no future outside of an institution. I mean, we know it happens, because people do it all the time. We just can't understand the kind of thinking and perceptions and deliberate ignorings that would lead to that conclusion.)

But... I guess the whole concept ties in, in our own thoughts, to a much broader phenomenon we've noticed about these ideas about people or (assumed) types of people, who are claimed just by word of mouth to do or say or believe some thing that of course any reasonable/sane/etc person would see is ridiculous and awful and bad and horrible. (...sort of sarcasm there, because we've been in unpleasant social situations in the past where we had certain things basically shoved in our face and treated like we had to put them down or mock them or make some big statement about how terrible they were, the idea being that every okay/sane/good/etc person should feel that way about them. When we didn't in all cases even see what the problem was, or we thought the person/people in question were being badly misrepresented.)

And how ideas about people can just grow and grow through endless repetition and appeal to outrage, until "everyone" knows that a certain person or group does or thinks a certain thing, when that supposed "common knowledge" in no way resembles the reality. We were poking at ideas for a conlang recently and thinking about the role of evidentiality in language, and the concept of a culture in which linguistically marking a certain idea as common knowledge might be seen as rude or questionable. Also some of the ideas we've seen that get circulated around about plurals or certain types of systems, including one that we had to rebut yet again on a community recently. Also how some of those confusions might result from lack of linguistic markers in English to distinguish between subjective mythic experience and tangible physical experience, but that that doesn't necessarily excuse people for taking ideas of "all X think Y" and holding people to an idea they may have never actually subscribed to.

A bit of an atypical post for us-- it's another in our very infrequent series of general disambiguation posts, that we want to keep around partly to have something to point people at, so we don't have to explain the same thing over and over.

(This is also not in response to anything recent in this journal. But it has been on our mind lately because of things we've been reading elsewhere. And a lot of this stuff is probably known/obvious already to those who read our DW, but we wanted to have it for future reference.)

We very rarely try to lay down any kind of rules at all in this journal-- we tend to assume in most cases that, as within our own system, having a good set of ethics and common sense works just as well, and sometimes better, for preventing blowups and drama than elaborate sets of strict all-or-nothing rules. But this is a topic we've been wanting to write something about lately, and since we're going to try to complete a late BADD (Blogging Against Disablism Day) post, we wanted to set this one out. Applying in particular to comments on the post, since it may be linked from other places and read by more people than our posts usually are, but it really applies to everything we write here.

That rule is, basically: No language dickery. This doesn't mean that we don't think that some words are demeaning and prejudiced and should never be used. The stuff we call "language dickery" has more to do with a certain way of thinking about and using language in general and assuming that everyone shares this way of thinking about and using it. Amanda of Ballastexistenz touches on some similar stuff in this post, The Fireworks Are Interesting, but I'll just quote the most directly relevant part for those who don't want to read the whole thing:

"Just because I happen to use the nearest available set of translation tools does not mean I have, in picking up those tools, agreed to the entire worldview of the people who built the tools. [...] I use these tools because the alternative is silence, not because I have picked up an entire set of beliefs about the world with every phrase I use."

And we've become very aware recently that we use a lot of words, because they happen to be the closest shorthand to make our thoughts understandable to the largest number of people, that are apparently associated with some abstract, wordy, labyrinthine ideologies. Or commonly used by people who subscribe to those ideologies and think that you can't really understand the world if you can't juggle a lot of them in your head. And where use of those words is considered, by both people who agree with those ideologies and those who disagree with them, to mean that you "belong to" those ideologies in a way we've never really been able to belong to any at all. We can be around and agree with some of the principles inherent in some of these big sprawling academic ideologies, when they're stripped down to their most basic elements, but our brain certainly doesn't handle them well.

Because of that, choosing terminology can become a minefield. There are people who will see one or two words or phrases used in a certain way in your writing, ignore everything else, and decide that they mean you are With some ideology they're vehemently against, in a way we are never really With any ideology at all. And start ranting about how what they assume you must mean by a certain word, is something utterly bad and horrible, and presumably you must be too (or just tragically misguided), since using That Word inevitably means you're With that ideology, or at least what they perceive it to be.

Just, no. We do NOT necessarily come with these giant tangled philosophies attached just because we used a few words or word-sets in common with them.

And if people don't see the difference between this kind of thing and asking people to not use words we consider hateful/slurs/etc, we'll try to explain: there is a difference between asking people to, say, not use ableist or homophobic or transphobic language-- such as "That's so retarded/gay!" or "S/he's not a REAL man/woman!"-- and demanding that everyone structure their words in a particular contorted way to discuss a certain issue. With the attendant assumption that words form the basis of everyone's thought and that by analyzing someone's words you can trace the entire chain of a thought process in their head. This does not work with us. At all. Most often with us, it's the ideas that come first and then we have to go scrambling around to find bits of language to fit to them, and sometimes consciously decide to use certain words over others because they seem to be relatively more widely used and understood.

If you are a person who is strongly inclined to forming/choosing among/tinkering with various sorts of ideology, don't assume that everyone's brain works just like yours. Don't assume that every single person in the world picks and chooses from elaborate ideology sets and language sets and writes everything from a deep-rooted belief in every last principle of them. Or is even necessarily aware that a word they have reached for is supposed to have a huge list of principles attached to it in the first place.

For some of us, words are several levels above the basic level where thoughts even start to come together to begin with. And trying to force ourselves to function in the same way as people for whom words are the baseline of thought is a short ticket to burnout, overload, and painful frustration. It's not that this makes us incapable of having a coherent worldview or an accurate understanding of how various parts of reality work. In fact, there are times when I think we perceive it more accurately than many people who insist on running through long ideology-mazes with thick and rigid walls in order to arrive at any conclusion about anything, or adopting any ethical principle. But be that as it may, people who can navigate their way through ideologies and line up and use all their words and concepts in the right way are, on the whole, more valued not only by general society, but by the vast majority of cultures and subcultures out there, including otherwise marginalized ones.

And no matter how much we may impress others as being someone who is "good with words"-- and we've been told that at times-- the simple fact is that very few people ever see the invisible cost, the invisible effort, in what we produce. We've actually been able to make it more understandable to some people with the analogy of a duck-- to someone who sees only the water's surface, we appear to be smoothly gliding across it. Underneath the water, the part that's important to us, we're paddling like hell. So don't assume, either, that because someone appears to you to be "good with words" on the whole, it's an effortless thing for them, or that the words they put down are perfect reflections of how those ideas popped into being in their mind. And trying to drag us into arguments about whether one word or concept we used necessarily entails some other thing in someone else's ideology is a fast way to drag us into a state where we can be easily manipulated and confused.

Back when we first started writing down the thoughts and ideas that led up to this, a few months ago, we had just discovered that deja.com still existed, it had just been taken over by Google. The search feature was weird and didn't seem to work as remembered, or they haven't finished working out all the bugs in the system, but by plugging names into the right places, we somehow did manage to come up with a bunch of old posts to Usenet we made under old handles and emails, dating back almost from when we first got online.

(No, we're not going to mention what any of the names we posted under were-- we don't really see any point in it, considering that it would just bring up a bunch of things we said that had little relation to our real thoughts and opinions, or had grains of truth in them but were extremely distorted in many ways too complex to explain, ways we'd been taught to view ourselves both by therapists and by various social groups we'd moved around in or at the fringes of.)

We also said and believed some things back then that now look pretty disturbing or ignorant to us, apparently completely honestly. Though I think we'd be more concerned to have realized our beliefs and opinions were all exactly the same as they were back then and hadn't changed at all.

( Some thoughts about our communication back then. )

( And thoughts about the bullying and trolling and social dynamics we saw in those communities. Warning, long post is long. )

Anyway. Looking back on all of this... it is both troubling and relieving to see how much the basic patterns of certain dynamics in certain communities don't change, whether or not we were involved in them. The things we wrote about in the last couple of paragraphs, we're... still fully taking it in, I think, and considering the connections to more recent situations we've been in or around. And how, despite incredibly awkward language ability, we weren't actually the overwhelmingly negative force we feared we were, a few times, in some of those groups.

I think people who get involved in situations like ours, and respond by ultimately going, "lol, IT'S JUST FANDOM, PEOPLE WHO TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY ARE STUPID" (or variations on that basic idea) are missing the point. Because the kind of social dynamics we saw as far as attacking and defending people, and people changing their opinions based on who was dominating the community at any given time, are also prevalent in communities where far more serious things than fandom are at stake.

Also, we are tentatively setting comments on this to being screened, in case anyone wants to mention anything they don't want to be public. Just let us know if you want your comment screened or not.

-mostly Julian and Riel

Mostly, this will be a mirror of our LJ, sethrenn, and used for posting of more self-advocacy-oriented stuff, while general day-to-day natter will stay on LJ. At this point, we don't plan on making any friends-only entries or filters, though we might change our mind at some point depending on how things go.

Bullies and trolls are not welcome here. If your intent is to bully, manipulate, or concern-troll us, our friends and acquaintances, or autistics or plurals in general, we will not give you a platform for it here. If you want to ask questions of us, many of them may be better answered on our webpage, so please bear that in mind. We don't want to sound offputting, but being constantly put on the spot in public and asked to answer questions feels very much like being told that the fact that we exist obligates us to constantly satisfy the curiosities of those with more privilege and power. And we've had enough of the self-narrating zoo exhibit treatment in other contexts, so please, if you want to ask us a question in the vein of "this is all so fascinating, and I was wondering if...", think about how you would feel if someone asked you a similar question, why you want to know it, whether you may be letting an unconscious sense of entitlement affect you, and check to see whether we have already answered it on our page.