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greenstormI can lie for survival, and a lot of my life did feel like that was needed. When I'm not in the kind of fear that comes out in my body, though, I am too resentful and angry at the pressure to lie to do it often. When I'm angry I can't lie but I can often misperceive the truth.
I've spent a lot of my life in the fear that lives in my body, often without knowing it. I've also spent a lot of my life outside of it: I've had a lot of life after all. When I'm afraid -- of being without food and shelter, of being without love or care or human consideration -- I often can't connect to other people in a real way.
When I depend on someone else for my needs I am afraid of them because they can withdraw support for those needs. My entire history is folks withdrawing Maslow's bottom-tier supports from me because I don't behave properly when my soul starts to wake up and connect. I'm too independent, intense, analytical, loud, absent, out-of-scale, inhuman, incorrectly emotional. People get deeply uncomfortable around that. They don't feel safe, they don't feel loved, they don't feel validated. If I only toned it down a little bit, shifted this or that a little bit, waited a little bit, compromised on a different set of things, was a little more secretive, lied a little more, then it would be ok. But it is not ok.
That's why I entered into this partnership with myself. That's why I'm here with Threshold. The land does not think I'm excessive: we understand and love each other and it's just ok. I don't need to be a little quieter, a little less intense, a little less excessive. I can put in my two hundred tomato plants and see what happens and the land doesn't tell me it's ridiculous or that it can't be done. We work together and out of it comes the joy of partnership I can't have on a longstanding ongoing basis with people. Threshold lets me decide how much of myself I'm going to put into what I want to do, then we do it.
People don't often ask me to be someone else completely. The manic pixie dream girl stereotype has served me well: people love a quirky unconventional person they read as female coming into their life and turning positive regard on them while they explore the edges of convention they'd never noticed before. People love someone weirder than them in the room who fits a comforting stereotype because it gives their own weirdness room to breathe; as long as I remain within the stereotype and follow the script I'm not challenging their construction of love or reasonableness. They love that at first.
I'm not a manic pixie dream girl, though. They are not the protagonist in my life nor can they ever be the center of it; I do not always believe or feel the right way about things; and I'm not even a girl. I love my body; I value my voice and my curiosity; I don't mind going big just to see what happens as much as I sometimes get caught in just details to try and understand what makes up the base fabric of what I'm doing. I believe in the world, not just as backdrop, but as a system we're all part of. I love the world. I love my self. When I'm safe, I love every fucking thing whether or not I'm supposed to. It's typical in poly to say that love is infinite but time is not and yeah: my love is very fucking divided. The only things it recoils from are real fear about my survival and from the demand to love and people only demand love from people they believe love them. For so many people love is a contract. My love isn't a contract. My contracts are contracts.
In any case folks like the first taste. I don't know whether this is because they don't perceive me fully until later or because I tone it down a little in the beginning. This is where I was confused with the autistic concept of masking. I can't "mask" well: masking is lying about who you are and it would destroy my place in the world with anger and resentment so quickly I'd be lying in the gutter or a jail before you could even blink.
What I do is veil. I draw a mist around me that obscures my inner engine, that quiets that loud thrum into a whisper. I say I like gardening instead of saying my life exists to interact with plants and I have done variety trials with nearly the entirety of my free time. I stay quiet or add my pronouns to my signature or zoom name instead of saying, "hey, I'm not a lady and I'm only fractionally a man, this ladies' night/women's group/no men policy makes me feel pretty invisible". I say I have two partners instead of saying I don't base my attachments or commitments on who I have sex with. I say "I'm not sure that will achieve your desired results" instead of saying that everyone deserves access to food, shelter, community, love, and security of person regardless of their beliefs and actions. I say there's a big urban/rural divide these days instead of saying "don't dehumanize my neighbours". I say I think people need more connection to the land instead of saying that the human/nature divide is a ridiculous artifact or that our focus on the land as either an anthropomorphized security blanket or a source of resources is an impoverishment of our souls. For that matter, I don't use the word soul much and I politely ignore when folks lean hard into body/mind dichotomies.
I veil. I dim. I quiet. I polite. It's not quite lying so it doesn't bump into my demands and anger. It just diminishes me, living in fear, treating everyone as if they were an enemy because I can't afford to test them just in case they actually are.
Facebook memes tell me I should tell my friends I love them more. I don't love my friends. I love the people I feel safe unveiling around and who also are willing to unveil around me. I love the people I can say the above to and they respond, not like I've just pooped in their livingroom, not like I've just kicked their puppy-selves, but with whatever level of agreement or arguement or indifference they are feeling about the thing. I love the people for whom my existence, as I am, is not a personal affront. They don't need to like me or get along with me or anything in particular. They just need to not kill me either overtly or subtly. And, what do we need not to be killed overtly or subtly? Maslow says: food, shelter, love, regard, curiosity, beauty. The Blackfoot who inspired him say: self-actualization, meaningful community, and the belief that community is safe into the future.
Autistic communities ask all the time, in a kind of oppression olympics, is it better to be able to mask and burn out and collapse in on yourself and forget who you are, or is it better to not be able to mask and be marginalized by society and lose fulfillment of your physical and community needs? I started this post to explore whether it was better to veil since maybe that was a less corrosive alternative.
In the end? No. None of it's really ok. It's shivering in the snow and eating tree bark when we should be recieved into the firelight at a banquet. That's my only answer that isn't a lie.
I've spent a lot of my life in the fear that lives in my body, often without knowing it. I've also spent a lot of my life outside of it: I've had a lot of life after all. When I'm afraid -- of being without food and shelter, of being without love or care or human consideration -- I often can't connect to other people in a real way.
When I depend on someone else for my needs I am afraid of them because they can withdraw support for those needs. My entire history is folks withdrawing Maslow's bottom-tier supports from me because I don't behave properly when my soul starts to wake up and connect. I'm too independent, intense, analytical, loud, absent, out-of-scale, inhuman, incorrectly emotional. People get deeply uncomfortable around that. They don't feel safe, they don't feel loved, they don't feel validated. If I only toned it down a little bit, shifted this or that a little bit, waited a little bit, compromised on a different set of things, was a little more secretive, lied a little more, then it would be ok. But it is not ok.
That's why I entered into this partnership with myself. That's why I'm here with Threshold. The land does not think I'm excessive: we understand and love each other and it's just ok. I don't need to be a little quieter, a little less intense, a little less excessive. I can put in my two hundred tomato plants and see what happens and the land doesn't tell me it's ridiculous or that it can't be done. We work together and out of it comes the joy of partnership I can't have on a longstanding ongoing basis with people. Threshold lets me decide how much of myself I'm going to put into what I want to do, then we do it.
People don't often ask me to be someone else completely. The manic pixie dream girl stereotype has served me well: people love a quirky unconventional person they read as female coming into their life and turning positive regard on them while they explore the edges of convention they'd never noticed before. People love someone weirder than them in the room who fits a comforting stereotype because it gives their own weirdness room to breathe; as long as I remain within the stereotype and follow the script I'm not challenging their construction of love or reasonableness. They love that at first.
I'm not a manic pixie dream girl, though. They are not the protagonist in my life nor can they ever be the center of it; I do not always believe or feel the right way about things; and I'm not even a girl. I love my body; I value my voice and my curiosity; I don't mind going big just to see what happens as much as I sometimes get caught in just details to try and understand what makes up the base fabric of what I'm doing. I believe in the world, not just as backdrop, but as a system we're all part of. I love the world. I love my self. When I'm safe, I love every fucking thing whether or not I'm supposed to. It's typical in poly to say that love is infinite but time is not and yeah: my love is very fucking divided. The only things it recoils from are real fear about my survival and from the demand to love and people only demand love from people they believe love them. For so many people love is a contract. My love isn't a contract. My contracts are contracts.
In any case folks like the first taste. I don't know whether this is because they don't perceive me fully until later or because I tone it down a little in the beginning. This is where I was confused with the autistic concept of masking. I can't "mask" well: masking is lying about who you are and it would destroy my place in the world with anger and resentment so quickly I'd be lying in the gutter or a jail before you could even blink.
What I do is veil. I draw a mist around me that obscures my inner engine, that quiets that loud thrum into a whisper. I say I like gardening instead of saying my life exists to interact with plants and I have done variety trials with nearly the entirety of my free time. I stay quiet or add my pronouns to my signature or zoom name instead of saying, "hey, I'm not a lady and I'm only fractionally a man, this ladies' night/women's group/no men policy makes me feel pretty invisible". I say I have two partners instead of saying I don't base my attachments or commitments on who I have sex with. I say "I'm not sure that will achieve your desired results" instead of saying that everyone deserves access to food, shelter, community, love, and security of person regardless of their beliefs and actions. I say there's a big urban/rural divide these days instead of saying "don't dehumanize my neighbours". I say I think people need more connection to the land instead of saying that the human/nature divide is a ridiculous artifact or that our focus on the land as either an anthropomorphized security blanket or a source of resources is an impoverishment of our souls. For that matter, I don't use the word soul much and I politely ignore when folks lean hard into body/mind dichotomies.
I veil. I dim. I quiet. I polite. It's not quite lying so it doesn't bump into my demands and anger. It just diminishes me, living in fear, treating everyone as if they were an enemy because I can't afford to test them just in case they actually are.
Facebook memes tell me I should tell my friends I love them more. I don't love my friends. I love the people I feel safe unveiling around and who also are willing to unveil around me. I love the people I can say the above to and they respond, not like I've just pooped in their livingroom, not like I've just kicked their puppy-selves, but with whatever level of agreement or arguement or indifference they are feeling about the thing. I love the people for whom my existence, as I am, is not a personal affront. They don't need to like me or get along with me or anything in particular. They just need to not kill me either overtly or subtly. And, what do we need not to be killed overtly or subtly? Maslow says: food, shelter, love, regard, curiosity, beauty. The Blackfoot who inspired him say: self-actualization, meaningful community, and the belief that community is safe into the future.
Autistic communities ask all the time, in a kind of oppression olympics, is it better to be able to mask and burn out and collapse in on yourself and forget who you are, or is it better to not be able to mask and be marginalized by society and lose fulfillment of your physical and community needs? I started this post to explore whether it was better to veil since maybe that was a less corrosive alternative.
In the end? No. None of it's really ok. It's shivering in the snow and eating tree bark when we should be recieved into the firelight at a banquet. That's my only answer that isn't a lie.
