Tag: general consensus reality

Queer as a verb

(Prompted by a discussion of the word “neuroqueer”.)

I’m not sure how I feel about it in general, but it definitely doesn’t do anything for me.

I don’t queer things. I don’t subvert things.

It’s like this.

“Queering” something basically means interpreting it in a different way, seeing it from a different perspective, right? Queering X means doing something that basically fits in the same conceptual slot as X, but with different underlying assumptions, a different point of view. (And maybe specifically a point of view that’s not traditional or conservative.)

I’m too busy to do that.

There’s a cute metaphorical phrase that says everyone has a little voice inside of them, their inspiration or their soul or their desires, telling them what they want and what they should do.

Mine is nonverbal.

And I spend all my time in the world of words, and ideas that other people know about, and I’m pretty good at that, but I can end up pretty far away from that voice. It gets pretty hard to hear. I have to really work to get in touch with it, sometimes.

Thinking about societal norms and expectations makes that even harder. Trying too hard to understand them overwhelms that little voice, and wondering what people will think of my decisions, what they expect of me, how they’ll judge me, is paralyzing.

And the way I deal with that, personally, is to shut it out completely.

So sometimes I may end up subverting things by accident, in the process of trying to follow the tiny little thread of what I want, but I don’t have the time or the brain capacity to go after subversion on purpose. It just doesn’t work for me, at least not as applied to my own life.

Right, well. People on my dash are talking about rape involving manipulation and pressuring someone else to take the active role, and if I’m going to be in this state of mind I may as well write the post I’ve been thinking about about gaslighting.

I’ve seen some people lately trying to discuss how the idea of gaslighting gets diluted.

My proposed definition is this: Gaslighting is when an abuser sets up a situation in which when they contradict someone, the other person will feel that they don’t have the power to disagree or fight for their own point of view. Gaslighting is controlling the accepted version of reality. It is making someone feel like they have to accept the abuser’s account of what’s real, even when it contradicts the evidence of their own senses.

That’s the important point. Contradicting someone, in itself, is not necessarily gaslighting, although it may be scary and triggering to someone who has been gaslighted before. Gaslighting requires a power dynamic.

I mean, the usual definition, starting from the movie that gives us the term gaslighting, refers to the process of creating that power dynamic. It refers to creating situations which make other people doubt their perception of reality. So you could say “Gaslighting is creating a power dynamic,” instead.

But definitions that focus on the intent of the person doing the harm don’t tend to work well, and indeed I think the reason this one gets elided into “anything to do with questioning perceptions of reality” is precisely because it starts before and away from the gaslighted person’s experience. However we define it, I think, the thing we’re trying to define is that feeling that anything you could say to defend your point of view will be useless, that anything you perceive or know can be overwritten by someone else deciding it isn’t true.

It’s late. Good night. More on this later, maybe.

(So yeah the existence and contents of the “general consensus reality” tag indicate that it’s not surprising I have strong feelings about this, and also indicate that I may be completely off base from how other people feel about this, I know.)

Oh also

This phenomenon is related to the whole “I live in consensus reality” thing too, isn’t it?

————

I feel like I need to clarify that this isn’t actually as scary as it sounds. It’s not like I’m having really scary “this isn’t real” experiences all the time. I don’t actually feel like things are less real when I’m alone or anything like that. There’s just a disconnect between how I perceive? interact with? think about? things when I’m alone vs. when I’m with people, and I’m not really sure how to describe it.

Today I noticed a thing.

I went shopping with Sparkly. We returned some things that didn’t really fit em, and wandered around a bunch of stores, and on the way home ey suggested we could pick up sandwiches for dinner. But ey was very tired, and so I dropped em off at home and then went to get food by myself.

And on my way to the restaurant alone, after being fine with all sorts of wandering and last-minute decisions all afternoon, I started thinking,  “Wait, shit, I need to stop and think. I need to make a plan. What am I supposed to be doing next? I’m going down this street, to get sandwiches, and then what?”

It’s not like I follow Sparkly around with no will of my own. Today I read maps and gave em directions, expressed plenty of opinions and even did some wandering around by myself.

But ey was in some way helping, I guess? Responding to other people’s ideas is different from making decisions on my own.

I think things like this have happened to me a few times before. I talked to someone else about what I was going to do and it seemed reasonably clear, and once I was by myself I did not feel sufficiently prepared at all.

The tricky thing is

If I had been diagnosed as a kid, theoretically it would have been so fucking wonderful. I could have coped a lot better with various things if I’d understood myself better. I could have gotten accomodations in school. I could have had words! to describe! my experiences! and it may not seem like it but that’s a big fucking deal.

I have a lot of trouble interfacing my feelings with the world of Real Things, i.e. things whose existence other people are aware of, which therefore I can talk about. Don’t ask me why I apparently live in General Consenus Reality, I don’t fully understand it myself. I think trouble switching topics and contradicting people’s assumptions is also part of it. Anyway, this is the world I live in, there are Things That Happen and then there are Consensus Real Things, and when the two categories don’t overlap (or I don’t understand how they overlap) effectively I can’t talk about some things I experience. So. Yeah. Having cognitive frameworks and specific words for things that I couldn’t put into words before is a big fucking deal.

But the thing is…

If I had been diagnosed with autism as a kid, I would still have needed the internet and the 21st century to find out probably 80-90% of the things that have helped me so much. Research, scholarship, medical knowledge about autism is not that great, even now. The things a doctor would have told me/my parents would probably not have been that great. Whatever special education I was given would probably not have been that helpful. And it might have been truly horrible.

I thought I made a short post about things like this before, but I can’t find it.

———-

So many things happened to me that shouldn’t have happened, though. I could have learned so many things! I could have spent so much less time feeling just useless and incapable– so much less time metaphorically hitting my head against things until I somehow managed to do them by brute force, instead of actually dealing with my problems! I wasted so much time. And I hurt so much, for no good reason. I couldn’t do things, and I couldn’t explain why, and that doesn’t incline people to try to help you.

I don’t specifically recall being called lazy, but I do recall the simple incomprehension, why is this very smart girl not doing what she’s supposed to do? Why doesn’t she understand that she has to do this? Dear teachers, I didn’t understand why either! I, too, did not comprehend why you sometimes expected me to know things that I just didn’t get! And I still don’t really know why exactly that happens.

———–

Why didn’t anyone notice? Why?

(The smart betting is on: I was “too smart”, and not in a “splinter skill”/”idiot savant” enough way. With “I was female” coming in second.)

Oh, here’s one thing tween!me could actually have told you: I knew I didn’t have like five separate talents, that made me good at different subject areas. I thought of myself as having one talent or maybe two, for patterns and memorization, that happened to be applicable to a lot of different subjects. I would have told you, if you’d asked the right questions, that I was good at spelling and grammar and foreign languages and algebra and geometry to the extent that they were all basically the same– they required the same skill to learn.

I’m not sure if that’s actually significantly “splinter skill”-like or not.