It’s Your Life!
Yours, and no-one elses. Know yourself, value yourself, and trust your own instincts. And don’t allow others, serving extraneous imperatives, having you doubting yourself and acquiescing in things you know are not right for you. Freedom is about having choices and, of course, the more money, power, and control in society you have the more choices you have. The tragedy is that autistic people, who need autonomy the most, are the least likely to be blessed with a range of social choices. Suffering impairments in social interaction, communication, and imaginations leaves an autistic person having to reach out to and rely on others, those who, adapted to a given society, give advice based on their own complicity and conformity - as if this is the measure of success. This creates a pressure to acquiesce in the advice and direction of others, even when it doesn’t feel right. Be open to journeying out into the big wide world. That’s the place to be, after all. Happiness is achieved through being able to expand one’s being outwards; unhappiness comes with self-absorption, the retreat inwards. But be careful as you go. Be trusting but be questioning.
I can speak from experience here. Time and again I have found that people, at best, will offer only what they have. Some will make it clear how little they have, reducing your expectations to a ‘realistic’ level; others will try to live up to your deperate hopes to give the impression that they have more to offer than they have. The former dash your hopes immediately, disillusioning you with the demand to shape up, fit in, adapt and conform; the latter string you along, keeping your faint hopes alive long enough to keep you keen, until in the end they dash your hopes just the same. I have wasted an awful lot of good-will, energy, and time allowing myself to be strung along by others, in the vague hope that they have something substantial to offer, something more than the usual advice and instruction with regard to the disciple of self-change and self-regulation.
One of my favourite books when I was young was Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. I say favourite book. It wasn’t so much the reading as the inspiration to go and sword-fence with my brother it gave that I responded to most. But one passage from the book stayed with me for life:
‘Without a blush, men made their way in the world by themeans of women blushing. Such as were only beautiful gave their beauty, whence, without doubt, comes the proverb, "The most beautiful girl in the world can only give what she has."’
I was always intrigued to know what it was that a beautiful girl had to offer, and knew I wouldn’t mind it if she ever offered it my way. As the years passed, I came to appreciate the deeper meaning. I have had dealings with many agencies and organisations over the years, dealing with training, employment, health, housing, and welfare issues. They offer what they can, and, with honourable exceptions, it has invariably been far short of what has been needed to make a substantial difference. The message, time and again, has been that you are on your own, responsible for your life, and charged with the task of making yourself fit to meet the Darwinian struggle for survival out there in an uncaring social environment.
There's no beauty to any of it.
Like we don’t know about the nature of that ‘free’ competition’!
Like we don’t know how rigged game of ‘equality of opportunity’ works against those whose nature is such that they cannot but play the game ‘differently’!
You seek help to be able to participate and play, only to be ‘advised’ about the rules of the game and how best to adapt to them. We know this!
This is useless.
My advice is this:
Reach out to others, seek to be active in the world. The expansion of being outwards is the road to happiness. Avoid introspection and self-absorption. Understand that self-knowledge possesses an ineliminable, valuable, and rewarding social dimension.
But don’t sacrifice yourself too easily and don’t allow others to exploit your trusting nature to divert you into sterile channels. Adaptation and accommodation are worthless if they entail having to subordinate your essential needs. Don't allow others to take their own path of least resistance, because their laziness and, frankly, uncaring attitude leaves you having to do an awful lot of hard work to precious little productive end. Beware the institutional and organisational imperatives driving the reality principle. The 'argument' that that's the way 'the real world' is is no argument at all, merely a statement of the problem to be resolved.
It’s your life. Remain the annoying idiot child and keep asking 'why?' and don't accept anything less than an answer. And if others can't offer and answer, don't place yourself in a position of making do because there seems to be nothing else. Don’t allow others to bend and shape it because it fits the only help they have to offer. Don't lose your ability to trust, but protect it well to preserve it over time: know that most others are much less concerned with your happiness and fulfilment than you are.
And be prepared to keep walking the Long, Lonely Highway to who knows where, if anywhere. It is better to keep travelling in hope than to accept journey's end in Heartbreak Hotel.
