Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Neurodivergency

Free to be me (maybe?)

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In yesterday’s post, I was talking about bras. Why? Because they are symbolic of societal norms that I consider pointless. I mentioned that so many women on the blog I was reading (and commenting) were so vehementy pro-bra, it surprised me. Not that they wore them or felt compelled to wear them, but that they were downright venemous about people with boobs not wearing them to work.

It caught me off-guard until I realized that it was the same thing that made women furious with me when I was in my twenties saying I was not going to have children. What’s more, I did not want them, and I was not apologetic about it. At all. Mind you, I wasn’t rude about it, either. I never brought it up myself because why would I? I didn’t think about it except when I was asked about it. Like, I wouldn’t mention I never thought about buying a drum set, either, because I don’t tihnk about drums at all.

I received a bunch of reactions to my decisoin–which I naively thought would only affect me. I was so young and so silly. How could I not know that the state of my uterus was public knowledge and that everyone had a say in the contents thereof? Am I being sarcastic? Fuck yeah! I took so much shit back then for not wanting to have children, and it took me at least a decade to unpack the layers.

I want to mention that these were all women. Men did not care if I wanted to have children–in fact, most of them wanted me NOT to want to have them (at least in my twenties). The biggest reaction by far was the condescension of, “Just wait until ______” (You get older, you hit thirty, you meet the right guy.)

That infuriated me because they presumed to know me better than I knew myself.  Or they wanted to ram me into that female-shaped hole, my actual personality be damned. Also, even if I did change my mind at some point, tthat wasn’t where I was at the time I met them, so mentioning future me was futile.

Then there were women who were just curious about me saynig I did not want kids. What did I mean by that? How could I not want them? These women had a hint of envy in their voices, and I think they were questioning their own choices. I didn’t mind nudging them to seriously consider not having children.

Then, there were the women who got angry at me. Like, actually furious. They said I must think they were stupid/bad for having children/wanting them. No matter how much I said I didn’t think that of them (hell, I didn’t think about them at all, which probably would make them feel worse), they just got angrier and angrier.


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A freak like me

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I’ve been talking about gender for the last few posts and how I don’t get it. Now, I want to get more broad (heh) in general because that’s how I feel about so many things.

A few years ago, I started chatting with someone in a Discord I’m in out of the main forums. In private messages, in other words. She and I have a lot in common, and we clicked once we started DMing each other.

She and I got to talking about neurodivergency because I had struggled with fitting in all my life. After we messaged back and forth for a length of time, she asked if I had ever thought that I might be autistic. That never occurred to me because I had the stereotypical image of autism in my mind. My brother? Yeah, he was on the spectrum. Me? Hell, no!

It was only after talking with her and simultanuously watching a few videos on autism that I slowly realized the stereotypes weren’t right. Or rather, they only depicted a very narrow kind of autism, which, not coincidentally, centered on young white boys.

(Lengthy rant on sexism in health issues inserted here.)

The biggest thing that shocked me to learn was that it’s not true that autistic people are not empathetic/don’t feel emotions. I mean, there are autistic people like this, true (like my brother), but there are also plenty of autistic people who feel too much emotions. Or, they feel other people’s emotions, but don’t know what to do with them or misinterpret what those emotions are.

There’s a saying when it comes to autism–if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. There are throughlines and shared traits, yes, but every autistic person is diferent. In my case, I had to deconstruct the image of a person with autism because it was getting in the way.

There are some common traits, of course, such as hyperfocus on certain interests, stimming, and  uncomfortableness in social situations, to name a few. The problem is that for non-male people (women and others), those traits are liable to get overlooked, chalked up to something else like anxiety, or used against said people more harshly than they are against autistic men (which is already harsh).

How often do you now hear about men acting badly, “Oh, maybe he’s on the spectrum” as a way of excusing his appalling behavior? And yet, you don’t hear it about women and other non-male people hardly at all if ever. They don’t get the same grace and/or amused tolerance.

Side note: By the way, you want to know if someone is acting badly on purpose or if he’s ignorant about it? Look to see if he’s acting the same way with people who have power over him or with men in general. If he’s trulyy autistic, then he’ll be awkward around everyone–not just grossly so around the women he wants to fuck.


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More on being mindful and meditation

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I want to talk more about mindfulness, meditation, and Taiji. I started a post aabout it yesterday, but as is my wont, I meandered all over the place. And probably fell asleep while writing it. My sleep is just terrible lately, for reasons that aren’t part of this post. So, yeah. Mindfulness? Miss me with that noise.

Look.

Look!

I’m not against mindfulness. In general, I’m pro-doing what makes you feel better as long as it’s not harmful to you in the long run or to other people. And, by not harmful to others, I mean truly harmful. Not, “you hurt me by setting entirely reasonable boundaries” harmful, but actually harmful.

I’m a big believer in acknowledging that most of us are just getting by as best we can. Life is hard, yo. And that’s for almost everyone.

Side note: I had a deep and abiding hatred for Christianity for most of my twenties. I had the  misfortune of being raised in a restrictive, sexist, conservative, Evangelical Christian church. I reacted very poorly to God with a capital G after that.

It took me ten years to get over my hatred. Then, I spent my late-thirties being studiously neutral to Christianity (while secretly judging it). It’s only in my forties and fifties that I can truly say that I’m fine with Christianity*.

Side note to the side note: It’s like Christmas and my birthday. I hated both when I was younger.Really hated them both. Then I reached a point when I said I didn’t hate them any longer, but still felt negatively about them. It took a long time (and a lot of Taiji) before I actually felt neutral about them. Do I feel positively about them? No. But, I’ll take it as a win that I no longer hate both.

Also, I have a new birthday. It’s the day I died and came back to life. It means much more to me than my actual birthday because, well, it just does.

Side note to the side note to the side note: When I was in my twenties, my mom would call me every year on my birthday. Foolishly, I would try to brush it off because I absolutely hated my birthday back then. My mother would get teary and go on and on about how important the day had been to her. That and the birth of my brother were the two most important events of her life. She went on about it for so long, I started comforting her.

That’s my role in life, you see. I’ve called myself her emotional support human, and I am used to it now. Back then, though, it really chafed that she dumped all this on me ON MY BIRTHDAY. It had to be about her, even on a day that was supposedly supposed to be about me. One reason I hated my birthday, by the way.

Wow. I really went in circles in this post, didn’t I?


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Some words are meaningless

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There are some words that I just don’t understand or get. I mean, I know them on an intelligence level, but I don’t get them on a cellular level.

One is gender, but that’s more the concept of gender. I’m not talking about that in this post because that’s not the point. I want to talk about another big picture word that I feel gets too mired down in toxic Christianity. (And maybe other religions, but that’s the one I know best.)

Fair warning: My bias is that I grew up in a very sexist, patriarchal, conservative with a small-c,  toxic, and just overwhelmingly negative Evangelical Taiwanese church. It was awful, and my lasting memories are, quite frankly, scarring. I walkekd away from the church in my early twenties, fought about it with my mother for about ten years (while being intensely angry at a god I didn’t think existed), and then made my peace with it.

However, any time the word/concept of forgiveness comes up, I become incandescent with rage. Or at least I used to. it’s not as bad now, but I still involuntarily grimace when I hear/read the word. And no matter how people try to explain it in a positive way, I still view it as a negative.

“Forgiveness does not mean forgetting.”

“Forgiveness just means getting past the anger.”

“Forgiveness is for the forgiver, not the forgiven.”

These are the common phrases, and they never fail to elicit a huge eyeroll from me (even if it’s mental).

I was reading an old Captain Awkward post, and the idea of forgiveness came up. One commenter made several comments that closely mirrored how I feel about it. I’m not going to say the name, but she talked about how it bothered her after she left her abuser how people wanted her to perform being a good victim by at least giving lip service to forgiving her abuser (paraphrasing).

I appreciated that she didn’t just push back on forgiveness itself, but that she embraced anger. She mentioned how anger helped her, and I really related to that. Growing up, I was told that any so-called negative emotion I showed was not ok. Oh, it wasn’t said in those specific words, but believe me, I knew it. By the look on my mother’s face. By the way my father shouted at me if I  dared show I was not happy.

People were supportive, but there were still murmurs of, “Oh sure, anger for a while, but then–you let go of it, right?” To which she defiantly said that her anger was what healed her. Again, I’m paraphrasing, but she rejected the idea that you had to let go of your anger at any point.


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A (not-so) beautiful (and-complex) mind

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I’m back to muse more about neurodivergency, societal norms, being a weirdo, and how this is all connected. Here’s my post from yesterday about how I just think differently than other people in many things. I ended it with the example of my feelings about two video games, The Surge and Nioh.

To sum up, Nioh is widely considered one of the best soulslikes out there. It’s exalted for its endless systems and the way they level up the weapons. So many people hold it in high esteem. I tried to play it when it came out, and I made it about a third of the way through before finally declaring defeat. No fun was I having, and I just could not do it any longer. (I also tried Nioh 2 right before my medical crisis in which, I kid you not, I died to the second boss 99 times. Nioh 2 keeps track of how many times you die to a boss.)

The same year the first Nioh came out (2017), so did another soulslike called The Surge. It was so janky, it was soon fondly known as Junkyard Souls. The novel thing about this game was that the enemies were some kind of robots (sautered mechanical bits to them), and you could attack their limbs rather than just kill them. If you managed to sever a limb, you got the armor or weapon that came with it.

And, one of the best things about the game was that the category your weapon was in leveled up as you used that weapon. That meant that your weapon leveled up with you. The downside to that was if you wanted to switch weapon categories, of course.

That’s just the backstory. I was in the public chat for a content creator I watch. Yes, it’s FromSoft-related. Some of the guys (and, yes, they were all guys) were gushing about how great Nioh was and how it was the best soulslike by far. Now, there has been some discussion about whether Nioh really was a soulslike or not, but let’s just take it as a given that it was a soulslike for this discussion.

I commented that I had more fun with The Surge  than I did Nioh. I very rarely say that one thing is better than the other because I don’t feel I can objectively judge that. I usuall say I preferred one to the other or some variant thereof.

Why? I’m well-aware that I’m a freak and that my opinion is rarely in line with the majority. And, I can differrentiate my opinion from facts much of the time. I used to watch a content creator who could not fathom that something he did not like might be good because as he said, “If it was good, I would like it.” He would show this cirrcular reasoning without an ounce of self-awareness.


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Another piece to the neurodivergent puzzle

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I have mentioned that I have three goals for 2026. They are 1. Teach myself the Bagua Knives Form; 2. write my novemoir; and, 3. Find an Asian queer/genderqueer group, probably online, to join. In addition to those three major goals, however, I have  other smaller goals. And to break it down even more, I have things that I want to do that are percolating in the back of my mind.

Just a quick update on the big three. I have not started on the third one, and I probably need to brreak that down even further in order to get it done.  One, I’m progressing nicely on it. Well, not at the moment because I’m recovering from my Covid vax/flu shot combo that I got last Wednesday. I’m about50% recovered in less than a week, so I consider that not bad at all.

As for the first, I’m mostly meeting my goal of an hour a night, but I’ve slipped a few times. I do make it up, but I don’t want to use that as a crutch. I’m going to check in at the end of January and see if I’m ready to up it to two hours a day. I think I need to change my whole schedule so I’m not starting to write at three or four (or later) in the morning, but that’s really hard for me to do.

Back to the topic–some of the other things I’m looking to change/improve/do in my life. One is the topic of neurodivergency. A year or two ago, an online friend brought up the idea that I might be  neurodivergent–specifically autistic. It made so many pieces of the puzzle called my life suddenly fit, and it really opened my eyes to how easy it is to be overlooked when you’re not a guy. Meaning, autisim is shown as a male thing, more specifically, a white male thing. And it’s portrayed as a young white guy who is socially awkward, bumbling, unable to look people in the eyes, stimming, overly logical and rigid, and not aware of other people’s feelings at all.

Funnily enough, I recognized it in my brother several decades ago because he fit so many of the stereotypical symptoms. It wasn’t until my online friend gave me several posts about nonmale people and autism (and had me take an online test, unmasking as best as I could–which wasn’t much at all because I’ve been masking all my life) that I was able to see how it applied to me.

I just got another piece of the puzzle when I was in a work forum, and a neurodivergent person took the time to explain how they (don’t know their gender) and their ND friends understand how society views hierarchy on an intellectual level, but they don’t get it on a personal level (I’m paraphrasing).

They made a few more comments about it, and it really clicked in my brain with some of the other things I know about myself that I always viewed as weird. I never got hierarchy, either. At least not the traditional hierarchy as practiced in Western (American) society.


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