Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Neurodivergency

Gender and society in general, part six

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Let’s talk more about gender as it affects how I act in society. In my post yesterday, I wrote about how the label ‘agender’ seems to freak out some people even more than being trans. It surprises me, even though it shouldn’t. Anyone who wants out of the societal norms is looked upon with suspicion.

You would think I would have learned after the negative reac9tions I received to being bi and to not wanting children, but I’m a slow learner. Plus, each big issue only happened every five years or so, so it wasn’t as if I had constant reminders of how out of the norm I was on the big issues.

By the time I reached thirty, I knew better than to talk my mad shit in casual company. As I accrued more and more weirdo traits (not wanting to get married, not wanting to be in a longterm monogamous relationship (being ENM), and not wanting to live with anyone, for example), I kept it to myself. Oh, let’s not forget Taiji weapons and now Bagua. I’m specifying weapons because Taiji in and of itself isn’t that strange. Well, at least the Westernized vision of it. It’s pretty funny, though, that the one movement that is always featured in any movie/TV show which Taiji in it is my least-favorite movement.

It’s called Cloud Hands (more like Moving hands like clouds, but Cloud Hands is the shortened verison), and it pretty easy to do it in a basic fashion. In other words, you can look like a master fairly quickly with this one miracle posture, er….

Of course, if you want to do it well, it takes longer to truly master. That’s a given, and not really the point of this post.

One of the reason I don’t talk about certain things is because I know that I have it easier than other people do. At the same time, being ignored/invisible/denied existence is a special kind of hell on its own. And I do have to deal with bullshit even if it’s not life-and-death bullshit.

So now the newest thing is being agender. If I was thirty years younger, I probably would have reluctantly embraced nonbinary. It’s not really me, though. It’s still a gender, which is not what I want. I am not interested in gender, much as I am not interested in religion. When I was thinking about religion and my (non) relationship to it, I really didn’t like atheist for several reasons. One, I did not have that kind of confidence that there was nothing bigger out there. I mean, to me, it was more ridiculous to believe the Big Bang Theory came out of nowhere. You mean to tell me there was absolutely nothing and then BAM! We get the earth? (Yes, I know there are more steps in there, but no matter what steps exist, it’s still unbelievable to me that it came out of nothing.)


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Talking my mad shit, part five

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As good as I am at reading social cues, there are a few areas in which I falter. One, it’s harder to do it online than in person. That makes sense because you can’t read tone online as easily as you can in the real world.Two, I have such a hard time with dry senses of humor, and that does not always come across online. The driest of dry senses of humor, I mean.

I will be honest. I went to bed after writing the first few sentences above, so I’m not entirely sure what I was leading to with that intro. I have things to say, though, so we might as well dive into it.

I’ve noticed that when I’m tired, my ability to read a room drops considerably. That’s not strange, of course, because sleep is so important. I’ve been having a hard time with it lately (more so than usual, I mean), which is impacting my ability to think. It also makes me more irritable than usual.

I realized some time ago that it’s so tiring to have to mask all the time. I didn’t realize it was masking at the time, but I knew I couldn’t show my real face. I am so finely calibrated to reading a room, it upsets me greatly when I get it wrong. It’s like, “I put in all that effort, and it’s still not enough.” There’s this idea of the double empathy problem, which I’ve only heard about in the last few years. In a nutshell, it points out that just as autistic people have an ’empathy problem’ for allistic people, so do allistic people have an empathy problem for autistic people. In other words,  it’s a two-way street. The article I linked above mentions that if autistic people have an empathy problem for allistic people (which is debatable*), then the same can be said about allistic and their lack of empathy for autistic people.

I will admit that I get salty when people in the majority admonish people in the minority to realize something about the majority world that is incredibly obvious, as if we would not be excruciatingly aware of it. For example, I was in a post about gender, and I mentioned something about being agender. It was just an aside and nothing wild–just that I was agender and I did not use gendered pronouns or something to that extent. A  cis het woman I had previously noted as being a bit weird about agender (but not about trans people) before went on this long rant about agender and trans people that was truly unhinged.

This was in a post about a trangender customer support rep being misgendered, by the way. The woman who responded to me (though not directly, interestingly enough), let’s call her Lucille just because, went on a long screed about how being a woman was deeply important to her. Fine. I’m not out here trying to dictate how others feel about their gender. If she had left it at that, I would have noted that it wasn’t relative to the topic, but whatever.

Then she went on to say that if she met someone with the standard hallmarks of a gender, then she would address them as that gender. Uh. I knew from previous comments by her that she wasn’t stereotypically feminine herself. In this rant, she went on to say that, but then insisted that she would use hallmarks like long hair to label a person a certain gender. What? She went on to say that she would be upset by being misgendered when she just said she would do the same thing to someone else for the opposite reason (the hair thing specifically).


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Speaking out tactfully, part four

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I want to talk more about knowing when to speak up and how. It’s something that many neurodivergent people struggle with. I have less issues with it than most because I was taught at a very young age that what other people thought/felt was more important than what I thought/felt. In other words, I was always tailoring myself to other people. There was a time in my thirties whwen I swung to the other extreme and said my opinion much more than I really needed to. Even to this day, if I get a hair up my ass about something, I will defend it to the death. Even if it’s better for me to back off. Even if it’s such a small thing in the big picture, that I would be better off stepping down. In fact, sometimes, I think it’s when something is small potatoes that I find it easier to let loose.

I get mad at myself when I lose control over my temper over some silly little thing. In the past, I had a very tight rein on my temper and it took a lot to make me lose it. After my medical crisis, though, I lose it much more easily. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my stroke, but I can’t say for sure.

I envy people who just talk fearlessly. Who have no misgivings about saying whatever is on their mind. I’m not sayng it’s a good thing overall as filters exist for a reason. Also, oftentimes, what they say is shit. But since they say it with such confidence, it’s taken as fact. There have been many studies that show how far you can get with just a clipbord and a confident demeanor. Alarmingly so, actually. Therre are many reasons for it, but the bottom line is that it works.

That was not what this post was about, though, so I’ll set it aside.

When I was in my twenties, I tried to hard to contort myself to fit in with other people. To an embarrassing degree. Taiji has helped me correct that to a certain extent, but I’m still way too much of a people pleaser. It’s one reason I like being on my own most of the time. That’s when I can just relax and be me.

Back to speaking out. In the last post, I talked about how it’s better not to go full bore when you’re with people you don’t know well. The problem is that many people  aren’t aware of their surroundings and/or don’t have a very high EQ. The latter is something that appears common for neurodivergent people, but it can happen to anyone. I mean, it’s more of an issue with neurodivergent people, but there are plenty of neurotypical people who have low EQ as well.

It’s hard to say how difficultI would find it if I hadn’t been trained to put others first since I was a kid. It’s so second nature to me by now, sadly. But I’m working on finding the middle between always thinknig about others and only thinking about myself. I’m not sure where that line is, but I try to stay on the right side of it.

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When is it worth it to speak out, part three

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I want to talk more about bumping up against the line in a crowd. What line? The line of what is socially acceptable and what isn’t. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked about a guy who used all the classic derailing tactics when he was called out on his bullshit after making a gross comment (not. a. joke) out of nowhere.

There were several things wrong with what he did, starting with the initial comment. Here’s the thing, though. That could have been forgiven (though, to be honest, Bob, the name I gave this guy, was on many people’s last nerve), but when he doubled down and turned it on how everyone else was just an uptight prude, and likened himself to a comedian being…pilloried for something or the other–that’s when he completely lost many people in the channel. It was unhinged, quite frankly, and I didn’t want to give enough brain cells to understand it.

In addition, he said we were all uptight, which made me roll my eyes so hard, I almost sprained them. I am the filthiest person in the Discord, though I keep twenty percent of it to myself. Hm…..Maybe twenty-five percent. Thirty? Something like that.

Again, what he said wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even dirty in the way he was implying with the prude comment. That was another mistake he made–thinking that making a comment tangential to a sexual predator was the same as making an edgy sexual joke.

Here’s another issue I have in deciding whether to talk about something or not. If I can’t even think about how to bring up the issue, I just let it go. In this case, it would have been trying to tell him why he was wrong. Not just the comment, but the whole context, and the fact that he so badly read the room. And that he threw a tantrum over being told (again, quite gently) that had stepped over the line.

Another factor in whether I speak up or not is if other people do. If they do, then I don’t feel as pressured to say something. In this case, several people immediately clapped back at him. Hard. Hard as in many people doing it at the same time. Not hard as in being mean. They were frank and open, but not mean.

I have not seen that reaction in person many times. I mean, the classic DARVO action by Bob. But, as I mentioned, this guy was always online and surrounded himself with likeminded people. That was another defense of his, by the way. That it was fine with his friends. Or was the other guy who I mentioned in the first post? I think this guy tried to use a similiar tweet situation (tangentially similar) to justify what he’d done.

It’s astounding to me how many people just keep digging that hole. Someone says that something hurt them, and at the very least you just stay silent. I would not apologize if I truly didn’t think I said something wrong, but I also wouldn’t keep pushing it. Not for something I claimed was a joke.


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The root of all…evil?

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It’s not money. I’l/l give you hint. It has something to do with my “bed”, the “night”, and cloosing my eyes. (I sleep on my couch, and I sleep in the morning, thus the quotes around bed and night.) It’s sleep–or rather, the lack of sleep. Before I continue, here’s my post from yesterday in which I talk at length about how I’m even doing autism wrong. And how I view things so differently than normies.

Every time I manage to get eight hours and only waking up once, I’m astounded at how great I feel the next day. Well, great depends on me not being too sleep-deprived to begin with–which isn’t guaranteed. In fact, I would say that I’m usually sleep-deprived*, and it’s not getting any better.

It’s so frustrating because on the surface, it seems like it would be so easy. Just fucking go to bed at a reasonable time. How hard is that? And because my sleep is so off, I could definitely ease into it by going to bed one hour earlier every night. Or if I can’t do that, then one hour later to do the cycle the other way around.

I could take a bath/shower an hour before bed. (No scented anything, though. Because ughhhhhh I’m allergic to everything.) Warm herbal tea; warm milk; warm anything before bed. Exercise, reading, and more. None of it has worked. I’ve even napped before sleeping (not recommended. It just makes me madder at myself because if I’m endlessly nodding off, then I should just go the fuck to bed).

It’s so frustrating. I’ll nod off for ten minutes while watching a video. I’ll rewind to the point where I had nodded off to watch it again. And I’ll promptly doze off again. This will happen four or five times in a row before I finally stay awake. Why don’t I just sleep the first time I nod off? If I could stagger off to bed (couch) before falling asleep, then I could actually sleep for a good long time.

This, apparently, is part of being autistic–having difficulties with sleep, I mean. Another one that I find frustrating is the inability to read tone very well. I have a bleak/dark/sarcastic sense of humor, and I have a hard time reading a dry sense of humar. And tone in words. And with different countries having different senses of humor, I can’t always read tone correctly. My brother has a very dry sense of humor, and while I know thim well enough to get maybe 75% of his jokes, there are times when I’m completely at sea.


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Free to be me, part four

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I think I need a therapist. No, there’s no think about it, but I’m too overwhelmed to find what I need. Ideally, it would be someone who was genderqueer, Asian, areligious, to name a few. When I tried to find a therapist via an online therapy website, once I put in everything I’d like in a therapist (what they specialized in, I mean) and found nothing. Not o single therapist fit what I was looknig for.

When I looked it up on Google, I found one decent hit. And then promptly sat on it for months (maybe a year by now?).

Before I go on, I wanted to say that I wrote in yesterday’s post about things I have accepted about myself that other people are quick to deny. It’s because they think of these things as negative whereas I think of them as just factual. Fat. Wolud not be a good partner. Would not be a good mother.

The things I consider negatives are things I don’t talk about.

Side  note: it’s interesting to me that if I firmly believe in something, I don’t argue about it. Take, for example, abortion. I have been pro-choice since I could fully understand what being pro-choice meant. I started out as pro-choice for thee but not for me because I was nominally Christian. I say nominally because I never really believed in it, but I was raised fundie Evangelical.

Different side note: I don’t understand why people put so much investment in things that don’t matter. Such as height. And why being tall is a good thing for men, but a bad thing for women*? I’m rewatching a Stray Kids episode in which they are getting their yearly checkups, including measuring their heights. In addition to being totally chaotic (as they always are), they are freaking out over it because they are collectively the shortest male group in Kpop (or at least are treated as such).

The way people are fixated on their heights and use it as a way tto put them down is, while not surprising, very discouraging. I mean, who the fuck cares? It’s the same as calling someone fat, especially women (in America. Apparently, it’s an equal opportunity insult in Korea). It’s an easy way to deflat ean ego.

I still don’t know why it’s so important–height, I mean. It’s something your’e born with, and there’s not much you can do about it. I’m sure you can stretch yourself out a couple of inches, but why? To what purpose? Same with weight and looks, but that’s not the point of this post.

Back to abortion.


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Vive la diffence!, part two

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The issue I have with “We’re the same under our skin” is the same problem I had with the melting pot theory of diversity–I like my differences.  Well, for the most part. I spent most of my childhood hating myself and everything that I thought was wrong with me. Telling me we were all the same at that point just felt like a sick joke. Not only did I not believe anyone who said that meaningless bullshit, it just made me feel worse about myself.

I remember going to school in a daze, not knowing what the fuck I was doing or supposed to do. I got teased and bullied almost on the daily, and I was utterly miserable. I got teased for being fat, for being Asian, and for having a weird name.

I hated my life with all my heart. I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in to make me a boy overnight. An adult once told me she liked my black hair, and I remembered thinking, “Why would anyone like black hair? It’s so ugly.” When I was a teenager, another woman told me to enjoy myself because those were the best years of my life. I thought to myself, “If these are the best years of my life, then then I might as well kill myself.”

Yesterday, I touched on how being the child on two Asian immigrants in the ’70s cemented my distaste for the melting pot theory of cultural diversity. It was my first introduction to the idea of mixing cultures, and it was not a good one.

Next up was the tossed salad* theory of cultural diversity. In this one, the idea wsa that we weren’t trying to melt into the American pot, but that we would all add something distinctive to the American salad before tossing it vigrously.

I thought this was better than the melting pot idea because it at least acknowledged the differences that other cultures have. Yet, it still wasn’t great because ‘American’ was still considered the base. And tossing the–er, mixing the salad kept the unequal feel to the different cultures.

Look, I know it sounds contradictory or that I am finding all the nits to pick (which, admittedly, true).  But neither was good enough. I’m not being a jerk about it because it was in its nascent stages back then (DEI, I mean). It’s not great now, either, but I don’t want to talk about that because it’ll ma ke me really sad/mad.

Side note: We were talking about Depeche Mode in the Discord I’m in. One of the guys reminded me of the song, Blasphemous Rumours, which I adore. I have included it below. it’s one of my five favorite songs by Depeche Mode, a group I quite enjoyed in my youth.


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What’s it to you? Part eight

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Let’s talk more about traditions and why they should be cast aside. Or at the very least, they should be examined thoroughly. In the last post, I talked about how I was an anarchist at heart, but also a pagmatist. I know that I’m not going to change the world, I know I’m barely a blip. I’m five years into my rebirth (well, starting my sixth), and I really don’t have anything to show for it.

That’s not fair to me, actually. I have taught myself a few weapon forms and started a whole new martial art. Bagua. I think I started learning it last year? Maybe at the end…hold on. Damn. I started learning it at the beginning of 2024. That’s further back than I thought. Has it really been that long?!

At any rate, one of my goals for this year was to teach myself a new weapons form, and I’ve done that. It’s the Bagua Knives Form; it took longer than I thought it would. Or rather, I made it take longer than it should have. That’s on me. I dragged my feet on teaching it to myself in part because I was rejiggering my practice in general.

I’ll be honest. I was feeling burned out. I was learning more and more forms–which is a good thing, mind, but a bit overwhelming. I know over ten, I think? Taiji Solo Long Form (right side and most of the left side); Sword Form (right and left side); Saber Form (right and left side); Cane Form (right and left side); Double Saber Form; Fan Form; Double Fan Form; Cane Form (right and left side); Cane Form with saber (right and left side); and now, Bagua Knives Form. Oh, wait. Plus the 13 Dancing WuLi Sword Form. That’s eleven forms.

Eleven forms total. Some left and right side both, but some only on the right side. I was trying to do all of them every week, and it was so tiring. I was spending up to two hours a day on my practice, and I was starting to feel depleted by it. I took a week or two just to do what I wanted rather than stick to my strict schedule. Then another week.Then another. I realized that I was burnt out, and I had to do something different.

I was doing the stretches/warmups every day. I was doing the Taiji Long Form every day as well as the Swimming Dragon Form (the hands only form for Bagua) as well. Then, I  did one or two weapon forms if I felt like it. It felt really good to do it that way, and I wanted to retain that spirit when I went back to my schedule. I did not want to go back to the strict regime I had done previously, but I was worried about letting things slide too much. I wanted to make sure that I did every form at least once a month, so my friend, A, suggested that I have a mixture of planned and not planned.

It seems so obvious, but I had not thought of it. My compromise was to do the warmups every day (that took about half an hour) plus the two hands-only forms, too. Then, I would do as many weapon forms as I felt like, which usually ended up as two to three. That’s similar to what I was doing before, but it felt much more freeing to make the decision every day.

It’s so much more refreshing now. I don’t feel like I HAVE to do anything, which, ironically makes me feel like I want to do more. It was a great suggestion, to be honest, because I’m split on needing a schedule. On the one hand, I love schedules, plans, and doing the same thing at roughly the same time every day. On the other hand, I get bored. Then, I want to do something completely different. In this case, the compromise eased my mind and allowed me to have fun.


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Maybe you all can just CTFO, part seven

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I want to talk more about societal norms and how I just do not understand them. I mentioned in my previous post that my mother got really upset when I told her I was bi. She said, “What’s next, animals?” Which makes absolutely no sense, but that’s how she is. It’s not just her, however. It used to be a fairly common response to being told someone was queer. Again, no idea why straights’ brains go straight to animals, but I think it says more about them than it does about queer people.

In a similar vein, when talking about not wearing a bra/not shaving your legs/not wearing pantyhose (depending on what point in time we’re talking about), there are so many women that are shocked and horrified. Some even say something like, “What next, no pants in the workplace?” I mean, come on. That is not a good -faith argument, but that’s because there’s isn’t one. A good-faith argument, I mean. For wearing a bra.

Side note: It’s always funny to me when people say a hill isn’t worth dying on. Sometimes, they’re right, but sometimes, I want to point out (and someone did in the bra post) that if it’s not a big deal/a hill to die on,  then the flip should be true as well. In other words, if it’s so not a big deal, then it shouldn’t be a big deal not to not wear a bra, either.

Also, at some point, I’m sure women were saying that being able to wear pants was not a hill worth dying on. And not having to wear pantyhose. And not being able to work outside the home. Changes are incremental for the most part, and they take many people constantly sticking their necks out and making a fuss. It’s not like it went seamlessly (ha!) from women having to wear pantyhose to being allowed to wear pants. There had to be a lot of pushback because traditions do not go gentle into the night.

More to the point, why do people care about things that don’t affect them one whit? I’m not being disingenuous when I say that I don’t get freaked out by jiggling boobs–even if they are not covered. Don’t get me wrong. I love boobs. Who doesn’t? As my late gay fake-husband used to say, “Everyone loves boobs!” He used to call my boobs his pillows, which was hilarious to me.

I knew this country was puritanical, but not to that extent. If someone has their boobs covered up, who cares if there’s a slight jiggle? I mean, not to be rude about it, but plenty of men have boob jiggle (and their nipples can be seen through their shirts. Maybe not the whole nipples, but at least the point. And the argument that we view men’s nipples and women’s nipples diferently holds no water because that’s the fucking point! It’s sexism, plain and simple.


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At a loss for words, part six

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I honestly don’t understand many societal norms. People (read, my mother mostly) think I’m a contrarian, but I’m not. Or rather, that isn’t my intent. It’s just that I truly don’t understand the mindset of society much of the time.

I was reading an old Ask A Manager post (from about ten years ago, I think) about whether a woman had to shave her legs for a job interview 9or for a job in general). There was a sizeable number of people who insisted that it was ‘gross’ if she didn’t. That body hair, and in particular women’s body hair, was gross/unprofessional/unacceptable in the office.

It reminded me of a much more recent post (meaning after my medical crisis or maybe right before it, but definitely during/post COVID) in which there was an argument about bras in the workplace. Again, some people were more than adamant that a woman HAD to wear a bra in the office because it was gross otherwise. I don’t remmeber if the word ‘gross’ was used in this case, but there was many an ‘unprofessional’ being thrown around.

I made a comment that if I were covered up and nips weren’t showing, why did it matter? I said I would absolutely walk over this (the Letter Writer had mentioned that in her office, they were–OK. I just looked it up. It was in 2023, and the vast majority were women who were virulent in their support of bras. Or rather, virulent in their disdain for women* who decided not to wear them.

There were women who said it was a privileged position to choose to quit over it or make it your hill to die on, but that’s the whole point of having privilege/hills to die on. As to the first, part of checking your privilege should be followed by doing things that people who aren’t in your privileged position can’t do in order to make life better for everyone. Otherwise, what’s the point? As to the latter, you don’t get to decide what is a a hill to die on for someone else.

There were several people who were adamant that it was professional and that you should follow the dress code of your office (though it wasn’t in the dress code of the LW). Someone asked quite reasonably if the dress code was that you could not wear a bra in the office, would they ‘suck it up’ (which someone mentioned) and rip off their bra?

I wasn’t surprised that most people were pro-bra; I was surprised how vicious they got in going for the status quo, though. As more than one person pointed out, things didn’t change without people agitating for that change.

The number of women who said no one wanted to see the jiggling and/or they wouldn’t hire a woman that didn’t wear a bra, sadly, was not surprising. Women often are the ones to hold up the patriarchy, which is one of the greatest tricks of man. If they  can get women to do it for them, then they can spend less time on it.

(Resisting to go on a rant about the patriarchy and dieting, which is not the point of this post.)

I can’t understand getting all worked up over something so meaningless. Tellingly, one person did the slippery slope argument and said that what next, no pants? It’s always wild to me when people do the slippery slope argument and then bust out something ridiculous. My mother did it when I told her I was bi–she said, “What next, animals?”


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