Yes, that’s right. I tend to add a year to my age on January 1st every year so by the time I make it to my actual birthday, I’m confused as to hold old I am. I think it’s because it’s an Asian thing? I’m not sure, but I’m sticking to it as my reason for doing it. I don’t care about my actual age because it’s always seem so random to me to celebrate one day for being a year older.
I mean, I get it on the basic level of it’s the day you were born, so yay for you! And then the next year on the same day, you add a year to that number. In reality, though, we’re aging every day. It’s not like aging is put on hold for 364 days and then you suddenly get a year older on one day. Oh, by the way, here’s my post from yesterday.
I know I’m thinking too literally about it, but that’s how my brain works. I am very literal in most ways and then I’ll be theoretical in some random sudden circumstance. I am terrible with people who are deadpan jokers beacuse I can’t read their tone properly. This is ten times worse over text/email because I can’t get any verbal/visual cues as to how I should react.
Here is how I react to any comment.
Other person (OP): Comments on something happening in their life.
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.
I have one more post in me about opposites being true at the same time. Here was my second post about it yesterday, in which I wrote mostly about what it was like to grow up with an undiagnosed (likely) neurodivergency. Specifically, autism. It wasn’t even an acknowledged thing when I was a kid. In fact, I don’t think I heard about it until I was in my twenties. I know I knew it existed in my early thirties because I saw it in my nephew when he was young, and I noted to myself that his behavior was very similar to my brother’s, who I had pegged as autistic several years before.
Hm. which seems to mean that I knew about it in my late twenties. It was a very rudimentary knowledge, though. “Something that boys have. It means they can’t look people in the eye; can’t feel emotions; don’t want to be touch; and are very set in their ways.” Even though I was most of those things, the factt that it was only seen as a boy thing made it impossible for me to have. I also thought it meant that you were out of control with temper tantrums, really loved mechanical/technical things, and that you could not relate to people at all. These I could not relate to at all because I had all that drummed out of me at an early age.
What I mean is by the time I was ten, I knew better than to talk back, state my opnion, or do anything that was deemed unladylike. It didn’t always stop you, mind, but I was painfully aware of how short my leash was. I was not supposed to talk too loudly, shout, climb trees, run around, sit with my legs uncrossed, or showing any personality in any way.
Both American and Taiwanese cultures had definite ideas of how a girl should be, and while they weren’t completely the same, they were both pretty restrictive. This was my first remembered time when two opposite things were both true–though I did not recognize it at the time.
I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in to make me a boy, but I never wanted to be one or thought I was actutally one. I just didn’t want to be a girl because it seemed so unappealing to me. So I guess it’s not a question of two opposites being true, exactly, but that I learned at an early age that I didn’t want anything to do with gender.
I will do a post on that soon (more than one, probably), but this is not that post. This is just to say that I learned at an early age that while I did not feel like a boy or wanted to be one in particular, it seemed preferable to being a girl.
In yesterday’s post, I wrote about how two things that were almost the complete opposite of each other can both be true at the same time. My example was how it’s the social norm to greet each other with small talk. “Hello, how are you?” I’m good, and you?” Or, “Hey,” with a nod and a smile. The social custom varies depending on the region, but it’s all for the same reason. It’s a version of “I acknowledge you as a fellow human.” “I acknowledge you in return.”
I’ve made my peace with it. I know this is not going to change and that it’s fairly harmless. Now that I understand it’s not really about caring how the other person is, but is a way to just smoothly start an interaction, I’m fine with it. Would I rather not have to do it? Yeah. Anything that would take away an instant of me having to pretend to perform humanity is a good thing to me.
The thing is, no matter how many scripts I have memorized, one surprise question will always throw me into a loop. I’m like a computer in that way. I don’t do well without my scripts. I didn’t even realize this was a thing until very recently–that I had scripts, I mean.
It was when an friend of mine who has autism and I were talking about growing up as a weirdo. She is alos bi and other minorities, so she could relate to the way I felt as I child. I gave her an example to illustrate what I meant.
When someone would tell me a piece of news, I would have no internal reaction. Didn’t matter what the news was. Pregnancy, new job, death in the family, it was all the same to me. I would have to take several seconds to digest what the other person had told me. Them: (telling me their news). Me: (my brain) …. Me: (my brain) Oh, I need to say something. Scrambles for somethin to say. Fumbling with my words, I come up with something appropriate and then breathe a sigh of relief. Most of the time, the awkwardness is merely internal and not noticed by the other person.
Here’s the thing. I truly do feel whatever emotion I am trying to convey. deep down inside. However, my feels on the surface are very flat. Any time I try to feel them, it’s as if the feeling is wrapped under a thousand layers of bubble wrap. So it’s deadened and squishy.
When I explained this to my friend, she gently let me know that’s what autism is like.
Side note: K and I had a heated argument about mental health issues being less taboo these days. We both agree it’s a good thing that we’ve made progress on identifying issues and getting/having help for them. However, she was concerned that it might have gone too far in the opposite direction and younger people were identifying too much with their mental health issues. Or rather, not coming up with strategies to deal with them. She also questioned if everything had to be a disorder.
One thing that tipped me into thinking I might be autistic is that I have always felt like an alien. I talked about it with an online friend who is autistic, and I said those exact words. “I felt like an alien when I was a kid.”
At the time, I thought it was just because my parents were immigrants who were loath to involve themselves in American culture. Of course, they had to work in American institutions, but they spent all their free time with Taiwanese poeople. Whether it was at church or playing sports or doing karaoke, they did it with Taiwanese people. I knew nothing of American culture all the way through elementary school.
I remember being on the playground during recess, looking around me, and feeling like an alien. I did not know what to do, what to say, or what to think. Kids were doing regular kids stuff like playing on the playground equipment, playing games with each other, or just running around. I tried to mimic what they were doing, but I was in way over my head.
It didn’t help that I was seriously depressed and thought life wasn’t worth living. Or rather, I thought my life was worthless and I shouldn’t be alive. That did not help my feeling of being an alien, and I pretty much gave up on life. At seven.
One thing that bemuses me is the argument between neurotypical people and neuroatypical people over social niceties like the whole ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ ‘Fine, and you?’ exchange that you have to do at work and in many social situations. Neurotypicals say it’s just a ritual that has no literal meaning to it. It’s a phatic exchange, rather than anything with meaning.
I was always confused by this and by how it seemed to go against the admonishment not to lie. In fact, there are many things that seem to go against the decree not to lie. First of all, there’s the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus–two of the biggest lies told to children. Blatant lies. Oh, sure, there were rationalizations for why this was an acceptable lie, but I could not understand why those lies were acceptable, but others weren’t.
Telling your spouse that their clothes doesn’t make them look fat? Acceptable. Saying you love someone you don’t? Not acceptable. Saying you’re washing your hair to not go on a date? Acceptable or not, depending on your point of view.
As a kid, I had no idea which lies were ok and which were not. I learned by intensely studying the kids around me, but that still wasn’t enough. I had no clue how to do the intricate dance that society demands we do on the daily.
That brings me back to the subject of this post–are social niceties lies? I say yes-and I say no.
I’m in my mid-fifties and just coming to grips with me being neurodivergent. I spent most of my early days thinking there was something seriously wrong with me, which I touched on in past posts. In the last one, I talked about how my mother’s very old-fashioned Taiwanese expectations of gender really messed me up. Add to that the fact that I was a weirdo to begin with, and my childhood was miserable.
I remember when I was six or seven, I was on the playground at school during recess. I looked around me and realized that I felt like an alien amongst the humans. Everyone else seemed like they knew what they were supposed to do whereas I was floundering at everything. My parents had no interest in American culture, which meant I was clueless about it as well.
I was also whip smart, which was not a good thing when I was trying to fit in.
I may have been book smart, but I was very people ignorant. I did not know what to say to the other kids, and I was miserable all the time. I had two teachers, one in the fifth grade and one in the sixth, who were really kind to me. I didn’t like the attention at the time, but in retrospect, they were examples of good men.
I had no friends as a kid. I didn’t know how to talk to American kids, and they did not know what to do with me. I got teased for being Asian, and when I brought food to school, I got made fun of for that as well. I was one of maybe three Asian kids in my grade, and that did nothing to help my low self-esteem.
I was good at school, and I was beaten down emotionally by the time I was in school, so most teachers just ignored me. Except the two I mentioned above. I was also bored because I learned very quickly, and back in those days, no one paid much attention to the smart kids.
I did have a reading class in the first grade that was just me and another kid–a boy who was also very smart. We read books that were way above our grade level, and that was my one refuge during the day. I was a voracious reader and tackled War and Peace in the sixth grade because it was the biggest book I knew of. I made it halfway through before realizing I had no clue what was going on because everyone had so many nicknames, so I gave up.
I also read The Scarlet Letter around that time, and even though I did not know much about sex and gender, I was appalled that Hester Prynne took the brunt of the blame. That never made sense to me, and it makes even less sense to me now.
I wasted so much time as a child and teen filing off all my rough edges, watching the others around me, and trying desperately to fit in. I didn’t realize that it was a fool’s errand because no matter how blunted I made myself, it was not going to matter in the long run. I could not twist myself into a tight enough pretzel to fool the normies.
I want to talk more about neurodivergency. In the last post, I talked about how for most of my life, I just assumed that I was a broken person or that there was something wrong with me. It wasn’t until I talked to my friend, A, that I realized that a lot of what I considered failings on my part might actually be neurodivergency (specifically autism).
Here are some other things that fall into this category. I cannot for the life of me NOT connect the dots. What do I mean by that? I mean that I can’t see things in discrete units. It’s why my posts go all over the place. I think of one thing that leads me to another thing that then leads me to a third thing, which may or may not be related to the first thing.
I am a big fan of footnotes, asterisks, side notes, etc. In my old posts, I was guilty of oversuing all of the above. I used to footnote my footnotes, for heaven’s sake. I went down long and winding side roads, sometimes, never to return. It’s really hard for me to focus on one thing and exclude other things because they really are connected to me. I remember the professor in my Feminism in Philosphy class asking us what we wanted to learn in the class. I mentioned something about race and gender, and she said we didn’t have time to talk about that. I lost interest in the class because to me, you cannot talk about one without including the other. This was years before intersectionality was even a whisper in conversations about isms, but I felt it on a cellular level.
In the same vein, any time I tried to bring up gender issues in the Asian group I was in while in college, I would get the (male) leader responding that we didn’t have time/energy/money to tackle that issue. What?! Excuse me? Feminist issues are Asian issues are queer issues. I can’t be Asian without being AFAB/agender, queer, areligious. I can’t be AFAB/agender without being the other things. That’s not how life works, and it still astounds me that people don’t get that.
I mean, I understand that sometimes you have to focus on one thing at a time for political reasons and to get shit done. That’s a political move, although I would argue that it’s still important to be as intersectional as possible when you’re trying to get shit done.
Look! I did it again. I digressed, and I’m fine with it.
A mentioned to me the social model of disability (as opposed to the medical model), and it really resonated with me. The medical model is based on the presumption that someone is sick and needs to be cured. Which, to be fair, works well for many illnesses. Though I would argue that there is room for the social model in doctor shit, but that’s another post for another day. The social model argues that the problem is with the society, not the individual. That if we make it easier for neurodivergent people to exist in society, then the neurodivergency wouldn’t be an issue (that’s grossly simplified, of course).
In yesterday’s post, I was musing about how stereotypes of autism blocked me from realizing that I might actually have it. Another one that really tripped me up was how autistic people miss nonverbal/social cues. I have read and heard it said so many times that if you want an autistic person to understand your hints and cues, you have to be explicit about them. A look, a grimace, a tilt of the head–none of that would actually get through to an autistic person. That’s one of the constantts I’ve heard about autistic people–they don’t understand nonverbal cues at all.
“Just be direct with them!” That’s what I constantly hear as counsel for dealing with people with autism.
Now, let me say, I’m not arguing for direct communication. I don’t think it’s a bad thing in general to just state what you want. Well, except that it’s not the way things are done in Minnesota. Here, you have to duck, dodge, and feint your way during a converastion. You can’t directly say no because that would hurt the other person’s feeling. I’ve had to explain to other people that if they extend an invitation and the answer is anything but an enthusiastic yes, it’s a no. “I need to check my calendar!” = no. “I have to talk to my husband!” = no. “It sound s great”, but with no actual affirmation = no. Only a yes is a yes.
Anyway. I can read facial/bodily cues just fine. In fact, I can read them better than some allistic people can (many) because as I’ve said many times that I’vee had it drumed in my brain since I was a little kid that I was responsible for other people’s feelings. Also, that there feelings were more important than mine. Also, that I should not upset anyone and if I did, it was of utmost importance that I did what it would take to make them feel better.
Side note: I’m not saying one should not be aware of one’s effect on other people. One should! It’s part of living in a society of disaparate people who need to get along. However, it’s usually non-male people who are made to feel resonsible for male people’s emotions.
I have a lot more to say about neurodivergency and society. In yesterday’s post, I talked about how society is more aware of the issue in general these days than, say, twenty years ago. Some people complain that everyone thinks they’re neurodivergent these days (much like some people complain that everyone thinks they’re nonbinary/trans/genderfluid these days, and much like twenty years ago, some people complained that everyone thought they were queer/gay these days) because it’s more talked about. As with any other issue like this, it’s not that there are more in the category (though there very well might be), but that people are more aware that the…issue–by the way, I’m not happy with using that word, but I can’t think of another at the moment.
This is a good thing. Itt is always a good thing to have more exposure for things such as this. This meaning neurodiversity, sexual orientation, gender orientation, etc. I would also add mental health issues to that list. It’s a plus when the society at large realizes that not everyone thinks/is/acts/believes the way they do. It really is that simple (and that complicated).
Here’s the thing about (in this case) autism. If it’s true that I have it, then it’s been fifty years I’ve been living with it. (Pllus a few). It’s not as if I suddenly got it in my twenties or thirties. That means I’ve had it, undiagnosed, for a half century.
Why didn’t I even think it could apply to me for much of that time? Because of society, quite frankly. The fact that it’s always portrayed in a certain way (male, unempathetic, constantly stimming, flat affect, etc.) was a massive hindrance to me even thinking it might be possible.
It wasn’t until my friend, A, told me to think about it without adding the mask/filter to it that I realized, wait, it might be possible.
Flat affect? Yes when I don’t put effort into it.
Side note: I think part of the reason I like being alone so much is that it’s so exhausting for me to try to act like everyone else. At this point in my life, I’m just off by a degree at all times, which is in some ways more exhausting than being completely out of sync with the norm. Because I feel like I’m juuuuuust off the mark and that can be fixed if I TRY HARDER.