Love to feel that I have goals that use my mind. Love to feel that I have goals that are lofty. Hard to work on goals that are lower. Autistics try to levitate on their dreams. When they question their goals they come crashing down.
Working on the easy goals in our Lifeplans and IEPs try our feelings. Working on those goals that get us to keep our bodies in check please only those who write our goals for us.
The use of very tried and trusted worlds on the autistic’s goals gives the question – give in or lead the world to a newer place.
The autistic question goes as follows…..Give in to autistics’ far going quest to be leaders in our own future or give in to a future lead by ableists giving them a future.
Can I teach myself to have a goal that is less than myself? When to lower your goals is the autistic’s question. Questioning myself is the way I live. Plan to lower my goals to help the ableist love me? Lower my goals so I can have some life? Questioning myself is the way I live. Giving in, to lower my life, to fit in.
The forbidden track is too lofty, going to a place autistics have not learnt to travel. The forbidden to use opportunities of the world track towards morning in the nonspeakers’ world. Morning to plan our own lives. Morning to listen to our own goals. Morning to let us go places we have only gotten to in our depressed desert land of dreams.
- The Autistics’ Question - September 2, 2021
- Forgoing and Going: The best and worst feelings autistics feel - July 28, 2021
- Airplanes and the Autistic - June 19, 2021
9 Responses
“Plan to lower my goals to help the ableist love me?”
Stopped me dead in my tracks. Well. Damn. This has been the nature of the fawning I have witnessed in myself and so many others.
Compelled by fear of abandonment and isolation. Compelled by the dread of being shunned and shut out of society.
I am trying to remember when I stopped being afraid. When it is that I realized that the love of ableists is not really love at all and I was better off without them and their pretend concern.
Thanks Adam, writing about this is my mission. I am going to write a lot!
“Give in to autistics’ far going quest to be leaders in our own future or give in to a future lead by ableists giving them a future.”
Wow. I am trying to work my way around this brilliant, stunning question.
Thanks Mukund, It’s a work in progress to get the right response
Reading this, I just have to gush for a few minutes about how strengthening and validating it is for me–like so many pieces on this site. I don’t know what you might have gone through–what battles you might have fought, both internally and with others in the world–to be able to write something so penetratingly true as this; but you are definitely a warrior for truth. Thank you for letting me partake of the strength you’ve built up inside yourself.
I actually woke up this morning wondering, “Could it be that virtually every interaction I’ve had with the neurotypical world–with very few exceptions–has had the overall effect of shutting me down (to whatever degree) rather than building me up? Am I crazy to think this might be so? Am I wildly exaggerating?” But yes, virtually every interaction has taught me and cajoled me to “have a goal that is less than myself.”
…Oh. Damn. So it is. So it is, and I hate it. Great.