The way I am coming to think of things is once I start going in a particular direction, my focus and energy is all in this direction.
Where other people, whose executive functions work better, can easily switch directions.
Like I am a locomotive full speed in one direction and other people are nimble cars.
Why how other people’s behavior and reactions are such a big deal. I might be going full steam towards being a health fanatic as I was at one time, but then things happened and upset my direction and then I am going full steam towards anger and resentment and bad habits to deal with everything.
Like I do not doubt my value or abilities and can be going strong in the right direction, but when other people seem to be constantly against me because they don’t ‘get it’ they can upset everything, and this starts me going in a bad direction.
Like at your job, you not having friends or people to talk to or people who might get your desire to save the bird and judging you for it, and you can get sidetracked into negative things
Like ASD Spectrum people need more support and more understanding or something because their strengths and weaknesses tend to be unusual, leaving them seeming to be odd and without a social group or external validation. But being unusual requires more social support, not less, to stay on the straight and narrow.
In a way I see things as a minority/majority issue, which is usually dealt with in today’s world with giving extra consideration or even rights towards minority individuals (like beating up some straight guy is a crime, but beating up a gay guy is a hate crime). But things don’t work like this for ASD or with severe mental illnesses or struggles or wrongs committed by a majority who thinks differently.
Like grasping gays or blacks or Jews suffer from historical ostrificatiin and things should be made fair for them by sometimes giving extra free speech are rights are things which are easy to comprehend and categories, and the strategy has logic behind it.
But it’s harder to see or categorize mental things, and with men, the #meetoo movement actually makes things worse for ASD men because clueless ASD men are just going to end up saying the wrong things and these things are watched like a hawk. More normal guys just adopt and sexually harass more skillfully, but it’s the obvious wrong things said that get jumped on.
My grandparents lived in a mostly black neighborhood and they would sometimes say racist things, but my experience since then with blacks is that they also say racist things. But everyone ended up getting along and my grandfather always had a lot of black friends and did favors for them and they did favors for him. The only friend of his that showed up for his funeral was a black guy. There are complicated things like maybe in this movie clip from Clint Eastwood movie
Like I suspect that loss of community with industrial revolution and into the present has confused so many things. Like you are from small community, like I suspect that when everyone is stuck together in small communities because they cannot travel very far, people actually get to know individuals and give tolerance to peoples strengths and weaknesses as long as their strengths add something.
Like in a close knit community, people know you for 20 years and just grasp that one is going to be strange and give allowances to keep the peace, but starting a new job without people who do not know you well and with society and often managers looking for ‘got you moments’ where you say or do the wrong thing, tolerance is actually a lot lower. Like a guy can be super weird but if he could do his job taking care of horses or being a blacksmith or whatever, people valued him
Like I think that in some ways things have gotten easier for people like women or gays, where injustices might have been overlooked before, but I kind of think they have actually gotten worse for ASD men, because ASD men are more likely to say the wrong thing and people never get to know them well enough to see their value.
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