THE SUN WILL ALWAYS RISE

Really. Absolutely none of my therapy sessions are focused on ridding me of any of my autistic traits. And aside from the psychiatric diagnostic process, I never have gone to therapy for autism.

I go to therapy because I was diagnosed so late in my life that the world traumatised me by misunderstanding my disability for behaviour that needed to be corrected. I go to therapy because of the one time in elementary school when a caretaker forced me to eat food that was giving me sensory issues for so long that I had a meltdown- even now as an adult the smell of this food makes me sick. I go to therapy because up to 70% of autistic adults have depression. I go to therapy because the only other neurodivergent family member I had died by suicide after cruel institutionalisation and misunderstanding. I go to therapy because autistic children are 28 times more likely to be suicidal than neurotypicals. I go to therapy because according to a 2017 Columbia study, the average lifespan of an autistic person is only 36 years.

Also, when we move too much during an argument, or lean forward, it’s scary, and I never knew. I was even a little insulted at first, because surely she didn’t think I would hurt her. But see, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a sign that she mistrusted me specifically; it’s a conditioned response. (Although if you keep doing it once you realize it scares her, she SHOULDN’T trust you.)

Not every woman has been physically harmed by a man she trusted, but every woman KNOWS a woman who has.

I used to be horrible about this, because I didn’t realize how intimidating it was. I didn’t understand why the woman I was with clammed up or tried to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I only got angrier, and acted even more like an asshole. It was wrong. It was abusive. It didn’t matter if I INTENDED it that way; it was still emotionally abusive. And it was inexcusable.

I get that when passions are high, and when you’re frustrated, it’s a natural tendency to let your voice get louder, to shout and gesture and lean forward. But you can train yourself to do better. You can train yourself to keep more of an even tone, to refrain from large and fast gestures, to not lean into her personal space. I did. I’m not perfect at it yet, but goddamn it, I WILL be.

History is littered with the bodies of women who believed a man “would never.” This includes women killed by men who honestly, deeply, truly believed they “would never”… right up until she said that one thing or moved in just that way and he just got so mad, just that once, and pushed her or punched her or slashed her or shot her… just once, y’know, to shut her up, or because she was flinching and didn’t she know that HE’S NOT LIKE THAT and I’LL TEACH HER TO BE AFRAID OF ME…

We are trained, from infancy, that Men With Loud Voices are a source of pain from which we cannot escape, and attempts to escape may result in more pain. And as soon as we’re old enough to comprehend a world broader than our immediate circle, a world that extends into the past and will run into the future, we realize that there is no way, no way at all, to tell which men “would never” and which men “would never… except if.”

We live or die on that “if.” And any man who doesn’t like facing that hyper-vigilance can work on fixing OTHER MEN, not women’s fear.

The reaction shouldn’t be “not all men are like that;” it should be “no woman should have to live in fear.”

I described it like this: 

Imagine you’re back at AllPro(where he worked) with fifty phones and they’re all ringing. You want to answer them all because they’re all equal priority. That’s an environmental cue– phones are generally a ‘respond immediately’ cue.

Picking up a phone is a simple thing. You know it’s as easy as deciding which phone to answer and reaching out to pick it up, but your brain is saying “I must answer all of them!” The phones are ringing, and you can’t make your body reach out to pick one up because you don’t have fifty arms to reach out, you don’t have fifty ears to listen with, you don’t have a brain that can process and respond to fifty conversations and you don’t have fifty mouths that can all say different things all at the same time. 

Either you do it all simultaneously or nothing will happen. You can want to do it so bad it makes you cry, and you can’t make a decision because no choice seems like the right one. So the task stays unfinished and you get frustrated every time somebody reminds you to “just do it, it’s not that hard!” Because yes, it really IS that hard.

Now, if you had somebody who could point to which phone to answer, you can do it fine. That’s a prompt. Prompting removes the ‘middle man’ thought that says ‘do it all at once’ and gets you to focus on tasks one at a time instead of seeing them as some towering insurmountable mess.

Dad looked at me for a couple of seconds and said something to the effect of, “I didn’t know doing things were that hard for you.”

"Well, in the past, I have said that there is real chess and women’s chess. Some people don’t like to hear this, but chess does not fit women properly. It’s a fight, you know? A big fight. It’s not for women."

Only for Kasparov to get absolutely obliterated by Judit Polgar, a Hungarian woman, a few years later.

Judit has defeated numerous other chess legends, such as Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, and Boris Spassky, all former world chess champions. She has even won a match against Magnus Carlsen, who is the current world chess champion as of 2021. When I tell you this woman is a beast I mean she is RUTHLESS.

Famously, in 1994, during a match with Judit Polgar, Garry Kasparov cheated, taking back a move after realising it was losing, even though this is very much against the rules of chess. At the time, Judit was only 17. Imagine being so good at age 17 that you make the world champion cheat!

Anyways. Stan chess legend Judit Polgar because she is a beast!!!!!

And, their sister Sofia Polgar, is ALSO a chess international master! Meaning that all three Polgar sisters are chess masters!