I saw a meme about autistics often having a pathological fear of making mistakes.

 

I don’t know any autistics with a pathological fear of making mistakes.

 

I don’t know any autistics with a pathological fear of making mistakes.

 

For those in the back, I don’t know any autistics with a pathological fear of making mistakes. 

 

Every autistic I know lives in the midst of people who are at least somewhat successful in neurotypical society (not all of whom are neurotypical; we do this to each other) who have a set of arcane, frequently nonsensical or contradictory, and utterly unspoken rules in their head. These rules are invisible to autistics and I swear some of them just get made up on the spot to justify “I feel bad and I am blaming it on you.”

 

Autistics inevitably and without any awareness break these rules.

 

Then comes the punishment. Some of these punishments are mild and some are devastating. Which, because the rules are a freaking secret, is in effect random punishment. You can’t predict it, you certainly can’t avoid it, and you can’t usually even learn from it because it doesn’t make sense.

 

I know an awful lot of autistics who have a perfectly reasonable fear of random punishment. We have learned to frame it as us making mistakes, but it is the dread we have learned will come if we “make mistakes,” the closed rooms and the fists, the shattered friendships, the grief in our existence we learn to recognise in our parents. It’s not the “mistakes,” it’s the punishment.

 

I pointed this out and someone said, yeah, that should be rephrased.

 

It should not be rephrased.

 

The people with relative power here should not get to build and maintain a social environment which is inaccessible to other people and punish those to whom it is inaccessible and pathologise perfectly human responses to that oppression. And these are not just two alternate ways of looking at things. If you punish a living creature randomly, this is what you get. Learned helplessness — the awareness that you cannot protect yourself — and emotional harm — because nobody can comfortably live that way. The creature, whether human or not, fears what harms it and which it cannot defend itself against.

 

And here’s the thing: you aren’t innocent. Nor am I. Because we all do it to each other. All of us. Without necessarily intending to or knowing about it (although sometimes you realise it later, or at least I do). I hurt, I blame you and retaliate a little or a lot; or I hurt, I am distracted from gentleness and am rough with you. It’s human. It has to be actively resisted. And even then we will fall short. Every one of us is implicated.

 

I had a friend tell me earlier this year that they are afraid they will hurt me. Well, yeah, if we stay friends it is gonna happen. It always happens. And I am gonna hurt them too. I really don’t want to but I will. The test of friendship is in the aftermath, the trust, amends, and forgiveness. But I have faith in this friend because I have watched the conscious gentleness with which they treat others. I want to be more like this person. I want to be friends with them. I want the world their existence suggests is possible to come to pass.

 

If you have a little red wagon and you take it everywhere, and sometimes it gets away from you and bangs into things, because that happens, and sometimes when you are loading rocks in they are heavy and you drop them rather than placing them gently, and sometimes you leave it outside in the rain, and once you dropped it off the garage roof to see what would happen (and then, okay, then you did it a few more times because the clang was tremendous), and after 7 or 8 years you look at it, there are going to be dents and scrapes and rusty bits. Those aren’t pathological. It’s just what happens when you are a wagon in daily use in a rough life, and what happens even more when some little twerp starts dropping you off garage roofs.

 

So much of what gets pathologised in neurodivergent people is just the dents and scrapes and rusty bits that come from being neurodivergent in a world built for NT’s, or even just from being human in a world that is at least as rough on humans as it is on well-used wagons.

 

If you blame the wagon for the dents, if you have professionals giving lectures on the distressing tendency of wagons to develop dents, if you start staging interventions on every shiny Radio Flyer you can identify to stop them developing dents while you are still dropping them off the roof and running programs to get dented wagons to polish themselves up, you know what happens? You completely miss what you are seeing. (But you build a certain number of exciting careers.)

 

Wagons are not sentient. You do not harm a wagon by pathologising it in your grant proposal and going on a lecture tour telling wagon owners about all the things they need to do to stop the wagon from developing the behavior of dents, even if you insist one of the things they should do is spend 40 hours a week dropping it down a ravine to get it ready to be dropped off a roof.

 

Even so, if you want your wagon to be as pristine as possible, be gentle with it.

 

Autistics, much as everyone misses the fact, are human. Hurting people to stop them behaving like they have been hurt has a moral component to it that banging up your wagon to keep the paint job fresh does not have. And if you want a person to be undamaged, step one is to try not to damage them. Nobody stays factory-new and shiny very long, and no matter how careful you are there will be some things you cannot avoid, but you can make choices within the range of what is possible in human relationships.

 

So let’s skip the feel-good memes about our so-called pathological fear of mistakes, which is actually a healthy response to a pathological situation, shall we?

Okay, talkies, I have a dare for you. I’m not kidding. If you are a full-time fluent speaker, I’m actually asking you to do this, even though it is work. Feel free to spread it out over multiple days. (And note: you will learn a lot more if you read each step, do it, and only then read the next step.

 

STEP 1:

 

Take 128 index cards and a pen. Set aside a pad of paper for later. (None of these things is intrinsic to the task. Feel free to substitute alternate ways of writing if needed for disability reasons. But if you can use index cards, that will help you grasp my point.)

 

STEP 2:

 

Write out as many of the really important words/phrases/sentences you may want to say as you can, one on each card, without going over 128. You’ll be able to combine things. So if you have a card for “I’m hungry” and a card for “not,” you don’t need another card for “I’m not hungry.” You can already make that message. You don’t have to use all 128 cards, but you can’t use more.

 

STEP 3:

 

Pick a number between 1 and 5. Write it down. You’ll need it later.

 

STEP 4:

 

Contemplate how many options 128 is. I mean, that’s a stack of cards you have in your hand, right? It could be hard even to find the right card when you go looking.

STEP 5:

 

It’s too late to go back and change anything now, but ask yourself if you forgot anything.

 

STEP 6:

 

Using only the messages you have written on your cards, and based on the number you selected in step 3, write out one of the following:

 

1. a love letter to someone you want to spend your life with
2. a crime report explaining how someone hurt you and giving enough evidence that the crime can be solved and prosecuted
3. a eulogy for a parent or other central figure in your life
4. an essay about the best and worst things that happened to you today and why they matter
5. an account of your dreams for your future

 

Do your best. Do your very, very best.

 

STEP 7:

 

Put what you have just written aside. Go for a walk. Shake out your body. Have some water. Notice how you felt writing that. Notice how you feel afterward. Take a break for a day or two. This is hard stuff.

 

STEP 8:

 

Give what you wrote to a friend. Tell them a person with a disability wrote it, but don’t tell them more than that. Ask your friend to read it and give you an honest assessment of this person. Listen carefully.

 

STEP 9:

 

Make your own adventure.

Every year around this time I get upset about Rudolph. Here is this year’s rant.

~

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen
But do you recall
The most famous reindeer of all?

~

This is marketing, by the way. Rudolph was born in 1939. His identified “father” was a fellow called Robert L. May who wrote a booklet about him for Montgomery Ward. I do not know whether any other “parents” were involved in his (asexual) creation.

~

The song was an adaptation daring to 1949, written by Rudolph’s “uncle,” Robert L. May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks, and performed by Gene Autry. So the claim that Rudolph was the most famous reindeer and, in particular, elevated above Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen, was solidly in place by 1949.

~

But Dasher and his compatriots were already very famous by Rudolph’s birth, having showed up in 1823. (Their “parenthood” is slightly murky but most people accept Clement C. Moore’s 1837 claim to “paternity” — the poem that introduced them had originally been published anonymously.

~

Anyway, this is all kind of a digression, but while Rudolph is the most famous reindeer now, that’s in part because excellent public relations work was done on his behalf.

~

But also think about it: for those kids who don’t have solid role models for how to live well, and that includes many kids who grow up with a marginalization their parents, teachers, etc., don’t share, the cultural artifacts, like books for me or TV shows for kids today or songs like “Rudolph”, that offer us models of how to navigate in the world can be very powerful. I learned a lot about how to navigate in the world from Rudolph, and all of it was very destructive.

~

That’s marketing too, even if it is not intentional. This song sells a particular understanding of how the world works, and part of that is this claim that “Everybody knows about this.” Art is a personal expression of the artist in response to the world, so it tells you something about the world — the chaos and suffering in Picasso’s painting “Guernica” and the arcane and repressive structure in Kafka’s novel “The Trial” are two powerful examples, but this is true of “Rudolph as well — and if the story is that famous and goes unchallenged and you, the child listener, are suspected of being one of the few people not “in the know,” then you should probably accept the truth of it. I’m not suggesting, of course, that this is intentional messaging. I’m just reporting on the effect it had on me as I tried to sort out the confusing allistic world I had been dumped into without any guide.

~

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows

~

Now, today, this is seen as a pretty neutral trait. But while I was reading Wikepedia to get my facts right for the last section, I came upon a really good point. In the thirties, a bulbous red nose was part of the stereotype for alcoholism. And people with alcoholism were deeply devalued. They were largely considered irredeemably bad people.

~

In 1935, stockbroker Bill W. and surgeon Dr. Bob S., two members of the Oxford group, a fellowship emphasizing spiritual values in daily life, met. Bill had managed to achieve a tenuous sobriety and was trying to help other alcoholics. Bob was still drinking. Bill persuaded Bob that alcoholism should be viewed as a disease, and Bob subsequently managed to stop drinking as well. The two men founded Alcoholics Anonymous.

~

Today, there are a lot of valid criticisms of A.A. We challenge the religious and cultural underpinnings. We look at how many people do not find the model successful. We address the way the emphasis on abstinence undercuts the very positive effects of medication-assisted treatment and harm reduction, and the effect on people with significant pain who benefit from certain kinds of uses of medications which can also be abused.

~

But at the time of its creation and for a long time thereafter, A.A. was an enormous step forward. Many people have benefited tremendously from working the program — including people who had no other place to turn.

~

The point is that although Wikipedia doesn’t suggest this was in any way intentional, Rudolph’s initial devaluation may have made a lot more intuitive “sense” back then.

~

It is also worth acknowledging that in the 1930’s “feeblemindedness” was thought to be connected to all kinds of deviance (disapproved-of behavior), including alcoholism, so my childhood identification with Rudolph may have been more on point than I could have guessed.

~

But whether we see the red nose as a possible indicator of “poor character” (for the record, I do not agree with the assessment that alcohol abuse is a moral failing; I’m talking about societal attitudes at a particular point in history) or intellectual/developmental disability or just some utterly irrelevant feature of his, it clearly marks Rudolph out as “different” and makes this song an instruction manual for those struggling with few adult resources for coping with differences.

~

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games

~

Rudolph is teased, bullied, and ostracized, a pretty common pattern for children and adults who are marked as different.

~

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
“Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”

~

And this, of course, was the point of Rudolph’s atypicality. More trivia from Wikipedia: apparently Robert L. May was in Chicago attempting to look through the fog at Lake Michigan when the idea of a reindeer who could help Santa navigate through the fog occurred to him.

~

How many of us have been encouraged to work twice as hard, to be twice as good at things, as the other kids, in order to be accepted? This is the myth. If you are useful enough to people in power (and Santa has a lot of power, even in the sanitized American version where St. Nicholas may not be accompanied in his travels by the Devil but does manage to run the most extensive surveillance network in existence), you will matter.

~

It’s a deeply capitalist myth. It aligns itself with the idea that the dignity of work consists not in the value of identifying something meaningful to do and being enabled to do it, but to participating in the creation of wealth, which you won’t necessarily get a share of. It aligns with the idea that 14(c) subminimum wage should not be repealed (it was enacted in 1938, by the way, a year before Rudolph’s “birth”) because there is value to the individual in being placed by service providers into a segregated “workshop” where they do whatever work they are assigned for sometimes pennies an hour.

~

Disabled children are urged in so many ways to fit into social, educational, economic and sometimes even familial structures that were never designed for them. The idea that your utility to others is a measure of your value has a role in a community where everyone works together towards common goals. When the others in question are powerful people whose goals do not include your well-being, the idea is extremely destructive.

~

Rudolph is now useful to Santa, who previously had seen no need to interrupt what the others were doing to him. And we are led to believe that this change, the change in Santa’s conception of him from irrelevant red-nosed fawn to potential tool, is supposed to signal a change in his fortunes.

~

Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
You’ll go down in history”

~

And here is his reward. With Santa’s approval on one night of the year, Rudolph wins over his bullies and they welcome him.

~

This is not how the world works.

~

Authority figures most certainly can have an impact in bullying. This is not how.

~

First, if Santa cared nothing for Rudolph at any time before 24th December, he won’t care about Rudolph from 26th December until he begins to plan for his next run. Rudolph is a means to Santa, a tool to help Santa achieve his own ends — and only as a means — and not an end in himself. To put it another way, Santa is not treating Rudolph as a person, but as an object. He is observing the forms of interacting with him as a person, but that is only because just as you turn a knob to operate a stove or push some buttons to operate a microwave, you say things like “You are so talented. Won’t you join my team?” to operate a sentient non-persons whom you desire to use as a tool.

~

Second, once an outcast achieves approval from someone whose approval matters to their bullies, the resulting envy may become a new “reason” for bullying, just as soon as the authority figure looks away. If Rudolph were useful every day Santa’s approval might protect him from the other reindeer every day. But his approval one day a year (and only if that one day is foggy) will not drive a significant change in Rudolph’s standing with the other reindeer. This is why “teacher’s pet” is not a compliment.

~

Rudolph, people experienced with bullies know, is about to get clobbered.  But the little child hearing this song, letting it sink into them and affect their worldview, looking for constructive ways to handle being laughed at and called names and left out of the group, may not. I did not. I believed this story about how the world works, in the many explicit and implicit ways it was taught to me as a child. And it sank so deeply into me that when I am not paying attention, I still act according to its guidance. I try to buy belonging with usefulness.

~

But belonging is not earned. It’s either the default state or it isn’t. All that usefulness gets me is willingness to endure my presence, if that. And offering a child — or anyone — the chance to belong but delivering only the opportunity to be present is a cruel bait-and-switch.

~

Moreover, unless belonging is conceived of as automatic, unless we cannot lose the relationship with our communities (even though it may change), then we are forever trying to justify something that we desperately need to be able to take for granted. And Rudolph is a symbol not of a community where everyone is embraced, but of the tenuous nature of that embrace, how hard it can be to win (which shows how easily it can be lost). That is not how we need to be educating children.

~

We all deserve to belong.