Saturday, February 12, 2022

PS - neurodivergent

Last year, as I dealt once again with the frustration I experience at not being believed or listened to, a mental health worker I spoke with a handful of times in 2021 said something that bothered me at first. After thinking on his words, and adding it up with my own ways of remembering events in my life, it dawns on me that he could have been on to something.  He said I am probably on the spectrum.

I am currently reading a book called "Divergent Mind," by Jenara Neremberg.  My constant feelings of not being "normal" or human, the way I desperately long for total honesty, my instant inner turmoil when I realize someone is trying to change the truth about my behavior or motivations or history without looking at my daily life and my recollections of things that do not change over time, my inability to read others properly, my total failure at ever figuring out the "game" of life, all of it fits into this idea of me perhaps being on the spectrum.  I don't know.  And for me it is irrelevant.  I have been othered and excluded by the very people I trusted most to never do that to me.  I am not seen as enough of a human to ever expect real inclusion in family.  I accept this.  I know my truth.  This blog, my memories, have always been what they are, and until my brain stops working or death takes me, my memories will always be what they are.  My "perspective" does not change over time, when it comes to what happened in my childhood.  No mental health person implanted false memories.  No mental health person ever even believed me when I said what my parents did for a living.  I grew up knowing what had happened to me, and nobody will make me change what I know is true.  Two plus two is four.  This very paragraph, and my blog, and my whole life, do seem to make it very possible that I am not neurotypical.