My Friend Has Killed Herself; My Thoughts

This isn't necessarily a political subject; I understand, but it's a controversial statement about my views on morality, and I'm warning readers right now who don't want to read it.  I don't blame you if you don't, but it's one of those things I feel I have to get off my chest before moving on.

Shortly after Justin "JewWario" Carmichael commited suicide, I made one of many of my infamously controversial, arguably cold opinion posts on the Donkey Kong Vine Forums (from which I am incidentally suspended as of typing this); calling him out for what I labelled a "dick move".  Somehow, the idea of a man blowing his brains out in the bathroom while his distraught wife pleaded for him to stop from the other side of the door, aroused more rage in me than the mourning typical of everyone else.  I was attacked rather fiercely in the comments.

Were I to believe much in karma, I might conclude it's hitting me right now, because three days ago, a friend close to me--whom I'll call "Ann" here--killed herself.  The details of how she did it haven't been revealed, but she posted a brief suicide note on her FaceBook account (which I am not linking), which was followed by many grieving posts from others.

Ann, too, was married.  She did not have children, but she had multiple pets she loved, and who loved her back, and many people who cared for her.  At one point, she was my boss, and a good one, too, before a bad depression attack prompted her to leave the company.  She stayed in contact, though, and provided a good reference for me when I applied for another job.  Her thought patterns were obviously something apart from the norm, of which I saw more evidence when I went to a party at her house, and she put a lacey, effeminate dress on her pit bull.  Still, the worst seemed to be past her, and she was rather chipper in the days leading up to her suicide; celebrating the Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage, amiably texting me about my new job (the one she gave me a reference for) and my cats; her death was a shock.

So having suffered a suicide closer to home, can I say that I finally feel more understanding than I did with JewWario's.  While on the one hand, my greater amount of sadness means I can't be so angry this time, on the other, the event seeming so eclectic, as mentioned above, means that no; I still don't get suicide, and I'm content to remain ignorant.

The suicide of any person who is valued by any other person is, objectively, a selfish crime.  I'm going to ignore the great unknown about what happens to people when they die, and instead focus on the very-much known quantity of what happens to those around  them--they typically get sad; sometimes to traumatic levels.  Even if we are to assume that someone can find relief in death from the woes of life; in taking their own life they've just created woes for other people.  By those criteria, suicide is as vile as relieving oneself of poverty by stealing all of someone else's money.

That is the sort of statement I get called an ignorant jerk for expressing.  They say that my cold, rational mind is simply incapable of understanding the different mindset of suicidal people, and I should stop judging them.  My go-to retort is that few people extend the same benefit of the doubt to homicidal people; despite them being comparable on multiple levels--they're acting in their own interests against those of others, they're making others miserable by taking the life of one they love, and they are often in a different state of mind than normal people.

Not that the different emotional reactions to homicide and suicide aren't understandable or somewhat forgivable, because suicidal people bring in previous perceptions of them; homicidal people don't tend to have as many who cared about them; or at least, those who cared about them aren't the same people they victimized.  Yet in a way, that almost makes it worse--at least if a homicidal person killed my loved ones, I could hate the killer with no qualms.  Yet when it's all the same person, then it's hard to know what to feel; where does the innocent victim end and the psychotic murderer begin?

So once again, it's all very confusing, and to the naysayers who claim I'm completely ignorant of what goes through the heads of the mentally unwell, I say that I am fine living with that ignorance--because living I continue to do.  Perhaps I could venture to empathize with whatever sort of chemically-imbalanced mind that can conceive of a moral excuse for suicide, but if I stared into that abyss I'd be worried it would stare back.  I don't want to know their rationale.  Also, contrary to the naysayers; I have known depression, and at one point I inflicted self-harm, but at no point did I conclude suicide was at all useful, and I got through it.  I got cats who depend on me, and a circle of online friends who care about me and collaborate with me, and they justify my existence; as lonely and drab as it gets sometimes.  I will miss you Ann, but I will not be that person who left a comment saying she respected your decision; anymore than I respected my half-sister's decision to continue smoking cigarrettes or my brother's decision to drive under the influence.  Reveling in my higher sanity is how I deal and soldier on, and if you're thinking of telling me how disgustingly self-righteous my coping method is, I remind you that I haven't taken the life of anyone you love; be it my own or another's.

With that rant done, we move on.

Gays Have Gotten the Right to Love--Can Autistics Be Next?

As of this month, July 2015, I am a thirty-year-old virgin.  This is a problem I have long bereaved, and like everything related to romance, one person can't fix it alone, and I'm now calling on people who care to help find a solution.  Lest anyone think of accusing me of distasteful political opportunism at a time while many are still celebrating the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage, I would like any possible naysayers to know that I have been called "faggot" more times than I can count.  I may be straight, but as an autistic straight man in a world only beginning to understand autism, I've suffered my share from the family of prejudices that includes homophobia, and in many ways I'm still suffering.  I am one of many nerdy, introverted people who can't manage to get into a romantic relationship, and here I intend to recount the sort of barriers that I, much like homosexuals, have faced to finding love, as well as positing a solution that also takes a page from gay culture.

Early Childhood

It's probably no surprise that autistic people, like many who seem alien, get bullied in school.  I was relentlessly persecuted for my differences, and those who didn't detest me still tended to ignore me, so eventually it became mutual, and I excused myself from my society.  While they used normal routes through the school, I resorted to the fire escape routes where nobody else was, and detoured through the staff offices; while they stood in line for lunch outside of the multipurpose room, I entered it through a side door and cut into the line, then ate in the backwings of the adjacent school theater.  When they went outside to play sports during recess, I retreated to the library and spent my leisure time reading; something I suspect that many see as something to get away from during breaks!  Anything I could do to be either apart from my peers, in the company of bully-busting adult supervisors, or both, I did.  I shunned contact with other students, and perhaps because of the natural tendency of autistic people to be rather disinterested in socializing to begin with, I was just fine with that.

Adolescence

Then along came puberty, and things suddenly weren't the same ever again.  My brain may not have functioned the same way as those of other boys, but as it happened, my genitals certainly did, and I knew if I was to satisfy them, I'd have to figure out some way to reacquaint myself with other people, and in many regards, I am still struggling to figure out how I fit into society.

Autistic people tend to have problems with normal socially-useful behaviors by default, and I was no exception, but it certainly exacerbated the problem that I was scared away from social development at an early age!  It took years before I learned girls don't like boys who stare at them constantly, as I did in multiple classes, and though they might like people a bit better who go and talk to them with some pretentious pick-up lines, I've never been good at that, either.

Part of it is that I don't tend to start random conversations with any people, any sex, because talking about random things is one of those social pastimes I've never been able to give a damn about, but another part, I have become convinced, is that I scare people, or at least irritate them.  Another thing I wasn't aware of until some time towards the end of high school, is that my voice is very abnormal-sounding.  People made fun of it for a long time, but I wrote it off as that standard "repeat speech in stupid voices to make the speaker sound dumb" thing that people do in spiteful conversations, until I actually heard myself on a tape recorder, and then even I conceded I sounded annoying.  I also have tried, to no avail, to get help learning to speak more normally; most coaches can't even assess what my problem is.  I also make involuntary motions, although they've subsided a bit since High School and never were at a really debilitating level.  Still, they brought even more teasing to me from other students, and actually worried some adults.  Such things also go a long way towards explaining why things might even have gotten worse as I moved on to a stage of life when social contact was no longer mandatory.

The Adult World

If school is hard for autistic people, the work world may be harder still.  As the economy slides ever further into the consumerist trend, and standardized chains push more individualized businesses out in favor of their carefully crafted customer-friendly images, heavy discrimination against introverts and anyone else who seems "off" has increasingly become the norm.  I quote myself from an earlier article:

We still get discriminated against in the job market, bymanipulative questionnaires that despise our mindsets as allegedly unfriendly, that force us to lie about who we are to get jobs.  UK data shows only 15% of autistic adults fully employed as a result of such things.  Even when they get in, bigotry still bites.  I once got thrown out of avolunteer position because of it.  The venue offered free English lessons to Spanish speakers, and after the girl who introduced me to the venue stopped going because she needed to focus more on her school work, I was the only tutor there who understood Spanish and could work with the clients one-on-one, which they needed often.  I felt invaluable, but apparently somebody got bothered by how I occasionally thought out-loud, and I was told not to come back.  That is just a a sample of the depths of bigotry affecting the people who don't--sometimes can't--conform to common but trivial behavioral standards, no matter how well they do the job at hand.  I have many other anecdotes, too.

 In the adult world, jobs replace schools as the most time-consuming social gathering for many individuals, and because of the relative unlikelyhood of autistic people getting into them, their chances of meeting people remain low.  As with schools, lower amounts of social interaction mean less chances to make friends, and less chance to make friends in turn means less chance to meet potential romantic partners.  There exists an alternative in the form of approaching random people, of course, but in addition to everything I said above about my general disdain for small-talk, I detest lying, and have long-since said no to the ridiculous pretentious convention of coming up with an asexual excuse (commonly known as "pick-up lines") to speak to women I'm sexually attracted to; as has become my standard declaration on this matter, when all I really know about a woman is her body, all I really care about is her body, and if being honest about that offends her, the most courteous thing I can do is not talk to random women at all.  As the mere act of approaching women out of lust has been meeting more and more disapproval these days, and since the Elliot Rogers shooting, nerd lust in particular terrifies casual observers more than ever, I'm convinced I made the right choice in not pursuing that purely (or at least, initially) carnal avenue of romance.  Let it remain open to the so-called alpha males and trophy girlfriends who know it's vacuous, pretentious crap, but have the assets that lead them to expect it to be worth it.

The Solution

Yet while I can agree that liking a woman for her personality, rather than just her body, is a more ideal path to romance, once again, the circumstances in which that path opens up do not avail themselves readily to autistic people.  Almost from birth, the odds of useful social interactions are stacked against us.  We can learn academic and professional skills, and in fact learn them well , but we don't fit the neurotypical definition of charisma; even when we try; we do not function on the same groupthink wavelength that governs playground politics, flirting, and even many workplaces.  We're a group that annoys-to-scares people; much like gays up until recently.  So in my thirtieth year of a life wherein I still haven't learned if I really fit anywhere in society, I declare that autistic people should consider doing exactly what the gays did between then and now: Just go our own way as a group, and nuts to those normies who object.

Hillcrest, San Diego; the gay district closest to me.

What I mean by this, as I've mentioned before, is that we autistic people (as well as other subcultures) should build our own counterpart to the rainbow district.  We collectively occupy neighborhoods of cities, or if need be, even create our own town, where we run things our way.  Autistic people will run the businesses, these sympathetic bosses will endeavor to hire autistic employees, they will assume customers are also largely autistic and make company policy around pleasing them; not neurotypical customers, and finally, these autistic establishments will festoon themselves with a broadly-conceived, blatant emblem to draw in others of our own kind and ward off those people who are scared of us.  The time is now for autistic people to band together and show the world they're capable of being productive members of society, so long as society (in this initial case, ours own autistic society) gives them a chance.  Then, just like gays in their specialized institutions, we'll also have a much chance to meet others who have suffered in a world where they've felt unloved and misunderstood for their whole lives, find common ground, hit it off, and maybe more.

I will return to more discussion of exactly how these communities should be organized at a later date; after I've talked around with other autistics, but meanwhile, I believe I have made my parable clear: Getting the right to marry the person you love is all well and good, but first, you have to find the person you love, without the constant worry of scaring people, and gays organized to do just that; far sooner than they got any justice from those outside and above.  If we autistic people ever hope to get justice, we, too, must organize in kind.