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The World Which Does Not Speak:
Accepting Uncertainty
Okay. This is me, sounding something out within myself. Feel free to ignore it as the ramblings of a flibbertigibbet, if you wish. You may not be wrong. Heh. Asperger's, agnosticism, asexuality (I like 'a' identities, I think) and a few other things throw in. It connects, I think. It weaves together
Accepting Uncertainty
Okay. This is me, sounding something out within myself. Feel free to ignore it as the ramblings of a flibbertigibbet, if you wish. You may not be wrong. Heh. Asperger's, agnosticism, asexuality (I like 'a' identities, I think) and a few other things throw in. It connects, I think. It weaves together
You know how people are complex? How their personalities and beliefs and feelings are the products of complex intersections along various axes of being? How the way you go through life, the way you view it, results from what age you are, and race, and gender, and sexuality, and culture, and what kind of brain you have, and what your history was, and what your genetics are, and a myriad of other axes of personhood and views and beliefs, and all of it comes together in a big tangled ball in the middle that is you, the person, at this point in time?
And, perhaps more importantly, how each of those axes are interconnected? How each of those things makes you who you are, not by lining up in a row and standing together, but by weaving in and out of each other, and feeding into each other, and perhaps causing each other, and occasionally coming into direct conflict with each other? How it's not simple, and you can't take out one part of yourself and say 'this is me, and nothing else about me matters, and nothing else about me changes this', because it all matters, and if you change any part of it, everything else shifts around the change and settles into new patterns?
Well, maybe not. But this is my understanding of people, anyway. Taken, I do have to admit, largely from a study of myself, and not others, and I'll explain that one in a minute. Actually, my base understanding of people, myself included, boils down to 'big, tangly complicated things, the full of which you cannot see, who shift even within themselves, and don't always know it'.
People are, on a fundamental level, uncertain, at least to me. And so is everything else.
There is a reason for that, within myself. A thread I can pull up, one axes of my self identity that I can tug, and see at least part of where it tugs on other threads in turn, and settles the world into a shifting kaleidoscope of forms, that tilts the world to the uncertain.
That thread, I think, is Asperger's syndrome. Well, Aspieness, I think. 'Syndrome' makes me want to poke it with a stick, as though it were a foreign part of me, a condition laid over who I am, instead of what I think it is, which is part of me, built in. Aspie is my Operating System, through which I understand everything else. It's built into how my mind works, and it affects how I see everything else. One of the deeper threads of me. And I think, even before I understood what it was, even before I knew it was there, it shaped ... well, most of how I saw the world, really. Though not alone. Always, always, in concert with the rest of me. But it influenced the rest, became part of the pattern and shaped how I saw the rest around it.
And the major thing I think it did was create in me, or cause to be created, a recognition and acceptance of Uncertainty.
Aspie means I can't see people, you see. Well, I can, sometimes, on a time lag (ranging from hours to years to never), and with a lot of work. But there are some fundamental parts of how people work that are completely invisible to me. And I can't ... express this properly, because ... because the part of me that's missing, in that regard, is a part that I think most people who have it don't know they have. Or ... it's a part that's so fundamental that they don't notice it's there, and trying to explain what it's like to be without it is ... complicated, on both sides. And ... look, I'm blind, here. I cannot see this kind of thing. I can't evaluate how much another person sees, because I'm blind, and I don't know how sight works. I just know that there are things other people see, and I never do, and I can't. I've no idea what the mechanism is, yes?
People are full of things I cannot see. Emotions, beyond the most blatant. The logic that links emotion to action, that links events to emotions in turn. The way emotions apparently make people do things. The arcane laws of social interaction, which are apparently tempered by varying levels of emotion and intimacy, and culture, and other things, such that all laws must be interpreted on a case-by-case basis, and there are very few that may be blanket-applied (beyond, I think, some things that are almost always taboo, like violence, though apparently even there ...).
That means I experience people, in real time, as ... as invisible, or only partly-visible things. Forces, that act by laws I cannot see, don't know. Sometimes, by laws I don't realise exist. Existing among people, for me, is an exercise in constant uncertainty, of the possibility at any moment for something to appear from the aether and blindside me, something that comes literally from nowhere, as far as I'm concerned. I can't see it.
And I know, I know, there's a range to what other people see, too. 20/20 vision to so nearsighted they're legally blind, I get it. It's just ... there's a difference between so near-sighted the world exists as a lot of fuzzy shapes, and blind as in does not know what light is. And for me ... I get those laws, emotions, things like that, on a theoretical level. I know they work in the same way someone's who's blind knows light exists, that it does things for other people such as let them see, that it's a form or radiation, etc. It's a thing, in my head, that does not connect to anything within me. I know it exists only by its lack inside myself, and the fact that others can see by it.
Argh! I think I'm getting caught up in a metaphor, here. All tangly, again. And it's not particularly accurate, because I do have emotions, even if, even within myself, I sometimes have no real idea how they work or why they're there. Society, on the other hand, social interactions ... I operate as best I can on if-then statements, if this, don't do that, if that, this is required, sort of thing. Lacking the ability to see the subtleties, that ... doesn't usually go very well with me, unless it's someone I've known for years, or it's a very basic if-then, like 'if someone is crying, don't yell at them'. Most of the basic if-thens tend to be the negative ones, if this, do NOT do that. Unfortunately, apparently I've gotten even many of those wrong, as taking them as blanket statements can involve eventually not being able to do anything.
Anyway. Anyway.
So. People are partly invisible to me. Right. This links onwards.
I live with uncertainty every day, when it comes to people. Not just in terms of things I don't know yet, but in terms of things I can't know, and know I can't know. There are things I don't know, that affect me regardless of my knowledge of them, and will keep affecting me, unless I decide to become a hermit, or something. Which ... tempting, but that's neither here nor there.
See, the thing is, I'm fairly sure that level of constant uncertainty has led me to, in sheerest self-defense, learn to accept the idea of Uncertainty. Because, well, otherwise I'd go quite mad(-der). I accept, on a very fundamental level, that some things happen to me without visible reason, without visible cause, and there's bugger all I can do about it. All the if-then statements in the world are never going to fully account for the sheer complexity of what's around me, and that's only the visible parts. The parts I can't even see ...
And this uncertainty has spiralled out, from my views of other people, to my views of the world in general, to even my views of me. Religion, sexuality, anything, everything.
Something will happen to me, or I'll meet something, and it will be nothing I've seen before, and it will do things/be something that obeys none of the laws I know, act for reasons I cannot fathom, exist in blatant defiance of everything I thought was true. And, well, it's still there. It still exists. It's still there. So what can I do, except accept it as-is, and acknowledge an exception/contradiction to what I thought was true?
I can accept the contradiction/exception, and try to expand my understanding of how things work to encompass it, but sometimes that's incredibly hard to do, especially when dealing with the more complex scaffoldings of understanding re things like religion, emotion, social rules ... life, the fundamental underpinnings of the universe ... So most of the time what I do is accept that, basically, there are things beyond what I understand, and that my understanding of more-or-less anything may be flat-out wrong. My understanding of everything may be flat out wrong, and I could meet the thing that proves it the next time I step out the door.
This means that I exist, and understand that I exist, in a fundamental state of uncertainty about pretty much everything. And that's okay. It has to be, or I will live the rest of my life in a perpetual state of terror, and been there, done that, do NOT want to do it again. *smiles sheepishly* Uncertainty is not a thing to be feared. All I can do is make the best decisions I can based on the information I have at the time, and accept the fact that later that information, and thus those decisions, may prove wrong, but I acted within the best faith possible at the time, and that's all anyone can do.
This spreads out. It affects how I interact with people. I will accept, pretty much every time, what that person tells me they are, how they wish me to react to them. I have to, because most of the time I can't tell for myself beyond their telling me. So I will accept most anything in people, accept any belief, identity, any action save that which directly harms another person, and even then I'll only react to defend myself or others, not to say the person is wrong. I don't know that they're wrong. I only know that my internal self doesn't believe causing harm is right, and act to stop it. If that turns out to be wrong later, well, all I can do is apologise.
It affects how I view gender and sexuality, in that I'm perfectly willing to accept that bodies do one thing, and minds do another, and sometimes the connections between those two are baffling at best. I don't need necessarily to understand what my body [does/wants] to accept that it does, and work around it. Again, so long as it hurts no-one else. And I'm pretty much fine with other people letting their bodies/minds do what they want, with the same caveat. I don't have to understand the hows and whys. I just have to let people get on with it.
It affects how I view religion. I know nothing of what may be out there. I understand nothing. Fine and dandy. I assume that whatever turns out to be the truth, if anything, will be revealed in its own sweet time, quite possibly after death, and we'll deal with that as and when it happens. I'm agnostic because I do not know, and accept that I do not know. Actually, that, perhaps, affects my idea of what a 'god' might be, too. The closest thing in my head that 'god' might translate to is 'That Which Knows', although perhaps also, as fundamentally, as 'That Which IS'. In that form, I do rather believe in the Divine, as much hope as belief. Heh.
So. Back on point. I have a ... a thread, inside me, part of the tangle that makes me me, and I think that thread has settled the other threads into a pattern around it. Though, of course, affected by them in turn. The way in which I'm Aspie, the way I react to it, is affected by all those other axes and identities within me, and vice versa. Heh.
What the Aspie thread has done, most fundamentally, is create Uncertainty as a position within me. I've ... sort of come around, in a strange way, to find Uncertainty as perhaps a certainty in and of itself, a position as firm to stand on as any other. There are ways to live within uncertainty, a series of if-thens, that have their own rhythms and comforts. In lieu of certainty, we have acceptance. In lieu of understanding, we have, perhaps, a certain degree of trust. In lieu of understanding how the world works, we have a willingness to be wrong, and act anyway as best we can at the time.
*smiles* I've said it before, but it seems worth saying again. I'm not uncertain of my position. My position is Uncertainty. About most everything. And, sometimes, that's pretty much okay, and a functional, if not perhaps desirable, way to live a life.
And yes, I can rationalise almost anything, why do you ask? *smiles faintly* Also, I do realise that this is a philosophy of life that mostly boils down to "Shit happens, and sometimes there's sod all we can do about it". Heh.
In my defense, though, well, shit does.
And, perhaps more importantly, how each of those axes are interconnected? How each of those things makes you who you are, not by lining up in a row and standing together, but by weaving in and out of each other, and feeding into each other, and perhaps causing each other, and occasionally coming into direct conflict with each other? How it's not simple, and you can't take out one part of yourself and say 'this is me, and nothing else about me matters, and nothing else about me changes this', because it all matters, and if you change any part of it, everything else shifts around the change and settles into new patterns?
Well, maybe not. But this is my understanding of people, anyway. Taken, I do have to admit, largely from a study of myself, and not others, and I'll explain that one in a minute. Actually, my base understanding of people, myself included, boils down to 'big, tangly complicated things, the full of which you cannot see, who shift even within themselves, and don't always know it'.
People are, on a fundamental level, uncertain, at least to me. And so is everything else.
There is a reason for that, within myself. A thread I can pull up, one axes of my self identity that I can tug, and see at least part of where it tugs on other threads in turn, and settles the world into a shifting kaleidoscope of forms, that tilts the world to the uncertain.
That thread, I think, is Asperger's syndrome. Well, Aspieness, I think. 'Syndrome' makes me want to poke it with a stick, as though it were a foreign part of me, a condition laid over who I am, instead of what I think it is, which is part of me, built in. Aspie is my Operating System, through which I understand everything else. It's built into how my mind works, and it affects how I see everything else. One of the deeper threads of me. And I think, even before I understood what it was, even before I knew it was there, it shaped ... well, most of how I saw the world, really. Though not alone. Always, always, in concert with the rest of me. But it influenced the rest, became part of the pattern and shaped how I saw the rest around it.
And the major thing I think it did was create in me, or cause to be created, a recognition and acceptance of Uncertainty.
Aspie means I can't see people, you see. Well, I can, sometimes, on a time lag (ranging from hours to years to never), and with a lot of work. But there are some fundamental parts of how people work that are completely invisible to me. And I can't ... express this properly, because ... because the part of me that's missing, in that regard, is a part that I think most people who have it don't know they have. Or ... it's a part that's so fundamental that they don't notice it's there, and trying to explain what it's like to be without it is ... complicated, on both sides. And ... look, I'm blind, here. I cannot see this kind of thing. I can't evaluate how much another person sees, because I'm blind, and I don't know how sight works. I just know that there are things other people see, and I never do, and I can't. I've no idea what the mechanism is, yes?
People are full of things I cannot see. Emotions, beyond the most blatant. The logic that links emotion to action, that links events to emotions in turn. The way emotions apparently make people do things. The arcane laws of social interaction, which are apparently tempered by varying levels of emotion and intimacy, and culture, and other things, such that all laws must be interpreted on a case-by-case basis, and there are very few that may be blanket-applied (beyond, I think, some things that are almost always taboo, like violence, though apparently even there ...).
That means I experience people, in real time, as ... as invisible, or only partly-visible things. Forces, that act by laws I cannot see, don't know. Sometimes, by laws I don't realise exist. Existing among people, for me, is an exercise in constant uncertainty, of the possibility at any moment for something to appear from the aether and blindside me, something that comes literally from nowhere, as far as I'm concerned. I can't see it.
And I know, I know, there's a range to what other people see, too. 20/20 vision to so nearsighted they're legally blind, I get it. It's just ... there's a difference between so near-sighted the world exists as a lot of fuzzy shapes, and blind as in does not know what light is. And for me ... I get those laws, emotions, things like that, on a theoretical level. I know they work in the same way someone's who's blind knows light exists, that it does things for other people such as let them see, that it's a form or radiation, etc. It's a thing, in my head, that does not connect to anything within me. I know it exists only by its lack inside myself, and the fact that others can see by it.
Argh! I think I'm getting caught up in a metaphor, here. All tangly, again. And it's not particularly accurate, because I do have emotions, even if, even within myself, I sometimes have no real idea how they work or why they're there. Society, on the other hand, social interactions ... I operate as best I can on if-then statements, if this, don't do that, if that, this is required, sort of thing. Lacking the ability to see the subtleties, that ... doesn't usually go very well with me, unless it's someone I've known for years, or it's a very basic if-then, like 'if someone is crying, don't yell at them'. Most of the basic if-thens tend to be the negative ones, if this, do NOT do that. Unfortunately, apparently I've gotten even many of those wrong, as taking them as blanket statements can involve eventually not being able to do anything.
Anyway. Anyway.
So. People are partly invisible to me. Right. This links onwards.
I live with uncertainty every day, when it comes to people. Not just in terms of things I don't know yet, but in terms of things I can't know, and know I can't know. There are things I don't know, that affect me regardless of my knowledge of them, and will keep affecting me, unless I decide to become a hermit, or something. Which ... tempting, but that's neither here nor there.
See, the thing is, I'm fairly sure that level of constant uncertainty has led me to, in sheerest self-defense, learn to accept the idea of Uncertainty. Because, well, otherwise I'd go quite mad(-der). I accept, on a very fundamental level, that some things happen to me without visible reason, without visible cause, and there's bugger all I can do about it. All the if-then statements in the world are never going to fully account for the sheer complexity of what's around me, and that's only the visible parts. The parts I can't even see ...
And this uncertainty has spiralled out, from my views of other people, to my views of the world in general, to even my views of me. Religion, sexuality, anything, everything.
Something will happen to me, or I'll meet something, and it will be nothing I've seen before, and it will do things/be something that obeys none of the laws I know, act for reasons I cannot fathom, exist in blatant defiance of everything I thought was true. And, well, it's still there. It still exists. It's still there. So what can I do, except accept it as-is, and acknowledge an exception/contradiction to what I thought was true?
I can accept the contradiction/exception, and try to expand my understanding of how things work to encompass it, but sometimes that's incredibly hard to do, especially when dealing with the more complex scaffoldings of understanding re things like religion, emotion, social rules ... life, the fundamental underpinnings of the universe ... So most of the time what I do is accept that, basically, there are things beyond what I understand, and that my understanding of more-or-less anything may be flat-out wrong. My understanding of everything may be flat out wrong, and I could meet the thing that proves it the next time I step out the door.
This means that I exist, and understand that I exist, in a fundamental state of uncertainty about pretty much everything. And that's okay. It has to be, or I will live the rest of my life in a perpetual state of terror, and been there, done that, do NOT want to do it again. *smiles sheepishly* Uncertainty is not a thing to be feared. All I can do is make the best decisions I can based on the information I have at the time, and accept the fact that later that information, and thus those decisions, may prove wrong, but I acted within the best faith possible at the time, and that's all anyone can do.
This spreads out. It affects how I interact with people. I will accept, pretty much every time, what that person tells me they are, how they wish me to react to them. I have to, because most of the time I can't tell for myself beyond their telling me. So I will accept most anything in people, accept any belief, identity, any action save that which directly harms another person, and even then I'll only react to defend myself or others, not to say the person is wrong. I don't know that they're wrong. I only know that my internal self doesn't believe causing harm is right, and act to stop it. If that turns out to be wrong later, well, all I can do is apologise.
It affects how I view gender and sexuality, in that I'm perfectly willing to accept that bodies do one thing, and minds do another, and sometimes the connections between those two are baffling at best. I don't need necessarily to understand what my body [does/wants] to accept that it does, and work around it. Again, so long as it hurts no-one else. And I'm pretty much fine with other people letting their bodies/minds do what they want, with the same caveat. I don't have to understand the hows and whys. I just have to let people get on with it.
It affects how I view religion. I know nothing of what may be out there. I understand nothing. Fine and dandy. I assume that whatever turns out to be the truth, if anything, will be revealed in its own sweet time, quite possibly after death, and we'll deal with that as and when it happens. I'm agnostic because I do not know, and accept that I do not know. Actually, that, perhaps, affects my idea of what a 'god' might be, too. The closest thing in my head that 'god' might translate to is 'That Which Knows', although perhaps also, as fundamentally, as 'That Which IS'. In that form, I do rather believe in the Divine, as much hope as belief. Heh.
So. Back on point. I have a ... a thread, inside me, part of the tangle that makes me me, and I think that thread has settled the other threads into a pattern around it. Though, of course, affected by them in turn. The way in which I'm Aspie, the way I react to it, is affected by all those other axes and identities within me, and vice versa. Heh.
What the Aspie thread has done, most fundamentally, is create Uncertainty as a position within me. I've ... sort of come around, in a strange way, to find Uncertainty as perhaps a certainty in and of itself, a position as firm to stand on as any other. There are ways to live within uncertainty, a series of if-thens, that have their own rhythms and comforts. In lieu of certainty, we have acceptance. In lieu of understanding, we have, perhaps, a certain degree of trust. In lieu of understanding how the world works, we have a willingness to be wrong, and act anyway as best we can at the time.
*smiles* I've said it before, but it seems worth saying again. I'm not uncertain of my position. My position is Uncertainty. About most everything. And, sometimes, that's pretty much okay, and a functional, if not perhaps desirable, way to live a life.
And yes, I can rationalise almost anything, why do you ask? *smiles faintly* Also, I do realise that this is a philosophy of life that mostly boils down to "Shit happens, and sometimes there's sod all we can do about it". Heh.
In my defense, though, well, shit does.
