Don’t hate former versions of yourself

Real Social Skills

So, I see this kind of thing a lot:

  • Wow, I can’t believe I used to like that
  • I was such a loser when I was 13
  • What was WRONG with me
  • I just found some of my writing from the 90s. How embarrassing. 

And here’s what I always want to say when people say things like that: You didn’t suck then. Your old writing is nothing to be ashamed of. Your youth is nothing to be ashamed of.

You were a person, and you were younger and knew less than you do now. That’s a good thing. It means you’re still learning.

But your younger self was worthy. Good. Deserves respect. And so do other young people who are similarly young and inexperienced, and who similarly have a lot to learn.

Keeping perspective in a world that tries to take it away

Real Social Skills

When you’re marginalized:

  • No matter how nice you are, people will call you mean
  • No matter how justified your anger is, people will tell you that you’re overreacting and making a big deal out of nothing
  • No matter how polite you are, people will call you rude
  • No matter how well you explain yourself, people will accuse you of speaking without thinking
  • No matter how closely you stick to the facts, people will accuse you of letting your emotions make you irrational

This post is not about that, exactly. It’s about one consequence of living in a world where people treat you this way. You have to grow a fairly thick skin, and learn to disregard a lot of mean-spirited and unwarranted attacks on you.

The need to protect yourself this way comes at a price. The thick skin you have to develop to function at all can make it hard to tell when you actually *are* doing something wrong. And sometimes you will be. Because everyone is mean sometimes, Everyone overreacts some of the time. Everyone is rude sometimes, Everyone sometimes believes things based on what they emotionally desire to be true rather than the facts of the situation. Everyone gets outraged at things that don’t warrant it. Everyone is cruel sometimes.

And when everyone tells you that you’re doing awful things whether or not it’s true, it’s really hard to tell when you actually are doing wrong.

It’s important to cultivate friendships with people you can trust to care whether or not you are doing the right thing. Who share your values and won’t use false accusations of being cruel to shut you up, and won’t try to undermine your struggles against marginalization. Who will genuinely care about both the success of your work, and whether or not you are treating yourself and others well.

And to have friends who can trust you to do the same. It doesn’t mean that you always have to agree, or that you can’t ever do something your friend thinks is wrong. But it does mean that you listen, and take into account what one another thinks.

One of the awful things oppressors do to us is to make examining our actions difficult by flooding us with a lot of mean-spirited false criticism. It’s important that we find a way to counter that.

Empathy With Storybook Villains

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:
Does it say something bad about me that I empathize with storybook villains?
realsocialskills said:
I doubt it. There are a lot of good reasons that people emphasize with storybook villains, for instance:
Storybooks can be very simplistic.
  • They don’t tell the whole story.
  • The things villains do often don’t make apparent sense
  • They’re crying out for an explanation
  • And if you make up a backstory of a character, it’s likely to be a sympathetic read of them. Because people create characters they like, more often than not
  • In that case, it’s very likely that you’ll sympathize with your version of the villain over the canon version of the hero

Sometimes the villains seem to have more agency than the heroes in storybooks.

  • Sometimes, villains make choices and do things, while it seems that the hero just sort of has a lot of things happen to them
  • Eg: the hero wanders into the enchanted forest and shares his lunch with a witch, or doesn’t, according to how he’s accustomed to behaving. The witch had decided to hang around that part of the forest, and decides in fairly creative ways how to curse or bless the hero.
  • That’s sort of.. more personal, somehow?
  • So it’s possible that you have more empathy for the villains because they seem more like people and less like simplistic embodied morals of the story

The heroes are sometimes not actually in the right.

  • You don’t have to like the hero just because the story says they’re the hero
  • Eg: in Jack and the Beanstalk, the hero steals all the giant’s stuff and then kills him.

It might have to do with your experiences being treated as bad:

  • If you’ve been taught to think of yourself as bad, it can be easier to identify with villains than heroes
  • If everyone treats you like the wicked witch, ogre, giant, or evil queen, you’re likely to identify with the villain than the people who kill the villain
  • When you’re bullied by a mob a lot, it’s not so appealing to cheer on a mob that rips someone apart
  • The story may call them the villain, but so do the people who call you the villain
  • And the villain may have had the chance to defy them, or come close to winning, in ways that you’ve never been able to do

I think the only way it might say something bad about you if it’s part of you convincing yourself that it ’s ok for you to treat others badly. Or, if it’s part of building your identity as a person who is intrinsically destructive of everyone, and seeing that as a good thing. If you’re doing that, you should stop. But that’s probably not what’s going on.

Thoughts on listening to marginalized people

Real Social Skills

Marginalized people are, first and foremost, people.

Marginalized people are not a hive mind. Not as a whole, and not by group, either.

Listening to marginalized people means listening to actual people who you encounter.

That means listening to what people tell you, even if it’s not what social justice theory or any other ideology told you that they should think. Listening means listening. It doesn’t mean you have to agree. In fact, you *can’t* always agree since people who experience the same category of oppression believe contradictory things about it).

What listening means is understanding what they are actually saying, without talking over them with your theories about what their life means. Talking over people with social justice ideology is just as bad as any other form of talking over people.

It means, also, acknolwedging that margianlized people don’t all agree with one another, even on really important things. And that, sometimes, you have to take a position. And you have to evaluate what you think, sometimes. But, you never have to be a jerk about it.

And it starts with listening to the person who is actually before you, and assuming that they understand their life better than you do.

When you don’t hide

Real Social Skills

Some people are bullies. 

Many bullies target people who have apparent stigmatized characteristics.

If you choose to stop hiding a stigmatized part of who you are, some people will be actively mean to you who weren’t mean before.

For example:

  • If you are gay, coming out will make some homophobic bullies more interested in hurting you
  • If you are autistic, stimming in public will make some ableist bullies more interested in hurting you
  • If you wear clothing associated with a stigmatized religion, some bigoted bullies will be more interested in hurting you

This is not your fault, but some people will blame you. Some people will tell you that you brought it on yourself by being visible. You didn’t. Bullying happens because mean people choose to hurt others. 

You were already getting hurt by bullies, because hiding hurts too. The way bullies hurt you when you are more visible is a different kind of hurt. Both are equally real.

Some people in some situation find hiding more bearable. Some people in some situations find being visible more bearable. Both are valid. It’s a personal choice. And the consequences are never your fault.

Bathrooms

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:

Hi, I have a social-interaction question. What is the appropriate response when someone knocks on a restroom door, when you are using that restroom? Do you say something, and if so, what?

realsocialskills said:

You should answer.

There are two basic reasons people knock on bathroom doors:

  1. To find out whether anyone is in the bathroom
  2. To alert whoever is in the bathroom that someone is waiting

You should answer so that the person knocking will know that the bathroom is occupied. Otherwise, they might think no one is in there and try to come in.

Some responses that are generally considered acceptable:

  • “Someone’s in here”
  • “Occupied”
  • “I’m in here”

Generally speaking, don’t identify yourself or say anything with much content. Bathrooms are considered private space, and talking to someone while you’re in a bathroom is likely to be seen as a violation of both your privacy and theirs. (There are exceptions to this, but I don’t know how to explain what they are, and I think they may not be relevant to your question).

Also, if you know that someone is waiting for the bathroom, it’s good to hurry up if you can. Eg: if you know someone is waiting, it’s probably not a good time to start fixing your hair.

Listening to folks whose speech is unusual

Real Social Skills

This happens a lot, especially for autistic folks with a particular cognitive configuration:

  • An autistic person says something in the most straightforward way they can think of
  • But it’s far from the way most people say it
  • And it doesn’t occur to other people that they’re being direct
  • It’s seen as either the autistic person not understanding something, being presumptuous, or being hilarious

For instance:

  • Alice and Nancy walk into a cafeteria, which is overflowing with different food options
  • Alice (wanting a particular kind of food and not knowing how to find it): Where’s the food?
  • Nancy: Umm, everywhere?

In this example, Nancy thought Alice was just being annoying or funny and didn’t understand what she was trying to communicate. This would have been better:

  • Alice: Where’s the food?
  • Nancy: Which food do you mean?
  • Alice: Food!
  • Nancy: Are you looking for something in particular?
  • Alice: Food!
  • Nancy: Your favorite food?
  • Alice: My favorite food! Chocolate pie! Burger?
  • Nancy: They have both of those things. We will see them when we go through the line.

Or:

  • Nathan is discussing politics with his son, Arthur
  • Nathan: What does the president do?
  • Arthur: Important stuff. Not like you do.
  • Nathan: You don’t think what I do is important?!
  • (Nathan, telling the story later, uses it as an example of how kids have no filter)
  • What Arthur actually meant was along the lines of “The president is a public figure with a lot of power, and everyone pays a lot of attention to what he says; that’s really different from how other people’s jobs work”.

This would have been better:

  • Arthur: Important stuff. Not like you do.
  • Nathan: What kind of important stuff?
  • Arthur: My fellow Americans…
  • Nathan: Important like speeches?
  • Arthur: Yes. Speeches on TV.
  • Nathan: I don’t make speeches on TV.
  • Arthur: You go to the office.
  • etc etc

Short version: When autistic people communicate things, sometimes it sounds strange or unusual in ways that are often misinterpreted. Be careful about assuming that they’re being dismissive, being cute, or joking; be careful to listen. Scroll up for some concrete examples.

Perspective

Real Social Skills

You don’t have to love yourself to be worthy of love.

You don’t have to love yourself to be capable of loving others.

You don’t have to think you’re beautiful to be worthy of respect.

You don’t have to have perfect self esteem to do worthwhile things.

If you don’t feel good about yourself, it’s worth working on that. (Including, sometimes, by changing some things you feel bad about). But don’t make self esteem or body positivity into yet another stick to beat yourself with.

You matter, no matter how bad you feel about yourself.

Getting people to explain things

Real Social Skills

If you don’t understand something, it helps to say so explicitly. 

One phrase that helps is “I don’t understand; can you try using different words?”

That helps because you’re saying that:

  • You don’t understand
  • You want to understand
  • The things you’re saying are not arguments or responses, they are requests for clarification
  • If they explain in different words, you might understand

Even if all of that is obvious to you, it’s not necessarily obvious to the person you’re talking to. Often, people do not consider the possibility that what they are saying might be confusing, even when they are entirely willing to explain differently when you ask.

People with disabilities learn and think

Real Social Skills

People with disabilities are capable of learning things on purpose, because they’re interested in what they’re learning. That’s true of people with all kinds and degrees of disability. Everyone cares about things, everyone thinks, any everyone learns.

And yet, education for people with disabilities often starts from the assumption that disabled folks have no intrinsic motivation to learn. That, before you can start to teach anything, you have to identify a reinforcer for the target behavior. And that it should be the same across subjects, and that it needn’t have any relation to what you’re trying to teach.

So, instead of starting by teaching reading, you might start by identifying an effective reinforcer, and using it to reinforce reading behavior. For example, stickers. Or giving a jellybean each time someone reads a page. Or high fives. 

In a technical sense, finding a book that someone enjoys is also, according to behaviorist theory, finding an effective reinforcer for reading behavior. But it’s not at all the same as using an unrelated reinforcer to teach reading.

Finding a book that interests a person you’re teaching to read communicates why reading is worthwhile. Using an unrelated reinforcer to get them to cooperate with reading lessons may work, but it doesn’t communicate the value of reading. In fact, it actively demonstrates that you’re assuming that they will not value reading and that it’s not worth trying to convince them that reading is worthwhile. 

The same is true of communication lessons. Identifying a reinforcer and using it to reinforce speaking behavior can get someone to cooperate with rote speech lessons, but it can’t teach them what symbolic communication is. Figuring out what someone wants to say, and giving them a reliable way to say it, can. So can making sure that you listen to communication someone already has, and making it clear that you respect them. (If you refuse to learn their language, you’re teaching them that their communication doesn’t matter. Which is the opposite of helpful.) Behaviorist approaches something accomplish that, but only as a side effect. You can teach communication better if you teach it directly, rather than as a side effect of reinforcing speaking or pointing behavior. 

People with disabilities care about things, and want to learn. The assumption that we don’t is deeply degrading.