{"id":1804,"date":"2010-11-15T17:56:24","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T22:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/?p=1804"},"modified":"2010-11-15T18:20:08","modified_gmt":"2010-11-15T23:20:08","slug":"outsides-are-not-insides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/outsides-are-not-insides\/","title":{"rendered":"Outsides are not insides"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have these bouts of insecurity, where I compare myself to others and feel that they are higher-functioning than me, that they are doing more, better, etc. I will then assume that they know how mediocre I am because of how I feel. During these times of despair, Ned will say to me, “Don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides.” By this he means that even though these others may appear<\/em> to be doing way better than me in one way or another — spiritually, intellectually, physically, etc. — that I may be making the mistake of feeling inferior because of how I’m feeling. But they might actually be feeling as inadequate as I do.<\/p>\n

If you look at your own case and say, “I’m so — blah — and the rest of them are so — wow —” then you are guilty of this same thing, because you probably look “wow” to them, too, and who knows how they feel? And who cares, really?<\/p>\n

Okay, let me rewind a bit, because if I’m lost, you must be even loster. What I mean is, we have no real basis of understanding a person’s inner life, not really. We have our tools for assessing each other’s mindstate: we have agreed-upon communication, of facial expression, body language, spoken language, eye contact. But all we really have is our own instruments for observation. You can tell me that you feel great love for me, but how do I know how love really feels to you?<\/p>\n

What if you did not know the word <\/em>for the feeling of love? What if you felt maybe a pleasant swelling in your chest, a warmth in your throat, a lifting of your spirit, when I walked into the room, but you did not know what it was called, how to tell me, or even whether to tell me. Maybe you felt it for me but you did not actually connect it to me for some reason.<\/p>\n

If you merely looked up when I came in the room and then looked away to think your thoughts, if you had not learned to transfer that feeling into your eyes or mouth, then I could easily assume that you don’t care much about me.<\/p>\n

If scientists observe this behavior — the common thinking would then be that you either did not or were not capable of feeling love for me.\u00a0 If all you ever use is a hammer, then every task you perform had better have a nail.<\/p>\n

Yesterday Ned and I were discussing this with regard to Nat.\u00a0 I made my case over and over and Ned took it and ran with it.\u00a0 He said, “when we look at Nat and decide that he doesn’t have a theory of mind, we might be gauging his inner mental state by his outward behavior. We may ourselves be guilty of not having a full theory of his<\/em> mind.”<\/p>\n

We may not know how to speak “Autistic.”\u00a0 We may be dealing with a different culture.\u00a0 For each individual!<\/p>\n

I don’t care if scientists like Simon Baron-Cohen have made observations that prove without a doubt that people with autism have difficulty with Theory of Mind, empathy.\u00a0 I don’t even care that Temple Grandin is convinced that she can only tell herself what love is, that she doesn’t feel it for people the way others do.\u00a0 Maybe that’s not what she said, but that’s what I remember reading:\u00a0 that she did not believe she felt love the way neurotypical people do.<\/p>\n

How do they know that?\u00a0 I think that it is these theories that do us harm.\u00a0 They create despair.\u00a0 They create strata between the Mindreaders and the Unmindreaders.\u00a0 They create a feeling of inferiority based on outsides.\u00a0 Once I shucked this perspective, I became much closer to Nat, and things started going much better between us.\u00a0 Do I know why, for sure?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 So why not just believe that it is because we are connected?\u00a0 The heart knows.<\/p>\n

You don’t even know how green looks to me.\u00a0 I will never know if I love Ned more than he loves me.\u00a0 The other mind is unknowable, autistic or not<\/a>.\u00a0 The truth is, either none of us has a Theory of Mind, or we all do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have these bouts of insecurity, where I compare myself to others and feel that they are higher-functioning than me, that they are doing more, better, etc. I will then assume that they know how mediocre I am because of how I feel. During these times of despair, Ned will say to me, “Don’t judge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-t6","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1804"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1807,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions\/1807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}