Neurotypicals can lie to themselves. We cannot.

The closer you are to the bottom the more disingenuous your thought patterns are expected to be. You are expected to believe you have worth and feel good about yourself despite the preponderance of evidence screaming the opposite. Neurotypicals value things like money, status, and title, but they are incredibly disingenuous about it. I spent my life being continually surprised about how much these things mattered as people cut me off and didn’t come into my life due to being low status.

I also don’t know how people believe something someone told them without providing evidence for it being true. I am pretty visually impaired and remember in junior high seeing kids through a football far away and the other person would catch it and I was just dumbfounded because I could never do that. Wanting evidence has cost me dearly because my family is religious and I am not. I do not believe in an ordered supernatural because I do not observe it existing from personal experience and what I read.

Some of the other tricks therapists perform don’t work on me. For example decoupling your wellbeing from your circumstances. I get it that it’s something everybody wants you to do (mainly because they control your circumstances and want to be free to make them miserable as possible while you feign happiness). The other thing is how the thought and emotions arrow goes both ways. For me it only goes one way. My emotions can change my thoughts but not the other way around. A depressing thought may change my emotions every once in a while but a positive thought almost never does. Therapists are also telling us to compartmentalize. I get it that everybody is different but I don’t have the brain power to compartmentalize. I’m like the old computer operating systems where the computers weren’t powerful enough to allow them to have guardrails so they were just messy. I look at life like I look at code and while understanding a codebase the more you know the better, with life in society that kind of awareness just makes you miserable (particularly when you are on the bottom).

We are also expected to tune out the structural baggage when we perform emotional labor. People love doing things that express their identity and hate doing things that mute it. Things nobody wants to do, like dishes, are more psychologically difficult when we are hyper aware of how performing this act is cementing our place on the bottom.