Fable of the 10-Cent Man
Dear Kari,
The night was so long as I laid bored in my bed, not really able to do anything productive, except kinda, because moments of boredom are training grounds for Eckhart Tolle stuff.
I wanted to learn more, but I couldn't. I had to wait for the stupid RPG text log to scroll and show me what I got from gaining 100 levels. It felt like hours and I fell asleep eventually without knowing it.
When I woke, I saw a lot of things. But I was angry because I couldn't just learn more stuff from YouTube, I had to wait like stupid Giftmas morning to be given permission to unwrap every single present. But I could feel myself teary eyed fully on both sides of my face, and feel my arms and my legs much better on my right side, which is strange because I was always good at dancing anyway. And industry people came to watch me at the bar and said it was a joy to see me dance.
The things I saw in the morning were:
Scott AKA the ten-cent man—when I thought I should bring him an extra gift, I realized that was wrong. The neurotypical way is to overwrite people's identity like that, like "let me treat you like a generic person" and the point of this is either ignorant loyalty, like helping the enemy because you don't know your own true identity and you're begging them to be part of their obsolete group.
And the other point of consciously overwriting neurodivergent people with neurotypical paradigms is to delete them, because they are scared of us and they admit it when they march in their stupid uniforms, "they will not replace us." That's the extreme example, but only extreme in performance. Many more people are thinking it covertly, women are doing it the worst because they were overwritten themselves to be masters of psychological warfare.
Scott is a lesson in true individuality, that I don't even need to ever park at his house, I needed to not delete him at all and listen to everything he was saying. He just wants to be understood, that ten cents is his currency, it's his way of saying "I respect you as one of my own, and these are my specific instructions for how to interact with me."
NEUROTYPICAL PEOPLE LOVE THE FUCK OUT OF INDIVIDUALITY IF IT IS PACKAGED FOR THEM BY THEIR SUPERIORS like Star Wars! Star Wars, oh I love how Chewbacca gets to be completely different than everyone else and he speaks his own language and never has to hide the way he feels, this furry and completely liberated individual! I'm gonna get a tattoo of Chewbacca because he's so cool!
actual human in reality trying to also be an individual
"We must delete you"
The other thing I saw was an extension of how Scott was contemptuous about younger people receiving so much care for autism when he had to survive a barren wasteland with no help.
And my brain said, "What if your dad was autistic, or somehow neurodivergent, because his brothers tricked him and almost got him killed and scarred his head and he got double punished for being black and super intelligent—
He revolutionized a company by writing programming for them that no one else could do, and he got sent to corporate to meet with the top people, and they loved him so much they gave him cash bonuses, and that's what he used to buy us a VCR when VCRs were new and expensive.
But he got rejected from other jobs even before he could even walk into the interview, they essentially said, "Oops, I didn't know you were black" and shut him out.
And when he saw me at home so many times, being such an inherently liberated individual, rejecting Christianity in preschool by refusing to accept a Biblical coloring book, and that I was so happy, he felt contemptuous, he felt furious. Because he ultimately had to submit to the neurotypicals to survive, he had to be deleted a lot,
And my dad became an autistic Darth Vader? Is such a thing possible?
I am once again so grateful for my friend that saved me and let me into her world, and this world that I'm exploring. She's the best.
—Michael