I'm Such a Poseur, Man.
27 Jan 2021Growing up, being a poseur was probably the worst possible thing to be.
Now that I know I’m autistic, I know that I was in fact a complete poseur, and probably that’s why I perceived it as being very horrible. I couldn’t skateboard super well, I couldn’t hackysack particularly well, and those were activities that the people I wanted to spend time with valued pretty highly.
I had good friends, and they were generous and compassionate with me. They themselves never made me feel bad about being less athletic than them and this isn’t really about them. They accepted me which is a truth that I am sad about in this moment. I don’t have those friends any more. We couldn’t hold the threads. I get to see these friends on occasion still, and there is a comfort and home-ness. But this isn’t really about them.
This is about my perception of social norms, especially in groups. What groups value. What the community values. And I value authenticity and I am attracted to personalities that present as authentic, and when you’re talking about skateboarding or indie rock, authenticity was doing.
I was a competent musician, and I think I could be one again. I could travel on skateboards just fine, but I never had a trick-focused board even though it was the late 80s and early 90s. My boards were department store boards purchased for me as gifts by people to whom I couldn’t adequately communicate what attributes mattered. I’ve never done an ollie. I probably could learn but even though I could buy myself a board now when am I going to try? Maybe this summer but probably not. But this isn’t really about skateboards.
Autistic people don’t behave like neurotypical people. We’re literally incapable of it out of the gate, and when we aren’t known to be autistic the behaviours we engage in appear to be intentionally contradictory. Sometimes I am intentionally contradictory, but most of the time as it turns out I’ve just had no idea what the fuck to do, so I bounce around doing the wrong thing until I finally learn through trial and error what the right thing is, or at least to a close enough approximation that I can get through the day.
That’s a really weird thing to learn about yourself. I’ve never been conciously aware that I don’t understand what’s going on. I’ve thought I’ve been operating with my full sensor array, that the world I experienced was as close to the objective truth as it was possible for a human to get.
Objective reality doesn’t really exist, but there in any given society there is is a shared perceived reality. The vast majority of people are in agreement about what is supposed to happen, and they are so deeply entrenched in it their entire lives that they are literally unable to perceive alternates. I mean, probably everyone is. That’s the whole process of disillusionment, the loss of childhood naivity, adolescent dissilusionment is literally developing a deeper understanding of how the world actually exists and how much we’ve been lied to by the people who taught us about it.
These thoughts don’t make sense, they aren’t coming to a point, there is no conclusion to this. It’s an exploration. This disclaimer should be part of the post template, really.