Weekly Thoughts 11/25/23

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters came out this past Friday, and it is amazing! Truly a great show, and has the potential to surpass Kong: Skull Island as the best MonsterVerse thing. The characters are well-developed and distinct right away, with a great cast. The story so far is really compelling and effectively paced. It looks good in the sense that it still looks like a TV show, but the monster effects are worthy of the movie world it ties into, so it doesn’t look like a chopped up or toned-down movie. I haven’t been watching much scripted TV recently – I mostly watch YouTube and Dropout – so I forgot how good a well-made show can be. Loki season 2 was also great, but it had a different feel and aesthetic; it had that “streaming show” vibe, while Monarch has a “TV show” vibe. It’s honestly better for it.

This week, Facebook brought to my attention videos by an autistic woman who talks about her experience with autism. I usually don’t watch suggested videos out of principle, but I checked hers out. She talked about having trouble identifying her emotions, having to repeat actions on her left side that happened on her right to be even, and copying mannerisms and accents from those around her. She talked about struggling with all-or-nothing thinking and rejection dysphoria. She thought that everyone planned conversations in their head so they’d know what to say. She said she over-sympathizes with others to the point of discounting her own emotions. She talked about needing to be as specific as possible so no one can misconstrue her words. I just saw a thing about getting burned out trying to be as productive as neurotypicals and not understanding how people can just move from one task to another.

All of these are generally true of me, as well. Every time I watch another of these videos, I’m like, “Yup, that’s me.” I also have an autistic cousin, so I know it’s in the family. My entire life, it’s felt like people treat me “differently,” even though as far as they and I knew, I was like them. But I’ve never felt like them. I’m very eager to accept anything that can tell me how and why I’m “different” than others. So of course, now I’m convinced I could be autistic. Within one or two videos, my mind was already fully embracing this new possibility. Embracing my gender and sexuality has helped me a lot, but it’s not the thing that keeps me feeling removed from others like I first thought it would be.

Obviously, it’s fine if I am autistic, and I want to get screened for that, too (apparently, it’s highly co-occurring with ADHD). At the same time, I feel silly for being so easily convinced of things, you know? I’m a huge sucker. I tend to trust people and new information at face value; as long as what’s being said doesn’t contradict something else I know to be true, I have no reason to assume it’s a lie. It’s really frustrating and tiring, because there are so many things we learn that are more or less propaganda, or a form of indoctrination. There are social constructs like gender and race, predefined relationship types like friendship and romance, and political ideals like free markets and the role of the military. When I first heard them, I didn’t question them much, because why would I? It took a while to get to a point where I knew enough to step outside that frame of reference and think more freely. It’s like feeling constantly betrayed by people who, for the most part, are just echoing ideas passed on to them by others; politicians are often more directly responsible, but the average person is just making sense of their world with these neat, ready-made building blocks, and showing you how to piece them together.

This happened to me on social media, and I do wonder what kind of an effect that has. I don’t think I’m falling into a trap for myself because so much of what’s convinced me has to do with everyday experiences; I don’t like how much time I spend scrolling Facebook and YouTube shorts, but I’m not on much social media beyond promotion. At the same time, I can’t help but notice how much social media is designed to train people to have these kinds of experiences while using their platforms. TikTok had controversy for convincing everyone they had ADHD, when it’s a site that’s tailor-made to shrink attention spans. That’s something all social media does to one extent or another; they get more money the more you scroll and interact. That’s why they also favor knee-jerk reactions and extreme emotions. It’s all-or-nothing all the time. There’s so much information on it, with no authority that can verify if it’s true, so you’re bound to find information that you can readily accept, encouraging a form of naivete. Everyone is pressured to put forth their best images and to look as productive and perfect as possible, making everyone else feel less than. You gotta hustle! You gotta hide your struggle and tell everyone they just have to try hard enough! And if you’re a person who wants to be more honest about your life, chances are high that you’ll get swarmed by negativity or toxic positivity. There’s a ton of pressure to be exact in every word you say, which has created an internet-specific mode of writing where you frontload every statement and spend all your time addressing imagined critics. You feel guilty or otherwise bad for everything you do because it’s never right or enough. It’s supposed to be connective, but it’s often isolating and exposes you to so much groupthink that you feel different from everyone on Earth. Every hot topic has some group of people you’re supposed to be thinking about and supporting, no matter what you think or feel.

I’m not sure what this all means, I’m just thinking out loud. I’m certainly not saying, “autistics are like Facebook,” or something, because that’s not true. Neurotypicals also have these experiences, to some degree. No one’s being “turned” by social media, although social media can help spread knowledge that can get more people to test and expand societal understandings of neurodivergence. I guess it’s just interesting to see this pattern. Social media has long been known to magnify and exacerbate negative experiences of all kinds. With the recent discussions of TikTok and the pandemic “giving everyone ADHD,” it feels significant that the particular negative experiences social media tends to magnify are those most felt by neurodivergent people. It shows not only how social media isn’t designed for positive social use, but how social interactions are not thought of with neurodivergent people in mind. I guess it’s kind of like how accessible building plans are better for everyone, not just disabled people; if social media were designed to be accommodating for the neurodivergent, it might be better for neurotypicals, as well. On a more personal level, it’s making me think more about why I might not like social media, and it gives me a new way of thinking about how I want to use it, or maybe a better reason to disengage when I’m not feeling good about it.

I guess that’s it for the week. As a joke, I should promise that I won’t come back next week convinced I have OCD or something, but let’s face it, I can’t make that kind of promise. I’m already expecting to see a video about how autism or ADHD includes a tendency to believe things at face value and immediately accept things completely. Maybe a preview for next week, because I’m also now thinking about how so many stories, especially those I’ve seen recently, have a neurodivergent-coded character (probably) on accident because “we all know that one person who’s this way about these things.” Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Akane-Banashi come to mind. In terms of fiction, neurodivergent people are like queer people: We give you more story possibilities and a more developed cast, so you should include us all the time.