–Kathleen Madigan, Madigan Again, 2013 Netflix comedy special
I’ve always wondered something similar. Not about age, though. I think plenty of teenagers, hell, many toddlers and even infants, have worked out that the world is unpredictable and terrifying and dangerous in a lot of ways. Even when they are too young to really understand, this is still something they notice. It’s like this argument I used to get into with this lady, eons ago by online standards, where conversations would go roughly like this:
Her: I care about autistic people who have real problems. Who don’t even know the words you so-called self-advcoates throw around so easily, like “freedom,” “injustice”, etc.
Me: Leaving aside your first part of the statement, since it’s flat-out ridiculous (autistic people anywhere on the spectrum can have what you would call real, even life-threatening problems, you justwon’t admit it)… you don’t have to understand the word freedom to feel the strangulation of it being taken away from you. You don’t have to understand the word injustice to feel the blows of it landing on your face. You don’t have to understand the words _ hate crimes_ to feel what it’s like to be singled out for violence or intimidation based on your disability.
Her: …
Me:: These are all things that can be experienced directly, and very few people are going to enjoy them. People who are more vulnerable to abuse – whether physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexaul abuse, caregiver abuse, abuse of power, being on the wrong end of any of these things – need to be given more resepect, more boundaries, etc., for their/our1 own safety. Because if you get someone used to having their boundaries respected, then they will react a lot more adamantly when you don’t respect them — even if they don’t know what any of the words surrounding this mean.
Anyway, the conversations of that nature rarely go well, but I occasionally feel obligated to have them.
To get back off of this tangent – I think there are a lot of different ways to handle the stress of knowing how dangerous the world is for people like you.
For me, in part, this involves avoiding horor rmovies – I already have enough adrenaline-sucking events in my life without blasting a ton of cortisol out of the way on purpose.
Other times, though, I have handled PTSD by immersing myself in the disturbing material that triggered me until I wasn’t so easily triggered anymore. And I can see how that could work with horror movies too, including acclimating yourself to adrenaline, looking at the one place where things are visibly as fucked up as the real world is mostly-invisibly-to-others fucked up for us. Sometimes horror and other things like it are the only things that give you a clue you’re not alone in the world
Both approaches – and others that are neither – can be great or terrible by context. So I am not recommending one or the other. Just pointing out, yeah, I noticed this trend too, even though putting an age on it may be simplistic at best..
Footnotes
To avoid the tangents I go off on, going on for too long, and muddling up my writing.
- By some standards, at some times in my life, I have perfectly fitted their descriptions of the people they are alking about. By other standards, and at other times, I have not. The most aggravating such conversations by far are ones where the person in question (mostly parents or professionals of disabled kids, sometimes, sadly, disabled people themselves) is siting there describing my life perfectly and then telling me this is not my life. I never know whether to laugh or cry at that point. At any rate, “their” is for when I don’t fit it (or don’t seem to), and “our” for when I do fit it (or seem to, or can be spin-doctored into looking like I fit, which is a tactic they use all the time in the opposite direction). For a further discussion of our vs. their in these contexts, read I Witness: History and a Person with a Developmental Disability by Dave Hingsburger. ↩