I Am Not Subtle

I am not subtle. I am not gentle as a drop of dew on a rose petal in the early morning Sun. I am not a gossamer thread of spider silk dancing on the wind. Nor am I the soft and sweet whispers of a lover in your ear.

I am a hammer. I am a hammer with a giant fucking heart on the front of it.

I can be gentle, I can be soft, and I often am. I prefer it. When it comes to something I am passionate about, something that can mean the difference between life and death, however, I am a hammer. I am a tank who shoots love bullets, and runs over Nazis.

I would say part of this is my autism. I am ADHD and Autistic, and so I usually don’t dissemble when it comes to how I feel about something. If you ask me “how are you feeling?” I want to tell you, but I only tell you “fine” because I have been conditioned by our society to not give away any notion that there is trouble in paradise.

It’s kind of an unspoken rule, at least here in the US as I can’t speak for other countries or cultures, that you only save your worst pain for a licensed therapist or, if you can’t afford one, a friend at the end of a beer bottle.

I don’t drink, and I can’t afford a therapist, and quite frankly the mental healthcare system in this country is so screwed up that “you should seek therapy” is almost always an insult rather than a statement out of concern. It’s more “I don’t have to listen to you because I consider you mentally unfit compared to me,” and it’s a common tactic in so-called “debates.”

I hate that shit.

So, as an autistic, I trauma dump, I take words at face value, I poke holes in carefully crafted self-delusions, and I say exactly what I mean.

I held off on doing this for decades of my life, because the implicit lesson when I was in school was you simply DID NOT DO THAT. It’s why I couldn’t really communicate my feelings well, because the neurotypical conditioning I received was causing a feedback loop, causing me to doubt myself, causing me to not trust myself.

That has changed, and some people are very upset about it. They liked it when I was more pliant, easier to silence. I mean, that never stopped me because I have a mouth bigger than all outdoors when I feel something needs to be said, but it did effectively curtail my self-esteem to the point where self-doubt was a constant companion in my life.

So I am not subtle. I will always tell you the truth. I will always tell you what I’m thinking. I will always acknowledge my bias. On that note, it impresses me to no end that there are people who believe they aren’t biased. Everyone has bias. The ones you have to watch are the ones who insist they’ve managed to control it.

If you can claim to be unbiased, then what do you stand for? Fairness? That’s subjective. Justice? Subjective. Honor? Subjective as fuck.

Believe me, everyone around you is biased. The people who agree with you that you are unbiased have a bias towards you because they agree with your position. It’s like when someone tells me they’re a centrist. They’re not a centrist, they’re a conservative, because centrism is a position of allowance, it is the permissive nature of political conservatism disguised as even handedness.

Centrism is the call sign of the white moderate, but that’s for another post in the future.

Anyway, I am not subtle about my politics. I’m not subtle about my positions on people I consider evil, and yeah, I believe evil exists, and that there are people who embrace it.

I’ve had people tell me I should be more subtle, and I try, I do, but when people lack empathy, when they lack the basic understanding of a subject, I tend to get frustrated because so often I’m told “you just don’t understand,” or “you didn’t research like I have,” when all I do with my autistic ass is research things of which I find interesting until I know the ins and outs of what I’m studying, and that’s only the first part of how I learn about a subject.

Usually, these same people are the ones who watched FOX news or a Youtube video and that was their “research.” It’s maddening, it’s infuriating at times, because it lets them say the worst things about human beings, and they get to pretend they’re being rational, logical, reasonable, when they are being cuckoo-for-coco-puffs and balls to the wall reactionary.

So I’m not subtle. I don’t do subtle well. I can be polite, kind, compassionate, and friendly, soft, supporting, and nurturing, but subtle is just not really something I can be, especially if the subject involves human rights.

I don’t coddle, I won’t coddle. Too many conservatives are coddled, given aesthetic respect while debating over the notion of whether whole groups of people deserve to exist. They don’t deserve subtlety, they deserve a hammer with a big fucking heart on it.

.Red