When I was younger, I would do everything I could to spare someone’s feelings. I’d put my own thoughts and opinions on the back burner, and I would proceed to assuage, comfort, and otherwise soothe the troubled mind of whomever I was around. Usually it was a friend, but not always. Sometimes I would sit and comfort my “enemies.”
I’d do this because I know what it’s like to be under monstrous mental and emotional stress. My family grew up poor, and nothing ever just came easy to us, we had to fight tooth and nail for every little thing, and I mean every little thing.
I remember eating toasted oats and water for breakfast one morning, and my poor mom started crying because we couldn’t afford milk. I put my cereal down and walked over to her, patted her on the leg and told her how much I loved them, how good they tasted, and she was the best cook ever.
It has always been in my nature to do these things, because I experienced so much pain, and I observed so much pain in the rest of the world, that I wanted to be a soft barrier against the sharp edges that life presented to everyone.
Of course, nothing is free in life, and I began trading away my own needs and wants in exchange for taking on the problems of everyone else. This lead to being used, exploited, by so many people, some who would call me friend and then just use me for everything while rejecting anything I needed, but I kept doing it, because it was the right thing to do, as far as I was concerned, to keep reaching reaching reaching out as far as I could, to let the water continue to flow, to slake the thirst of the people who had no one else to turn to, and I did it freely.
A friend once told me that you couldn’t keep drawing water from a well forever, that at some point the well would run dry, and then there would be nothing left for me. I understood this, but kept pouring out as much water as people needed.
The well never ran dry, but it was close. Towards the end it was probably more silt than fresh water.
Then my mother passed away. In my opinion she was murdered, but convincing people the hospital simply neglected her because she was disabled is unlikely to move many simply because COVID has become an unpleasant memory people would rather forget, and so I carry that with me, too.
Still, if anything good came of it, over time my heart began to recover, my body began to heal from all of the years of physical and emotional labor involved in taking care of someone you love 24/7/365 without a break. I had burned out, I had been a shell of a person surviving on the fumes of compassion that I had for everyone else.
For the first year, very little seemed to change. Then into the second year, I started to feel things more sharply, I started noticing more colors, I could smell things I couldn’t before, and no this isn’t a metaphor, anyone who has experienced severe depression can tell you that your senses become so dulled you no longer directly connect with the world they way you once could, it literally affects your whole mind and body.
Now, I’m still on the road to recovery at this point, nearly 3 years later, but I can feel the person I was before all of this happened starting to return. This time, though, I have the wounds of experience, and the knowledge that I didn’t possess 15+ years ago, and I am using it to not only protect myself, but to improve myself.
Thus enters the title of this post. “Cotton Candor.”
George Carlin once warned people of soft language, this idea of making things so banal and inoffensive that it removes the humanity from the equation entirely, and creates an almost inhuman physiognomy of verbiage that does nothing for anyone except hides the truth and gives them more time to take shelter in self-deception.
I didn’t want to contribute to that any longer, so I started opening up the Autism airwaves in my brain and decided I was going to tell the truth, because if the truth sets you free, then handing someone the keys to their own freedom is the most beneficial path, right?
Eh… sometimes.
While I am more direct, more plainly spoken than I once was, and just as sincere as ever, I’ve noticed it is met with more resistance, too. Some people don’t like to be told exactly what I’m thinking, and some, usually neurotypicals, think I’m either lying or being weirdly mysterious when, as some of you who are also autistic know, I’m simply stating my thought process and conclusions.
I haven’t change in the sense that the core of who I am remains the same. My ethics remain the same. My principles remain the same. My core values are essentially static, but the method by which I convey my thoughts and feelings has changed, and for some people this means a change in reality.
There isn’t much I can do about that, though. The truth inside of me just wants to burst out. Look at some of the things I talk about when it comes to politics, I focus heavily on how aesthetically deceptive it is, and how frustrating it is to watch people fall for the same gaslighting time and time again, where the players just change masks but still commit the same atrocities against innocent human beings.
So, as an antidote, I hold nothing back. I am direct, I am honest, and I am sincere, but it is always in compassion and empathy that I speak. It’s not to say I don’t soften some things, of course I do, no one likes a freight train smashing into their living room, but I also won’t shy away from the heart of the issue, and that is still disturbing for some.
I think we need to be disturbed, though. If all we experience is the comfort of our surroundings, then we lose the empathy for others behind a plate glass window of performative gestures and empty words that resolve nothing, but ease our consciences, and all that does is allow the powerful to run roughshod over everyone else who doesn’t get to benefit from that privilege.
So I will continue to be openly direct, and even if I am very sorry about it causing someone emotional distress because they don’t like the content of the message, I won’t regret it, because at the end of the day I still believe the truth will set you free, and that it is the difference between life and death, and I don’t want to take away tools you might need to survive.
.Red
