The Cruelty of Small Children

There are so many theories as to what this song is actually about, but according to the creator it's about the cruelty of small children.

And I have no problem believing that at all.

You see, I was a victim of the cruelty of small children while I was a child myself. I was isolated, I was ridiculed, I was emotionally, mentally, and physically hurt. My belongings were public property and routinely destroyed.
And no one who knew cared, save five people: an old friend of mine, my mother, my grandfather, Maureen, and myself.

I had one friend, Owen, who also experienced the cruelty of the same small children, during the school year. I had to wait until summer to have more friends. Sam and Walker, Ari and Cody. During the summer I knew I had friends who would never treat me like dirt just because I didn't know they were popular at a school I had never been to before. They wouldn't treat me like my oldest friend Kelsey.
And they didn't know that it was happening. They didn't know that during the school year and in my own town I had one singular friend.
I didn't want them to.

I had fun during the summer. I had friends, actual friends, and I didn't want the ugliness of the school year to intrude on my time with them.



And then there's the one thing that I lived with my whole life.
I knew someone who was a fairly constant presence in my life. She not only didn't care that I was bullied and pushed around, she said it was my fault.
She said I needed to dress differently, act differently, drop my interests of reading and video games and trading card games, horses and singing and archery.
She said I needed to care about celebrities and boy bands and clothes.
She said I needed to wear clothes that didn't cover enough skin for me to feel comfortable.
She said I needed to stop riding and doing barn chores and instead play softball or soccer or some other sport.
I said no. That was a mistake.
I didn't want to change who I was. I had no concept of pretending to be someone I wasn't in order to fit in with the majority of people. I had no DESIRE to pretend to like the people who hated me. Why would I?
I was told that if I followed her instructions that they WOULD like me.
I asked her that one question: Why would I want to be friends with the same people who isolated me, hurt me, and ridiculed me?

The cruelty of small children broke me.

But I put myself back together and, like the Japanese art of kintsugi, made those parts of me that broke, that were the target of the cruelty, shine out.

I do have to wonder, though, what I would be like had I not experienced so much of the cruelty of small children.
I have to question just why the behavior that is condemned in adults, condemned, intolerable, considered harassment, even assault, is tolerated, ignored, even encouraged in children.

Can anyone tell me that?

Reaction to a Friend's Article

A friend of mine wrote an article that was recently featured here. I replied to it, and it became a bit...long. I will repost it here.

I am on the spectrum, too. I may have started to talk and read and even write earlier than most children...but once I did I had trouble stopping for anything. Even eating was sometimes a fight. To get me to interact socially with any children beyond a very few was a war. I didn't WANT to. I didn't LIKE talking to people. I learned very early that if you look like you're so involved in what you're reading that you literally cannot notice what is going on unless they physically move your book...well, that got most people to leave you alone.

And why wouldn't I want people to leave me alone? People were loud and startling, and they didn't make sense. Books made sense. You read and turned the pages and eventually there were no more pages to turn. Then the book was over, and you started another. Books were linear. They had plots and people in books acted in accordance with the plot - either to move it along or to hinder it. Protagonists and antagonists.

Eventually I learned that if I didn't talk to people and didn't "make friends" I would be labeled a "problem". What? I wasn't a problem. I didn't make trouble, I did okay in school, I was relatively quiet and well-behaved...but I ignored "real people". I didn't understand them. They didn't follow any set of rules I could follow. Saying hello to one person could get me a hello back, but another person would treat me like something to scrape off their shoes if I said hello to them. I didn't get it.

Later I found video games. RPGs, really. It was like a book, with a story, but YOU made the story happen. There were rules, and the people you didn't control acted in accordance with those rules. You acted within those rules to further the story. It was simple.

Eventually I found friends. Eventually I puzzled out this strange thing, human interaction. I learned more and more of the sets of rules that others followed. Sometimes I still stumble on the unknown, another rule to learn, another set of rules to puzzle out.

But it was hard. Everyone was loud and in my face and they moved through a conversation so FAST...it was, to me, like trying to hold a conversation with an auctioneer.

I learned to read emotions. I do it so well now that I will react to the emotions of people I pass on the street. Walking through a city is a mental drain. So many people going by so fast and about a third of them I notice how they hold themselves and how their faces look and the energy they surround themselves with - anger or fear or the frantic panic of the very late...happiness and deep sadness or even preoccupation. It gets to the point that sometimes it overrules what I actually feel, and when that happens, I break down. Sometimes it's a panic attack, sometimes it's complete emotional deadlock - locking everything so far inside that I don't feel any emotion. I'm told that it's anxiety disorder modulated - modified - by being on the spectrum.

I have cats. I can tell you right now that without those cats I would not be functioning as well as I do. I don't do well academically and I can't work a steady, ordinary job. I'm not good at organising things and I have trouble keeping my house straightened out.

What I do do well is horses. Horses are simple. They have social rules and set behaviors. Stables have rules and are laid out in a simple way, everything in its own, very obvious place. Stalls are all mucked out the same way. Mucking out goes into the pile outside, no matter where in the world you are. Tack needs to be cleaned and stored the same way the world over. Horses need to be groomed the same way. Feed is measured the same way. Hay bales have flakes no matter where you are. No matter if you're in America or the UK or Siberia, every horse the world over needs water. Tack is put on the same way no matter what horse you're tacking up. Feet are cleaned, bits de-grassed, and aisles swept the same way. Bathtime always involves water and soap and hoses and sponges. It always ends with some amount of water and stray horse hairs on you.

If you act this way, horses will react this way. Act that way and horses will do that. It's simple.

But to tell this to people who know I am on the spectrum and they, save for family and friends who might as well be, will treat me like a five-year-old who wears glittery Disney princess dresses and wants a pony to keep in her backyard.

Sure, I may wear clothes that most people don't, and have interests most people aren't interested in, but that does not mean that you can treat me like a five-year-old pony-obsessed princess girl.

I may be in a bliaut, but I have a six-foot-tall bow in my hand, arrows at my hip, and know how to use them...be they for target-shooting...or elegant, witty, barbed discourse.

I am on the spectrum...and while that makes me different...

...it also makes me who I am, and I will neither apologise for it nor hide it.

And you, Jason, are one of the people who helped me be that person.

Thank you, my friend.

I am who I am thanks to my friends. With all that I have gone through in my life because I am on the spectrum I feel it is wrong to hide who I am and how I think. I would hesitate very little to go around in a lovely long bliaut and chemise. Work, shopping, a nice walk. I WOULD, however, think twice about wearing just a bathing suit to the beach. I prefer to cover up. I am modest. I like looking pretty, but my idea of pretty - for myself - is much different from how most people my age like to dress to feel pretty. I like my jeans and my t-shirts, my long skirts and shorts that almost reach my knees. Sometimes I wear multiple skirts at a time. I am different. To many people that is enough, in their minds, to make me unsuitable as a friend. To them I say this:

If you feel you cannot be yourself with your friends, then maybe they are not actually your friends. If you cannot be yourself, if you feel you have to be perfectly socially acceptable, then just think: why? Why do you feel you have to hide yourself? You are you and that should be enough.

 Humanity as a whole is disgusting. I honestly can say humans are the most stench-ridden lot of slime molds in this universe. Of course, that's rather offensive to slime molds. They're decent life-forms really, and some smell quite nice. Mind their own business.
Of course I include myself. I am, after all, human. I really wish I weren't. I encounter some of the most unpleasant people.
I can honestly say that one of the best friends I've ever had is a pony named Comet. Two others are cats. The other few are humans who are really on the decent end of the scale.
I also know one human who should really be non-fungal, non-algaic pond scum. You know, the kind that's all neony yellow and green and colours your skin when you so much as breathe near it and contains not one bit of pollen and never freezes? Yeah.
I think as a whole humanity is a disgusting lot of self-serving traitorous backstabbing warmongers. When a given tech is invented it is invariably used shortly thereafter to improve warfare. It is the nature of humanity to war and it is a disgusting thing. You will find individuals who are kind and honest but it is a rare thing. I tend to carry around lots of books and some headphones so I can ignore the large majority of humanity without seeming more impolite than those trying to interrupt someone reading a book larger than their head. You can count on one hand the number of centuries without warfare since the dawn of our recorded history. It is shameful, wasteful, and thoughtless. Only by seeking to understand can we erase fear and its offspring hatred and bigotry, and the large majority of the human species would rather bash those with differences into burnt cinders. I do not like humanity. I myself am human and so there is a part of me that is as bad as those I dislike. I dislike this part of myself as well, but I suppose I must live with it or live not at all. I prefer life. Life can be spent wisely and widely but death buys you little and almost none of it lasting save a name and a deed, if that.

You have value just by living?

Lloyd from Tales of Symphonia is amazing.

He believes that no matter what happens, you are yourself. Lloyd has this attitude that to change yourself for others isn't right. That everyone is who they are and that's perfect. That people are who they are, and that to hate them for things they can't change is monstrous. And following that, it's not right to hate people for what they can choose, either.

He thinks that no one should have to sacrifice themselves, their happiness, or change who they are, not for anything. He thinks that every life has value, that everyone is born the same and that it's the people who raise us who pass on prejudice, or not. He truly believes that one day there will come a time when everyone sees the value of life and no one will be sacrificed for anything. That one day every life will have value enough that no one will be seen as expendable.

One day...

But humans are, as a whole, a violent species. War has been part of humanity almost longer than civilisation has. We can dream that one day war will be unthinkable...but unless there's a drastic shift in the way we live our lives, the way we think, the way we ARE...

Lloyd Irving's dream will never live.

No life will be valued just because they are.

Friends

A long time ago, about seven years now, something happened. When this thing happened, not only did I nearly lose myself, but I lost contact with the majority of my friends at the time. A lot of these friends I had had since I was about ten, or even longer. I've been out of contact with many for years and years. There are a few who I remember being particularly awesome friends. Owen, Walker, and Katie…among others. They know who they are.
The thing is, I'm not sure how many of them remember who I am. I'm positive very few of them would recognize me now, and I don't just mean appearance. I've changed, and not for the better. I used to be someone different, more confident, more outgoing. Today I am too scared to set foot outside my door. I hide behind my curtains and my excuses and most days curl up in bed, barely eating, not doing much.
But this is different, this fear. I am scared to go outside my door because the medication keeping two events - well, a two-part event and a long line of emotional abuse - locked where they belong - inside my head - was taken from me. This same medication allows me to order my thoughts and actually take less than a full day to decide if I should cook, let alone what to cook.

But it is those two things that I can no longer banish from my head that keep me locked up in my own apartment. I suffer nightmares of the two-part event anyway, but now I relive two ordeals complete with all the immediate pain I suffered seven years ago during each one. To be honest, even though I've told others, only one outside person knows for sure exactly how bad it was - exactly how lucky I am that I wasn't killed.

The years of emotional abuse already left me with self-image issues. Now, without the medication that let me Not Think About It, I am deathly afraid of the worst offender in that chain, someone I need to deal with regularly, and it's bad - and noticeable - enough that someone else has thought to force me and the person I am afraid of together to "make [me] deal with it and get over it" - a supremely idiotic idea, by most opinions, but a fantastic idea according to two.

I need the support of good friends behind me if I am to ever get enough back to my old self to live in a world I am now rather afraid of. And most of my best friends got left in my past when I nearly had my whole self destroyed by a person I trusted, and was nearly killed during that.

I regret that. I was dealing with the aftermath of seven years ago for five, maybe six years, and lost two of my family during that time. I lost friends because I couldn't keep up with life, let alone MY life and the lives of my friends.

Is it too much to hope that my friends will forgive me? Can I dare to hope that I can reconnect with friends I all but abandoned?

...And there's ALWAYS a downside. Maybe a ferret?

I've been watching Season 4 of Warehouse 13. I did it originally because I wanted to get my mind off something I've been thinking about lately. Of course, it's MY life, right? NOTHING gets my mind off of what I'm thinking over. One line really hit me. I mean, it disrupted my thoughts like the mental equivalent of dropping into a sinkhole.

"We don't know the downsides of the Metronome yet! When you find out the downside...and there's always a downside...I just hope it doesn't end up killing you...or worse."

...and there's always a downside. Of course there is. To everything. Change one thing, and you can never un-change it. That's what I was thinking about. I have something to say to someone, and potentially after I say it things could be great.
The downside? I could push this person away, and...well...pretty much ruin one of the best things in my life.

Or things could be like the Wishing Kettle. I could get a ferret, and nothing else. That's what the thing does. If you run up against an impossible wish, the Kettle produces...a ferret.

And sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't prefer the ferret. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't WANT this to be an impossible wish, if I want what I say to end up as a ferret. Then I realize...I'm scared. I want this change, this thing I say, to end up great. I do! But...I'm scared that this thing I say WON'T be like the Wishing Kettle. I'm scared that the downside won't be a ferret. I'm scared the downside will be like, say, Pandora's Box. That the downside would be my life would be worse off, that my friend will act differently.

Well? What should I do? I don't know. Should I risk everything? Or should I hope that, whatever happens, if the downside happens...that it's just a ferret?

Trashing an apartment? Nothing wrong! It's perfectly acceptable! Oh, and Big Ben uses batteries, and what's this about panthers?

Why is it that the people you care about the most always are the first to be left behind? Why is it that when you grow, the one person you want to stay with is the one who seems to backslide instead?

I was hosting someone, and asked them a very simple thing. "I need to give a cat a bath. Would you help out by doing some dishes?" And of course they said yes. It's not like I asked them to give a bath to a cat with a front paw full of needles, no that was my job.

I came back to the kitchen over an hour later to find all the dishes...still in the sink. I was furious. It's not like I asked my guest to remake a bed or run a malware/virus check and purge onto my computer. He'd been there three days already and I'd fallen into my mother's old trap, sorry Mom. I'd let him NOT LIFT A GORRAM FINGER. Well, okay, I let him make his own tea, but that's more the fact that everyone likes their tea/hot beverage of choice differently.

So I go into the (trashed!) living room and there he is. Reading. READING! I confront him, and he said he did do dishes! HAH! So we went back into the kitchen and he points out three small plates. Three small plates. In an hour?! No, he says. He just wanted to finish his book, and anyways, they're my dishes.
Sure, I say to him. Sure, there are a few in there that are mine, but look, there's all SEVEN mugs you used for THE SAME TEA, and look, you cooked last night because you wanted something you could cook and I could not, and don't forget who used two oven bowls for his pasta the day before instead of reusing the one you'd just eaten out of, and just LOOK at this room, and the other one!

It was at that point, as I nearly-scream at him on the same subject for the second time, hear more promises most likely just as empty as the first set...

This was going nowhere. I loved him, but the things he did...or rather that he didn't do. I left the ability to be comfortable in my own mess and filth behind at a school with people I loved but teachers and staff that hated me, one where I was socially in the best position I'd even been in(still applicable, too), where I'd left the, to quote a friend, "meh" moods that led to me not seeing anything wrong with sitting in a puddle in driving rain. A place where I was happier than I'd been in years but also more miserable than I'd ever been in my life.

If I left that behind before I'd met him, I'd also left behind being okay with others making a royal mudpit of my own home. I may not be the best at cleaning up, but I'm nowhere near making my living room cat-repelling in just a few days.

And that? That's something I cannot tolerate. The ability to not only sit as a place gets trash but to ACTIVELY TRASH IT and wonder why that's a bad thing.

There is a large difference between being an inefficient cleaner comparable to a solar car running out of energy on a sunny day...and someone who willfully ignores cleaning up in the way of a gas vehicle's engine malfunctioning in the way of its name. I, like the inefficient solar car, at least TRY to clean up and often can keep my apartment from "running out of sun" for several months, theoretically, and I get better at it all the time, if very slowly. However, the one who is an over-compliant combustion engine? If I cannot completely keep up with my own cleaning I do not need an explosive anti-cleaner around. Eventually(okay, really not so eventually) I'd go insane, or wear myself out, or something like that.

No one needs that. And as much as you may like someone, if they cannot see they have growing to do, and before age 23 at that...it is unlikely they ever will see it, no matter what they say. Superficial acknowledgement is only as lasting as the memory of what they wore that day.
There are very few days that I can say I know what I wore on them without lying. One was the worst day of my life. One was honestly pretty fun, but sad too because I had to throw out the bottom part of my best work yet because the knees of my jeans didn't fit...and that was only the jeans anyways that I remember.
And the last? It was the last Christmas with my grandfather, and I wanted to sleep outside because Naples was closing down all the non-private-residence-or-hospital lights around and in Forest Glen and the surrounding area to funnel power to an orchard that would have frozen otherwise. Street lights, outside lights, Christmas lawn ornament lights, golf course lights, restaurants and Wal Marts and Kohls and Targets and Pubixes, and even gas stations. The stars were so bright I thought I was out at Misery on the boat for a minute, until I realized I wasn't actually on the boat, or on any boat.

But that's beside the point. The actual point is that...as much as you care for someone, if they refuse to see that they actually need change...there isn't much that can actually be done, is there? If they cannot see that their actions and beliefs are harmful to others, and also to themselves?

I refused to have to babysit my boyfriend. I refused to have to walk him through thoughts that shouldn't be THAT hard. I refused to clean up after him, when all he did was fight it. I refused to sit there and fight with someone who obviously only ever COULD learn through rote memorization, someone who couldn't even begin to guess how to start a mechanical clock, even though a further "suggestion" proved he wasn't beyond thinking "batteries did it." Yes, Big Ben used and uses batteries, that's exactly it. A several-hundred-year-old clock tower, and you just put a couple AAs in, maybe a C-cell or D-cell. Maybe a Baghdad battery? Oh! I know, plug it into the thousand year-old power grid from the Roman construction of Londinium.
And that's just on GRANDFATHER CLOCKS. Ask me about "non-melanistic panthers". That's a hoot! Please, it's hilarious!