Being Black and autistic is awful

I’m not sure where else to vent. I don’t want to seem like I’m playing the victim as everyone else in this community is having the same executive functioning issues I’m having and I don’t mean to distract from those things but having to navigate these issues while being constantly reminded of my race is exhausting.

I can handle the stares from my coworkers when I head to work. I know why they’re staring. I know what Black men are stereotyped as and a black dude repairing laptops in a small repair shop located in a small town is a rare sight but im used to the stares.

I can handle it when people spot me walking on the sidewalk and immediately veer straight to the road to avoid having to walk in my direction. It’s funny at times that people will prioritize not having to walk next to a Black man over their own safety but this is fine in a sad way. Everyone does this. White, east asian, south asian. It doesn’t matter.

What is stressful is having people hypermonitor me. I can’t enter grocery stores anymore because loss prevention will always try to follow me everywhere. I’ve filed complaints but management doesnt care. They’re wasting resources having people follow me around looking to see if i might steal but it doesnt matter. I start stimming a lot when people watch me and this makes people even more suspicious of my intentions. It’s immediately obvious to most people that I’m autistic after I start doing this, but they simply don’t care.

I’m also almost always lost. I have a terrible sense of direction. This constant confusion I have as to where I’m going is misinterpreted as me scheming or casing an area. I ask people around where is x and they either don’t respond or nervously laugh and say they don’t know.

It seems to me that the only times I’m noticed are when someone is trying to ascertain whether im a threat or not. I’m not human to most people.

I’ve almost been involved in fights back in high school because I get nonverbal and struggle to maintain eye contact as soon as people confront me. I’m small but I have a bigger frame so most people don’t mess with me.

It’s bad enough that I have both ADHD and Autism but being Black amplifies the disadvantages these disorders have to my social life to an almost unmanageable degree. I’m tired of having to navigate all of this. Even after paying for an expensive psychoeducational assessment my family still thinks I’m not autistic because I speak “like a white man”. Even after I mustered up the courage to go to toastmasters, the head of that specific group asked me so many questions as to why i joined and concluded his barrage of questions with “your one of the good ones”. Noone stepped in. They all silently supported what he was doing because I’m Black and “what could his intentions be?” Noone stepped in when I was called a racial slur for failing to troubleshoot a customer’s complaint. My boss just made a snide remark and said “these things happen, try not to let it get to you”.

The one romantic partner I had disclosed to me that her parents absolutely hated Black people. We liked the same things, I cooked her food from her culture and even learned enough of the language to follow a conversation. None of it mattered. If her parents hated just neurodivergent people I’d be okay with that but there was never any chance that we’d be anything more than gf/bf. My life is pathetic.

I can mask well enough and I’ve mitigated the effects of ADHD with adderall. But I will always be Black. I get annoyed when people just tell me to toughen up or “it’ll get better” or “it’s the anxiety talking”. None of these things are true. Noone will say it but if you had a choice as to what race you could be and you knew the implications it would have wrt your social life, noone would choose to be Black. Even Africans in Africa have an inferiority complex and my own mother laments the fact that my skin isn’t nearly as light as her. What the fuck?

I don’t know if I’m forming a coherent post anymore. This is the first time I’m trying weed and instead of calming me down I’ve just been in a bad state of mind. I’ve gotten nothing productive done today but I’m tired of playing at such a severe disadvantage. At the very least let me not have autism and adhd so im not called retarded by the people I thought were my friends. I hate being here and I hate being me

doctordevice,

To give you a word and framework for what your post, and a lot of the comments here, are describing: intersectionality. Multiple oppressed identities or characteristics compound to be more oppressive than the sum of their parts.

Your struggles are real, and you’re making perfect sense. I’m so sorry you have to deal with all of that, that fucking sucks.

reedbend,

I just wanted to say I read everything and you’re not crazy to be wondering what the fuck.

Immersive_Matthew,

I feel for you and while I grew up with what I would call, typical autistic struggles, I can imagine what you are dealing with and how utterly awful it must be. Maybe it is time to move if you can. There are places that are much better for those in the spectrum. I used to live in Vancouver and had none of the issues your described as it is such a melting pot of a city that seems to have very few racial issues. Sure there must be some similar cities where you are from? Changing your environment can truly have a big impact on one’s happiness as the grass really is greener in some places for you.

GBU_28,

Not minimizing your situation but I hope you one day get the opportunity to move away from the shitty town you live in. I’ve lived all over the country and certainly noticed some areas are far more normalized towards the situations/reactions you described. Though there are issues with acceptance/bigotry everywhere, it sounds like you are in the deep end.

Marthirial,

You have to learn to never hate yourself. If you do, you make the shitty people around you right. We all human are shit in one way or another. But nobody deserves to be treated as if they are shit by default.

Find a niche where you can belong and become an authority in it. Stop trying to fit. Embrace your nature, and just then, you will find your path.

RBWells,

This all makes sense to me and yes it sucks. I’m sorry. I do think you will find your way. I am a 50-something white lady and can say with absolute truth, I see black IT guys at my work, have worked with black nerdy guys my whole life and have never thought about it until reading this post, where do you live where it’s unusual?

I do not walk in your shoes but understand the crossing the street business and yes, police discrimination I have received the benefit that everyone should for being human, and know it sucks that not everyone gets that, it’s wrong.

Sorry I don’t know if this is helpful but I hope you find your way, you sound quite young. Hang on. Things may yet get better.

Pantrygheist,

I feel you, being a neurodivergent minority sucks, especially when trying to establish deep connections with others. Most of the time they just mask their racism saying “oh you people just prefer hanging out with your own” and I’m just like I would love to hang out with you folks but that comment gives me really hostile vibes.

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S,
@PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I’m sorry that this is happening to you. Thank you for sharing your perspective with us. I’ve read it several times to make sure it sinks in.

ghostface,

My advice, just lean into it. Lost prevention is following you, talk to lost prevention, get to know whose working, after a week or so. Even in a small town, you will just blend in.

The main thing is just try to make yourself as comfortable in any situation you happen to inhabit.

Good luck

Tarquinn2049, (edited )

Well, we can only hope you are at the very least a step on their path to seeing it as normal.

And yeah, unfortunately most drugs interact differently with different brains. Just like how we have to try so many different medications to help, the other less legal drugs also don’t do the same thing for all of us.

You will eventually find better friends, I do very much recommend joining a local social or support group, whichever sounds more palatable to you. Social groups are just for hanging out with people who have a bit better idea of what it’s like to be you, a support group will include talking about it and potentially looking at solutions to any individual components that can be helped, and support for those that can’t.

You did indeed get dealt a bad hand. And no matter how much anything “shouldn’t” matter, it doesn’t change real life. But you do have to live your life anyway, and while people are very bad at choosing their words in general, there is some truth to how much control you have over your thoughts around it. You can’t change what other people do, but you can change what you think about it. It’s terrible, and you should only try to accept things that aren’t actually damaging. Balance what you fight against and fight for with the things you try to make peace with. You only have so much mental energy to dedicate. Hope that any fights you choose not to participate in will still have enough participants without you, take care of yourself too. The better a place you can manage to get yourself in, the more energy you can devote to the other fights later.

I don’t want to make you feel any smaller than you may already feel, but each of us really are very small parts of any fight we need to fight. As bad as it feels to derelict our duties, it is overall a positive if the alternate is being defeated early before we had a chance to make a much bigger difference in the long run. Take breaks, get yourself good, fight harder later.

As horrible as it is, try to gain perspective from what life would have been like 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. At least things would have been worse then… which is terrible… but it means they are indeed better now, and have continuously trended that way over time. When you look real close, you can see all the individual battle losses and set backs, but the “war” is going our way.

donuts,
donuts avatar

I'm sad and sorry that you're having such a rough time. You paint a really clear and awful picture about how social stereotypes about autism and racism interact.

I'm a white guy, so I haven't walked in your shoes and frankly I'm the last person anyone wants to hear talk about race, but...

For what little that it's worth though, don't lose hope or give up on yourself. You said that your life is pathetic but I don't think so. From the sound of things you're just doing your thing, working, buying groceries, trying to make friends and a girlfriend, trying to help yourself through a world that's harsh to all of us. (Though not equally.)

From reading your story It seems like most of the negative feelings you have for yourself right now are because of how other people perceive you, based almost exclusively on prejudice. They don't know you for you, so they just mentally revert back to the worst small town America racist Fox News tropes that have been hammered into their small minds for decades. I don't know how to combat that. I wish I did.

I do know that it's not on you, however. None of that is your fault, so why go beating yourself up over it? You're having a bad time right now and that's ok, we all do, and it sounds like you're dealing with a lot of ignorance and hurtful bullshit. (You should be a bit stoned, giggling at cartoons or being blown away by a song you've heard 1000 times before, while eating seemingly endless junk food. But you're just in a bad headspace and I can see why.) Go ahead and process your negative feelings, but I don't think you should hate yourself or treat yourself like an enemy just because some other ignorant assholes out there are treating you that way.

I wish you the best, man. Stay strong. Thanks for sharing your story.

Bipta,

It’s bad enough that I have both ADHD and Autism but being Black amplifies the disadvantages

I think about this a lot even being white - how my idiosyncrasies would go from borderline suspicious in the eyes of society to obviously troublesome just because of skin color.

Don't worry about your post; it's coherent and enlightening.

The world is a fucked up place and I wish you the best.

Starglasses,

I’ve definitely thought about how my behaviors and actions are “manageable” to people, but if I was black, I know the exact same quirks I have would be looked down on angrily.

It’s not quite the same, but when I lived in Africa I was the only white person around. I experienced what it was like to be the only different one. People would touch me, call me out, take pictures of me. I am in so many cab-ride selfies. Luckily, I got to play with it and make it fun. When someone was trying to sneakily selfie with me in a cab (taxi) and I noticed, I’d pose for them and we’d have a laugh and chat.

It was weird being so noticeable and watched, but my experience was not hateful. I hate that you get something different and awful just because of skin color.

tygerprints,

It's very sad that you have to contend with this. It's all due to one thing - other people are total assholes. It's isn't you who is broken here. It's the rest of the society around you that condones hate and fosters violence toward anyone who is different or unusual.

Your post is very coherent, and congrats on having the courage to be open about it. I don't claim to have gone through anything like what you have, but as an old whiny white gay male, I can say I have had similar experiences (especially living here in Utah in Mormon country USA).

I've put up with bigoted small-minds since I was a kid. Because I was different then, I was the kid who would rather make art than go play ball outside, the abuse I put up with would boggle your mind. I always knew the problem wasn't me - I was pretty talented. It was the social goops around me who came from idiotic families with very little in the way of social graces and almost no real moral values of any kind.

The world is made up almost completely of assholes and dickwads. You'll always be black and have to deal with ADHD, but just as I always say, I love being who I am, I hope you get to the same point eventually. It's not a question of you having to fix anything about yourself.

They say that no one would purposely "choose to be gay," for example. But I would. Even if I was given an opportunity to do it all again, I'd do it the exact same way (except I'd probably come out and be more open about it earlier). You have to not only develop a thick skin, but the mindset of a warrior. It's us against the world. And in the end, we'll inherit the earth and all the bounties of heaven. Not them.

Best of luck with all of this.

vzq,

Privilege, or lack thereof, compounds just like interest. It’s a real problem, but it’s really hard to communicate to normies. They see it as pointless “oppression Olympics” (their words) and not a real thing that affects real people that they could have a hand in solving.

Thanks for sharing this.

winterayars,

I mean “oppression Olympics” is a disease that can afflict marginalized communities, too. In its own way. You’re right, though. Shit really adds up in Western society.

Seraph, (edited )
Seraph avatar

"Look for the helpers"

In this case I mean look for those who do not judge you. Make efforts to befriend those who give you the respect you deserve. As with everything, take the good forward and leave the bad behind.

However, you have my sympathy. You're right this won't ever change completely, but hopefully over time you'll find more people that fall into the above category.

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