Know Thyself Part III: Belonging vs Fitting In
At 35 years old, I was diagnosed with what is now called high functioning autism. And at the time I was told it was Asperger's. And I say that as part of my example, right? I got really in deep with the online autism community on social media and I felt like, wow, there are finally all these people who understand me and I really feel like I belong
And therefore we are denying them the very sense of belonging that we often think we are trying to create by sharing our truth. So I ask you today to consider times when your subjective reality, your subjective truth has been misaligned with another person's subjective truth. How you handled it and how you might handle it now. Now that your truth has probably changed some, how do we handle people who believe something completely different because they've had completely different experiences? Aren't they just as valid?
And that I think of labels and categories and boxes as being helpful to an extent, but only as a starting point. If we see them as a doorway and we leave that door closed, we're not having a full understanding. You don't stop. And simply when someone says they're an artist, you ask them, oh, what kind of an artist, what is it that you are passionate about? And so whatever the box label et cetera is it's just the starting point
This is often why I choose not to identify myself to others as an artist because other people tend to still ignore the nuance when asking what kind of art do you do? Well, I mean, for me it's really just a matter of like I have to get my expression out somehow. I don't have one particular medium or whatever and then that becomes like an overly nuanced conversation that, again, some people just don't have the capacity to process. We haven't learned how to think