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
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.