Two Corollaries To Growth Mindset

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

A lot of people I know try to acquire a ‘growth mindset.’ Growth mindset is the opposite of fixed mindset: growth mindset emphasizes that your skills can grow and develop, while fixed mindset emphasizes your inborn abilities. Growth mindset is alleged to improve persistence, motivation, willingness to embrace challenges, and hard work.

I like having a growth mindset. However, I have two corollaries to add, however, which very much improved my experience of developing a growth mindset.

First of all, be careful how you frame ‘growth mindset.’ It is always possible for you to improve; it is not always possible for you to reach a specific achievement. If you are 5’2″, you are probably never going to become a member of the NBA; however, you can most certainly improve your basketball skills. If you say “I can become a member of the NBA as long as I try hard and believe in myself”, you’re lying to yourself. If you say “if I put in a lot of time and effort, I can practice basketball and become a better basketball player,” then this is quite true. There is absolutely nothing about growth mindset as conceived of in the psychological literature which requires that you believe you should be capable of literally everything, but a lot of people wind up thinking that it does, and then they waste their effort in a fruitless attempt at self-deception.

This caveat is really important for disabled people. It might be true that if you worked hard then you would improve your driving skills, but if you have certain disabilities like blindness or dyspraxia it might also be true that no matter how hard you work you’ll never be a safe driver. It’s not fixed mindset to say “given my limitations, it’s dangerous for me to be on the road, and it will be no longer how hard I work at driving.” It’s just good sense.

Second, remember that just because you can improve something doesn’t mean you should. My motor skills are terrible: I continually knock over glasses, run into furniture and drop things; my handwriting is unreadable, I spill food on myself, and don’t even ask about my ability to tie my shoes. If I wanted to, I could improve my motor skills, probably through seeking the services of an occupational therapist. But occupational therapy is time-consuming, I have a lot of things going on in my life, and I can actually get by fine by only wearing shoes without laces, never handwriting anything, and buying the extended warranty on my laptops.

It is true that with sufficient effort people can improve anything. However, it might be that the effort required is unreasonable for you right now (you might not have the spare time to go to occupational therapy). It might be that improving at a skill requires more effort for you than for most people (you might have to practice five or six times as long as another person to be equally good at throwing and catching a ball). It might be that you have limitations that other people don’t have (maybe occupational therapy is very emotionally taxing for you because of being bullied for your clumsiness as a child).

To me, it feels very empowering to say “I can improve, but I don’t want to.” I get to make decisions about my own life! I have agency! I can decide to do things! If I’m bad at something, I can decide to put effort into it without thinking “but I’m so awful at this, I shouldn’t bother”, or I can decide to skip it without thinking “but other people can do this! I should be able to too!” If I’m good at something, I can decide to put effort into it without thinking “I’m already okay at this, I should stop wasting my time trying to get better”, and I can decide to skip it without thinking “I’m wasting my potential.”

There are lots of skills I could improve in my life: spinning poi, speaking Swahili, emotion regulation, poetry recitation, fixing roofs… I only have seventy years on this earth! I have to prioritize! I can’t try to improve literally every skill I could conceivably improve! It’s okay to say “you know what, this isn’t a high priority for me. My energy can be better spent elsewhere.”

Some people will take great offense at people admitting that they don’t want to do things because it’s not worth it. They think “but you just admitted you could have readable handwriting if you worked harder, therefore there is absolutely no excuse for not putting the effort in other than SHEER LAZINESS!” This is particularly common for people who are bad at skills most people have (like handwriting) or for skills that are particularly valued by whomever’s doing the complaining (weight isn’t really a skill, but fat people get this all the time).

Of course, if you are an adult, you get to make your own tradeoffs about what you do or don’t care about. Other people may certainly get to object or even stop talking to you (if, for instance, you decide one of the things you don’t care about is their happiness). But other people’s shitty handwriting is what is technically referred to as ‘none of your fucking business.’

To people who are like this: I would propose that you consider how much better you could get at playing wastepaper basketball if you put three hours a day of practice. If you’re like “but I have things to do! I don’t want to become the world’s best player of wastebasket basketball!”, then maybe you should consider that other people have priorities too.

If you’re around a person like that, feel free to say “I can’t” whenever you mean “I have done the cost/benefit analysis and it is not worth it.” Growth mindset is an internal reframe that doesn’t have to be applied to hostile outsiders.

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Parable of the Skills Gap

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

Alice grits her teeth, preparing herself. She bends over, aiming her head at a weak spot, and starts to run, picking up a good speed. She bangs her head into the wall as hard as she can and collapses back. The wall remains unchanged, but it seems to have a little air of mockery.

“Ow,” she says, rubbing her head. “It’s no use. I’m never going to be able to get into my living room.”

“Doesn’t it have a door?” you say. “Most living rooms have doors.”

“No, they don’t,” Alice says. “You get into the living room by bashing your head against the wall until it breaks down. Duh.”

“I found this door over here,” you say.

It swings open easily.

“…I feel kind of stupid,” Alice says.

—

Bob grits his teeth, preparing himself. He bends over, aiming his head at a weak spot, and starts to run, picking up a good speed. He bangs his head into the wall as hard as he can and collapses back. The wall remains unchanged, but it seems to have a little air of mockery.

“Ow,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s no use. I’m never going to be able to get into my living room.”

“Doesn’t it have a door?” you say. “Most living rooms have doors.”

“I’m just going to have to accept that I have to bash my head against this wall for the rest of my life,” Bob says, “or never get to enter the living room.”

“I found this door over here.”

“There’s no such thing as doors,” Bob says condescendingly. “I have been trying to get into this living room for twenty years. Don’t you think I’d know if there was a door?”

“No, seriously, I just walked in the living room.”

“That’s just because you’re lucky,” Bob says. “Privileged people like you assume that everything is easy for everyone else. Well, it’s not. Some of us have to enter the room by breaking down the wall with our skulls.”

“You can enter through the door too,” you say helplessly. “It’s right here.”

Bob is ignoring you as he begins to bash his head against the wall once more.

—

You’re talking to Charlie on the phone. “I just don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t understand why I can’t go to my living room like normal people. I think I’m going to stop trying.”

“You can’t give up,” you say. “Quitters never win and winners never quit, you know? You just have to try harder. Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, after all. The harder you work, the luckier you get. The price of success is hard work.”

“That’s a good point,” Charlie says. “I really should try harder.”

There is a loud crash.

“What happened?” you say.

Charlie’s voice is broken and weak. “I think I have a concussion.”

—

You’re talking to Dani on the phone. “I just don’t get it,” she says. “I don’t understand why I can’t go to my living room like normal people. I think I’m going to stop trying.”

“There’s a door.”

“No, there isn’t,” she huffs. “I’ve checked.”

“Look, I’ve been through this with Alice, and Bob, and Charlie,” you say. “All of their living rooms have doors, even though they didn’t know it. Yours does too.”

“Other people’s living rooms might have doors,” she says, “but mine definitely does not have a door.”

“Yes it does,” you say. “You’re just not looking hard enough.”

“I have looked through EVERY SECTION OF WALL and there is NO DOOR HERE,” she says.

“Maybe there’s a place you’re not looking.”

“I called the builders! They said they fucked up!”

“No one fucks up that badly.”

“Well, this time they did.”

“You’re just in denial,” you say. “You just need to look harder for the door. Here, I’ll come over tomorrow and we can look for the door together. I’m sure that’ll help you find it.”

“No, you won’t,” Dani says, “Because there is no door! You are solving a problem that is different from the one I have!”

When you go over to Dani’s house, you can’t find a door. But she has to have a door! Everyone does! You wonder if maybe she hid the door in order to protect her self-image of not having a door.

Dani bangs her head against a wall. It does not seem to be an attempt to enter the living room.

—

Edgar has hired a bulldozer.

“You know,” you say, “there was a door in the wall you just knocked down…”

“Doors are a myth,” Edgar said, “made up by Big Architecture.”

“You destroyed half your house,” you say.

“Yes, but I can finally get into my living room!” Edgar says.

“So can the rain,” you comment.

Edgar waves a hand airily as if to dismiss minor details.

The bulldozer, not properly braked, reverses two feet and runs over a cat.

—

“It won’t open,” Felicity says.

“Some doors get stuck,” you say. “You have to put your back into it and try a little harder.”

“I’ve tried that,” Felicity says, “and all that happens is I get a concussion.”

“Well, this time you’re doing the right thing,” you say, “rather than the wrong thing. That’s bound to make a difference.”

“I suppose,” Felicity says dubiously, and pushes.

The door swings open.

“…holy shit I’m in my living room!” she says. “Am I going to have to do that every time?”

“Probably,” you hedge. “Most heavy doors don’t get much less heavy.”

She looks around, basking in the interior decorating she never before got to see. “Totally worth it.”

Assorted Thoughts On Scrupulosity

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, scrupulosity cw

[Attention conservation notice: Navel-gaze-y.]
[Content warning: brief discussion of eating disorders.]

I.

This essay is very personal. On scrupulosity, even more so than on other issues, I am acutely aware of the reality that different things work for different people, and that the advice that saves and soothes me is poison to someone else. We do not have best practices for dealing with scrupulosity yet. And for scrupulous people even more than for other groups, advice may be easily taken as orders; if the things that work for me don’t work for you, you can conclude that you are evil because they don’t work for you. This is not my intention. If my strategies work for you, excellent; if they do not, try something else. Write about it. We need more people who deal with scrupulosity talking about the techniques that work for them.

II.

I recently read an essay by Peter Singer, Ethics Beyond Species and Beyond Instincts, in which he defined the moral as that which is universalizable, in this sense: “We can distinguish the moral from the nonmoral by appeal to the idea that when we think, judge, or act within the realm of the moral, we do so in a manner that we are prepared to apply to all others who are similarly placed.”

I read that, sat back, and said to myself: “I cannot do morality.”

I cannot do it in the same sense that an alcoholic cannot drink, and a person with an eating disorder cannot go on a diet. I am incapable of engaging with universalizable morality in a way that does not cause me severe mental harm. While I can reject a universalizable moral claim on an intellectual level, I am incapable of rejecting them– no matter how absurd or contradictory to other things I accept– on an emotional level. If I fail to live up to such a claim, I will hate myself and curl in a ball and be utterly nonfunctional for a few hours, causing harm to both myself and those who have to put up with me.

So (with much backsliding) I have started to make an effort to weed out the universalizable morality from my brain. I do things I want to do, and I don’t do things I don’t want to do. I do not mean a simplistic sense of ‘want’ here. If a person is trying to kick the caffeine habit, they may deeply crave a cup of coffee, but they can still be said to “really want” to not drink caffeine. Notably, this does not require that we create a universalizable moral rule that no one ought to drink caffeinated beverages.

This resolution may prompt the question of why I’m an effective altruist. Well, I want to. It is nowhere written that I am not allowed to have preferences about states of the world, and as it happens I prefer worlds in which fewer people die horrible painful deaths to worlds in which more people do. I do not care about it as the most important thing in my life, but as one of perhaps half a dozen equally important goals. I would, of course, prefer that more people become effective altruists, and I will act in such a way that more people become effective altruists, but that does not require any justification other than my own preferences.

This is the reason, I think, that I am triggered by so much discourse around scrupulosity. It is not engaged in the project of stepping away from universalizable morality and learning to live without it; instead, it is engaged in the project of coming up with a form of universalizable morality that most people can achieve, and (often) of criticizing other systems as unrealistic and inhuman. (See that fucking Moral Saints essay.) For me, this is sort of like going up to an anorexic and saying “look, that diet you’re on is very unrealistic! You need to get on Weight Watchers instead.” If the anorexic could get on Weight Watchers and not have this predictably result in eating-disordered behavior, they wouldn’t fucking have anorexia anymore.

(People actually do give that advice, because people are the worst at putting themselves in other people’s shoes.)

Also, like, what if I want to be more morally saintly than Susan Wolf prefers? At least utilitarianism has the advantage that when it’s telling me to do shit I don’t want to do, it’s telling me to prevent children dying horrible deaths, rather than telling me to be someone Susan Wolf wants to hang out with. Why do I care whom you want to hang out with, Susan Wolf? I have literally never met you!

III.

One of the most useful techniques for me in coping with my scrupulosity is training myself to respond to universalizable moral claims by adopting the attitude in this picture:

BDSM is disrespectful to the dignity of the human person? Literally no one asked for your opinion!

Effective altruism is wrong because we should help people in our own neighborhoods first? Remind me again why I care?

Promiscuous women are being unfair to men because they only have sex with attractive men and not with the unattractive ones? Uh, who asked you?

Being fat is morally wrong because of the burden on our healthcare system and because people should be physically fit? I don’t recall asking for your input!

I am working on trying to parse universalizable moral claims as people having opinions about their own preferences which they then choose to extend to me. “I want there not to be any promiscuous women, therefore you have to want there not to be any promiscuous women!” No, I don’t. In fact, I am generally in favor of the existence of promiscuous women. It is an argument as absurd as saying that because you like dark chocolate therefore I must like dark chocolate.

(I know this isn’t actually true– universalizable moral claims are actually different than statements of preferences– but it’s sure as hell useful.)

A notable exception to this technique is moral philosophy, where I simply extended my eyes-glazed-over “why does anyone care about this bullshit?” attitude to metaphysics to normative ethics as well.

IV.

Part of my problem, I think, is that I don’t feel guilty enough.

This is an odd problem for a scrupulous person to have, but I think it’s true. An observation that comes up a lot in dialectical behavioral therapy is that for people with severely dysregulated emotions, an emotion that you have too much of is often a result of using that emotion to cope with another emotion you’re afraid to feel. For instance, a person who feels angry all the time might be shutting down their natural feelings of sadness at a loss, because they feel like if they start crying they might never stop.

Whenever I’m in a situation that should logically prompt guilt, instead I feel shame. I do not recognize that I have done something that goes against my long-term desires and acknowledge that I want to do better in the future. Instead, I think that I am a bad person, that others will hate me, that I am inherently evil and nothing I can do will wash the impurities away, that I will never be approved of or praised…

Of course, this is not right. The usefulness of guilt is in pointing out when I have violated my own standards; the approval or disapproval of other people does not particularly matter, except that they have an outside view and might be able to tell when I am being too hard or easy on myself. But, like I said, I care about my own preferences; while I do care about other people’s happiness, I do not give a flying fuck about their thoughts on whether parents should sacrifice everything for their kids or whatthefuckever.

But my brain slides, so subtly that I don’t even notice it, from the question of “did I do something that I don’t really want to do?” to the question of “does everyone hate me? am I inherently evil?” That first question is scary. It involves things like ‘taking responsibility’ and ‘making amends’ and ‘self-improvement’. All of that sounds like work. On the other hand, if you’re inherently evil, you don’t have to try to get better; you just have to try to stop existing, which is much easier. And if most people don’t care about me failing my own standards (which they don’t, because they don’t even know me, and also my standards are higher than most people care about), then I can determine that they don’t hate me, and never address the question of whether I’m failing to reach my goals. Because, you know, that would be hard. Self-flagellation is easy.

V.

Recently, I was having a conversation with an acquaintance who’s a negative utilitarian. He asked what my particular brand of morality was, and I began my usual “well, it’s kind of handwavey, but…” spiel, bracing myself for an argument about why I cared about things other than suffering and didn’t I realize that suffering was the most important issue and blah blah. Part of the way through, he interrupted me, smiled, and said “oh! You have complex values!” and the conversation moved on.

This made me feel really nice. Part of the reason, I think, is that I didn’t have to defend my position. He was a negative utilitarian. I was not. There were ways in which we could benefit each other: after all, I don’t particularly like suffering either, and so we could help each other on the common project of making there be less suffering in the world. Agreement on normative ethics or on ultimate goals was not necessary.

It felt freeing. He had his own morals, but (at least in that conversation) they didn’t have to be universalizable; he was comfortable with me believing differently from him. I didn’t have to be ashamed. It was great.

BPD Makes It Harder Not To Hurt People

Tags

bpd, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[content warning: discussion of rages, self-injury, suicidality, and abusive behavior]

Being borderline– not for everyone, but for most people– makes it harder not to hurt people.

One of the most iconic symptoms of borderline personality disorder is rages. They often come on suddenly, with other people having no idea what set them off. The borderline may cry, throw things, scream, insult people, hurl profanity, break possessions, threaten to leave their partners; some may even be violent. And then as quickly as the rage started, it subsides, and the borderline may be as horrified as anyone else at their behavior.

Even if they don’t rage, borderlines may have other difficulties with not harming others. For instance, most borderlines are suicidal or self-harm: out of fear that the borderline might harm themselves, people the borderline knows might find it difficult to set boundaries about how much time they’re willing to spend comforting the borderline, whether they give them money, or other subjects. Because it feels like being abandoned every time their friends go somewhere without them, borderlines may feel tempted to isolate people they’re close to. Many borderlines “test” people they’re close to (for instance, by giving them the silent treatment to see if they will initiate conversation on their own). Many borderlines are incredibly possessive. Moving away from the field of interpersonal relationships, most borderlines are impulsive, and sometimes this can lead to damaging others: for instance, driving recklessly can injure or even kill other people, and getting high while babysitting is risky for the child you’re taking care of.

This is a thought a lot of people are uncomfortable with. We know that you can have difficulties walking, or hearing, or turning in papers on time, or reading, but a lot of people seem to have this odd idea that it’s impossible to have an impairment in morality.

So I’ve noticed a couple different ways people try to resolve the conflict. First, many people demonize borderlines. It’s not that we’re people with a disability that makes it harder for us not to hurt others: it’s that we’re Inherently Evil. Some people claim that when borderlines self-harm it’s not a product of real pain, but just “manipulation” and “attention-seeking”. (Of course, if you need attention so badly you’re willing to cut yourself open for it, I’m… pretty sure you’re in some serious pain.) This ignores the obvious fact that many borderlines don’t want to hurt other people; indeed, borderlines whose emotions are not dysregulated are notoriously compassionate. For a lot of people, it’s not like they wake up in the morning and go “I know! I’m going to rage at my partner today!”; they just don’t know how else to handle anger.

Second, many people pretend that this is not an issue. For instance, they may claim that the idea that borderlines are sometimes awful people is “borderline stigma”. Of course, borderline personality disorder is very stigmatized. But the behavior I’m talking about wasn’t made up for Leaving The Horrible Bitch Demoness You’re Shackled To: A Guide For Innocent Nons Who Have Never Done Anything Wrong In Their Whole Entire Lives. A lot of it is literally in the diagnostic criteria: inappropriate, intense anger; substance abuse and reckless driving; recurrent suicidal behavior and self-harm. And the rest is well-attested in the literature, even by sympathetic people like Marsha Linehan.

Third, some people pretend that there’s not a problem with borderlines’ behavior. This is, for some reason, a very popular strategy on BPD Tumblr, large portions of which seem to be under the impression that not being okay with people screaming insults at you or needing to talk to you every thirty minutes is ableist. This is absurd. I do not intend to use moral culpability language here: I don’t think it’s particularly helpful. But the fact of the matter is that it is very difficult for us not to yell at or cling to people and sometimes it might even seem impossible– and it will cause harm to people we care about if we do it, not to mention causing other people to dislike us and maybe even try out that abandonment we were trying to avoid. That is not ableist or people falsely accusing borderlines of being abusive. It is a perfectly reasonable preference set.

I think it is hurtful for borderlines when people don’t realize that a lot of us have a hard time not hurting people, and it’s not because we’re evil. For one thing, the amount of work many borderlines put into not hurting people goes unrecognized. It literally does not occur to many people that not having rages is hard. Why would it? Most people have gone through their whole entire lives never having a rage because their partner bought the wrong kind of peanut butter. The amount of personal growth, self-awareness, and inner strength it takes to go “oh that fucker, I’m going to KILL– okay, deep breath, don’t do anything yet, check the facts, those are thoughts they’re not reality, now we’re going to go do jumping jacks to happy music until we’re calm” goes entirely unrecognized.

For another, it can be very invalidating of our guilt. I’ve done things that hurt people, some of whom I loved very much. I feel guilty about this. That’s okay! It’s not unreasonable or a sign of my irrational guilt complex that I feel guilty about hurting people I care about; that is what people are actually supposed to feel guilty about. But if you don’t realize that this is an experience most borderlines have, you can treat their perfectly justified guilt like it’s a sign of their mental illness.

I feel like having to accept that it is harder for me to not hurt people has made it easier for me to accept other demanding moral premises. For instance, some people have argued that vegan ideologies are ableist because many people are disabled and can’t go vegan. My reaction to this is mostly “yeah, so?” Many people can’t go vegan, and not going vegan leads to the horrific suffering of thousands of animals. Both can be true.

Hot and Cold Cognitive Empathy

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

Many autistic people lack cognitive empathy– the ability to accurately understand other people’s emotional states. We might have a hard time telling from someone’s face whether they’re happy or sad, predicting whether a blunt statement of “your hat is very ugly” would be read as an insult, figuring out what sort of present another person would want for Christmas, or saying something that would comfort someone going through a hard time.

In my experience, a lot of adult autistic people develop what you might call “cold” cognitive empathy, in contrast to the “hot” cognitive empathy non-autistic people usually have. Hot cognitive empathy is an intuitive sense: you look at someone and just know that they’re sad, you easily grasp that calling someone’s hat ugly is an insult, and you see a present and can easily recognize that it’s the perfect present for another person. Conversely, cold cognitive empathy is rational and deliberate. If you have cold cognitive empathy, you might have certain rules: for instance, you might pick a Christmas present by listing out all the things the person likes and what they might need, or you might comfort someone by fetching them tea and offering them a hug. You might deliberately put yourself into their shoes, imagining what you would feel like in that situation: “well, her dog just died, and I would be sad if someone I cared about died, so I bet she’s sad.” I tend to think about people’s personalities the same way I’d think about what a fictional character wants and how they’d react to things, but then I spent a lot of time writing fanfic as a teenager.

(If you’re familiar with the terminology, hot cognitive empathy corresponds to System 1, while cold cognitive empathy corresponds to System 2.)

Of course, a person can develop both hot cognitive empathy and cold cognitive empathy. But I think having severely impaired hot cognitive empathy is a spur that makes people develop their cold cognitive empathy more strongly.

I feel like cold cognitive empathy can give you a lot of insight into how society works. A person with well-developed hot cognitive empathy, when asked something like “why do people like wearing band shirts?”, says “uh, because they’re cool”. A person with well-developed cold cognitive empathy says “because they’re indirectly communicating to others that they like the band”. A person with well-developed hot cognitive empathy, when asked why one shouldn’t proposition strangers, says “it’s creepy”; a person with well-developed cold cognitive empathy says “engaging in behavior that it is generally off-limits, particularly in a sexual context, communicates to other people that you don’t care about boundaries– including more important ones like ‘don’t rape people.'”

I also think that cold cognitive empathy works better for dealing with diverse groups of people. People with high levels of hot cognitive empathy and low levels of cold cognitive empathy, in my experience, tend to fall into this failure mode where, when people don’t behave the way they predict, they assume the person is behaving the way they predict anyway. If they misread a person as being sad, then that person must secretly be sad, however much that person protests otherwise. If they think a person wants chocolate for Christmas, then that person must want chocolate, no matter how often the chocolate sits in the back of the cabinet unopened. Some people wind up having entire relationships with fictional people that bear only a passing resemblance to the actual person they believe they’re interacting with. Cold cognitive empathy, because it’s conscious and rational, is more open to deliberate correction when one discovers that it is in error.

The big problem with cold cognitive empathy is that hot cognitive empathy deals with a lot of complexities in human interaction subconsciously, where the person doesn’t have to think about them. Representing all those complexities consciously through a process of rational deliberation is really hard. Think about it like throwing a ball: your brain is doing a bunch of subconscious trigonometry to figure out what angle to throw it at, which you don’t have access to. You might not even know how to do trig. If you had to calculate it all yourself, throwing balls would take a really long time and you probably wouldn’t be any good at it.

It doesn’t help that– since most people have fairly high levels of hot cognitive empathy and don’t bother to develop cold cognitive empathy to as high a degree– a lot of explanations of why people do things are really unsatisfying. Imagine if you were talking to a hypothetical alien who had to do trig to throw balls, and you were giving advice like “just look at your target!” or “I don’t know, I just throw it.” That’s the reason that a lot of neurotypicals wind up explaining why you shouldn’t do things with such non-explanations as “that’s wrong”, “that’s creepy”, “that’s impolite”, “that’s lame” and so on. Their brains are doing really complicated game theory and psychology and such on a level that they don’t have access to.

Because most people tend not to accept unsatisfying explanations, you get the stereotypical autistic behavior of going “it’s this way because neurotypicals are STUPID and IRRATIONAL and DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE and EVERYONE SHOULD STOP.” While that’s sometimes true, it’s often simply a failure of cold cognitive empathy.

On The Canonicity of Neurodivergent Characters

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, writing

Will Graham is autistic.

It’s the little details that make his character: his tendency to pick up speech cadences from whomever he’s around, his body language, his difficulty with understanding what he’s thinking or feeling, the fact that everyone around him infantilizes him, even his fashion sense being ‘this appears to be sort of generally clothes-shaped’. He’s one of the best-done autistic characters on television…

Except that Bryan Fuller’s opinion on Will Graham’s autism is “For Will Graham, there’s a line in the pilot about him being on the spectrum of autism or Asperger’s, and he’s neither of those things. He actually has an empathy disorder where he feels way too much and that’s relatable in some way. There’s something about people who connect more to animals than they do to other people because it’s too intense for whatever reason.”

(Yes, Bryan Fuller did give a description of some people’s experience of autism as a reason why Will Graham could not possibly be autistic.)

Most people would consider my thoughts on Will Graham’s autism to be a headcanon, in the same sense that thinking he’s LGBT or a person of color would be a headcanon. But I don’t think it’s irrelevant that if Will Graham walked into the office of any competent, non-cannibalistic psychiatrist in the country, he’d walk out with an autism diagnosis. That is far more grounded in the text than most headcanons. Indeed, it’s the clear and obvious interpretation.

The solution to the mystery, I think, is precisely that authors don’t know what autism is. 1 in 68 people are autistic; therefore, nearly all authors have met at least one autistic person, and most have met several. However, they’re not likely to know that the people are autistic. Many autistic people do not disclose their autism; some might not ever have been diagnosed. And because they don’t really know what autism is, they’re not going to recognize the signs.

Compare this to homosexuality. Many gay people are out in every part of their lives; the gay people that any author has met are very likely to identify themselves as gay. And homosexuality is legible in a way autism isn’t. Visibly autistic people are not usually read as autistic; they’re read as weird or nerdy or high or a vague undifferentiated “special needs”. On the other hand, a man who kisses another man is easily recognized as gay.

For this reason, authors have autistic traits as part of their general sense of what people do, without understanding that those traits are autistic. (I’m not saying that authors model their characters on any specific autistic person, although that’s some writers’ process– I’m saying that when an author’s subconscious mind thinks “hm, what would it be plausible for this person to do?”, autistic traits are included as part of the things it is plausible for people to do.) When they want to write a character who is weird or nerdy or vaguely special needs, they wind up writing a tremendously accurate autistic character– by accident.

Indeed, these characters are usually much better depictions of autism than the characters that are supposed to be autistic, because the latter are influenced by the author’s stereotypes and pathologizing depictions of autistic people, while the former are based on actual autistic people.

This doesn’t apply nearly as much to gay headcanons, because it is extremely rare for authors to know that typical gay behaviors exist without connecting them to the existence of gayness. (It is, interestingly, possible that an author knows of the traits of self-closeted trans people without knowing that those are self-closeted trans person traits– but I’m not sure if there are commonly unintentional self-closeted trans people in fiction outside of transformation fetish porn.)

In conclusion: there is a sense in which Will Graham is ‘canonically’ autistic which would not apply to more normal headcanons like him being gay or polyamorous or trans, and the same thing apples to a bunch of other neurodivergences.

With Borderlines, Validate, Don’t Reassure

Tags

bpd, ozy blog post

Consider a pretty ordinary scene with a person with borderline personality disorder: they say “I hate you! You’re going to leave me!”

The natural response is, of course, to respond with “I don’t hate you, and I’m not going to leave you. I love you very much and I want to be with you.”

Don’t do that.

Instead, say something like “you must feel really scared– I’d feel scared too if I thought someone I loved was going to leave me.”

Now, you might think that this is going to make the borderline feel worse. After all, you just said it was okay for them to be scared! Instead of showing them that their feeling is silly, you implied that it made sense!

But, in reality, if you say the first thing, what goes through a lot of borderlines’ minds is something like this: “They’re just saying that! They don’t really mean it! It’s not true! Oh no, I’m not supposed to be feeling this way, I’m supposed to not worry that they’re leaving me, I am the worst person in the whole entire world, and I know they’re going to leave me because anyone would leave the worst person in the world!” And then they start sobbing and you have no idea what you did wrong.

If you say the second thing, what goes through a lot of borderlines’ minds is something like this: “oh! They really get it! They must really care about me if they get it. And it’s okay to be scared– they said that it was, after all. Oh, huh, I guess I feel better now.”

Borderlines want to feel understood. We often feel like our emotions are unacceptable or bad, which just makes them more intense. And we often have a hard time figuring out what we’re feeling at all. All of these things can be helped by a simple process of (a) figuring out something, anything, that makes sense about what the person with borderline personality disorder is doing and (b) saying it.

If they’re mad about something you did that was, in fact, kind of a dick move, say that it was a dick move. If they really did make a mistake, say “it’s okay to feel bad that you broke the dish.”

It’s important not to say that things are true when they actually aren’t. Responding to “you hate me and you want to leave me!” with “yes, I do” is not going to improve the situation.

Of course, sometimes this is very difficult. As Topher said when I originally explained this concept to him, “but most of the time I DON’T understand your emotions and they DON’T make any sense!” One thing you can do is look for aspects of the situation that make sense. Maybe it doesn’t make any sense at all that the borderline has come to the conclusion that you’re a robot, but her distress at the possibility makes perfect sense. Or maybe the fact that the borderline is curled in the fetal position crying because she got an 89 on a test doesn’t make very much sense, but feeling sad about it certainly does.

It can also be helpful to prepare a few safe scripts for situations where you don’t understand what’s going on at all. It is almost always safe to say that the borderline is in a lot of pain or doing something really hard, on account of this is true of borderlines approximately 90% of the time (and nearly 100% when they’re telling people that those people hate them). Similarly, “that sucks” or “you must feel overwhelmed” or “you seem sad/angry/afraid [choose your borderline’s favorite emotion]” are often great. Do mix up your scripts, though; if they catch on that you say “that sounds hard” every time, then it will stop working.

I’m not saying that this strategy works for every borderline. But it works for a lot, and it’s worth a shot.

The Suicide Rate Is Too Low

Tags

ozy blog post, ozy is an obnoxious contrarian, suicide tw

[content warning: did you read the fucking title? Suicidal people, please consider whether it is a good idea for you to read this.]
[epistemic status: I don’t behave as if this were true, but the arguments are reasonable.]
[commenting note: If you wish to comment on this post with earnest recommendations about my mental health, don’t.]

There is a tremendous tragedy in our society today: not enough people have killed themselves.

Naively, one would assume that the individual is best at assessing whether their life is worth living. However, I believe there is a systematic bias in favor of people whose lives are not worth living failing to kill themselves.

First, consider it from an evolutionary perspective. There is considerable selective pressure against committing suicide: if you kill yourself, you won’t have any more children, and you will leave any existing children parentless. Therefore, like most animals, humans have evolved a preference to not kill ourselves, no matter how deeply in pain we are. In my personal experience of attempting suicide, the drive to live live at all costs live prompted by a suicide attempt is one of the strongest and most all-consuming feelings I’ve ever experienced.

However, our society does not leave the evolutionary bias towards life alone, but heightens it. Celebrities routinely discuss how important it is not to kill yourself– from Dan Savage to Lady Gaga to Gerard Way. If you google “suicide”, Google will show you the suicide prevention lifeline; the top results are universally people trying to talk you out of it. Similarly, looking up “suicide” on Tumblr will get you a message about suicide prevention. As a suicidal person, I can attest to the paucity of people who will talk with you openly about your desire to kill yourself without assuming that your desire to die is a cognitive distortion that should be put to bed as quickly as possible.

Information about how to commit suicide is censored to the point of being nigh-unavailable. Books like Final Exit and the Peaceful Pill Handbook are controversial, because how dare anyone give people information that could theoretically cause them to want to die? Similarly, many ‘public health interventions’ consist of nothing more than taking away suicidal people’s ability to control their own destiny. Eliminating coal-burning stoves and thus an effective form of suicide is hailed as saving lives. Today, many advocate for gun control with the same logic.

Of course, any discussion of the social pressure not to commit suicide is incomplete without mentioning the fact that planning for suicide (along with homicidal ideation) is one of the two cases where we consider it acceptable to imprison someone without trial. Fortunately, the crime of saying to a therapist “I wish to kill myself tomorrow, and I have a plan” is only punished by three days’ imprisonment, and such a punishment is trivially easy to avoid, but it speaks to the depth of pressure on the suicidal person not to commit suicide. If I wish to discuss with a trained professional all the options that are on the table– my chance of recovery, my hope for the future, and the prospect that my life will never be worth living– I will never be allowed to do so.

And you’re telling me, looking at all this cultural pressure not to commit suicide, that most people who ought to die do so? Some people report that most suicide attempters are impulsive people who regret it shortly after: of course they are! Anyone who would attempt rational suicide has already been dissuaded by all the people screaming about how rational suicide is wrong wrong wrong and the only moral option is to endure misery until your hopefully early grave.

This pressure not to commit suicide is culturally contingent and not inevitable. As Cicero writes in the De Finibus:

When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart from life. This makes it plain that it is on occasion appropriate for the Wise Man to quit life although he is happy, and also of the Foolish Man to remain in life although he is miserable. For with the Stoics good and evil, as has repeatedly been said already, are a subsequent outgrowth; whereas the primary things of nature, whether favourable or the reverse, fall under the judgment and choice of the Wise Man, and form so to speak the subject-matter, the given material with which wisdom deals. Therefore the reasons both for remaining in life and for departing from it are to be measured entirely by the primary things of nature aforesaid. For the virtuous man is not necessarily retained in life by virtue, and also those who are devoid of virtue need not necessarily seek death. And very often it is appropriate for the Wise Man to abandon life at a moment when he is enjoying supreme happiness, if an opportunity offers for making a timely exit.

Following this wisdom, Stoics like Seneca and Cato the Younger killed themselves when they felt it was time.

Some will say that suicide is a selfish act, because of the grief others experience. But everyone will die (for now). At some point, my loved ones will experience grief at my passing– or I will experience the grief of having outlived them all. To delay– not to prevent– the pain of grief, anti-suicide proponents ask that the rationally suicidal live in misery for decades upon decades. And somehow committing suicide is the selfish act?

I contend that suicide is the only moral form of death. The death of a happy person whose life was fulfilling and who had many friends? Every one a tragedy. A rational decision, made by a calm person, that the future contains more pain than pleasure in expectation and to a high degree of certainty? Never. Many are not sad when the very old die; they think that they lived a full life and that they would not have had many years left anyway. Surely the loved ones of the rationally suicidal can come to think, “at least they did not suffer, and though I miss them very much, I would not like them to have experienced pain so I would be with them.” Such a kind, selfless attitude may provide them much comfort.

There are three groups of people for whom this argument does not apply. First, chronically suicidal people have no doubt extensively assessed the pros and cons of suicide, and I will not dare to suggest that I know better than they do whether they should be alive. Second, suicidality is somewhat acceptable among terminally ill and incurably physically disabled people; the strength of the stigma on suicide is less, making it more likely (although by no means certain) that those people have an accurate assessment of their situation. Third, parents of children under the age of eighteen may cause their children undue trauma through committing suicide, and thus should wait until their children are grown.

However, many healthy, nonsuicidal individuals live lives of quiet desperation; they may do well to realize that suicide is an option for them. They do not have to continue a life of misery.

Accommodations vs. Coddling

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

I have been thinking about the difference between accommodations and coddling. On one side, there are a lot of people who claim that all accommodations are coddling: that giving someone extra time on a test, or allowing them to work from home, or providing them medications that allow them to function better, is keeping them from developing the essential moral fiber to participate in society. On the other hand, there are a lot of people that claim that coddling isn’t a thing that happens, that no one ever infantilizes neurodivergent people, treating them like children who need to be protected from things that are too hard and scary for them.

I think both sides are untrue. Accommodations exist, coddling exists, they are often difficult to tell apart, and one must pay careful attention to figure out which one is which.

[ETA: I have listed two fundamental differences between accommodations and coddling here. I think that they are two clusters; however, it is possible that a proposed way of coping with neurodivergence fits one category and not another, and in that case we must be even more careful to figure out which one it is. I apologize that in the previous version of the post this was not clear.]

One of the fundamental differences between accommodations and coddling, I think, is this: coddling makes you weaker, but accommodations make you stronger.

Consider the dyslexic person who gets access to audiobooks. Suddenly they can read much more easily. They can experience great works of literature and poetry, learn about history and science. They are better informed than they would otherwise be and more capable in their studies, at work, and as citizens. They can do more than they could without the audiobooks.

On the other hand, when I’m depressed, I usually don’t want to do anything; I want to lie around on the couch under a blanket making sad noises. It does not actually help to say “it’s okay, Ozy, I will do everything for you and you will just lie under a blanket making sad noises.” If I tidy my room, I will get a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment; if someone else tidies my room, I will just feel worse, because I can’t even do that. And it can be self-perpetuating: the longer other people do everything for me, instead of helping me do things for myself, the more I end up under a blanket being sad and the less I am capable of doing.

It can require a lot of discernment to figure out whether something is strengthening you or making you weaker. For instance, imagine that you’re an agoraphobe who uses Instacart to buy your groceries. It’s possible that not having to go outside in order to eat means that you go hungry less, which gives you a lot more ability to do things; because you spend less energy and time working up the nerve to go grocery shopping, you can do more things that matter to you. On the other hand, it’s also possible you’re using Instacart as a way to avoid doing things which frighten you. Instead of practicing courage, you’re giving in to fear. For the same person, the same thing can be accommodations in some circumstances and coddling in others; it can be really hard to figure out.

Another fundamental difference is that accommodations are something you decide, and coddling is something other people decide.

There is a really important difference between saying “I can’t do this” and someone else saying “you can’t do this.” There is a difference between saying “ugh, I can’t handle making this phone call, can you make it?” and someone else saying “every time you make a phone call, you have a panic attack; I’m going to make it for you.” There is a difference between saying “given my executive functioning issues, college is too hard for me, so I’m going to drop out” and someone else saying “you’re probably going to fail a class if you take one, so I’m not going to let you.”

People have a right to struggle, to make mistakes, to take risks, to do things that scare us, and to fail. Neurodivergent people have that right just as much as neurotypicals do. I think the most pernicious part of coddling is when– often from the highest of motives, distressed at the pain we cause ourselves– people take away this right from us. When they wrap us up inside a cotton-ball world where there are no sharp edges we might cut ourselves on.

When you don’t do things that are hard for you, your achievements aren’t meaningful: if you didn’t work or struggle, how can you take pride in what you’ve accomplished? You might as well skip playing a video game and instead stare at a screen that says YOU WON. When you aren’t allowed to fail, you aren’t allowed to try new things. Your world can get very small. And when someone else is making decisions for you– even for your own good– they are substituting their values for yours, and instead of having a life that is full of things you want, it’s full of things that other people think you ought to want.

An interesting outcome of defining the words the way I define them is that many anti-trigger-warning people– the ones who say that if you have strong negative reactions when exposed to certain material you should be in therapy, rather than in the classroom– are the ones who are really coddling rape survivors. The decision of whether a rape survivor should go to college should be made by the individual rape survivor, not by thinkpiece writers. And in many cases allowing a person to avoid or prepare themselves for certain material allows them to be educated when they otherwise wouldn’t. Imagine a veteran with PTSD who has flashbacks when she hears loud noises but who wants to learn physics; she is clearly stronger as a physicist who occasionally skips loud demonstrations than as someone who never takes a class where there might be a noise.

Generalized Shame Disorder

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[Epistemic status: I am not nearly smart and well-informed enough to propose the existence of new medical conditions.]
[Content warning: vivid explanation of distorted thought processes, including suicidality, self-harm and eating disorders.]

A lot of my friends seem to have something along the lines of generalized anxiety disorder, but for shame. Generalized anxiety disorder is a condition in which people worry about everything, all the time, without any good reason, even when there is no good reason to worry about anything; people with generalized anxiety disorder can’t get rid of their anxiety, even when they recognize that it is excessive. Similarly, what I’m proposing is a condition in which people feel shame about everything, all the time, without any good reason, even when there is no good reason to feel shame about it.

Let’s be clear about how I’m using the word “shame” here. Shame is not the same thing as guilt, although many people with generalized shame disorder self-identify as having guilt issues. Guilt is a response to doing something wrong; while sometimes people feel guilty too much or guilty about the wrong things, in general, guilt is useful and healthy. Shame, however, is about fundamentally being a bad person. Guilt is “I made a mistake”; shame is “I am a mistake”. Guilt often motivates people to make amends and change their behavior; shame often doesn’t, because fixing a specific defect is much less daunting than fixing an entire defective self. Guilt concerns itself only tangentially with other people; shame, at its core, is often about how other people would respond, the idea that your actions make you unworthy of love or belonging, the idea that everyone is going to hate you and you deserve it for being so bad.

As far as I’m aware, this does not match up with any condition currently in the DSM. The people I know who have generalized shame disorder seem to be diagnosed with a wide variety of things, including depression, generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, and borderline personality disorder. However, I don’t think any of those explains the condition perfectly, although in individual cases they may be correct. Many people I know with generalized shame disorder do not experience the mood swings and relationship instability of BPD, the compulsions or intrusive thoughts of OCD, or the sadness and lack of energy of depression.

Commonly, generalized shame disorder seems to be associated with literal self-destructive impulses. Conventionally, the term “self-destructive” means doing things that have far more negative consequences than positive consequences, such as substance abuse; however, people with generalized shame disorder seem to literally want to destroy themselves. This manifests in a lot of different ways. Suicidal ideation is obvious. Some might have an eating disorder in the hopes that they can waste away until they stop existing. Some people may go to a psychiatrist in the hopes of getting medication that will cause them to be a completely different person. Some people make life choices that make them miserable because the complete opposite of themselves is the only good kind of person to be. I am sure there are others; we are nothing if not inventive.

Regardless of the preferred form of self-destruction (and most people with generalized shame disorder have more than one), the root thought is the same. In fact, if there’s anything besides “lots of shame” that defines this condition for me, it’s that: the urge, in some literal or metaphorical sense, to stop being you. It is very common for people to feel guilt about the fact that they can’t force themselves to be someone else or that they don’t want to.

People with generalized shame disorder often want to punish themselves. This self-punishment is not usually motivated by the idea that it will cause them to stop doing bad things; instead, it satisfies some obscure sense of justice that anyone as bad as they are deserves to be punished. Common forms of self-punishment include self-harm, eating disorders again, and deliberate self-sabotage such as breaking up with a beloved partner, not showing up to class for two weeks, or refusing to complete a major assignment at work.

Many people with generalized shame disorder seem to pedestalize certain people, who are perceived as not being defective. They might try to adopt tangential personality traits of the pedestalized person, such as their political views or taste in furniture, and believe that their inability to adopt those traits means that they’re defective. Conversely, they might wind up getting viciously angry at the pedestalized person for implying that they’re defective, even when the pedestalized person has done no such thing and is just, say, expressing a preference.

Many times, people with generalized shame disorder seem to have thoughts themed around purity: they are bad, dirty, tarnished, gross, disgusting, contaminated; the impulse to get rid of themselves may be perceived as becoming clean or pure. I suspect the purity moral foundation may be involved.

People with generalized shame disorder apologize constantly. They may apologize for things they had nothing to do with (for instance, someone else five feet away dropping something), for existing, for having opinions, for liking somebody, for wanting something.

People with generalized shame disorder often have elaborate systems of rules for what makes them a good person; these rules are usually extreme, self-contradictory, and completely unrelated to actually being a good person. More self-aware people with generalized shame disorder may try to create achievable rules so that they can stop feeling shame; however, this doesn’t usually work, because they become obsessed with the idea that they might have the wrong rules, or might have broken the rules by mistake.

In many cases, people with generalized shame disorder may have thoughts that are distorted to the point of being delusional. Examples from my own life include deciding that I don’t need to eat and the only reason I consume food is because I am bad, declaring that it is a fundamental law of metaphysics that I am a terrible person, and concluding that because I have read a Tumblr post criticizing Klan members I must be a Klan member and I have just forgotten. In most cases, these thoughts seem to be relatively brief in duration (a few hours to a day), although they often recur.

Needless to say, there is a great overlap between generalized shame disorder and scrupulosity.

I would like to conclude this post with some kind of useful advice about what to do, but frankly I don’t have any. So I’m going to stop describing this and instead toss it out there: does this match your experiences? Am I missing any common features? Are some of the features I’ve outlined just weird things that the people I know do? Do you think it is silly of me to attempt to invent mental conditions in the first place?