Requests of the Unreasonable

    I hope that I don’t need to say this, but I need to start by reminding everyone that we don’t live in the same reality. Most of us are lucky enough to live in a reality that overlaps with everyone we meet. All of us overlap at least a little bit. We may not agree on the difference between good and evil, but we all agree the sky is blue, and when you jump up, you’ll go back down. It’s what we don’t agree on that’s problematic. What’s good, what’s bad, where to draw the line. Our world is shaped by disagreements, by people saying that they don’t think something is right. A good thing, a bad thing, but mostly a thing that haunts us and the worlds we make.

      Our world is currently defined by extremism, but those who can’t live in our society’s, or who simply don’t want to. People like me, different on many levels, ignored by everyone for the sake of convenience. Many of the people in our society wants a world where those who can’t, or don’t want to, live in in its boundaries simply leave and go somewhere else, but that’s not feasible anymore. There’s no wild land left, countries are bound by similar rules, and even places without laws aren’t safe from pollution and warfare. It also doesn’t help that those who live in society rarely fare better than those who leave. As someone who avoids society as best she can, I find it horrifying that those who live within it, who follow its rules and sing its praises, routinely complain about the issues that keep me from wanting to join. Am I wrong in feeling on some level that if I was being punished for not following the rules, this would be better? I don’t like the feeling that even if I lived in this world, nobody would care.

      I can’t help but wonder if things wouldn’t be better if the extremists got their way. Evil would be in society, but we could at least see what we were fighting and not hold back until we got rid of it at its source. As it is, we know that our world is unwelcoming and its people unhappy, but nobody is quite sure why. I think that we all know that if extremism did make its way into our worlds core, all that would happen is that we would fight to bury it again, and then not do anything to make sure it was actually gone. I’m also very aware that the extremists are no better at building worlds than the moderates are, meaning the best we can hope for is a world that’s just as bad as what we have now.

      Still, I can’t help but dream of a world that suits me, that I can just live in without difficulty. This world just doesn’t make any sense to me at all, and whenever I try to live in it I keep running into walls. Between autism, anxiety, and a strong sense of doom, it’s reached the point where it’s been years since I tried in any meaningful way. I’m well aware that I’m lucky to have someone who can support me, and that my luck will run out, but the answer to my problems is not trying to go back to college or getting a job at a grocery store. I’ve made peace with the fact that my options are either starving to death or destroying my mental health, which will likely lead to me starving to death as well. Which is something a lot of people just don’t get; dealing with people I don’t know often isn’t safe for someone like me, and it’s increasingly becoming dangerous even if you’re what our world calls normal.

     I think what I want more than anything is for our world to stop trying to be reasonable and try to look at us as beings who feel a lot more than we thing, beings for whom a world based even superficially on logic just won’t work. Religion, belief, insanity, everything that we say divides us and makes us more vulnerable, all of this and more are things that will stay with us forever. On purpose. We were built to be unreasonable, because the act of living, of being in a form you know is temporary, is the kind of thing only unreasonable beings would do. You can’t solve extremism by being reasonable or understanding. The people who feel slighted will only listen if they believe that you feel as they do.