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It is an oft repeated phrase, that we live in a world not made for us and with it comes the understanding of the harm that this can do to us. In many respects that harm is actually easy to see, especially once you start realising that, no, it's not just you, and stop convincing yourself that it's nothing and that it can only be a sign of how broken you are, if you can't cope. The world of man really is too loud and bright. They really don't notice the smells and the over crowding, the sheer amount of peopling it takes to even do the simplest thing and the way that everything is geared in such a way that it has to be in done in their way, with ever-increasing barriers of impossibility if you try to do it in any other way. That the way things are, the world really isn't set up for us and the willingness to soften that, to allow for other ways, is limited at best, always to our ongoing cost.
But, for me, there is something deeper than this that has, perhaps, caused me more harm through my life, that has led to more confusion and conflict and trauma than even the sensory overwhelm and torture of existing in their world. It is, well, I suppose you could call it the how's and why's and what's of their world. The underlying framework that defines it and them. All the assumptions and shared perception that is like the unwritten code of their existence and which they just take for granted and that I just struggled to even see, let alone understand.
Some of it, of course, I could work out. Like, the ways their societies always revolve around status driven hierarchies. Whether that be school, your book reading club, or the country as a whole. I could even accept that this was simply the way they think, just as, in so many ways, it's not the way I can think, or see the world. But, the basis for, say, the status, why being one way was good and valued, and another, virtually equal way, wasn't. Why sex should affect that, or race, or religion. or anything really, except the judgement of the thing in and of itself, was beyond me. There were just so many invisible, and taken for granted, ways that things were seen, except, it seemed, by me. All the ways that something was, just, obvious. Not in the way you might argue that your football team was better than another one. But, in the ways that no one even thinks about, or even realises is actually a judgement. What should and shouldn't be, why and how.
Yet I could see it, that all too often the assumption that something was so, didn't really make it so, not with the way my mind worked anyway, and also found that trying to get an answer to why it should, just never seemed to happen, not when no-one else even seem to understand the question. It just meant that walking through their world became like walking through an endless minefield for me. Where, sooner or later, I just knew that I was going to step into something that would blow up in my face. Not because I tried, or wanted it to, but because I simply couldn't help it, not when I couldn't even see it.
This, to my mind, is where the real harm of living in a world not meant for us can come from. Not the overt, but the covert. From the fact that we are always in a place that we can never really understand, or deal with. Not with any certainty, anyway. That there are always unknowns and unknowables, waiting to trip us up, or for us to crash into. That there are always ways of being hurt and, indeed, hurting others, that we can't even begin to see and, because of that, forgive ourselves for, until we realise this, anyway.