You may know, if you’ve ever seen a Jewish house before Passover, it’s hard work. It really is. I try and be away from home when it’s happening. You have to clear the house of all products that contain leaven, you’ve got to clean everything, you’ve got to take out a new set of utensils and cutlery and crockery, and it is really hard work. I got somebody in England to design a special apron for Passover cleaning that read, “For this, we left Egypt?”
I used to wonder, why make Passover such hard work? And now I know: because freedom is hard work. And it has to be fought for in every generation. We have to tell and re-tell the story. We have to remind ourselves what it feels like each year to eat the bread of affliction and taste the bitter herbs of slavery.
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Freedom is hard to attain, but it is very easy to lose. And that’s why it has to be fought for in every generation.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z"tl, “In Defence of Religious Liberty,” the acceptance speech at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty award ceremony
My autistic peeps, I have one bit of advice for you.
Be extremely selective about who you accept social rule feedback from.
Most autistic folks I know tie themselves up in knots, trying to figure out this social rule book that everybody else seems to have gotten, that they didn’t get. In fact a lot of the “rigidity” that I see other therapists complaining about can be put down to the natural effects of people trying really hard to find one goddamn rule that will stay put.
The thing is- most people walk around as if they have the one universal, unassailable, common-sense rule book for social interaction.
And they are utterly full of shit.
In the US in particular there is incredibly low consensus about how people should behave. Just go post on twitter about whether it is or is not rude to wear your shoes in someone’s house, or as a 70 year old and a 20 year old about phone etiquette. That’s before we get into other demographic differences. Don’t even get me started on “professionalism”.
Neurotypical people get that feedback to, but are, on average, way more able to flag it as either 1) a rule for working with that person/similar people 2) bullshit. NOT as a universal rule they should have already known, that they should feel bad about not already knowing.
The number of things that people actually universally agree on is really low.
So when people give you feedback that the social rule they expect you to follow is obvious, they are often being a total dick.
Ask questions, look for patterns in specific settings, and make sure you’ve worked on your values enough to have a reasonable ecosystem of guiding principles.
Tfw you’re very emotionally attracted to a very weird alternative version of the riddler who hasn’t been in a comic since 2009 and no one remembers. Enigma my beloved <3
Had a dream that I met and befriended a little black spider who became my art partner. I would bring her food and I’m exchange she’d give me web to experiment with. We figured out how to build whole webs out of thick anchor web and then paint them silver for human visibility, which she thought defeated the purpose but was flattered by how much praise they received for their beauty.
People didn’t believe she was my friend that I talked with and kept trying to smash her, though. I got kicked out of a party for beating the shit out of someone I thought had killed her (she was fine).
Later in the dream I become possessed by some kind of ancient paint god who wanted to eat my soul and return to walk the Earth but the spider was just like “none of those words are in the spider dictionary” and the evil god and I just kind of quietly broke it off out of respect for her inability to comprehend religion or evil.
