133 Anger and Aloneness

0:00Welcome to Audi HD flourishing about living awesomely with autism and ADHD. You deserve recognition for both the challenges and the strengths of this unique neurotype. Let's celebrate wisdom and support from real life stories and talk strategies to manage the difficulties of day to day life so we can move beyond that to thriving and building a sustainable and awesome life. If you want to be here, you are accepted here and you belong. I'm your Audi HD host, Mattia Moray. Let's do this. So there is a lot going on in the world. I think there was already a lot to be angry about. For a year ago, before a week ago, there just keep being big new terrible things. And I wanted to touch on two topics that have been very alive for me that come together, which are anger and just feeling anger. And then also this concept of being alone.

1:01And in particular, what I've noticed is that when I feel isolated, which fun fact, a lot of this world is set up to isolate us and to keep us away from each other and away from community. When I feel alone, I feel a lot worse in pretty much every way. And I don't mean having alone time. I mean, you know, feeling isolated and this sort of existential feeling that I am alone with my problems that my problems are individual, etc. And a tiny example of this is I've had a couple kind of stressy weeks in a row with just a bunch of things. And my partner keeps asking if there's anything they can do to help. And sometimes there is, but this has been a case where not really this is all just kind of stuff I need to do or stuff that I'm responsible for and that I can't really pass off to anyone else. And it would be a lot easier if I could pass some things along to someone else.

2:02And that's another way that I think for me feeling alone, feeling like I'm individually responsible for a lot of things. That's its own kind of stress. And then when you take that and put it out into this larger context of the world and everything that's going on in the world or just in your own world, like your relationships, your work, what's on your plate personally, even just feeling personally responsible for all of that. I think feels terrible. It makes me feel a lot worse. And the feeling of anger in particular, depending on your culture and how you were socialized, it can be really frowned upon. And we don't really necessarily have a lot of ways to express it. Some people say that anger is only a secondary emotion. I don't really believe that evolutionarily or whatever. But it can be a secondary emotion, meaning that there's actually something else

3:02underneath it that anger is kind of covering. And a common one, for example, is fear. And sometimes also grief. And I would say also shame. So you've probably experienced that where there's something that frightens you, for example, a really loud noise. And the first reaction is anger at the person who made the noise, when really it's a fear response. And that anger is just to hide the fear or potential shame or whatever that you might have underneath that. So I personally don't think that anger is only a secondary emotion, it can be. And because we typically don't have a lot of healthy modeling for anger, there's a lot of, I would say secondary anger in the world. There's a lot of just general rage and raging against things. And in particular, I think, you know, if you've been online, you've seen people just going on long rants against someone else who they often don't know,

4:05you know, just kind of strangers arguing on the internet. I don't think that's a particularly productive form of anger, not that the purpose of emotions is to be productive, but that particular kind of anger doesn't really feel like it's doing anything. But there's definitely a kind of anger that motivates human beings to take action, to stop putting up with things, right? I would say anger at injustice in particular tends to be behind a lot of the effective movements against injustice over time. And one of the ways these two topics comes together for me is that when I'm feeling angry about the state of the world and injustice, it's easy for that to feel like an isolated thing. And even if I'm thinking, oh, it'd be great to, you know, join a movement, join community, go to an action of some kind, get involved in some way about any particular topic. First of all, there's so many things you can get involved with.

5:07And then there's, you know, infighting in leftist circles about whether you are doing the right thing in the right way, which, in my opinion, is kind of puritanical bullshit stuff still hanging on. But anyway, that aside, when I have these feelings and when I'm wanting to get involved and do something, it's still, I think, really inculturated in me to think of myself as an individual actor who needs to go and do these individual actions. And that's very overwhelming. One way that I've oriented around change in general, change work and activism is this idea that I am not interested in being a leader in that way, not because I think I couldn't, but because there are people who are better at those particular things who've been organizing in particular ways, who have a lot of lived experience. And I want to follow those folks. And a lot of those folks are black and indigenous.

6:10And that's the kind of leadership that I want to be following in my own context in my culture. I could say, okay, I'm just going to take these angry feelings and funnel them into this kind of work. I think that that can be effective. I don't always have that immediate pathway when the feelings are there. So a lot of what I've been doing with my own anger is, kind of doing things in my own life that help me personally, essentially, when that's what I have access to in the moment. So cleaning, baking bread, right? I've been doing things to essentially nurture myself, my home, my family. And again, in that kind of individualist way, it can feel like, oh, I'm not really doing anything. But another thought I had recently was, I wish there was a lot more acknowledgement of the people who are feeding the movements literally, like literally feeding the people who are going out and protesting or building things or, you know,

7:13starting unions, doing the important work. They are only able to be there because their needs are being at least somewhat met, right? I'm not saying everyone's are all the time, but there are a lot of people who are literally making the food, doing the nourishment, doing the care work. And it's often behind the scenes. It's often not visible. But it's so important. And one of the themes for me in ADHD, flourishing, but also just like all the work I've done around this theme is basically, you know, it's really hard for us to do some of these basic care tasks. It's hard for us to get some of our care needs met, whether by us or by someone else or other systems. And if what you can do in the moment is take care of yourself or take care of your kids or your parents or whoever it is that you're doing care work for, even if it's just yourself.

8:14I think literally nourishing yourself in the form of food or any body care, anything that helps you in that moment. I still think that this is part of this broader network of care that is feeding the growth of the people who are going to be doing the work. Because ultimately, what's going to change the world, and I think it will, I think it will happen. I'm somewhat optimistic about this in the long run. I just don't know what that means in terms of time scale. But in the long run, the people are very powerful and people working together in groups for cause they care about are very powerful. We do that when we have capacity and part of how we build that capacity is through this basic, simple, active care. So if it is helpful to you, it's a little bit like the surviving out of spite episode a while back.

9:14But if this is helpful for you to channel some of that anger, rage, fear, guilt, like I'm just listing some emotions I've had recently about things that are happening in the world. But all these feelings, if you can channel some of that into caring for your body or for other people, even if you don't feel like you're really building anything in particular in that moment, and it doesn't feel that connected to these bigger issues, I really do think that this active care repeatedly because we have to do this over and over our entire lives. Instead of it being a boring, frustrating, annoying thing, I'm always trying to find ways to make it feel more meaningful to me and feel like something I can be interested in because of that interest-based nervous system. That's one of those reframes that has been helpful. Another one I'm just going to throw this out there because it's sort of related

10:14is that lately I've been thinking, you know, one of the ways that I don't just waste a bunch of time on my phone is by literally doing other things, like having other things to do. So I've been doing, you know, mending, and I was like, you know, this is actually one of the first things that has made me really motivated to keep my house more clean overall. I mean, I like it when it's clean, but I don't want to do all the labor. So I was like, oh, if I put more time into cleaning my house more consistently, just doing these cleaning tasks, it will just kind of eat up that time that won't get spent on my phone. And I feel like the movement, the repetitive nature, being able to listen to audiobooks while I do it, et cetera, all these things will actually make me feel better overall. Whereas, you know, without that framing of some kind, I'm just like annoyed that I have to spend all this time. So again, the way some of these things come together for me is that the emotions are here, right? If I'm hearing about war and atrocities in the world,

11:14I'm going to feel a big feelings about it. The feelings are here. I can't necessarily funnel those into like the most effective, perfect action in the moment, targeted toward that exact thing. But what I can do is take care of myself, take care of the people in my immediate vicinity, and that actually helps me build capacity, like when I'm well fed and my house is relatively clean, I actually have more capacity to be more social, to invite people over, to be building that community a little bit more actively. So, you know, it's not a perfect solution, but I wanted to talk about this a little bit because I think there can be a lot of guilt and shame for disabled and neurodivergent people feeling like, you know, I'm not doing enough, I'm not involved enough, I'm not in this like direct action enough. And I really do think that caring for your body and your mental health and caring for your immediate people right around you,

12:15like it's a microcosm of community. It's still community. It's just not broad yet. And building that capacity gives more chances to be able to build that larger sense of community. So, that's something I'm leaning into as I've had fairly low capacity, but enough to still be able to take care of myself. This has felt like a thing I can do. And I know that when I do this, everything's a little bit easier. And I'm trying to let that be enough for now because there's so much going on and it is so overwhelming. I also just want you to know you're not alone in those feelings because it's a lot. Please take care of yourself and I hope you have a good week. Hey, you are doing a freaking great job in difficult circumstances. You're correct that there's a bunch of screwed-up stuff in the world that's incredibly difficult to navigate, let alone in a way that works for your brain.

13:17It's totally understandable if you're feeling scattered, overwhelmed, or all over the place. The annoying thing about the journey of life is that it's basically one giant transition. There are constant unknowns and everything is constantly changing. Sure, that's life, but it's inherently challenging for ADHD and highly monotropic folks. One thing that can feel good is acknowledging and validating that this moment is hard, or even that life is hard, and that's okay. Does it feel doable to give yourself a little approval because you are the way you are? Or a little self-love around how hard you've been trying? I love you. I like you. I approve of you. And I think you're doing an awesome job despite all the hard stuff.