My Dark Side
Cover for The Young Elites by Marie Lu, a book series that felt relevant when I wrote this post.
There’s a young adult fantasy trilogy called The Young Elites written by Marie Lu. I read them in my mid-teens, though for the record, I prefer young adult novels even in my mid-twenties. Without spoiling anything, the main character, Adelina Amouteru, aligns with passion, and it gets her in a lot of trouble. She’s the sort of protagonist whom it’s often hard to love.
While I sat at a table in a computer lab yesterday evening, wondering what I was going to write about for today’s post, those books occurred to me again. In some ways, I am like a male version of Adelina Amouteru. And I’m going to explain.
In a previous blog post (the one dated November 4, 2024), I wrote about how being autistic makes me weird and wonderful, like Bennie And The Jets. For the record, I still believe that sometimes. I want to believe that without people like me, the world would not have as much passion, and that people like me help solve problems. Is it a superpower?
Well, not exactly. Today I’m going to talk about the darker side of that passion and why it matters.
One way in which the passion manifests is shame. As I talked about just yesterday, I feel deeply ashamed to be American and am compelled to constantly state it. Perhaps that is a result of my OCD, very often a comorbidity with autism. I care what other people think, sometimes far too much, and it’s led to some situations that I don’t feel like talking about publicly. Sometimes, to quote Alice Merton…
Lyrics for a karaoke music video of “Lash Out” by Alice Merton
Yes, that line is rather tongue-in-cheek, but I have to drive the point across somehow. More to the point, I also have incredibly thin skin. I can’t handle being teased for having an orange buffoon as President not once but twice. I just can’t deal with the fact that more than half the country wanted Trump again, and I counted down ten reasons why this was a bad idea here.
Passion also extends to the damage Donald Trump is going to do to everything I care about. Consider the topic of reproductive rights. If Trump is able to pass a national abortion ban, I fear for any woman of child-bearing age in this country, particularly women who have reason to believe their pregnancies are more likely to be difficult. My heart breaks for my younger sister, all of her friends, and all the female friends I have both in real life and online. These should be the best years of their lives. They should be excited about maybe starting a family, not worried about how dangerous it might be to become pregnant.
Consider also the issue of gun violence, which is so often sanitized in this hellish nation. Maybe the passion drives me to worry more than I should, as getting shot is statistically relatively unlikely (even if it’s a lot more likely than it should be). But whenever I hear a loud noise - a car backfiring, a hammer, even the furnace going off - I instinctively flinch at the sound, wondering for a split second if I am about to die. I weep even harder for the students of America who must get on that big yellow school bus every morning not knowing if they’re going to come home on that same bus. Again, the chances of it happening to you or your child are objectively low, but in the words of one survivor of September’s Apalachee High School shooting…
A gun control advocate holds a sign saying “Our schools shouldn’t be cemeteries.” Taken from The Economist.
Finally, let’s take the issue of climate change. This issue deserved a lot more attention in the 2024 campaign, considering that it poses an existential threat to all life on this planet. And yet, my country elected Donald Trump, and now the fight against climate change is over. Don’t take it from me; take it from Bernie Sanders - he literally said exactly that when trying to convince pro-Palestinian voters to back Kamala Harris in last week’s election. As we now know, that plea fell on deaf ears.
And I feel responsible for all of this, as a citizen of the only country holding the world back from solving this crisis. It doesn’t matter that I personally voted for Harris - I feel as though I should pay somehow. It literally makes me feel sick to my stomach whenever I think about what the world thinks of us. And by extension, what they think of me. Humanity has failed to save the Earth, and we only have American voters to blame.
How Greta Thunberg probably feels about American voters right now.
So what does all this have to do with my autism? Well, the common thread with all these societal problems is that I have no control over them. Or rather, I’ve already done everything that’s within my legal ability to solve these problems - it’s just that 50.3% of the American electorate (according to currently counted ballots) unleashed this hell on both the United States and, in the case of the climate crisis, the rest of the world. One of the things about being autistic, at least for many people, is the hyperfixation - it just so happens that one of my hyperfixations is politics. And it’s a very depressing time indeed to follow politics if you’re a progressive in the United States.
Adelina Amouteru aligned with passion. She aligned with it so much that it led her to some very dark places. After a particularly impulsive yet consequential act, to paraphrase the ending of the second book, she waited and waited for the wave of satisfaction to hit her. But it didn’t come. And that’s exactly how I feel right now.
The worst thing about being passionate is when there’s no practical application for said passion. It doesn’t matter how fervently I support a woman’s right to choose, the ability to be safe in public, or a habitable planet for future generations. Thanks to the decisions of just over half my countrymen, we will not get those things. We will never get those things, and I feel as though that passion of mine will go to waste.
And there’s nothing worse than wasting the one thing you’re good at.
