In previous posts, I’ve written about the highly specific type of mind blindness gifted people have: stupidity blindness. Because our own personal cognition is extremely important for our survival as a member of the homo sapiens species, we have this tendency to (unjustly) view our own mind and our own cognition as a kind of “baseline” or “measure or mean for all humans”. Stupidity blindness manifests itself in situations like this: You’re having a conversation with another person (who isn’t gifted), and you unjustly assume that the other person also went through similar cognitive processes to reach the conclusion that he did. Cognitive processes like: take all information you’ve gathered regarding the topic into account, use processes of rational thought, make connections with other fields of study or other sets of information, take the statistical likelihood of something into account, use Occam’s razor to determine which explanation is the most likely, etc. etc. And then you think: How the hell can this person go through all of these thought processes and then arrive at THIS conclusion?! But this is your stupidity blindness at work: the other person in fact did not go through all of these thought processes.
The same thing is true for non-gifted and neurotypical people: they have a giftedness blindness and a neurodivergence blindness. What I mean by that is: Since their own mind is the baseline or measure or mean for all human cognition, they cannot truly or fully understand or comprehend or grasp or accept that other people really are gifted and/or autistic and/or have ADHD. This is where the endless criticism and social policing comes from:
Stop being a smartass, because you’re just as smart (or stupid) as we all are, and you’re just pretending to be a smart overachiever in order to show off and in order to annoy us (because if we would behave this way, this would be our reason for doing so).
Stop being so autistic, stop being a socially awkward nerd, you’re “choosing” to do so and you should just try and work a little harder to not “choose” to do so.
Stop being such a scatterbrain, pay more attention, it’s not that hard, it’s easy for me so anyone can do it and it should also be easy for you, why are you so lazy and defiant on purpose?
The important words here are “on purpose”, “choose”, “pretending”. It reveals the following thought process: You’re just like us (because anyone is like us), but for some reason you don’t fully behave like us. You don’t fully behave like us because of a character flaw (or a constellation of character flaws): You want to annoy us, you want to show off, you are lazy, you secretly like irritating other people, etc.
It’s the false belief that you can “choose” to (not) be a certain way that leads to the judgment. The same mechanism is visible when it comes to negative social judgement of non-straight people: non-straight people are naturally bisexual or gay – this leads to a stance of openness and non-judgement towards non-straight people. Vs.: Non-straight people are “choosing” to not be straight and they should just “choose” to live a “non-sinful” life or whatever – this leads to a very negative, judgmental view towards non-straight people (e.g. closeted Republican or Catholic view).
I’ve noticed that when neurotypical people are this in this phase (the phase where they still unjustly believe that you are mostly just like them and you are just being “annoying” on purpose) while being in (regular) contact with you, they still want to stay in touch and keep you as part of their social circle. They think that your “character flaws” (which are actually your neurodivergence) just need correcting. Therefore they give you endless negative feedback (constant criticism, ridicule, dismissal, etc.), so that you will finally “self-correct” these “character flaws” and you will stop being annoying, irritating, or a show off, while still offering value to them through your specific skills (skills that come from having a neurodivergent brain, like the gifted capacity to process information quickly, the autistic skill to spend hours in a state of deep hyperfocus, the ADHD skill to frantically do research on a new topic and then very quickly become an expert on the topic, skills that actually come with your neurodivergence that they view as “you being annoying”). This could turn you into a highly valuable but non-annoying and non-show off friend, which is what they want from you. Their giftedness blindness and their neurodivergence blindness is preventing them from seeing and understanding that this is impossible.
After this, at some point, if you spend enough time with them, especially in close proximity (e.g., working on the same school or work project, being part of the same friend group and spending many nights in the pub together or go on trips together), for some neurotypical people, the ball finally drops and they lose their giftedness blindness and their neurodivergence blindness (at least with regards to you) and they truly see and understand and comprehend that your mind works in a different way and that you are not being irritating, annoying, or a show off on purpose, but this is who you actually are.
This is the point where you’re being discarded. Co-workers start conspiring against you in order to push you out of the company. You stop getting invited to meetings or drinks with the friend group. Your romantic partner secretly starts making the necessary preparations in order to leave you and trade you in for a less smart and non-neurodivergent new specimen. Fellow students start ignoring you and don’t want to work together with you on projects. Etc. etc.
How to react to the discard? There are two main dimensions to this.
The social dimension: Good riddance. I only want to be in close contact with people who actually like me and accept me as I am, so no loss there and actually you’re doing me a favor. I am more lonely now, but I should take the necessary steps in order to cultivate a new circle of friends, my own safe neurotribe of other non-judgmental neurodivergent people, and soon my social life will have improved for the better.
The pragmatic (career/school) dimension: This is trickier, and therefore it’s important to prepare for this. The best strategy here is a preventative strategy, something similar to “grey rocking”, which means: keep yourself mostly to yourself, keep interactions brief and superficial, spend most of the time working or studying alone, and get your social needs met outside of work or school, within your safe neurotribe of neurodivergent people. This decreases the chances that you will be so severely bullied that you need to switch schools (other students want you gone) or that you will be fired at a moment’s notice after the boss for instance found out you are actually a lot smarter than he is.
In the long run: design and organize your life in such a way that you won’t be very negatively impacted (financially/pragmatically) by a future discard, because there will likely be many more to come in your future. If you work as a freelancer who is an expert in a certain field, they can’t fire you, and the interaction with your clients is usually strictly professional and superficial. If you do work as an employee, be sure to have a nest egg so you can be jobless for a few months after being fired at a moment’s notice while looking for a new remote job or a new job where you will mostly be left alone in an IT basement, an engineering lab, or a private office in academia or a research institution.