If you’re old enough, you may remember the Verizon commercial where a guy wanders around with his cell phone asking, “Can you hear me now?” The gimmick was meant to highlight Verizon’s supposedly superior connectivity. But lately, that question has been rattling around in my own mind for an entirely different reason.
At the community resource center where I volunteer, someone had brought in several bales of hay to set up a Halloween photo booth for visitors. Nice thought, yes, but what this well-intentioned person hadn’t considered was my neurodiverse need for routine. So on Monday, when I went to do my usual setup for the Tuesday event, I had to completely rearrange the table placement.
For most people, this wouldn’t be a problem. They would simply, as I was advised, “adapt and overcome.” But that’s much easier said than done for me. Routine is almost a necessity for minds like mine. The neurodiverse mind is hyper-focused and detail-oriented. It expects situations to unfold in a particular way, and any deviation sets off a cascade of disorder leading to near panic.
To make matters worse, the humidity had been unbearable for days, creating the perfect environment for those Petri-dish bales of hay to sprout a fine crop of mold. So, on top of my pseudo-panic, I was now dealing with burning eyes, congestion, and clogged ears…you get the picture.
When I brought all this up to the, frankly delightful, director of the center, I was told once again to “adapt and overcome.” Reasonable advice, I’ll admit. However, given my passive-aggressive tendency to ensure that everyone around me is aware of my displeasures (whatever they might be), I commenced an every-twenty-minutes schedule of reporting my allergy symptoms to this wonderful, yet probably exasperated, man.
What he probably perceived was an annoying and demanding volunteer wanting her way, and honestly, that’s not far off. But after some reflection in the days that followed, I came to a small personal epiphany.
My frequent, and admittedly irritating, tendency to be passive-aggressive when expressing dissatisfaction is really just my odd way of saying I want to be heard. I want someone to acknowledge that my emotions, no matter how illogical or outsized, matter.
And then it hit me: I bet a lot of women are like me (even if they’re not on the spectrum). We’re often seen by men as strange, illogical, demanding, unreasonable. But what if the motivation behind these stereotypical “feminine antics” is simply a cry to be heard and to feel that someone cares about our emotions, even when they don’t make sense?
Eureka. I might actually be onto something that could change the masculine–feminine dynamic. What if men learned to truly understand this, not-always-feminine, need to be heard, to have emotions validated?
Do you think there’s a Nobel Prize in it for me?
Perhaps. Stay tuned.
Until then, my friends, cheers – and join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did.