"Support Your Local Community", "Go and organize", "Read Theory"... I am sick and tired of people backhandedly telling me to do things I don't understand. What does it mean?
"Support Your Local Community", "Go and organize", "Read Theory"... I am sick and tired of people backhandedly telling me to do things I don't understand. What does it mean?
As an Autistic Man, it is really irritating that, people, as though they are a Neurotypical person that expects me to easily "get" unspoken social rules, and easily understand things without needing background information, it seems as though I am for some reason expected to not only automatically understand what people talk about when they say those phrases, but also even if I do want to look them up, I am scared of doing it wrong, because growing up, my mom forbade me from socially interacting with people, which caused me to become socially awkward.... which made her not want me to talk to people for "Fear of embarrassing her", leading to a vicious cycle that caused me to never have any friends until last year.
So thus, even to this day, I am completely unfamiliar with what it means to Support a Local Community, to Go and Organize, to Read Theory.... unless those are all phrases that were made so memetically popular, that people forgot about their original meaning, and people repeat them in order to make themselves LOOK intelligent rather than actually say anything intelligent.
The end result? I have no clue whatsoever how to socialize with people, or to attend public events, how to know when they are happening, how to find them, I don't know what the first steps are with socializing.... all thanks to my mother, who failed to teach me social skills, and failed to teach me the confidence in helping myself.
So how do I accomplish the commonly thrown around phrases I just mentioned?
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I get really anxious when I hear these phrases as well, I get really anxious of being judged for my social awkwardness, being off putting for being autistic, not being "radical" or well read enough and just having the motivation to try to do the things while burnt out for years is a struggle too.
I use Instagram and have been able to follow accounts from local mutual aid groups who post about their open meetings and other events around town such as teach-ins, share fairs, food not bombs, etc. That's been helpful, and I plan on tryyyying to engage with some groups in the near future now that I know some people who go.
A good start might be to see if there is a Food Not Bombs near you that you can volunteer at. Or try volunteering at warming centers or homeless shelters; there are often a lot of radical people who put time and energy into things like that.
Your ability to find groups like this is gonna vary, I'm lucky to live in a place where there is an abundance of different groups to join.