I've hinted at mental health issues before and people expressed interest. One thing outsiders don't see is that most people weren't born with their issues, they were given to us by the people around us. This post inspired me to share a little story about autistic disdain for false authority. First let me be clear that we see and understand authority just fine. The issue is a refusal to participate in unearned authority. A true expert earns my respect. An authority position held by someone I don't feel earned it does not. Sorry anyone who thinks they deserve respect over a title or age but I don't give a fuck. This is fluid by subject. I'm capable of treating the same person as the ultimate authority on one subject and dog shit I just stepped in on another. Finally the story. Early elementary school. My teacher decided to send me to the principles office. I declined to go and simply sat in my chair. The teacher could not or would not tell me which rule I had broken. No broken rule, I don't need to go to the principles office. That is for kids who break the rules. I was told I was disrupting class. I explained that they disrupted class not me. I wasn't the one who stopped the class to attempt to send me to the principles office when I had broken no rule and then refused to move on. So my adult teacher physically assaulted me in class in front of all the other students. Violence to get compliance from a child perpetrated by an adult. Nothing changed. I told the principle exactly what happened. I was sent back to class. With the same teacher. We continued in pattern for the rest of the school year. The teacher was not fired. I wasn't even moved to a different class with a different teacher. One moment of a pattern of mistreatment by many people across a lifetime. I was never told why I was different. The only recurring point was that I was different and that difference meant I was worthy of mistreatment. Without knowledge about why or how I was different I had no way to defend any sense of a true me. I didn't know I was autistic until I was in my 30s. It was years after that until I saw any content that wasn't negative or defecit based about autistic people. Only then did I find anything about how to build a life I could be comfortable in instead of being handed what was neurotypical and told I was a faulty person for not liking it. A lifetime in a world actively hostile to your natural state takes a massive mental health toll. Most who get diagnosed as adults start looking because their lives are falling apart. This post is already long and burnout itself is a whole different story. Without the why any story of the what would seem absurd. If I'm going to talk publicly about my experience the main thing I want the reader to see is the way we contribute in large and small ways to the mental health states of those around us. Next story will be about the small death of 1000 cuts stuff. A side exercise for the reader. What do the Nazis and the current Trump admin have in common that made them both so obsessed with autistics?