Richard dismisses my experiences

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on July 3, 2010February 2, 2021

I got frustrated and angry with Richard because it seemed he didn’t care what things were like for me: He just wanted to lecture me on what he thought was right, and everybody else should agree with him. (This was the same approach he took in many other areas as well, which was maddening.)

Richard just laughed it off whenever I tried to explain NLD, not even entertaining the possibility that I might know myself well enough to see myself in these conditions, that they explained my entire life and meant I was not a freak. (I shed many tears over my life because I thought I was a freak. Discovering NLD was a lifesaver.)

I thought maybe he would finally believe my brain was different from his when he showed Jeff and me Batman Begins:

Jeff understood what was going on, Jeff and Richard both enjoyed it very much, while I couldn’t make heads or tails of the plot, the explanations, or anything. It was such a garbled, jumbled mess that I found it very disconcerting, almost alarming and disturbing (not because of the story or violence but because of the incomprehensibility).

I asked on an NLD support forum if other people had the same problem with such movies.

On IMDB, the reviewers keep saying it’s the best Batman movie or comic book movie ever, while I thought it was terribly done and should have been slowed down a lot to make it understandable. (Give me Christopher Reeve’s Superman, not this! I can understand those movies!)

Occasionally, movie trailers and the new, revamped episodes of Doctor Who, confuse me. They go by too quickly with so few words I can understand, and people talking too fast in their different British accents on Doctor Who.

Meanwhile, my husband catches every important detail, understands the trailer for next week’s episode, understands the Doctor’s explanations, etc. According to some other posters in an NLD support forum, if these trailers were hard for everyone to understand, then the marketing department would have failed and have to do things differently.

Yet still, Richard didn’t believe me, thought I just had to push myself harder.

He never heard about the mental stimming or the repetitive behaviors or most of the other little things that support my supposition that I have either Asperger’s or NLD. (Most likely NLD because I don’t do stimming that’s obvious to others.)

He didn’t know me when I was a kid and did not make eye contact at all, was very disorganized, and had all sorts of social and academic issues that I have since overcome (though I still struggle socially and with eye contact).

But he presumed to declare me a neurotypical and an excuse-maker or “victim” based on what little I had told him, and because he had this idea that NLD requires autistic traits.

(That’s not NLD, that’s Asperger’s, and the two, while related, are not the same. A new study shows that 25% of NLD subjects have benign cysts or legions in their brains; 1 Aspie subject; 1 neurotypical (normal) subject. It’s a minority in any of the three groups, but far larger in the NLD group than even the Aspergers group.)

He only knew me as an adult who had already overcome many of the things that caused me trouble in childhood, yet decided he knew better than I did if I had it or not. Jeff and I both found this to be very arrogant.

Amazing how they would poo-poo the NLD, while Tracy kept getting offended at and making fun of the very things that showed I do have it: routines, particular behaviors that others don’t understand, “weird” as Tracy called it (chapter 7), extreme reserve and quietness, isolation, gullibility, the occasional remarks from Richard or Tracy that “I shouldn’t have to tell you this–everybody knows it!”

(I express myself much better via writing, and talk normally with people I know well, such as mates, roommates, family.)

Heck, even one of my brothers made a comment once–only several years ago–that I would come for a visit and not talk to anybody. Well, I do talk to Mom and Dad, but my big brothers have always been a bit scary for me, picking on me all the time and such.

[sarcasm on] Oh yeah, I couldn’t possibly know myself better than you guys do–and it couldn’t possibly be anything other than stubbornness or malice. [/sarcasm off]

(Yes, despite NLD, I do understand sarcasm fairly well.)

Richard acted as if it were better for me not to “label” myself as NVLD, as if deciding I’m just introverted and bad at sports would somehow make me feel better about myself and what I can accomplish.

But I had already been “labeled” all through school as “weird,” and my struggles with driving made me feel like a “freak,” so “NVLD” was far better. As a matter of fact, NVLD meant I could pinpoint where my problems lay and possible ways of dealing with them. As Peter Flom puts it here:

If you are weird in some way, you are going to get labeled. You can choose the label, or have it chosen for you. If you (or you, for your child) insists on not having a label like “NLD” then you will get a label like “lazy”, “crazy”: or “stupid”.
But labels can be more useful than that. They can help find services, they can reduce isolation, they can even help with solutions to the problems you face.
The problem comes when we let the label dictate to us, instead of the other way round–because a label can be a box, and people don’t fit in boxes.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. We share a house