I don’t have to do anything

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with authority. My mom has the biggest anti-authority complex of anyone I know. To the point she basically starts foaming at the mouth when there’s police anywhere (to not speak of my own complicated opinions about the police). This influenced a lot of how I deal with figures of authority in my life. I have a natural suspicion towards anyone with some degree of power over me, I remember being in school with teachers trying to ‘be friends’ with students and thinking ‘I don’t call my friends sir and they can’t give me detention for insulting them’. 

A lot of power people have also seems to be based on absolutely nothing. Like, cool, you’re 10 years older than me, I don’t have to listen to you. Functions with power, such as politicians, police and teachers, seem to be divided on terms of wanting to have power, not deserving power, which is dumb. There’s also a lot of societal power based on how you were born, whether you’re white or a man or rich. 

I’ve also found that my autism gives me a certain lack of power. Not understanding societal norms sometimes often puts you in a vulnerable position, as well as not being able to handle ‘ordinary’ things sometimes. I’ve heard about a book where a police officer describes how he identifies ‘suspicious’ people, and the behaviours he describes are all much more common within neurodivergent people (also I don’t know the name and citing sources is for pussies get off my dick).

So yea, me and authority, not a great combo. 

This results in that often when people tell me I ‘have to do’ something, I promptly reply with ‘I don’t have to do anything’. It always startles people a bit, which is slightly funny to me. Some sentences are so ingrained in people that questioning the wording will confuse them. Also, it’s kind of rude of me.

But rudeness is such a weird thing as well. I remember being with some friends and drinking red wine, and the ENTIRE FUCKING EVENING I was walking around with two little red splotches on my top lip, because no one told me anything, probably because they thought it would be rude. That’s the weird thing about being rude, is that you can (mostly) only be rude by being honest. Lying isn’t rude, it’s mean. If someone smells bad, I can’t tell them, even though it would improve both our lives if I did. 

And when you start to think about that there’s so many societal rules that just make no sense. Why is it taboo for me to talk about my period (to the point where I doubted if I should use it as an example here) but sitting at the bar and talking about historical torture and genocide is a very normal topic? Why is anything taboo at all? Why can’t I cry in public without it being awkward? Who decided that emotions are awkward? That nakedness is weird? That certain things are weird and others special?

It’s like, we’re just monkeys on a rock, floating in space, and for some reason we’re the only things within a radius of many lightyears to exist and be aware of it. We just thought of all these little rules we need to follow, a lot of them, from aesthetics to ethics to not being a fucking weirdo, and we just have to live with the fact that we have to follow all these rules that no one ever decided, that no one ever wrote down. That just appeared over the course of history. 

Maybe I just have to stop thinking about it. 

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Well I don’t have to do anything.