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The Neurotypical Stage, Shakespeare’s Tragedies, and Reclaiming Pandora’s Hope

Phased
I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on how we navigate the world post-diagnosis. A recent conversation on this forum got me thinking about the famous Shakespeare monologue, and it made me look at who actually writes the social scripts we are forced to play.
It puts me in mind of the line: "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players."
The tricky thing is that neurotypical society writes the social script of the play.
Meanwhile, autistic people put together the structure of the theatre—solving complex problems, finding objective truth, and mapping out the patterns.
Yes, that putting-on-an-act thing is exhausting. The social performance script is a parasite that drains off the energy needed to build the structural one. Personally, both before and since diagnosis, I have been trying to live life in the most efficient way to maximise my autistic potential and minimise the cost of neurotypical performance parameters. The difference post-diagnosis is that it's much easier to see this.
In Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, Malvolio, and Coriolanus all map the specific dangers of the neurotypical stage for autistic people with brutal honesty. The plays don't end well for them.
But those plays were written 400 years ago. Now, after diagnosis—like so many other people I read from on this forum (including a recent great point by  ) —I am given the tools to rewrite the context.
Are we entering a new age of autistic acceptance generally? I don't know. We are in a messy transition period, but hopefully, yes. I observe that the answer is mixed, but I hope so. Concepts of the double empathy problem and being neurodivergent are gradually breaking through into schools and the workplace.
Personally, I aspire for a new age of acceptance of my own and others' autism. Maybe the more autistic people there are who can do the same, the more accepted and even valued we will be by neurotypical society. I hope so, not only for the individual people but for the sustainability and the structure of the theatre.
On the nature of hope (at the risk of an unnecessary pivot into even older text stories), in Hesiod's original 8th-century BCE text Works and Days, Pandora doesn't let everything out. As the plagues and miseries pour into the sky, she panics and slams the heavy lid back down. By the will of Zeus, Hope (Elpis) was caught right under the rim and remained trapped inside the jar.
So I realise that I had given up on hope—seeing it as some sort of thing that floats around widely, like maybe the way I saw some neurotypical people use it as a sedative, an excuse for inaction as Nietzsche argues. I can now see that it's something one has to actively open the box to get to.
When the box is opened, maybe that's a metaphor for opening up one's past experiences for examination. In that box, what is trapped is the hope that fuels action—the raw energy that fuels capacity and rebuilding.
I hope that's true.
I'd love to open this up to the forum: What does "opening the box" to retrieve that active, rebuilding hope look like in your own post-diagnosis life? How do you stop treating hope as a passive wish and start using it as fuel?
(Note for transparency/moderators: The thoughts and metaphors here are entirely my own lived experience, but I used an AI tool to help me clean up the structure and typos before posting.)
  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    A vote for flashing one's belly as how to rebuild hope post-diagnosis.

    I second that  

  • I'm not really into Shakespeare apart from Henry V and my Greek mythology is a bit rusty.

    But I don't know who writes these scripts, but I wish they'd change thier tune, this one's got old and boring. I think some of the worst ones are written for us autistics, often by those who are supposed to help us, they seem to want to put limits on us, to define what we can and can't see, think and do and what's worse is we internalise those scripts and beat ourselves or others up for not being able to follow them.

    I think I mostly deal with it by being thrawn, and asking questions of the scripts and thier writers and generally refusing to allow myself to be bounded by what the deem as acceptable and doing what I want to do in the way I want to do it. Some many of the ways I've been told I MUST do things are wrong, like being told I was wrong for getting the right answer in a maths question at school, because I didn't do it the way they wanted me too.

    It all reminds me of the maternity tents that women used to be forced into wearing, as if pregnancy was a sign of sin or sex, I guess they're interchangeable in this instance, that could be covered up by a very large dress in floral material with lots of lace and ruffles. I'm all for flashing your belly, there life in there, why be ashamed?

  • in reply to ArchaeC

    Glad you like the image - kind of an adaptaion of "bubble meditation".

    Hope emerges.  It's just under the lid of the jar / the first thing I find when I go there.

    Likewise  

    Best wishes :-)  -/\- 

  • in reply to Phased
    Phased said:
    The balloon is allowed to float, catch the wind, and feel the full intensity of the emotional weather. But because it is firmly tethered by our structural practices—like Yin receptivity and meditation—it never flies away into a chaotic, untethered shutdown. We can process the data, use the energy, and then let the balloon of anger float away. The tether keeps us safe while letting us feel.

    That’s a powerful image of the mind and doable to observe its reactions to external forces. 

    I hope that hope emerges for you.

  • in reply to ArchaeC
    Thank you  
    I am honoured by your deeply honest and courageous reply.
    I am incredibly sorry to hear about the trauma and assault you experienced.
    It makes complete sense why my Pandora's Box metaphor hit like a red rag to a bull.
    Your initial reaction was not unfair at all; it was a completely natural response to a deeply rigged system.
    I appreciate your openness immensely, and please know that no offense was taken on my end.
    You make a very fair point about the difficulty of achieving total detachment while performing a social script. Outwardly we can look calm while an intense internal dialogue is raging. I agree that anger can be healthy and entirely justified when it leads to positive action or self-compassion.
    I’m reminded of a classic song lyric by Public Image Ltd: "Anger is an energy."
    Yes, it is — a very strong and high-voltage energy. It is completely necessary to feel it, but running that high voltage through my system used to cause an immediate panic or a thinking choice shutdown. It was literally corrosive to my physical health.
    So instead of suppressing it, I try to convert that voltage into the less corrosive energy of enthusiasm—routing that power into focused care, system-building, and finding cures. Total detachment all the time is not healthy or achievable, but I like to think of the mind like a balloon safely tethered.
    The balloon is allowed to float, catch the wind, and feel the full intensity of the emotional weather. But because it is firmly tethered by our structural practices—like Yin receptivity and meditation—it never flies away into a chaotic, untethered shutdown. We can process the data, use the energy, and then let the balloon of anger float away. The tether keeps us safe while letting us feel.
    I am really glad we held the space to find the structural connections in this conversation rather than reacting to the initial friction. It feels like a real step toward collective healing.
    I wish you well.
    (Note for transparency: The thoughts and lived experiences here are entirely my own, but I used an AI tool to help clean up the structural flow and typos before posting.)
  • in reply to Phased

    I’m not surprised that a warning sign flashed when you saw the worlds ‘Catholic Church’. I experience something similar when I read Catholic literature on the ‘state of women’.

    I must admit, your Pandora’s Box metaphor was like a red rag to a bull, only because I’ve spent years fighting the Catholic Church system and its misogynistic views, many of which rely on the ‘Eve’ account when describing ‘fallen’ women. The similarities to Pandora’s Box cannot be ignored. My relationship with the Church ended years ago following an assault by a priest. The matter has been dealt with.  My reaction was unfair on you because the story is an ancient myth and its meaning in the modern context has changed, and more importantly, your intention was benevolent.

    It’s interesting to learn how one can listen without immediate judgement or defence. You describe a state that is worthy but can be unachievable when performing a social script. Outwardly, one can give the appearance of detachment, yet inwardly a dialogue of things that may include judgement is taking place. I think anger can be healthy and justified if it leads to a positive action, eg., a service to others or self-compassion. I don’t think anyone can attain a totally detached attitude all the time, but perhaps your practice of Yin receptivity and meditation allows a little space in the day for detachment to emerge.

  • in reply to ArchaeC
    Thanks for your rich, supportive, and deeply considered reply @ArchaeC (NAS96740).
    I completely agree with your pointing out the 'backstory' to the box/jar and its being opened (thanks for picking up on my mixing those two in my post—as I understand it, jar is more original). And I completely agree with your analysis of 'blame-shifting' onto poor souls by those who are actually responsible.
    I also agree that culturally women have been the primary gender target of this for a long time. And it goes on for all sorts of people whose agency to defend themselves is reduced by social imbalance still.
    I think that personally, I have become a bit detached from being angry at how the system is. I have found it to literally be really bad for my health. So I do my best to include that in my own version of physical and mental detachment. I've concluded not getting angry doesn't mean that I don't care. Personally, I try not to run on the 'energy' of anger these days like I used to.
    I am really pleased how you have added, as I understand it, the literal biological mechanism of meditation as a means of how to structurally rebuild one's own brain over time. To me, that structural rebuilding is everything. It shifts the entire internal landscape—fundamentally changing how we interpret the events around us, how we choose to respond to them rather than reacting out of old habit, and ultimately how we feel inside our own skin. It proves that while we can't change the neurotypical script of the world, we absolutely can remodel the internal architecture of our own minds.
    Reflecting on my own initial reaction to your reply has illustrated this exact process for me. When I first saw the words 'Catholic Church' in your text, my brain instantly flashed a warning signal and tried to put up a defensive wall. Because our autistic minds are so highly attuned to pattern recognition, it is very easy for us to develop a protective, reactionary bias against institutional structures that have historically harmed or forced compliance upon outsiders.
    For me personally, when I run entirely on these defensive barriers, I run the risk of experiencing a panic glitch or a temporary shutdown of my capacity to think about it whenever a trigger appears. Meditation helps resolve that in my experience.
    Meditation personally helps me realize that staying behind that wall blocks me from receiving genuine insight. It made me think about the Yin aspect of philosophy—the energy of openness, receptivity, and listening without immediate judgment or defense. This is a distinctly different analysis of 'negative' to that which culturally many people are used to. Maybe that touches on the male and female in all of us instead of blaming which gender picked the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
    I find that by consciously practicing Yin receptivity, I can create a quiet space between trigger and reaction. And this saves me from getting angry. Meditation, I find, allows the raw information to enter neutrally, giving minds the time needed to separate the value from the trigger word.
    Putting this into writing is really helpful for personal practice for me, so thanks again for your reply.
    I recently looked into the linguistic roots of these concepts and discovered that the Greek root for 'hope' (Elpis) is literally 'to wish' or 'to choose,' while the ancient root for 'help' literally means 'to cure or amend.' This brought me to the conclusion that wishes are made to cure—and that is exactly what autistic people do for society every day by bringing that precise, intense care and attention to broken systems. By cultivating more of this receptive Yin capacity, we can actively do that same work for ourselves, dismantling the internalised trauma of societal bias so we can protect our structural energy on our own terms.
    I wish you well @ArchaeC (NAS96740).
    (Note for transparency: The thoughts and lived experiences here are entirely my own, but I used an AI tool to help clean up the structural flow and typos before posting.)

  • I would like to take that box and throw it at Zeus (and at Hesiod) because he instructed Hephaestus to create Pandora and the gods endowed her with good and evil attributes. Pandora disobeys instructions not to open the forbidden jar (box). Her disobedience causes countless plagues to be relaeased upon the earth and humankind is cursed with physical and emotional afflictions.

    Parallels can be seen in the Biblical narrative of Eve taking the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and in the historical Catholic Church’s justification of treating women as less than human.

    Having said that, spiritual detachment acquired through contemplation via the church in the past, has stood me in good stead in the present. I am not a person of religious faith any more but I continue to meditate and contemplate, prioritising detachment (not desiring one thing more than another/living in the present etc.) Over the years, hope has evaded me for long periods and my energy is depleted much of the time, but shoots of hope pop up here and there.  Noticing these things, but not trying to change things, helps stabilise my mood. I do what I can and leave what I can’t, knowing things aren’t solely up to me. It sounds simple, and in some ways it is, but the results of meditation aren’t instant. I have learned that meditation (in layperson’s language) changes the brain pathways and creates new ones which enable more positive thoughts. I’m holding onto that hope.