Published on 12, July, 2020
There is a behaviour that happens on this forum and it is worse than trolling because the poster may or may not be genuine, and you care about them but then no matter what you suggest to try help them they won't accept it. They might as well preface their original post with "whatever you say I have accepted my fate and it is bad, it just sucks to be autistic, you should feel bad too" and have it over with.That may not be their intention, but we know intention counts for nothing compared to the result. So here it is the lesson learned today, don't wast your energy trying to help those that don't want to be helped. Yes you are right to care, yes you are right to be confused but you need to recognise the cut off point.You cannot save a drowning man by reaching out to him if he won't reach back. For our own sakes as autistic people we need to maintain our own emotional energy, and self preservation is not selfish.Yes there was a specific incident that set off the need to post this, but it's not just about one person, there are others who have and will come in here and engage in this behavior. And whether they mean to or not it harms the community here because it creates the same effect as feeding-the-doom-trolls-comes-at-a-cost and takes it's toll on our collective mental health. It's great to care, I wish more people cared, but please keep yourselves safe and healthy first.
I want to add some additional context.For weeks and weeks (abt 2-3 months actually) on a mental health support discord server before I wrote this post quite a few of us there had been trying to talk another user out of suicidal ideation and the user kept making out there were no good sides to life and it took it's toll on the mental health of those who had become extremely emotionally invested, eventually one of us who had initially been in a good place started to have their own mental health decline, and eventually took their own life... it was scary to see something like that almost act as if it were contagious, and I realised although it wasn't wrong to care, it was a mistake to get too attached to a total stranger like that. And proved unhealthy for at least one of us there. That Discord server now has a new rule, we are there to support eachother but we are not a crisis service, you need to already be in a strong place yourself to do that, and those people at Smaritans have training and check ins for themselves too, which we don't, so if someone comes in to that server with ideations now we have to just direct them to actual crisis services.I'm not saying it is contagious in the physical sense but it is true that what I witnessed was someone taking on the emotional burden of another to the point it became self harming. You cannot and should not be expected to ripp yourself into peices just to keep others whole. I've noticed some of us here do duck out of the forums for a while for self care before coming back again and that is a healthy way to treat online spaces in general tbh.I didn't want to write the whole sorry tale in the original post at the time I wrote it as I know if people are already feeling down putting more emotional load on them can be dangerous and I didn't want to do that here. But I decided to add it now because I couldn't help but feel like some people may not realise this is more than just "omg bad vibes ew" it's a serious thing.
That must have been really difficult. It's not the same thing but whenever friends would talk about something they're struggling with, I would always feel like I need to actively fix it for them.
Even though they'd never expect me to, I fear that I'd be being unreasonable by keeping an eye on my own mental health. Like I'm being selfish and don't care.
One time someone I knew was clearly at crisis point and she was messaging me (late night). I made the mistake of leaving her to go to bed because I did find it very heavy and overwhelming and I didn't know how to deal with it. She wasn't happy and remained upset with me for the best part of a year.
I could have handled it better but at the same time, I just didn't know.
Yeah that's the thing, even with the other person saying "I wouldn't expect/want you to take it on as your problem" there's a little bit of guilt, but it's not as bad.
I think that particular event made me more vigilant. The person in question is also autistic and they were a bit drunk at the time, and I know they didn't intend to make me feel guilty for how I handled it but I still did.
In hindsight I could have directed them to Samaritans or whatever and just be honest about my ability to handle it. Because I didn't I felt like I had to feel bad about it and that continued for like 9 months.
I did my best in terms of offering words of support, maybe they wanted me to stay up and keep talking to them but I didn't know what I'd have said.
They cited it as the thing that killed whatever friendship we had - up til then we were on the road to it. I don't know, maybe there was just a big clash.
HMO said:Even though they'd never expect me to, I fear that I'd be being unreasonable by keeping an eye on my own mental health. Like I'm being selfish and don't care.
No that's pretty much what I mean. You should not feel guilty for self preservation.
HMO said:One time someone I knew was clearly at crisis point and she was messaging me (late night). I made the mistake of leaving her to go to bed because I did find it very heavy and overwhelming and I didn't know how to deal with it. She wasn't happy and remained upset with me for the best part of a year. I could have handled it better but at the same time, I just didn't know.
You weren't wrong to go to bed though, this is the point: you are not a Samaritans tele-person, it's not your job to suffer for others, not being able to be their makeshift therapist into the small hours while your eyes are burning and your brain is turning into sleepy mush isn't a failing on your part because you were never responsible for them. You can love a person very much but you still aren't their keeper.That doesn't mean you stop caring and say "deal with it", it means you need to acknowledge when you have hit a wall and hand the person off safely to another avenue of support, ie an actual crisis service.