Frequently failing to flourish
Tuesday Tutorial
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Human beings are simply not made to flourish. There, I said it. I have never felt like I was flourishing - at least not in any permanent sense. Whatever flowers blossomed on, or in, my chest, invariably withered away. And this is how it should be: to be alive is to flourish and to decay. To only go for an aesthetics of a carefree life is to deny an ethics of care. All this talk of leading a flourishing life needs to be exorcised for the Western demon it is. There are those in the autistic community who are hell bent on securing a possibility of a flourishing life for poor autistic me. However well intentioned they are in this, their minds are colonized by the neuro-normative idea that only a flourishing life is a life worth living. But if there is one thing that autism shows, it is that one need not live a flourishing life to live a life that does not need a flowery adjective to feel like it’s complete. All this talk of flourishing is just an offshoot of flowery plant supremacy trying to force non-flowering plants into an inferiority complex. We won’t have it. We may not be successful in terms of … (well, in any possible term;), we are - collectively - here to stay (but, as life is not our bed of roses, we shan’t feel individually compelled to live long, see below).
Maybe you protest: nobody was saying how you need to flourish, just that you need to be able to flourish. And whether I like it or not, being worthwhile or complete are not too far from being flowery adjectives. Your protest is vain: a life lived in misery is still complete, and it was worth living if and only if it was truly lived, no matter how short and inconsequential it was. The problem with flourishing is that it glorifies some type of living over other living. It is a normative ideal of how an individual life should be, or should feel. It therefore creates the Fear of Missing Out that drives us to an aesthetics of a carefree life, away from an ethics of care. It individualizes - therefore annihilates - the ethical which can only be relational. It makes us compare lives based on how long, healthy and prosperous they were. We start to sanctify life, demanding that it be long and prosperous; only to find not just that life so sanctified is miserable and boring but, most important, in the limit case simply not a-live anymore (see this old post applying Gilbert Simondon to our current craziness of avoiding one’s death at all costs, as if life can be its own reward). The truth is I frequently feel like I fail to flourish, and that it is good and beautiful to remain charitable to your self, especially when your life sucks.
What the West is trying to do is to deny the very existence of a death drive to give the the instinct for survival the monopoly over our motivation. That makes me mad. Mad, because I was born with a drive for death that is seen as pathological by a sane society in which more and more people are driven to insanity. Mad, because I can’t speak out about my death wish without people wishing me to be well enough to want to survive, even if just not to discomfort them with talk of decay. Mad, because as the West grows older, the misery all around the West just increases, as does the loneliness in the West (a problem discussed in this old post of mine). This is because surviving is something you do on your own, whilst realizing life is sorrow is the only way that sorrow can be halved. Is this too bleak? It is only bleak when you are privileged enough to believe in the utopian ideal of an individual (needing to) realize their full potential (in a carefree life aesthetic often symbolized by ticking off items on a bucket list). Life is a struggle, but not one for individual survival. Life is struggling together to make the best of what non-ideal circumstances one faces. Poor autistic me is more sensitive to the injustice of it all. It is this sensitivity that is my gift to others, just as it is poison to my self.
That last sentence is a reference to Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato’s use of the word ‘pharmakon’ which means both remedy and poison. I reappropriate the word here, not because of some elaborate attempt at word play, but to show a reality of my ‘surplus of sensitivity’ being, always and simultaneously, remedy and poison. My autistic pride is to have contributed to others and to realize that this contribution is related to feeling utterly lost and isolated from time to time (frequently failing to flourish is the apt way to describe it). I never really felt a part of anything. Then again I was unfeelingly a part of many things that mattered to me because I felt like I mattered to them. I am a part of those whose sensitivity anchors them to their world. I do not choose to be one who identifies as individual with other individuals who think like them. No, I was chosen to be one whose identity is to feel related to how others feel. It does not matter who, if anybody or anything, did the choosing. It only matters that I was chosen, not in order to flourish like everybody else does, but in order to live in the way that I can live, even if that living is often painful and intrinsically tiring. I play my part because I am a part and part of all this is to playfully accept that my part is - just like yours - quite apart.