Okay, here it comes...my late-night thoughts that I wrote up and couldn't bring myself to share in person. Here's my take on the workshop. I know it's different. I'm glad so many of you had such a perfect time. But life isn't always perfect.
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Sometimes things need to be said that nobody is saying.
This year was different, for me at least. I haven’t changed much in the past year, but everything around me changed, several times, and abruptly. For a high-functioning autistic person with OCD and social anxiety disorder, change like that is very upsetting.
Since I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, I’ve become part of the outcast group. You know, the group where you find the troublemakers, the non-Christians, the dark writers who actually write about things that happen all the time in the real world. The less-than-perfect recipients of ignorant judgment. And you know what? Every single one of them is an amazing, beautiful person.
There’s a lack of love here. And I’m sure most of you think I’m crazy, of course there’s a lot of love here. But is love really love if it’s conditional? There’s more love here than many other places but it is still lacking and that’s something we cannot ignore. A community that supposes itself to be a wonderful, loving environment must hold itself to a higher standard…or be torn apart.
I’ve heard people talking about other people behind their backs. I’ve seen kids in tears because of something another person said, and others barely holding together while trying to comfort them. The most caring friends I have here have been described in rather harsh terms by other people who don’t understand them.
Some of you may not have any idea what is going on. Maybe you’ll go home and write overly dramatic accounts of your time here, making it sound like a sort of sleep-deprived heaven where nothing can go wrong. Maybe you know, but you choose to ignore it. Or maybe you know and care but don’t know how to help.
Whatever the reason, love isn’t love if you simply care about a person but reject them for being too different or too depressed or too dark or too difficult. It isn’t love to speak against someone’s beliefs or experiences without first making sure you understand what you’re talking about. After all:
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
It’s easier to work with assumptions and reject people you don’t like, than to actually get to know them, and understand who they are and why they do what they do.
Loving is difficult because understanding is difficult.
Let me point out that “understand” is comprised of the words “under” and “stand”. You’re not standing above looking down at an object and studying it so you know how to use it, or how to fix it. To understand means to put yourself beneath something, to be willing to learn from it. You can be under someone as a student or as a support, but either way you have to treat them as more important than yourself.
I don’t know if my little ramble will have any effect. What I’d like to see is a little more effort put into understanding people who think differently, speak differently, and live differently, instead of just forming a majority group of like-minded people and silencing the dark anomalies. Y’all are such beautiful, messed-up people, and I love you. So if you give a damn, get off your ass and learn to really love people regardless of how they speak or what they believe.
~Matthew Lauser
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