There is a text meme circulating at the moment that caught me right in the chest:
“There is something
particularly cruel
about criticising
the way someone swims
while they are drowning.”
It struck a chord because of a recent phone call where I found myself apologising for speaking about my own lived experience. I retracted what I said before I even had the time to check if the complaint against me was valid.
🧩 The Default Setting: “I Must Be Wrong”
I am prone to assuming I am the one in the wrong. Whether that stems from being a woman, being an undiagnosed autistic person, or both, it is definitively a core feature of my Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD).
When I was 25, I did an all-day job interview at the Terrence Higgins Trust. I did well, but the feedback I received stayed with me forever. During a counselling role-play, another participant criticised me. The observers noted that I instantly took the criticism on board without noticing that the critique wasn’t actually valid. I was so conditioned into being wrong that I automatically assumed the other person was right.
I look at that now and wonder: Is this autism?
That constant, exhausting feeling of not knowing or understanding what is going on and feeling a need to run to catch up all the time – sorry, sorry, sorry! Professor Jason Arday spoke poignantly about how lonely and bewildering it was to navigate elite spaces without clear guidance. He noted that institutions assume everyone inherently knows the hidden social and structural codes of the workplace. Because nobody explicitly laid out those codes for him, he was constantly guessing in the dark.
This is my daily reality too. I am used to lacking the “baseline information” others seem to have. Sometimes this results in laugh-out-loud moments where I’ve taken something literally. But often, I am vulnerable to not “getting” jokes, not understanding references, and not “reading the room.” I default to assuming I have failed whenever I am challenged by an “authority.”
RSD might be part of a sensory process – a difference in the experience of pain, but it’s also a cumulative experience of being different, being othered and excluded for being different. It’s the central reason for masking, the autistic trait key to the exhaustion experienced by neurodiverse individuals. Dysphoria is defined as “A state of unease, discomfort, anxiety, or anguish“.
Dysphoria
from the ancient Greek word dysphoros
meaning “hard to bear”; “bad or difficult to carry”
⚡ The Invisible Electric Fence and The Tone Police
This vulnerability doesn’t just apply to authorities. It happens with anyone I fear losing. It can look like I am cowering, playing small, or acting like a victim. But that is not accurate.
It is actually an uncertainty about whether I have bumped into yet another unwritten social rule I didn’t know existed. When it happens, I either experience intense anger that the rule is stupid, or utter shock at hitting an invisible electric fence I “should” have seen.
When I finally speak out about how I feel—using raw emotion such as grief or anger—The Tone Police make their appearance.
The Tone Police are the people who say:
- “I can’t listen to you when you’re angry.”
- “You are being dramatic and overreacting.”
- “Rephrase that so I feel less uncomfortable.”
I have studied tone. I use Nonviolent Communication (NVC) language whenever I can, and I teach it as a strategy to the couples I work with. I have tried so hard to get it “right.” But having intense feelings upsets people, and society has conditioned me to apologise for my own formatting. In my upcoming book MIDLIFE LESBIAN: THE COMING OUT COMPANION I refer to a study that shows that being accused of emotionality delegitimises what a woman is saying more than a man.
I’ve been noticing this same pattern in Black community reactions to Jason Arday’s death—the sudden arrival of The Tone Police! Give minorities space to speak, stop criticising the style, approach and tone.
🛑 The Cost of the Call-Out
This is how I ended up apologising for a post I made challenging structural oppression, in my case the experience of women socialised in the second half of the last century. I was wrong-footed by a phone call. I never saw coming from someone who felt uncomfortable about my story.
The familiar shock of being called out propelled me to apologise and retract my words before I could even reflect. It forced me to agree to being wrong, rather than applying the clarity that arrived shortly afterwards: that this was tone policing. It was actually just a justification to continue making me the enemy, simply because my open-hearted story and some associated generosity behind the scenes was upsetting someone else’s narrative about me. When I re-frame the story of the later in life lesbian to one of conditioning, masking, bewilderment and then sometimes a series of devastating losses and misunderstanding, it doesn’t fit the trope of the selfish, sexually deviant, marriage wrecker! It is unacceptable to re-write the narrative to an understanding of thousands of women in distress today.
Highly intelligent people can logically know a critique is invalid,
but intelligence does not reduce the dysphoria.
I am quite stubborn about being nice to other people because I choose to be. This is entirely different to the automatic RSD quick-reaction. This is a deliberate strategy, partly based on Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” and partly based on my insistence on being true to my own values. Being non-judgmental and not making assumptions is at the very heart of my approach for fundamental personal reasons.
Yet reflection and judgment calls are important, to protect myself and others. I have to let myself challenge oppression. The tone police and the structural bias silenced Jason Arday, and in the same week silenced me in a minor way. Still I rise, I’m going to continue to speak out and cope with The Tone Police and my internal dysphoria.
That phone call came packed with privilege—male privilege, straight privilege, and the privilege of a secure attachment style (the exact opposite of RSD). I highly doubt the person on the other end of the phone has regular, intense nightmares about being rejected by groups of people. I had spoken publicly about the historic trope of the “wicked woman,” only to turn around and apologise to a man for my own stupidity – sorry – sorry – sorry – of speaking out against patriarchal conditioning of women.
If some people choose to ignore the importance of speaking out about oppression and try to shut it down, they only prove the need for us to keep speaking out.
Yes this left me paranoid and anxious. The cost of self-expression is so often rejection, and intense, physical dysphoria. I have been challenging myself to speak out about racism as a white person and to cope with my fear of getting the words wrong or being seen as incorrectly motivated or some other slur. I figure that if the global majority have to feel anxious each day, shut down, hunted to death, that I can cope with occasional “white fragility” moments and stop worrying about how I might be seen and validate and amplify the voices of people of colour.
đź’” Autistic Empathy is Not “Making It About Me”
All of this has been spinning in my mind as I feel into what Jason Arday experienced before his passing. I cannot say he “chose” to die, because an RSD reaction is an automatic neurological loop, not a conscious thought. Highly intelligent people can logically know a critique is invalid, but intelligence does not reduce the dysphoria. Dysphoria is an overwhelming, physical, sensory pain issue common in autism.
There is a social rule I am told I am always breaking:
“You are making it all about you.”
This is an invalid reading of my brain. This is how I feel empathy. I am frequently brought to tears by the suffering of others—I “feel for them” by imagining their pain through the lens of my own experiences that are the closest to what they are describing. Neurotypicals might take a different route to empathy, but mine is not wrong and is another example of being criticised for my “swimming style”.
I haven’t been able to sleep through since hearing about Professor Arday because of this process of feeling the feelings I imagine he felt. It is hard to not do this when I’m not properly awake as my autism creates rumination loops that was once misdiagnosed as OCD. I am not trying to “cash in” on a tragedy. My autistic brain is simply stuck in rumination about injustice, misunderstanding, and how his final moments must have felt. It is all wrapped up together: his pain, structural oppression, and the personal phone call I received from The Tone Police about my swimming style while I was just trying to stay afloat.