on thoughtpunk

I’ve never fit in.

I was simultaneously the smartest and the dumbest kid in class. I was high achieving and proud of it, but also desperately uncomfortable and lost. Many days I longed to be one of those other children who just seemed to know the answers without asking the questions that were constantly dragging on my mind.

My mum’s a feminist, and like many late-twentieth-century girls I confused the calls for equality with a rejection of the feminine. Early on I developed a horror of dresses, skirts and the colour pink. But I also refused to dress “like a boy”. No khaki whatever for me. I marched around in crazy leggings for a couple of years — I had one pair that were violet leopard print that I absolutely adored.

Later, when coming out as a lesbian (an ongoing process, not a single event), I’d get a curious mix of “I’d never have guessed — you don’t look like a lesbian”, and knowing nods from people who had already picked up something about me and read it as queer-coded.

Once, someone told me they’d known I was gay because my voice was husky. This was the morning after a long night out, shouting over rock music at bars (something I almost never do). That wasn’t my voice. People really, really needed to categorise me. And the category errors were fucking hilarious.

If it’s taken me a long time to figure out who I am, that’s because Who I Am has always been so profoundly mixed up with How Society Reads Me.

Eventually, I decided I rather liked not being readable.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’m unreadable — people, and now algorithms, are reading me all the time. They’re just doing a pretty mediocre job of it, that’s all. And deep down, I believe every neurodivergent person knows this: there are no sure signs; only assumptions. The upturned corners of a mouth aren’t always a smile. And sometimes they are a smile, but they don’t signify genuine happiness.

My wife, for example, makes some pretty crazy shapes with her face. Some days I’ll look at her and say, “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“That look on your face. You looked almost maniacally happy?”

“I don’t — I was just trying to make my face look like it’s supposed to?”

My wife is autistic. She has spent decades trying to contort her responses into something resembling “normal behaviour”, because she grew up knowing her natural ones were inappropriate. She doesn’t really get facial expressions. And so, if she responds the way her bodymind wants to, it makes others uncomfortable: they can’t “read” her. She’s spent her whole life training to respond in readable ways. And she’s still, apparently, “doing it wrong”, but we’ve finally decided that if other people don’t understand, they can just fucking ask.

People don’t seem to like doing that.

In fact, massive data-driven algorithms are designed to automate that asking. Instead of reaching out and connecting with something we don’t understand, a big data algorithm will aggregate huge volumes of that thing, average it out and generate an interpretation based on its own metadata (labeling and annotation).

Mouth with upturned corners? Smile.

Folks, this is a shortcut to nowhere. This is a shortcut to an interpretation of a world that can fit inside a computer. It’s the ultimate manifestation of Enlightenment hubris. It’s not my world; it’s not yours, either. You are more than this. The world is more than this.

Be all of the things you are. You don’t have to mediate them; you don’t have to categorise them; you don’t have to hashtag them.

You are not machine-readable.