For someone so highly attuned to the people and places around him, there’s one area of social discourse I struggle with immensely.
I’m at a coffee shop, and I’m scrolling through post after post about the most recent layoffs at Meta. I like it here. I don’t come here often anymore but I used to frequent this place before I moved last fall.
I take a sip of coffee and look back to my laptop.
8,000 people lost their jobs via email at something like 4am, on a day where the company preemptively told everyone to work from home in the hopes of—get this—avoiding a scandal.
I mean...
Wow.
I’m on the bench side of a two-person table, on the end of a row full of others just like it. As I’m reading through all the people expressing outrage, sorrow, grief, and fear, I start to notice something. There’s a common thread emerging between the pile of Meta hate, and it seems like... betrayal. And this trips me up, because that doesn’t make sense to me as a response.
I mean, logically I understand why people feel betrayed.
Emotionally, though, I don’t experience that naturally.
It takes knowing why for me to get there.
This is something I struggle with a lot. I’m neurodivergent, which I’ve been quite open about, and this is one of the areas I really struggle with, mostly in social situations. Often, it sort of looks like trying to decipher monotone sarcasm through a text message or email from someone you don’t know all that well. But, you know, in person. And it makes me squirm in the same way that wondering if people are fucking with me or not does.
And so, now I’m wondering... are people really shocked by the way Meta handled this? Sitting in my corner-bench seat, I’m feeling like such an asshole for wondering that, but I’m genuinely curious. And I genuinely don’t know the answer—are people shocked? I’m not. And this is one of those times where I’m hyper-aware of how much my way of processing makes me different. How it can come off as insensitive. Robotic. On the one hand, I’m feeling really terrible for the people impacted by the layoff. After all, I’m still working on navigating the aftermath of one, myself. And then on the other hand, I don’t immediately understand where feelings of betrayal fit here.
I can hold both at once.
And sometimes, I really hate my objectivity.
Because at times like these, I just want to feel compassion.
Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
263/365
When’s the last time you felt like the crazy one? How’d you talk to yourself about it?
onward.
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