I remember back in school anytime I was “being myself”, acting or saying things freely, without concerning myself with what other people would think, that was always when the other kids would laugh at me. For some people, this kind of treatment encourages them to become normies, but for me it just made to start to withdraw within myself.
I have an autistic cousin and I think the same thing happened to him, only far far worse. Every time I was with him as a kid he was happily being himself, he didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought of him. He didn’t seem to either know or care that he was different from the other kids. Who knows how much bullying this earned him. After a few years without meeting him I saw him recently at our grandmother’s funeral, (he’s about a year older than me, either 19 or 20 right now), and he was completely and utterly withdrawn. He wore casual clothing to the funeral, I guess his Mom couldn’t make him put on anything formal. His hair looked like it hadn’t been cut in at least a year. He wouldn’t speak or even look at anyone else there. When I said hi to him, he gave me a barely audible grunt as a reply, that was more acknowledgement that he gave to anyone else there. I found out from his sisters that he had no plans to go to college or get a job. I actually almost started crying. How could this have happened to him? How could that boy have been so utterly crushed, turned into a fucking shell of a person? Normies did this to him. By fucking laughing at him and mocking him and excluding and humiliating him until he realised that his true self would NEVER be welcome. So he gave up, and decided to lay down, and rot.
