Against fitting in
Between dissolution and crystallisation
A year of dissolution
This past year felt like dissolving. Everything disintegrating, everywhere. Human rights norms, even in appearance. Geopolitical orders. Planetary stability. The very possibility of human thought and communication is being dissolved by enshittifying AI-boosted fascist takeovers of formerly public spaces, from twitter to science journals to classrooms.
In that general dissolution, I found myself also losing form, losing ability to think clearly, speak clearly. The very act of communication, reaching out with meaning to others, similarly affected, became exhausting. And if I, in my cushy-cozy upper-class life, am exhausted, what to say of the Palestinian, Sudanese, Ukrainians, non-white and migrants under attack under every sky? Of the precarious trans and non-binary, facing the sharp edge of the fascist wedge?
But the fact that others have it so much worse didn’t make me feel any better, or any braver, or any more energetic. This was a slope I had to roll and bump my way down on my own. Along the way, I acquired an ADHD diagnosis. This was a trophy of sorts: after all, I had struggled for over 2 years trying to get it. The medication was magical and marvellous, the demented pinball of ideas in my brain could finally settle on one at a time, for an hour or two even. But as the cloud of ideas and emotions settled a bit, it settled in a strange place. All of a sudden, interaction with people became more difficult, making eye contact more tiring, pretending to care about small talk or things I just don’t care about even more daunting. And then my extra, bonus, diagnosis of mild autism became real. As the ADHD funfair circus quieted down, it turned out the village underneath was an eerie, unfamiliar place. That didn’t help.
The reason I am “sharing personal stuff,” as my friends put it, goes beyond my lifetime habit of ADHD spontaneity and lack of boundaries. Coming to face-to-face with my own particular grab-bag of neurodivergence somehow made the sinkhole of general, humanity-wide dissolution even deeper. Self-disintegration multiplied by world-disintegration. In that swirling void, new patterns started to appear, in a process of destruction and reconfiguration.
A failed worldview
I started to see my old, admittedly failed, worldview in a new light. If we ask ourselves honestly, we each have a simplistic image of our core worldview, guiding and making sense of our daily actions. I will not try to disguise mine using fancy words. My worldview image was that of the world as an evolving puzzle, of which I was but one piece. I always knew I was “different,” but that difference was mainly explained by being a professional nerd, a scientist. Through that explainable and acceptable form of difference, I had a clear role to play. I was a piece of the puzzle that could also change and illuminate the rest of the puzzle. I fit in to the world: if I did my science right, and communicated my findings and those of my colleagues correctly, I would help make clear what kind of world we live in, and help the other pieces of the puzzle reorient themselves to build a new, better picture. I was a bit spiky and less rounded of a puzzle piece than others, but I had a role. I fit in.
In this new, disintegrated reality, that worldview of puzzle pieces itself had to fall apart. The world and ourselves do not fit together. There is no clear or guaranteed structure, but a constant amorphous powerplay of mostly hostile forces overlapping, overreaching, permeating people and their interactions. Within this swirling tug of war, imagining a greater purpose and pattern, an overall image, is itself false, even dangerous. Trying to fit in, one way or another, with one justification or another, is to surrender. Trying to be part of a sensible whole is itself a fairytale, leading to capitulation and eventually complicity. As for the 12 step program of alcoholics anonymous, the first step has to be honesty: we are prey to forces beyond ourselves, beyond our control.
Crystallisation
With that honesty came a new question: if I am not, and other are not, pieces of a puzzle, what are we? And how do we come together? The answer came to me as a new image, one of crystallisation. [Aside: “crystallisation” is the accurate word for the weird image I am trying to convey, but I can’t even type it without cringing, because of the baggage of unscientific woo New Age nonsense beliefs associated with crystals. Which is a shame, really, because crystals are actually very interesting and cool and pretty, when they are not associated with New Age nonsense. End of aside.]
What do I mean by crystallisation? I mean that we should hold on to our spiky-ness, our rough edges, our lack of fitting in. I mean that we should hold on to our core values, our beliefs and principles, the things that make us resist compliance with pressures of power.
Instead of feeling guilty or out of place, feeling responsible for fitting in, we should hold ourselves (and each other) responsible for resisting the forces of harm and destruction swirling around us. And that resistance has to exist at an elemental level, no matter how small its kernel is: it has to exist as a fundamental determination to resist the harm and evil inflicted on others and ourselves. That kernel of determination makes us a different kind of spiky: it makes us capable of resisting the flow of harm. From the swirling void, as pieces swim by, we keep only those that fit our own internal determination. Like a crystal accreting only the atoms that align with its original internal geometry, we can choose to only build upon our determination to resist the forces of harm.
With this image, the dream of fitting in and somehow, by fitting in, helping to change a coherent whole is dismantled, and replaced with a more realistic worldview. We can be hard, sharp little crystalline rocks, whose goal it is to actively defy the swirling forces of harm. We can see ourselves as gritty resistance, coming together with similarly aligned people, learning to form bonds and organise. Starting from a determination to be, and stay, an irritant and spiky conscience, within a world of harmful dissolution, we can become something way more formidable than a compliant piece of the puzzle.
The world doesn’t have to make sense. It is not a grand pattern or puzzle that we can solve, if only we are skilled and disciplined enough. Good doesn’t have to triumph. But somewhere, in most of us, we can find that hard little piece of spiky rock, the one that refuses to comply and go along with the flood of harm and chaos. Being a determined irritant, a piece of grit in the machine of harm, is far from nothing. It’s a starting point. A shape, taking form. And as we come together, through our hard-earned prehistorical heritage of counter-power and reverse-dominance organising, we might build something different: a new geological formation of humanity, like a mountain range or a new continent emerging from the chaos. And like the hard granite of my beloved Alps, a collection of spiky crystals can become shelter, safety, and the ability to stop the forces of harm from destroying humanity along with out planet.
So that’s what I’m holding onto now, and what I am looking for. Other grains of sand, that refuse to be swallowed by the storms of end-times fascism, whose spiky edges I can trust and align with. I will never dream of fitting in again.
