E86: How to be you part 3

What if everything you've been taught about being "normal" is actually rooted in systems of oppression? Welcome to a thought-provoking journey through the hidden forces that shape our understanding of executive functioning and neurodivergence.

Diving into Ellie Middleton's "How to Be You," we explore how capitalism has trained us to equate our worth with productivity and independence. When profit becomes more important than people, our natural variations in planning, focus, and organization are reframed as personal failings rather than simply different ways of processing the world. We unpack how government cuts to support services have made it even harder for neurodivergent people to access the accommodations they need.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Behind the Banner
• 0:57 Capitalism's Impact on Executive Functioning
• 5:12 Colonialism and Forced Ways of Being
• 10:42 Ableism and Perceived "Normal" Functioning
• 17:41 Letting Go of Societal Expectations
• 21:23 Episode Wrap-Up and Next Week's Preview

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Behind the Banner Podcast with me, paulson, victoria. Now we are going to continue how to Be you by Ellie Middleton, and we're only going to do 10 pages. Today we're going to cover two subjects capitalism and colonialism and that's all we're going to read about. It's 10 pages because then it starts to go into like the actual chapter one and that chapter is about 20 pages long. So I want to attempt to do like a chapter at a time, if that makes any sense. So this is going to be a shorter episode than usual, but this episode will conclude like the introduction, basically. So, yeah, my name is welcome to behind the battle podcast and yeah, let's start reading.

Speaker 1: 0:57

Capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which property, business and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit. It's the system that defines us by our ability to work, achieve things and, essentially, make money. It puts profit ahead of people, ahead of our happiness, ahead of our happiness, health, comfort and fulfillment. This affects our relationship with executive functioning in a number of different ways, overvaluating productivity. In a capitalist system, efficiency and productivity are considered to be two of the most important things, since these are the means to achieving the material wealth that is prioritized under capitalism. This means that we're encouraged to strive for more, bigger and better, and told that our ability to achieve things in a workplace environment will help us get there. If we didn't place so much importance on productivity and success, we wouldn't need to plan, prioritize, hold and manipulate information or initiate tasks immediately in the ways we are currently expected to Overvaluing independence. Under capitalism, each person is seen as an individual working part, rather than cogs working together as part of a bigger machine. We're expected to be completely independent, and so any independence or reliance on community or support is considered as quote weak or something to be ashamed of. Executive functioning differences, such as challenges with planning, impulsivity or disorganization are seen as personal shortcomings rather than considering that we might just need support or input from people around us.

Speaker 1: 3:15

Humans have always relied on their quote tribe, but capitalism rejects this notion and reinforces their expectation that we should be 100% self-fulfilling and self-sufficient Access to support. In the UK, we have seen the Tory government repeatedly cut funding to education, healthcare and social care and services, which has made it increasingly difficult for people to access the support, resources and accommodations that they need to be able to quote function in the ways that society deems normal. With the proper support and resources, many of the things we consider to be quote dysfunctional would not cause half as much suffering. For example, does this person have quote emotional dysregulation or can they just not access therapy to process and work through a difficult experience and work through a difficult experience? Does this person struggle with quote working memory? Or if they had access to support tools like a dictaphone in the workplace, would this struggle go away? Does this person struggling with planning and prioritization or are they just having to spin an impossible amount of plates while they work free jobs in order to support themselves and their family?

Speaker 1: 4:50

Marketing and consumerism Just like the way that the beauty industry was designed to make us feel we need to buy certain products to be desirable desirable capitalism creates quote problems in order to be able to provide and market quote solutions to those problems which drive the economy. It reframes natural differences in ways of being as problems that quote need fixing, because if we believe that we need to be fixed, we are more likely to be swayed to buy whatever is promising to quote. Fix us as much as some apps, products and services will genuinely help us with our brains rather than against them. Some might capitalize on our feelings of being quote wrong, quote bad or quote inadequate. Colonialism is defined as quote controlled by one power over a dependent area or people.

Speaker 1: 5:56

As national geographic explains, quote colonialism occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people. Historically, the British Empire, along with other predominantly white European nations, colonialised countries and communities across the globe, with many nations still under the rule of colonialism and an even greater number still feeling the implications. When these predominantly white colonialisers imposed their control over different nations, they forced their own ways of being, thinking, behaving and working on the native people and tried to extract as much profit and labor from these colonized lands and people as possible, instead of respecting their heritage and traditional cultures. The effects of this rule still live on in our framing of executive functioning to this day. I spoke to my wonderful friend Kelechi Okafor she her black British actress, director, author and public speaker about this and she explained there is a place in Lagos called Sulu Lili. I've always found this name interesting because loosely translated to English, it means quote. Patience has worth To me it speaks of a time before rampant British colonialism, which brought Nigeria as we know it into being.

Speaker 1: 7:49

Colonialism defiantly reflects how society treats atypical thinkers and doers. Firstly, what is known as Nigeria today is a forced amalgamation of various ethnic groups. The ways these groups lived were unique and special. Through the depraved colonial lens, lines were drawn through, lands and people forced together, languages disregarded, with English inflicted as the main source of communication. Of course it would cause dysregulation Sound familiar. When society ignores our individual way of processing the world and forces all of us under one mode of thinking, slash doing, as a means of aiming to extract the most amount of labor from us, we are bound to feel untethered. Why did I mention Sululele? Because it's an area named by the Uyuruba ethnic group of Nigeria. It clearly identifies a time when patience was seen as worthy and time wasn't wound around our throats as a threat.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Colonialism is integral to modern day working practices because to dominate a country one must first flatten all that makes that country unique. Thus all the resources can be extracted from that country, while the country has been made to believe such debilitating extraction is for its own good. That's how the working environment and various professional industries function, asking that neurodivergence be left aside and our experiences flattened to the point that our aim is to keep up with a society that only intends to leave us behind. Society demands endless labor through a very specific framework which disallows individual modes of working, because various individuals can't be controlled, but a homogenous group can. Thus, to make our uniqueness appear unprofessional would mean that peer pressure forces us into confinement and away from our creativity and self-worth.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Ableism Ableism is a form of discrimination or prejudice against disabled people based on the incorrect and harmful belief that disabled people are quote inferior or quote less capable than non disabled people. It involves the marginalized, stigmatized and exclusion of disabled people in many aspects in life, including education, employment, social interactions and access to support. Ableism can show up through stereotypes such as that disabled people are quote lazy, misconceptions such as feeling sympathy towards disabled people, or the denial of rights and opportunities such as unemployment. All these things ultimately hinder disabled people from being able to fully participate and be included in society. These ableist ideas have a huge impact on what we consider to be quote normal executive functioning versus quote executive dysfunction, because, instead of seeing differences in the ways that disabled people might need brackets or choose to do things as a neutral part of human variation, we see them as quote wrong or quote lesser. I asked rachel carlton daily she they disabled editor, journalist and activist how this had affected her and she explained ableism subconsciously underpins so much of what we think of as quote normal in society and especially work.

Speaker 1: 12:18

This can be from working in person being seen as the quote only right way to work when many need to work from home. To people being criticized for quote fidgeting when they're actually stimming brackets, repeated movements, actions or sounds done by a neurodivergent person to self-stimulate or self-regulate. When the world has been built by mostly non-disabled and neurotypical people, anything they don't experience is seen as being quote weird or worse, invalid. The way the media has portrayed disabled and especially neurodivergent people as either human computers or ditzy, flaky job jumpers means that we see executive functions as problems instead of things that can be worked around and incorporated. We see emotional dysregulation as quote hysterical women or, more recently, quote snowflakes. Lack of organization or planning is seen as being bad at your job and lateness or memory issues are seen as not caring.

Speaker 1: 13:41

Ableism and ableist views keep so many neurodivergent people from living up to their full potential because they're written off for things they can't change. In reality, it's not the neurodivergent person that is the problem. Society's problem in supporting them is Kathy Ray. She, her disabled journalist author, shares a great example of this. Here's something I haven't admitted publicly before I mostly work from my bed, I send emails in bed and I take calls from my bed no-transcript. I'm living the dream, right. But then why don't I tell people? Because even I still wrestle with my inner ableist voice telling me I've failed because I haven't managed to power walk around an office building and sit in an unbearably uncomfortable chair. And if I think I have no excuse for working from my bed, what are non-disabled people going to think?

Speaker 1: 15:03

Ableism is entrenched so deeply into the fabric of our society that we all, even disabled people ourselves, struggle with identifying disability as a legitimate reason for working or doing things differently. We attribute value and importance to people based on how busy they are, brackets or are perceived to be, and on how much they get done. Kim Kardashian's famous line quote get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days caused uproar when she said it. But she was only voicing the ideas our society promotes. But she was only voicing the ideas our society promotes, a hustle and grind culture that fails so many of us in disabled, neurodivergent and sick communities. Truth is, whether I work from bed or not is irrelevant to my worth, both as an employee and as a human being. If we need to do things differently, need support or take longer to complete tasks, that doesn't mean we're unqualified or somehow not as good as others. It means we're doing our best and that's all we can do. It means we're doing our best and that's all we can do.

Speaker 1: 16:42

Charlie clement they she expands on this same point in their book all tangled up in autism and chronic illness, where they explain quote for those of us struggling with chronic fatigue and pain when at an uncomfortable desk, the option of working in bed means that we can at least do some work where not doing so might mean we cannot do anything. To recap, overall, we see that these bias and systems of oppression, including, but not limited to, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and ableism, inform our culture and obviously therefore have an impact on how we perceive executive functioning and therefore, how we quote should behave. We think that not being able to initiate a task immediately is quote bad because it is deemed important under capitalist systems where productivity is a priority and we think that outward displays of emotion are quote wrong because patriarchy tells us that they are weak. What is considered to be quote dysfunctional is not objective. There is no definitive quote right or quote wrong when it comes to human behavior and thinking styles. What is quote normal or quote dysfunctional is subjective and ill-informed by harmful biases. Although we cannot individually dismantle these systems of oppression and the responsibility absolutely shouldn't rely on marginalized people to do so we can begin to find ways of working, functioning, behaving, living and being that better suit all of us. By questioning what has always been considered the quote right way of doing things or the way we quote should do things, we can start to make more space for people beyond the privileged few who have traditionally held the power.

Speaker 1: 19:01

In this chapter, we explored which systems of oppression have impacted the way we think about executive functioning, how these systems define what is considered quote normal versus quote disordered, what we can do to begin to resist these systems of oppression. All of us, however marginalized or privileged, have grown up and been socialized in a society which holds many harmful biases. It is not our fault that we have been conditioned to hold certain incorrect beliefs about how we should behave, live and exist, which directly affect the way we perceive neurodivergent people. However, it is our responsibility to do the work to begin to change those beliefs. The best starting point is to listen to those with lived experience of these biases, especially those whose intersecting identities mean that they are marginalized by multiple systems of oppression. Marginalised by multiple systems of oppression. We don't need to be experts in each and every system of oppression, but once we start to understand the fact that these systems exist and impact our society's norms and expectations, we can start to question whether these norms and expectations actually matter at all and let go of any shame we might have felt for not being able to meet them. It's only when we let go of how we should be that we can truly be ourselves. Once we are able to shift some of the emphasis that we've put on quote the way that things have always been done being the only incorrect way of doing things we can start to look for different and better ways to function in our day to day lives which are most suited to each of us lives which are most suited to each of us.

Speaker 1: 21:23

Okay, so we are going to start the next chapter next week, next Thursday, which is called Working Memory, and, yeah, that's going to be it a quite short episode, but I hope you enjoyed and, yeah, if you enjoyed this episode or any of us previously, please go to Spotify, apple wherever you are listening and go and rate us. It really, really helps us out if you want me to talk about certain different topics or or any books in the future, or if you want to come on the podcast. And, yeah, you'll be able to find us on instagram as well. So, thank you very much for listening. This has been behind about a podcast from you. Post in victoria bye.