The problem with diplomacy
Neurodiversity, truth and masking
The thing about me and the social graces that society demands is that I can do them all fine—as long as I mean them. When I mean it, I can effortlessly tell someone that I love their haircut, that I’m impressed with their skills and talents, that I enjoy their turn of phrase or that I learned a lot from their insights. To me these are not social graces, they are authentic remarks. And this approach will get me so far in making friends.
But there’s a glass ceiling. And to break the glass ceiling, you’ll eventually need to flatter people you have no time for. This is when things become much, much harder. Misrepresenting myself is a dissonant experience that begins in my body and feels like I am being shaken. It’s nauseating in the non-metaphorical sense and creates a disabling vibration in the bright flowing that is my inner experience. Sparks fly inside me and they burn. Mis-representing reality itself simply does not compute.
My high school tutor—who was a friend and ally—wrote a letter to my mother when I finished school saying she had found me “challenging and iconoclastic, but always a pleasure”.
My mother was happy with this seemingly positive appraisal, but I understood that my teacher meant I had been a royal pain the rear, constantly subjecting the pompous to a scrutiny they found uncomfortable and, in many cases, intolerable. And while my tutor may have quietly enjoyed that, as a kind of intelligent rebellion, most of my teachers had seen it as a series of deliberately insolent challenges to their authority. I saw it as neither. I was not remotely concerned with power, or what they thought power was. For me it was merely the essential mapping of reality.
If a teacher tells a whole class that a spider is an insect, they are going to get corrected. It’s a force I cannot control. They might send me out of the class and keep me behind afterwards to threaten me and call me provocative, but at the end of the day, we’re here to learn and the taxonomy is on my side. It’s not a hard point to concede. Shouldn’t their shoulders be broader? It always shocked me that they were not.
My school friends would have a sharp intake of breath whenever I would pipe up in class. “Shut up, Lewie, you’re gonna get in trouble.” But, to me, what would happen if I didn’t speak up was much worse. My whole life has been lived like this, with a somatic inability to live with an untruth or a broken system, purely to smooth relations with an assumed power. And that makes diplomacy very, very hard. Because lying about the world to stay safe from power is what diplomacy is.
And there’s the rub. For me, truth is safety. Establishing a truth, for me, feels like driving a pile deep into silty ground to gain a solid footing. Each truth mapped shores up reality. The more true I can make things, the less chance we all have of sinking into the silt and being washed away. Every time someone forces me to retract a truth, because acknowledging it would ill-suit their ego, the more compromised the whole structure of reality becomes. If they kick away all of my carefully driven foundations, then everyone is lying about everything and nowhere is safe.
I never understood how my school friends and, later, colleagues could live with these fundamental rips in space-time and pretend everything was OK. I knew I could not.
The first time that I made a career choice that I felt actually leaned into my personality was when I became a journalist. Surely this was the ultimate career for a pathological truth-teller? I got a shock when I realised people didn’t have to take your call or tell you anything. The only way to make that happen was to curry favour. Use diplomacy.
Afraid of failing, I learned how to lunch the powerful. I made them like me by hiding my intelligence. I would make deliberate small mistakes and allow them to correct me, then thank them for their insight. I would lay out breadcrumbs, leave them to voice the blindingly obvious conclusion, then praise their excellent idea. I would “accidentally” let slip something I wanted them to know, then apologise for my indiscretion. They would respond by lowering their own defences. As a result, I found these power brokers would now take my call and, eventually, they would be the ones calling me, to tell me everything I wanted to know.
To me, it felt diabolical, manipulative and false. How did they not see it? All in all I worked for around 12 years as a journalist and when I stopped, the relief was all-encompassing. How many lies can you tell about yourself in order to tell the truth about something else? Is it worth it? Some neurotypes are perfectly comfortable with this kind of hierarchy of truths. To them it’s just the way of the world. But for me, living as a cypher had been mentally and physically exhausting. I believe I never again regained the kind of elastic energy I had in that period of my life. I feel the intense and sustained masking left me permanently spent. From that point on I would need to live more congruently, even if it meant being less successful.
Eventually, I was lucky to find a career where I was surrounded by impressive and likeable people, so the issue never came up. The piles were driven deep and things felt secure. In the meantime I trained as a psychotherapist because I felt this work would allow me to use what was authentically and congruently within me to help others heal from experiences like mine. And that is true. It works. I can offer relief.
But the profession … the counselling and psychotherapy profession itself is riddled with self-appointed powers, saturated with giant splintery egos exploiting the gullible, and held up by flimsy balsa-wood structures built on fine dry sand. There are many would-be emperors and they all are naked.
And I feel a familiar old vibration in the bright flowing …
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