Manifesting The Bootstrap Myth
Sitting in my living room this afternoon watching the Red Sox game with the audio feed from WEEI’s radio coverage, suddenly in the third inning the two Wills (Flemming and Middlebrooks) were chatting with an autistic person who was diagnosed as an adult, who threw out the first pitch, and who will be running the Boston Marathon this coming Monday. My entire nervous system braced for impact.
The guest in question was one Conrad Miller-Fabregas, about whom you can read more from Special Olympics Massachusetts as well as from Spectrum News. This isn’t a hit piece, because that’s pointless and a waste of everyone’s time and isn’t necessary or what I’m after. Nonetheless I needed to share here the following exchange.
Miller-Fabregas: Everything you need to succeed is inside of you, and if you envision the outcome then the path will appear. […] If you envision the end goal then the how will fall into place, it will manifest.
Femming: So true.
Middlebrooks: Such a great message.
In fact, this very much is not such a great message. It’s not even an especially good message.
The world is positively teeming with autistic children and adults for whom no amount of “manifesting” is going to change their fate or alter the course of their lives. One of them happens to be me, which is why I was bracing for impact in the first place.
None of this is meant to take away from anything Miller-Fabregas has managed to accomplish. I’m glad he’s running the marathon. I’m glad his GPA is 3.87. It’s an unqualified good (per the Special Olympics piece) that after his diagnosis “everything began to make sense, and he was able to work through the challenges he used to face with a better understanding”—an experience he shares with a great many if not most autistics who were not diagnosed until adulthood if not midlife.
However.
Miller-Fabregas is being held up to the world as the right way to be an autistic person, or an otherwise disabled one. He’s being held up by WEEI and others in the spirit of the bootstrap myth which underlies the twin plagues of inspiration porn and the model minority, a myth falsely claiming that not only is everything you need inside of you, but it’s the only place to find what you need.
It’s simply not true. It’s never been true. It’s never been true even for people who aren’t autistic, and it certainly isn’t true for people who are autistic. It’s a divisive message that actually undercuts the kind of solidarity that should come from the feelings Miller-Fabregas had post-diagnosis.
For sure, one thing I did not expect from today’s baseball game was for it to make me angry and depressed for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual baseball, manifesting in me nothing so much as those old feelings of being a failure and a fuckup.