My Feelings Are Not a Debate Club Topic
(Unless You’re Ready to Lose)
There’s this thing neurotypicals do with their faces. You know the look. It's not confusion. Not concern. It's a facial shrug. Their eyes glaze ever so slightly, and their mouth prepares a rebuttal that will almost certainly begin with “Well actually” or, if they’re particularly insufferable, “But let’s play devil’s advocate.”¹ This is the moment I know I’ve become not a person but a provocation. A premise. A poorly understood point they believe needs “refining.”
This happens when I say things like: “That noise makes it feel like my nerves are being sandpapered from the inside out,” or “When you interrupt me mid-sentence, my brain loses the thread and I can’t find the end again,” or even God help us all “, That joke you made about autism wasn't funny.”
Cue the tilt of the head. The tight-lipped smile that tells me they’ve activated Debate Mode. Suddenly, my sensory overload isn’t pain. It’s an intellectual opportunity. My meltdown isn’t neurological. It’s an emotional overreaction. My boundaries aren’t sacred. They’re “an interesting perspective.”
And now we’re not in a conversation. We’re in Crossfire. I’m no longer speaking; I’m defending. The prosecutor rests when I am sufficiently exhausted or sufficiently self-doubtful to recant or, more often, to shut up.
Which brings us to the thesis: My feelings are not a debate club topic.
Unless you came to lose.
Not because they lack complexity. Not because they cannot withstand scrutiny. Not because I fear contradiction. But because the premise that they must endure interrogation to warrant acknowledgment is itself ethically void. Ontologically fraudulent. It presupposes a world in which emotional experience stands trial for the crime of being felt before being certified.
See, what the neurotypical logician the dialectics-obsessed, devil’s-advocate possessed sophist in an elbow patched sport coat fails to understand is that feelings, real feelings, the raw, fibrillating mess of them, do not exist in the realm of propositional logic. They are not syllogisms. They do not traffic in deduction. They erupt. They flicker across the nervous system like electrical storms in a godless sky.
And yet, somehow, in polite society’s demented architecture of knowledge, the burden of proof always lands on the one bleeding. As though pain were a hypothesis. As though grief required graphs. As though sensory agony could be adequately conveyed via a flowchart and still retain its shape as suffering. You want me to render the scream legible before you will call it a voice.
This is the epistemological rot at the core of the neurotypical discourse industrial complex: the presumption that truth must present itself first in the language of calm. That distress, unless spoken in coherent paragraphs and couched in disclaimers, disqualifies itself. That the person overwhelmed is not a witness but a suspect.
So yes. My feelings are not a debate club topic.
They are not invitations to adversarial dialogue in a sterile room with good lighting and bad faith.
They are not thought experiments for grad students with empty word docs and inherited confidence.
They are not thesis statements. They are not Socratic prompts. They are not the setup for your rhetorical slam dunk.
They are fact. Pre-linguistic, inconvenient, unpermitted fact.
And if you require them to perform objectivity before you grant them reality, then you are not engaging in philosophy. You are participating in an elaborate, socially sanctioned form of gaslighting disguised as discourse.
I did not choose this brain, but I have made peace with its architecture. It is made of algorithms and fire. It observes the minute. It catalogs patterns. It clutches textures and recoils from dishonesty. It cannot stand lies dressed as etiquette. It doesn’t play poker, because its face has not evolved the requisite muscles for performative ambiguity.²
So, when I say I’m hurting, I don’t mean I’m fragile. I mean the world has applied itself to my skin like sandpaper with a PhD in subtle cruelty. I mean your tone stung because I noticed the micro-shift in vowel stress that telegraphed contempt before you even knew you felt it. I mean your eyeroll felt like a bullet. Don’t ask me to cite a peer-reviewed journal on that. I am the peer, and I have reviewed.
You don’t get to make my interior landscape a panel discussion.
You don’t get to build strawmen out of my pain so you can practice rhetorical jujitsu on their burning husks.
I am not an episode of Hardball. I’m a girl trying to breathe.
Let us now shift. Enter: the therapist. Not a therapist. Not the “how-does-that-make-you-feel?” NPC type with framed inspirational quotes and a cloying fondness for eye contact. No. The therapist who gets it.
The one who doesn't ask me to metaphorize my experience into metaphors more digestible to neurotypicals. The one who says: “You don’t need to justify your nervous system.” The one who takes my words at their full literal voltage and does not blink. Who does not prescribe gentleness as a euphemism for invalidation.
She says, flatly: “You are not too much. You are not broken. You are not dramatic.” And I believe her, not because I’m gullible but because she says it like she’d say the Pythagorean theorem. She has facts. I am one of them.
When I say, “That noise makes my molars hum like they’re tuning forks,” she nods and writes nothing down. She does not dissect it. She does not tell me about cognitive distortions. She does not launch a Socratic inquiry into the plausibility of molar vibrations.
She just says: “Yeah. That makes sense.” And holy hell does it.
Because the therapist who gets it knows that debate is the tool of those who need to feel superior when they cannot feel close. She knows that “Let’s discuss your feelings” too often means “Let’s put your nervous system on trial and cross-examine your credibility as a sentient being.”
She has seen it. She has heard the verbal contortionists tying my lived experience into knots just to feel clever.³
She calls it out. She burns it down.
There exists a peculiar genre of cruelty dressed up in dialectics. The Socratic method as weapon. Logic as bludgeon. This cruelty wears tweed and smirks. It finds great joy in “challenging assumptions,” especially when the assumption is “I deserve to be taken seriously as a human being.”
These people call themselves rational. They claim emotional detachment as a virtue. They operate like empathy is a bug, not a feature. And when I say, “This hurts,” they ask me to define hurt. When I say “That’s ableist,” they ask for an operational definition. When I say “Stop,” they ask “Why?”
And that’s when I walk away. Or if I’m feeling particularly sharp, I say: “Because no amount of IQ points will teach you how to shut up and listen.”
The autistic individual does not want your approval. She wants your respect.
She does not need you to “understand her completely.” She needs you to stop explaining her to herself.
She does not seek validation from the marketplace of ideas. She does not auction her pain for applause. She states it. With clarity. With fire. With no apologies.
And if that makes you uncomfortable, she will not shrink. She has done enough of that. She has folded herself into bite-sized fragments just to survive your discourse games.
No more.
You want to debate me on my pain?
Fine.
Bring your facts. I’ll bring my nervous system. We’ll see who walks out.
Spoiler: it won’t be you.
…Which brings me to now.
Excuse me. I have a debate I must attend.
Location: a lecture hall. Windowless. Air stifled by the breath of stale academia. Fluorescents flicker overhead like anxious Morse code. The moderator fumbles a clipboard. He announces the topic with theatrical neutrality:
“Resolved: Subjective distress does not constitute empirical reality.”
The man across from me Dr. Leland Argus, neuroscientist, tenure wielding, dopamine besotted clears his throat with the pomp of someone who has never once been interrupted mid-sentence by a waitress but often interrupts waitress’s mid-sentence. He holds a remote control. Behind him, a projector illuminates a chart so sterile it might as well be a hospital waiting room in graph form.
He begins with the phrase: “What we must first understand about the neurochemical substrates of emotion…”
And there it is.
The delusion that brains obey PowerPoint.
“Let me first establish that what we commonly describe as emotional distress, sensory defensiveness, or cognitive rigidity can be best understood through the lens of maladaptive neurochemical feedback loops,” he says, wielding phrases like scalpels.
He speaks of overactive limbic systems. He diagrams dopaminergic dysregulation. He uses words like “pathology” with the bored confidence of a man who has never been told his facial expressions are wrong, too much, not enough, off.
His PowerPoint slides multiply. The amygdala becomes the scapegoat for every scream. He cites fMRI studies with p-values and sample sizes. He calls it evidence. He calls it truth. He calls it a matter of “objective insight,” delivered with the same inflection someone might use to describe airport security as necessary.
And now we arrive at his thesis, unearned but unshaken: that autism though he avoids the word, preferring “atypical processing profiles” is fundamentally an error in function. A miscalibration. A neurological glitch.ⁱ
His argument amounts to this: Pain can be explained, therefore it must be tamed. Feelings are symptoms. Not truths. Not testimony. Neurological artifacts, not evidence.
He leans back with the self-satisfaction of someone who thinks objectivity smells like Old Spice.
My turn.
“I hear your argument,” I begin, “which amounts to this: that pain must be explained to be believed. That irregular firing equals dysfunction. That difference mine, not yours must earn its right to exist by performing utility.”
He looks annoyed. I look directly at him.
“But what if your premise is flawed? What if the science that named me broken was built on a question it never had the courage to interrogate?”
I move forward, hands steady, voice louder now.
“You mistake your methodology for morality. You assume your measurements define the real. But let me ask you this who decided that the neurotypical brain was the control group?”
His brow creases.
“You made the mistake of thinking that the first map of the forest was the only one. That because you could publish it, it must be true. That because it earned citations, it earned authority. You’ve been tracing your own assumptions in permanent marker and calling it ‘data.’”
I circle slightly, not for effect, but to let the room shift. People are listening now with their whole faces.
“You call my dopamine patterns irregular. You frame my sensory system as over-responsive. You say ‘deficit’ where you mean ‘deviation.’ But what if your hypothesis was never neutral? What if your baseline was just the average experience of the loudest group?”
He stammers something about statistical norms. I cut through it like wind slicing dust.
“Statistical norm does not equal biological truth. Repetition does not create validity. And calling it peer-reviewed does not make it holy.”
I pause. Let that settle. Then:
“Your entire framework pathologizes that which you cannot feel. You frame difference as disorder, not because it fails but because it refuses to mirror you.”
A murmur. The moderator looks unsure whether to intervene or confess something.
“You think neurons misfire when they light up in unfamiliar configurations. But the language of fire is older than your models. I was not built for your fluorescent classrooms. I was built for pattern, for echo, for hyperattention to meaning where others skim.”
Dr. Argus fiddles with his pen. I do not.
“You believe your way of processing the world is correct because it is common. And you mistake comfort for correctness. You mistake consensus for truth.”
I lean in slightly now.
“You see disorder. I see divergence. You see impairment. I see perception in a higher resolution than your eyes were built for. You see malfunction. I see a system that refuses to compress itself for your convenience.”
His mouth moves but does not speak. I finish clean.
“You misnamed me. You mistook your perspective for proof. You mistook your map for the territory. And while you dissect the brain, I live in it.”
Silence. This time, full-bodied. Not awe. Recognition.
The moderator tries to say something procedural, but the sound of it evaporates.
Dr. Argus opens his mouth again. A tremor of desperation coats his syllables. Something about scientific integrity. Something about replicability. Something about data driven practice. I do not respond to the desperation. I do not respond to the data.
I respond to the structure that built this argument in the first place.
I let the air pause, then part.
“Might I suggest,” I begin, each word sharpened on bone, “that the real failure here is not neurological but epistemological?”
He frowns, squints. The room listens like a held breath.
“Might I suggest that the greatest scientific waste of our time is this: neurotypical men in temperature-controlled labs producing grant funded inquiries into brains they do not occupy, bodies they do not inhabit, and lives they could not endure for a week?”
I say this not softly. Not cruelly. Clearly. The way you say arithmetic.
“You study us like insects. We walk among you as exiles. You chart our brains without once asking what it feels like to live inside them. Your graphs cannot hold grief. Your PET scans cannot map the slow corrosion of being misunderstood daily and praised only when we mimic your broken definitions of normal.”
He looks down. I look directly.
“Might I suggest that you, Dr. Argus, and your white coated peers with all your syntax and none of our soul, have missed the central nervous truth?”
Now the therapist speaks through me, not beside me.
“The people with the most expertise in neurodivergent experience are the ones who carry it. Not the ones who dissect it. Not the ones who reduce it to spikes and dips on machinery that has never once cried in a bathroom because the light was too loud.”
I pause.
“You call it disorder. I call it data you cannot parse.”
Dr. Argus does not speak.
I keep going.
“Might I suggest that you are not the authority here? That the real scientists are those of us who have experimented with survival every day in a lab called the world and have still, somehow, stayed?”
I step back. Not retreat. Closure.
“Might I suggest you listen.”
And then I leave.
Not quietly. Not loudly.
But completely.
I turn to leave, no notes, no rebuttal necessary.
The crowd does not clap. They breathe. A breath they didn’t know they’d been holding.
I walk out, not triumphant. Just intact.
Which, frankly, is more than your entire field ever offered me.