Feeling Overlooked? Here’s What to Do Instead of Performing for Love
I have a question that I think a lot of us who are on the spectrum or have felt like we don’t fit in, that we kind of wrestle with a lot of times. The question is, why is it that I always feel like I am overlooked, or that I have to earn the love of other people, or I’m taken for granted by other people?
I feel like that’s an internal struggle that we’ve had to deal with related to our own internal struggles of being on the spectrum, whether we’ve known that or not, or just feeling a little bit outside the loop or outside the bubble, and having to kind of wrestle with, “Well, why is it that no matter what I do, I never really feel like I get to get picked first or really thought of?”
I want to talk about Leah because she is just the quintessential person for this. She was overlooked for what I can only assume is the entirety of her life and her marriage. She had a younger sister. She had a popular younger sister. And I just want to get into the story, just a little bit of the backstory for her.
Leah’s Backstory
So Jacob, we’re in Genesis 29, and Jacob was running from his brother Esau. He happens to run into his uncle’s family and he sees Rachel, falls head over heels, love at first sight. And his uncle, Laban, is like, “Hey, we’re really happy you’re here. What can I do for you?” And Jacob is like, “Hey, I would really like to marry your daughter, Rachel.”
Laban was like, “Cool. Rather it be you than someone else. So here is the deal. You’re going to work for me for seven years.” Jacob said, “I’ll work for you for seven years for your daughter, Rachel.” Laban’s like, “All right, you got a deal.” So seven years fly by in Jacob’s mind because he loved Rachel so much.
We know that part. Wedding week comes. Oops, this isn’t Rachel. It’s Leah, and Jacob is furious. “Hey, Laban, I worked all these years for Rachel. Why is Leah in my bed?” Jacob’s understandably frustrated. Laban says, “Hey, I’m so sorry, but over here, the older daughter has to get married before the younger daughter. But I’ll tell you what. You finish this wedding week and next week you can get married to Rachel. How about that?” Jacob says, “All right. I mean, I guess that’ll work.” So finishes the wedding week, gets to be with the sister he really wants to be with, and here we find ourselves with Leah.
So Leah is just put in such a terrible position. Obviously, in that culture you didn’t really have a say in who you married. Your dad just came home one day and was like, “Hey, you’re going to be marrying so and so. Pack your bags.” So that was it. So Leah was in such an awkward and hurtful position because she didn’t get a say, obviously. Two, it’s not even like they could work something out on the other end because Jacob already loved her sister.
So she was just in this place where she was married to someone who didn’t like her. The word says, it was Genesis 29:17, and it says, “Leah had dull eyes,” or weak eyes in some translations. I tried to look up exactly what that means, but there’s a direct comparison to Rachel in the second part of that sentence. It says Rachel was beautiful and had a lovely figure. So just for the sake of this conversation, we’re going to say that Leah was kind of plain Jane in this scenario. There’s nothing wrong with being plain Jane. You have to be who you are in this world. But in this scenario, it was a negative because she couldn’t do anything about that. You look like how you look like, and it’s not her fault.
So kind of tying that into being on the spectrum, you just are on the spectrum. There’s nothing to change about that. You are who you are. But unfortunately, not everyone responds to that really well. And in her scenario, her husband, he wasn’t really that interested in her. He was just like, “I got an extra wife that I have to deal with, but at least I got the one I really wanted.”
The Naming of the Sons
So moving on. Leah is on a mission now. Leah is like, okay, in this culture, having children was the number one thing you could do as a woman, in particular, having sons. Sons carry the family name, they carry the legacy, all the inheritance passes through the sons. So she’s like, “You know what? I’m on a mission.” So she ends up pregnant with her first child. And then she says, “Because the Lord has looked on my affliction, surely now my husband will love me.” So she’s like, “Okay, I did it. He has an heir. There’s an heir to the Jacob throne and fortune. I did it.” Didn’t work though. Jacob still doesn’t like her.
So moving on. This is Genesis 29, verse 32, so we’re just going straight through the verses with kids. Next kid. And she says, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, He has given me this son also.” So now she already knows the Lord sees her because they understood that having children is something that the Lord had control over. He opened wombs and He closed wombs. We see that all throughout scripture, in particular the Old Testament. So she says, “All right, great. Now I have a second son. We have an heir, and we have a spare.” Now this is really moving things forward. Jacob, “Hey, look, I got you two sons. Isn’t this amazing?” Jacob doesn’t care.
So moving on, she’s like, all right, third time’s the charm. Now she has the third son, and she says, “Now this time my husband will be joined to me because I have borne him three sons.” She is trying her hardest. She’s doing everything that she can do or what she has available to her in this culture to make her husband love her. And what a terrible place to be in. She didn’t have a choice in marrying him. She didn’t have a choice that he already loved her sister, and she was doing everything that she could. She’s like, maybe this time. Maybe if I try hard enough this time, he will pay attention to me and he will love me. But none of those efforts got her the result that she wanted. Jacob still loved Rachel. He paid attention to Rachel. She was just a ghost in this household that bore kids, and that was about it for her.
And I can only imagine being in that kind of scenario where you’re trapped. And I feel like if you, especially if you were maybe late diagnosed like I was, being on the spectrum, you’ve just had this thing that you’ve been dealing with for most of your life, but you didn’t have a name for it. Or even if you were diagnosed as a child, but you have this thing that you didn’t know was autism, but you’re trying. You’re like, “Maybe if I just learn this, or learn this skill, or read this book, or join this group, then I will be able to connect. Then I’ll be able to fix it.” But it doesn’t work that way. Your brain is the way your brain is.
Change the Focus
So now we get to baby number four. Pregnant with baby number four, but this time her mindset changes, and this is what I want to get into as an actionable step for us who are on the spectrum who deal with this on a daily basis. What does she say in this fourth verse, fourth kid, she says, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she named him Judah.
So nothing about her relationship with Jacob changed. Nothing about her appearance changed. Nothing about the circumstance changed. But her mindset shifted on this one. She said, “You know what? We have the heir, we have the spare, we have third time’s the charm. I’ve given this man three kids, three sons. I have a backup to the backup, and now we have another backup.” But she said, “This time I’m going to praise the Lord.” She recognized that she couldn’t constantly be looking to Jacob for acceptance and approval. This time I’m going to shift my mindset and look towards the Lord.
Being on the spectrum isn’t something that we have to manage on a daily basis. There are situations that we just have to manage on a daily basis and we can’t change the external, but what we can focus on is the internal, and that is something that you can actually do on a daily basis.
A New Perspective
And something so beautiful about this is we never know what kind of outcome that may have. Sometimes it’s an immediate outcome that we can see and it’s like, oh man, my perspective changed and then this happened for me. Wow, that’s amazing. And then sometimes in Leah’s case, the outcome is far, far, far down the line and you don’t even get to see what that positive mindset shift did.
Because Judah, if you look in Matthew 1, Matthew 1:1-3, you can see it right in the first gospel. Judah is the tribe that Jesus’ lineage came from. So Leah, in this terrible situation, decides to have a mindset shift. That’s something that she chose. And Judah was the tribe that God chose Jesus to be born through. And that’s an outcome that she would have no idea was going to happen 28 generations later. She had no idea that that would be the outcome.
And we have no idea what kind of outcomes our mindset shifts will have, what kind of impact that will have on our future or someone else’s future. But that’s still a decision that we can make on a daily basis. We might see it then or we might see it later or we may never see it at all. But you still have to make that decision as to, okay, am I going to search for other people’s approval? Am I going to try and get everyone to accept me and figure out what’s going on? Or this time I’m going to praise the Lord.
A Personal Story
I have a little personal story. I have two brothers. I grew up mostly with my younger brother in the home. We’re closer in age, and he’s amazing. He’s a great guy, but we are fundamentally pretty much polar opposites in personality, especially growing up. I think we meet in the middle a little bit more now that we’re both adults.
But growing up I was very introverted, very quiet, withdrawn, kept to myself, and him, oh my gosh, he had friends on friends on friends, knew everybody, so charismatic, such a magnetic personality. I was so jealous. I was so jealous. I was like, “How does he do it? I don’t know.”
And then there was this one day in particular, we were driving home from who knows where as a family and the neighborhood children that lived on our street saw that we were driving home and they literally ran behind the car chanting my brother’s name. Chanting. Asking, begging my parents if he could come outside and play. And I’m sitting there dumbfounded, because I’m like, how is… It’s like the king had arrived. And I’m just this invisible person. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, she could…” There wasn’t even a she can come too. Nobody cared about what I was doing. It was just mind-boggling to me.
And I imagine Leah kind of felt similar. She has this beautiful younger sister, the popular one, and everyone wants to try and get to know her. And then Leah’s just, “Oh, yeah, then there’s Leah.”
Take the Next Step
And so I feel in those scenarios we can do what Leah did. It’s like, “Okay, well maybe if I change this then I’ll get more friends.” Or, “Maybe if I do this then people will like me.” Or, as I learned over time, I can praise the Lord, and I can focus on the Lord, and I can say, “Hey, listen, I don’t know why you picked me to be on the spectrum and have this challenge,” because everyone on the spectrum is different and we all have different challenges with things. “I don’t know why you picked me to go through this. I don’t know why that has to be my struggle, but I’m going to praise you anyway.” Because there’s a purpose and a reason for that. I may not understand it right now, but some good is going to come out of it if I can have that positive mindset shift and say, “You know what? Thank you. I don’t understand it. I’m not particularly enjoying myself at the moment, but thank you.”
So this week I want us to, because this is a work in progress, think about these moments where we’re still in some way, shape, or form acting in a way to gain other people’s acceptance or approval or trying to fit in. Take that moment and say, “You know what? Instead of focusing on everyone else, I’m going to just praise the Lord. I’m going to focus on the relationship that matters the most.” And who knows what kind of impact that can have for you, one, in that moment, because you’re not constantly thinking about what other people think, only what God thinks. And so that’ll shift your mindset in the moment. And two, you never know what kind of impact that can have down the line. But it takes a decision in those daily moments to say, “You know what? This time. This time I’m going to focus on the Lord and see where that gets me.”