Metonymical

I keep reminding myself that I embraced my being autistic only three months ago. While I’m doing fairly OK, I’m still going through a lot.

I used to mask a lot, and still do, although I’m working on it. Much of the masking I’ve done is/was entwined with coping and self-care strategies. I have a standing set of tools in this regard (most of which were beneficial, but not all of them were necessarily palliative as much as improvised). For example, I’d have (and still have) very strong alexithymic and hyper-empathic responses to something as seemingly innocuous as an emotionally challenging article online, or a friend of a friend who I barely knew passing. 9/11 was pure hell. In order to cope with feeling lucid, but also completely overwhelmed, I’d start improvising self-help strategies that I’d learned over the years from spiritual, human potential and self-work techniques I’ve picked up over the years, so that things wouldn’t possibly lead to anxiety, depression or if things are really tough, disassociation as a result. I definitely catastrophize things, though, and have coping/counter-inner-monologue approaches for that as well.

That all said, I mostly seem ok mental health-wise, relatively speaking. I’ve become really good over the years at flipping “fuck everything” around to “No, things are going to be ok, and even if they’re not, I’m not going to start thinking like that”. I gradually figured out that “I shouldn’t be living with 12 other people in a collective house, or doing street activism and all the stress and sensory overload that comes with it” was a wise call, even if it took having several shutdowns and meltdowns to finally get it. (“I’m just passionate. It’s not OK that I’m like this at times, but who even knows why. Maybe I’m just not cut out for all this.”) My coping mechanisms have coping mechanisms, my techniques have composites. I’m positive that years of spiritual work, human potential work, personal self-help work and therapy have all played a positive role in this.

The issue I’m having now is that the coping strategies I developed were based on a generalized concern on my and other people’s part regarding my emotional well-being, not on my or our informed knowledge around my being autistic. Many of those strategies were in response to catastrophizing, over-analyzing why something went wrong (including things from 25-30 years ago or more), or all my nerves being on fire from having an alexithymic/highly sensitive/hyper-empathic response, but it was just “that strange thing I do sometimes. Maybe it’s intuition or empathy. No idea” to me. Everybody else was either like “I’m concerned about you” or “knock it off”. So I’d do my best to try. My hope was that I’d develop better coping strategies to “fit in”, even if fitting in was more like “fitting into NT or non-autistic neurodiverse subcultures that I’m a part of”. (Yes, there are NT anarcho punks, and yes, they can be as much of a pain in the ass as NTs in general.) Eventually, I realized that my attempts weren’t working, and I moved on.

Now though, it’s like “I’m autistic! I know what’s wrong with me – nothing!” Which is great, but it also means that my coping and self-help strategies (which I had developed over decades), which were rooted in my hopes of fitting into NT society, in one way or another – are destabilized. They still work, they just “work as well as can be expected, given who I am.” It’s not just intellectual, it’s an actual shift in the way I perceive the “problem”. It’s like I’m recovering from a very gentle (and sometimes, not so gentle) form of ABAing myself, my best attempts to be good to myself along the way notwithstanding. Stimming helps, letting myself be autistic without condition or compromise helps.

I’m also struggling around what to do in terms of trying to fit into allistic society (or not). Even before I started this process, I was not looking forward to forcing myself back into the corporate software industry pressure cooker again for the bazillionth time, academia seems like a dead end, and just…wandering would be really nice, but has its risks and limitations. Where I really want to be (and already am) is in the arts, but they’re are in crisis, in terms of their economic viability as a paid, professional career.

So I’m in this in-between place where I know the things I love to do, and have for many years (thank fucking god that I didn’t get conned into giving up on my interests), but the ways to make a go of them were a struggle even before I realized that I’m autistic. Now it just seems like – *deep breath* – a lot of professional circles in the arts weren’t designed for people like me, either, even though a lot of the reason I started pursuing those things is because I’m gifted and autistic. Being autistic is intrinsic to the ways I approach making art (and technology, for that matter), and the work itself. Knowing that the tech industry has become so overrun by NT (or in some cases, autistic) dudebros who seem to think that the industry is a giant male fraternity is hard, but it’s also clear to me that I’ll never fit in with a lot of that. Seeing the same sorts of problems in the arts, where I’m freely expressing myself as an autistic person, creatively, when its the sort of life-long passion that I’d gladly do, regardless of if I’m getting paid or not, if it wasn’t only for frequent expectations to conform to unwritten rules and expectations there as well? That’s especially hard.

Even when the arts, academia or tech are potentially more accommodating to autistics (not unlike how artists, academics and sometimes, developers and designers in general are given more slack sometimes because of being “eccentric”, especially if they’re white, cis and male), the social and professional rules and practices in the arts are still largely designed and controlled by, and for, allistic society. I’ve run into this in one way or another all my life, and it seems mostly unavoidable, unless there’s a fair amount of disclosure and accommodation. Which frankly, makes me sad and angry, especially since (as I now know) “faking it until I make it” as a way to try to fit in, not only doesn’t work, it’s actually self-destructive if you’re autistic, because it’s based on fitting into allistic rules and norms.

I think (as do other autistics) that we need to create our own spaces, otherwise, these sorts of problems will keep coming up for us, and for myself. So, I’m working on making that a reality, but it’s still like…”Wait, I’m a self-actualizing version of someone whose kid got diagnosed with autism, so then the shrinks do a family evaluation, and the parent got ‘hey, you’re autistic as well’ dropped into their lap”. Except I’m both the parent and the child, so to speak. All of which came to a head three months ago. There’s only so much that “hyperfocusing to the rescue, let’s learn everything about autism!” can “fix”, in terms of my coming to terms with all this. Please note that this isn’t a form of internalized self-hatred, though! I love my autistic self. I mean fix in the sense of “ok, how do I change my life, now that I know I’m autistic.”

So, I’ve been taking things slow. If it gets too intense, I slow down, and above all, I’m working hard to keep being good to myself, while I’m also plowing through a large stack of books and films. I’m finding self-advocacy resources, including ones focused on women and people of color. I’m starting to come up with an emotional framework to compliment an intellectual one, and as Mary Catherine Bateson says, “compose my life” once again.

Hey. I’m a blogger and I’m autistic. I self-dxed three months ago. (Fuck off if you don’t like it.) This is my personal blog around my coming out process as autistic, and what I’m discovering along the way.

Some things about me:

Writer, musician, performer, poet.

Trans, intersexed, woman-identified, demisexual, pansexual, queer, mixed race. (yay, comma salad!)

Anarchist, post-marxist, anti-imperialist, genius, billionaire, playgirl, philanthropist. (OK, I’m making some of that up. 😛 Lucy Parsons is my imaginary dream lover, though.)

I used to work in the computer industry as a tech writer, and I have the scars to prove it. Now, I’m semi-retired (I’m in my 50s), have worked in the arts and publishing full time since 2005, and have an MFA in writing. I’ve read and performed at spots throughout the country, have work published, have albums out, and so on. That’s not the focus of the blog (go here, here, or here for that), but it’s an integral part of who I am.

I’m also writing from the U.S. a year and a half into the Trump administration, so I’m watching my barely established rights as a trans woman getting taken away from us by some “legal coup” Handmaid’s Tale shitheads. El Hefe seems to thinks its hilarious to mock people with disabilities, specifically for lacking of normative physical traits. I mean, he got “elected” on this as a platform. Always festive, always a joy. I don’t feel personally attacked by all this, at all. Sarcasm! Take that, shrinks.

So, why autism? What gives you the right? Why self-dx? “Vere are your papers. Ve need your papers.” Give me a minute here, imaginary interlocutor, and I’ll explain.

I had a hunch that I was on the spectrum for a long time. I was up on the stories that were going around about autism being an “epidemic”, the profile pieces on aspies in the software industry, and sometimes, the arts as well. The software industry aspie stories in particular seemed sort of…male to me, but it all rang a bell, too. (I also had written off my childhood experiences that map to autism to “Well, I’m weird. Thankfully, I escaped mostly intact”. The parts that map to autism to this day were attributed to “Well, I’m weird and I’m still trying to escape, to be honest.”)

When coverage about autistic women started becoming more common, that was when I really started to wonder. I also had a sequence of very alexithymic and sensory overloaded experiences that got my attention. I started reading about highly sensitive people, which then led me to more in-depth reading about autism, and starting to watch videos about autism on YouTube. When I found the work of people such as Rudy Simone, Cynthia Kim and Steve Silberman (as well as the film Autism in Love), completed online tests, read the diagnostic criteria for autism (DSM IV and V), as well as lists of autistic traits that focused on women, I realized that this was where I fit.

It still blows me away that I made it to my mid-50s without putting two and two together, but there’s reasons for that. Nobody who would otherwise have been read as “high functioning” was getting diagnosed until the 1990s, women are still undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in high numbers, and there’s hardly any information for autistic POCs at all, save for some possible indicators that autistic POCs are being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar. It’s also possible that I was diagnosed and not told about it – I definitely was evaluated as being a possible “feminine boy” in grade school (because trans girl, as I later figured out – this was in the early 1970s), and much of that process could map to a pre-diagnostic process for autism as well. For example, I did the pattern-matching test, and the “map faces to emotions” ones as well.

There’s a lot about my childhood that fits the diagnostic narrative. I started reading one day, when I was three. By kindergarten or first grade, I was reading at sixth grade level, because nothing beyond that was available in the library. My parents’ books mostly bored the crap out of me, save for the encyclopedia and dictionary, which I read all the time. I toe walked, until my mom hissed at me “do you want people to think you’re gay”. I stimmed, but was getting watched like a hawk, so (my guess) it went into finger tapping, toe tapping, leg shaking and pacing instead of those stims and hand flapping. I did love to spin, though. I’d get bored with a group sport, so I’d make up a new game on the spot, and start playing to the new rules, somewhere between second and third base. (Note to self: this upsets male children.) My emotions would flip on a switch. Kids would tease me, I’d cry and yell, then run off to hide in the closet. I had no idea how gender worked, on a social level. I did feel social affinity with other girls, but teachers would shut that down. (At one point, I was lab partners with another girl, and the teacher separated us, to both our objections.) I’d chase off a boy who was interested in a girl I liked, and barely knew. (“Can’t they see how I feel?”) The grade school bully used to hit me in the arm regularly, so one day I’d had enough, so I stood up and clocked him. I’d find biographies of Mao and Einstein tucked away in a corner of the school library stacks, and not understand why kids would try to drag them away from me. (Especially the Mao biography. Nixon was president.) I played alone. I made small walls out of pebbles. I loved spinning things. I’d hide in the drapes, at a wedding. My dad would try to teach me basic electronics (and was probably evaluating my intellectual response along the way – he wasn’t very hands-on with this sort of thing, typically), and it took me 45 minutes to figure out how to connect the switch to turn on the light, because I focused on the cardboard that he used as a makeshift breadboard and the components instead. (Probably as a result, I had an interest in cardboard for a while – “There’s entire stories on the back! The address points somewhere, and there’s people at those addresses. Who are they?” My parents talked me out of that as well.) Nobody was sure if I was very smart, intellectually challenged or both. I was flunking out of math. I tested several grade levels ahead – for math. My abacus was my best friend for a while.

This all was in the early to mid 1970s – there was no public discussion about autism, save for the occasional “how tragic” story. Asperger’s wasn’t part of the diagnostic criteria, and the assumption was that if weren’t completely mute and, at least in society’s eyes, had limited to effectively no executive function, you were just “eccentric” or “weird” or “savant-like” or in my case, “smart, or dumb, or who cares, let’s just say very, very weird.”

So, that’s a bit about my background and what led me to this point in my journey. Where I’m at, three months into my process, in the next post.

Introduction, Part Two

Introduction, Part One

A personal blog about autism, neuroqueerness and transformational liberation