If you spend enough time in group therapy you gain a kind of second sense for whatever particular ailment landed you in it. It’s akin to being in a funhouse, each mirror image distinct but recognizable enough to provide you some reflection of yourself and illustrate the ways in which, through different eyes, you jut out from the world’s flat background in strange (and sometimes wonderful) ways. My rehabilitation from willfully oblivious, difficult autistic child to not-quite-there adult was long and involved much in the way of physical therapy, special education, and exposure to a revolving door of earnest but graceless psychology grad students. But the purpose of such measures was not particularly important to me as a youngster. I was not engaged with them except as means to break away from the monotony of the normal school day. It was only when placed with others like myself that I realized my peculiarity, and cognizance of such peculiarity in others.
The irony of having radar for autism when the very condition presumes obstinacy to others has not been lost on me. I’m unsure if I should be giving myself more credit for being perceptive (my spectrum case being relatively “mild”) or resolve that reading such surface-level details is less a talent one is born with than a skill to be honed. You can’t fully trust such a sense, of course. Sometimes a man who forges chain mail is just a man with a strange hobby. Sometimes a guy who doesn’t make eye contact, won’t return phone calls and owns every piece of Highlander fiction there is to own is just an asshole. These are possibilities. But when you come out of that experience of realization and refashioning, of going into the forge imperfect and coming out with the right shape but your flaws tempered instead of removed, you learn the telltale signs that differentiate your tribe from the merely eccentric.
There is, first of all, a hesitant detachment in the way a body is carried. The autism spectrum, as it’s now called, is typified first and foremost by a certain kind of deafness to human communication. The common term is “mindblindness,” but I think hearing provides a better sensory analogy. The extent of its severity is variable, but there is always some range of frequency that is unreachable, and the possibility that vital messages might carry in those frequencies and be lost is a stressful prospect. The nervous autist thus carries himself (and it is most commonly himself – I have known women on the spectrum but their disclosures have always been made in strictest confidence) in a peculiarly shrinking or rigid way, as if to protect a blind spot. That blind spot works both ways – on the one hand I fitfully perceive what approaches me, but I also tend to misjudge the ways in which I exert myself upon the world. In some sense I am left not knowing my own strength, and given the delicacy of social relations, my hesitance to move freely is unsurprising. It’s one of many reasons why I think the avoidance of eye contact is so common – to fully engage is to take up space, and to take up space is to both expose one’s throat and blindly charge.
The second tell is in one’s speech. I have two modes that I recognize in myself and others. There is the conversational mode, which is to say the unprepared mode, whereby the blind spot is exposed and one simply tries to make do. Scripting comes in handy here, lest one simply speak his mind in torrents and mumbles, or (more commonly) fall silent. And there is the public mode, the prepared effort, the professorial voice, mannered and declarative in ways bordering on excessive. There is an emphasis both on grammatical structure and enunciation, and it feels clumsily deployed, often showily or needlessly archaic. Ours is a language that seems to have been gleaned from pages but rarely spoken, it comes out of our mouths propped up. My radar tends to ping when I meet someone whose speech feels written, pulled from a technical manual or journal article.
When I was younger I drew from my southern family’s languid cadence in regulating my voice. I tried where I could to hedge declaratives, space my words into a loping gait, and allow a borrowed Tennessee drawl to wash over my rigid and off-putting grandiloquence. When I reached an obstacle to my speech I thus leapt over it. It is speech that paces itself by the exhale of breathe, the last words of a statement squeezed of its air. I sometimes worry that as an affect it is no less obvious than Michael McKean’s Law School Professor. I have an unshakeable tendency to use oblique language even in conversation and put hard emphasis on the wrong point in a word pair (“Let’s go to the movie THEATER,” “we’ll get ice CREAM.” etc) but I think that in general, I pass. At my best I want to sound like a TV detective, someone whose distracted manner belies his focus. In some sense all people inhabit their own panopticon, but the metaphor of the one-way mirror somehow seems more apt when social feedback isn’t where it should be.
When I moved into studying IT (I like to think of it as a homeland of my people), one of my professors gave the tell through his voice. When I was young I liked to play cards – I labored greatly in trying to replicate the methods of dealing that were so smooth and pleasurable to watch in media, a sort of effortless skill that I envied. I daydreamed often of having some talent that I could simply walk into a room and deploy, like belting out a consummate tune on a piano or producing a lighter by sleight of hand – something that sidestepped my obvious difficulties and presumably established me as a person worth knowing. I found that I couldn’t do it, that my movements were too rigid, lacking the smoothness in the wrist, and the light effortless touch of the fingers. I overthought it, tried too hard. When my professor spoke I heard in his voice my difficulty with a deck. You could hear the concentration, the feint toward a natural facility with speaking that wasn’t quite there. Being autistic in public is being “on” but never being entirely natural. To an incurious spectator it might seem pathetic or discomfiting, but I think there’s magnificence in managing outside one’s element. To ford those rapids takes a lot of poise. The untrained eye just doesn’t see it.
Then there is, of course, the stereotyped interest, which I’ve written about previously. It is perhaps the most enduring element, acknowledged or not, of the “high-functioning”* autistic within the wider culture. Simply described it is an enthusiasm that borders on the peculiar, in terms of its thoroughness and the attention to which it is paid. The stereotyped interest tends toward the intense and arcane – that is to say, what separates you as an engaged autistic from a normal enthusiast is the encyclopedic scope of your fascination. It is hardly surprising that before the advent of the internet, one could buy comic books and baseball cards from the same enthusiast’s shop. Such passions involve accumulation, taxonomy, mapping. The stereotype of the “savant” from Rain Man and beyond pegs us as having a knack for high-level systemic thinking and its applications, but this is not always the case. We may not take to things for reasons that are any different from a typical person (sometimes I find myself disappointed by my utter rapture in something both impractical and strange, like the history of carnival wrestling jargon). But we tend to be, in my experience, collectors and esotericists, often at the same time. The consumptiveness of our interest is sometimes hard to overstate. It’s what makes us so infamous.
One of my most vivid memories from grade school group therapy is of another boy whose every conversation would inexorably bend, sooner or later, to the Transformers’ “Beast Wars” TV series that he loved. By that age I had stopped talking so much about my interests to people other than my friends, either out of shyness or acknowledgement that other people were generally uncaring about what constituted the perfect late-game Fallout character build, in my opinion. That was just how such things went. Some of us are shamed into quietude, our fixations relegated to private rooms and endlessly circular arguments on message boards. But even then, the right (or wrong) question in polite company can open the floodgates. I can’t count the number of times I realized after the fact that I’d overwhelmed a conversation once the right chord was struck.
The consumerism underpinning most facets of geek culture abets our detection by some degree – when I was young, a boy decked out in all-Pokemon-everything was unmistakable (I hated Pokemon. It seemed to supplant and obliterate the naturally diverse and vibrant array of fascinations among my kin, like an imperial regime). A cynic might look at the convention-industrial complex as a caucus of sorts, and there’s something to be said for immersing in one’s passions in a more literal than figurative way, but there’s no woodwork that we emerge from. The industry came to meet us, not the other way around.
I would be remiss to issue the standard caveat, here, that intuition can never really hold up to good old fashioned clinical diagnosis. That I was made official does not give me a special mandate to condense and describe this rather complicated concept. But one can, and indeed many have, contest that the very mention of a “spectrum” admits a large degree of imprecision. Time was, the “spectrum” was a conceptual grouping of defined diagnoses nominally delineated by their present symptoms and severity: Pervasive Developmental Disorder (Not Otherwise Specified), my house on one end of the street, Asperger’s roughly in the middle, and full-blown autism at its most (supposedly) severe at the other. Now through the DSM V, the grouping itself is the diagnosis.
There’s a classic bit of baseball humor that post-structuralists tend to be fond of – three umpires discuss their approach to calling pitches. The first says “I call em like I see em”, the second says “I call em as they are”, and the third says “They’re nothing until I call them”. The implication in this context is that a psychiatric diagnosis like spectrum placement is imposed, not discovered, and thus serves as a means of roundly regulating public behavior, or erasing traditions of indigenous mysticism, or furthering other incalculably grand and nefarious cultural-systemic projects that segregate and silence. If that is indeed the case, then my glib deductions are as legitimate as any other diagnostic measure. But when the concept is pitched to me I feel what I imagine it’s like to be the patient of a behaviorist, being told that there is no mind, only reflex.
To wit, however obvious the institutional confusion over what constitutes an autist, it seems patently obvious to me that there are meaningful differences between the people I’ve known off and on (and between points upon) the spectrum. I was not made up to sell drugs. And though I can scarcely be blamed for seeing through the warped lens I was born with, a laissez-faire approach to my disorder can result in more than inconvenienced teachers. There are aspects of subjectivity that I may never understand in other people, but people are subjects nonetheless. That is real and it must be contended with. My fundamental uncertainty can make me gullible, skittish and rude. It can also foster intense loyalties and prevent me from taking others for granted. From the fond (and sometimes bemused) ways in which people I know speak of spectrum kids other than myself I imagine that’s fairly common.
I can’t honestly claim that the signs by which I identify those like me have any real utility (first-look assessments of character and temperament are probably less useful than they’re made out to be in general), but the personal benefit of scoping out such people is therapeutic in a sense. A life of interiority can easily chafe and irritate when you’re set adrift in the wild, and even the indirect signage of similar lived experiences seen in the wider world soothes to some extent. Like a common coat of arms glimpsed in a tattoo or a symbol worn about the neck, they give life to the idea that at some point in time someone felt and thought the things that you have when you had nothing but your own counsel, and they maintain their potency in memory even as when you relate to one another as ships passing in the night.
* It should be noted that such terminology is not without its vocal critics. I use the “functioning” distinctions based from my experiences within groups and interactions with other spectrum people, and their self-described degree of difficulty with like experiences and interactions.
Tags: autism, john thompson, relationships, the human condition
This was really fascinating, but beyond that, I just wanted to say I very, very much enjoyed your writing!
Thank you for this. My stepdaughter is nonverbal, PDDNOS, with general anxiety disorder and OCD as well. She is 22 and still living at home because funding for all-female in-neighborhood residences has dried up; the pipeline is full of young men who need to get placements. This article is well-timed for us; she’s been out of her dayhab program for 10 days due to “summer break” and I think we are all challenged right now – she is bored out of her mind, and boredom makes her anxious, and anxiety makes her self-harming, and the self-harming is fueled by the OCD. This piece was comforting to me.
I’m glad it provided some comfort 🙂 wishing the best for you and your stepdaughter.
I am an autistic with OCD and anxiety. Something that’s helped me a lot has been “cognitive restructuring therapy” which you may want to bring up with her and her aides or doctors. You can find free resources for it on psychologytools.com as well. It is designed specifically to target OCD.
Some other things I have found that help me are puzzle games on my phone, one called brain yoga, and deep pressure therapy. One thing you can show her how to do is apply deep pressure by tensing her joints or squeezing them, starting with her toes and working up to the top of her head. If she has trouble coordinating her movements, a set of chewy jewelry that she can chomp on when she is feeling self injurious can be really soothing. I used to be a head banger and scratcher and my meltdowns, and OCD spikes were violent. Now I am a lot calmer. I have a binder I keep all of my OCD tasks in, as well as some PECS cards I use in public to tell people I need help. Tensor clothing that can be found in pharmacies works well too, as do compression socks.
Thank you for writing this. I want to say something more and more eloquent, but really, I’m just feeling gratitude for something that is so beautifully written and so clear an insight.
“Some of us are shamed into quietude, our fixations relegated to private rooms and endlessly circular arguments on message boards.”
After reading this I’m trying to rethink how we handle enthusiasm and conversation domination – my son who is on the spectrum does not read cues well yet, so we’ve been trying to tell him directly whether or not we are interested in what he wants to say, and have been trying to suggest ways to find a way for both participants to enjoy a conversation. There are ways this seems to be a good system, but reading this makes me wonder if we are too often shutting down his own interests. Making space for him to be excited is pretty important, too.
My mother’s approach to my NVLD has always been to either poke me/step on my foot (if we’re in public and she doesn’t want to alert other people to the fact that she’s “correcting” me) or cutting me off my saying “TMI!” (if we’re at home.)
Shockingly, this constant undermining has not helped me develop better social skills.
It was difficult for me, to some degree, in an academic setting. Because at first it felt like it fit there – I could speak up, it was expected, it got my teachers to like me, and it made my deep stores of esoterica seem useful. Then I went into gender studies and after the first class I was taken aside and told, very politely, to shut up already. Because taking up space with voice is a very gendered thing. And it was, in fact, the only real means by which I felt strong in a masculine way in the company of other boys.
It’s not so much about dominance as enthusiasm, obviously, at least in a conscious sense, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a bit of a knot, isn’t it? It’s a question of whether we should be more cognizant of other people (yes) but also whether we should be contorting ourselves so as to let other people forget that we’re different (not really). It’s tough to ask the former without implying the latter.
I agree that it’s important for him to have space to be excited. I might suggest that it is better to give him small doses of “role-playing” or direct teaching regarding how to read the cues of others. The learning curve for reading social cues is very long – he will always be learning, and your support will make a world of difference.
Basically, I would say that how you respond to his excited conversational dominance may not actually benefit him in the “real world” unless he is able to keep learning very specifically about the physical cues that others give (e.g., beginning to fiddle with objects, or moving their body slightly away, or starting to look at their phone). One negative consequence of being more aware that others aren’t always interested in what you are excited about is that you may decide to clam up and not really talk about your passions to anyone, or that you will “turtle” in uncertain social situations and be MORE awkward and reserved. Better to learn to read the cues and learn that some acquaintances may actually be excited about what you have to say! (That’s my super preachy and long-winded response – I have been working my way through this social challenge for years, and I haven’t got it all figured out yet).
That’s useful to think about. It’s often counterintuitive for me to devise ways to teach things that I don’t really remember consciously learning, and there are many ways in which I am not adequately taught how to bridge that gap between my own (fragile, imperfect) parenting and this brilliant, sensitive, sweet child whose behavior does not always reflect his nature. I feel lucky to have him in a school district that loves and supports him after a nightmarish kindergarten experience in another district. (Years in the past – he’s in middle school now, but the trauma of that first year lingered throughout elementary school.)
I feel like many of the sources I can find on parenting a child with autism are things that neurotypical people have come up with to make our children behave more like us, and some of these things are not really considerate of the unique needs and beings of our neurologically different children. In many cases, the adaptive behaviors that the children themselves devise are not really problematic, just not what we expect or what we ourselves would do.
I know I’m messing up lots and will mess up lots more along the way, but I’m grateful to the insights of people who have more of a view of what my son may be experiencing. For a lot of years, we could tell how his day at school went by how he behaved when he got home. If he was cheerful and compliant, it had almost certainly been a bad day at school. If he was weepy, exhausted, and had meltdowns, he’d probably had a good day. The realization of what a good day took out of him, how hard it had been to hold himself together and conform to the expectations of others, really helped to give a little perspective to how much harder he had to work than most people. I’m lucky that he’s now often able to verbalize internal reactions, but it’s not something everyone can count on.
And I’m rambling, sorry! I’m tired and slightly weepy, and your comment got me thinking a lot about my own social limitations and how to be more generous in my parenting. I appreciate what you wrote! We are trying to work on physical cues, but it may be that we are not going in depth enough. He was taught with a computer and a mirror what facial expressions meant as a four year old, and eventually how to make those faces himself, and it may be that he needs something as broken down as that for measuring interest.
someone whose speech feels written
Ooh, this encapsulates perfectly what I had been struggling to put into words about some academics. I love your style!
I really loved the last paragraph of this piece, thanks for writing it!
Thanks!
Like a common coat of arms glimpsed in a tattoo or a symbol worn about the neck, they give life to the idea that at some point in time someone felt and thought the things that you have when you had nothing but your own counsel, and they maintain their potency in memory even as when you relate to one another as ships passing in the night.
This is such a beautiful, universal sentiment. Everyone, everyone wants to connect.
“Being autistic in public is being “on” but never being entirely natural. To an incurious spectator it might seem pathetic or discomfiting, but I think there’s magnificence in managing outside one’s element. To ford those rapids takes a lot of poise. The untrained eye just doesn’t see it.”
First comment EVER to tell you how much I love these sentences (and the whole piece).
This was a great article in many ways! It was especially illuminating for me how you wrote about the experience of eye contact and your reasons for often avoiding it.
I do have some constructive criticism, though. I know you mean well and are just looking for kinship, but it’s not a great idea to try to pick out who’s autistic or not based on “tells,” especially if you yourself feel you are not good at reading signals. There are a lot of different reasons people could be speaking or carrying themselves in a certain way — and even though you are doing it from a positive place, it is still not good politeness-wise or kind ethically to try to categorize people based on assumptions. I would feel uncomfortable if I met you and thought you were secretly diagnosing me, and I think others would feel the same. You can always identify yourself and see if others respond in kind, if you really want to know.
My beloved niece is a high-functioning person on the autism spectrum, and from what it sounds like, much more afflicted than you, and yet a little girl, not a boy. Given the widespread nature of the autism spectrum epidemic, it’s getting more and more common for women to be on the spectrum, and not necessarily better adapted to social life than boys.
Do you ever spend time with younger children who are growing up on the autism spectrum — or might you have the time to try it? Like group therapy, it too might be very interesting for the ways it does and doesn’t reflect your younger self back at you. (It would also be an amazing thing for the kids and parents, of course).
I actually don’t think it’s that rude to categorize people based on assumptions from their behavior. Categorizing the people and things we encounter is a pretty basic human behavior. Now, letting those first assumptions let us treat people poorly is rude, but that is not the same thing. I think all of us who are “weird” in some way look for “tells”. When I am out hosting a munch, I look for cues that someone is trying to meet up with us; sometimes they look lost, sometimes they are dressed a certain way, sometimes it is something else that I can’t necessarily put my finger on that tells me “one of us”. When I was in college, I could pretty accurately guess someone’s major (or major field, at least) based on their walk and the way they dressed. “Gaydar” is a thing, not because gay folks have a sixth sense, but because folks who keep parts of their identities secret or hidden are often on the lookout for other people who are part of their “tribe”.
It isn’t rude to make assumptions about people based on their behaviors. It IS rude to not let those assumptions be proven false over time. It IS rude to decide that you know the person better than they know themselves. And certainly it would be rude to say “oh, I assume that you are on the Autism Spectrum” and then declare that that person is now your BFF or your special project. It ISN’T rude (IMHO) to meet someone, decide that they are likely on the spectrum, and then consciously try to be more explicit in your speech or less physical or make slightly less frequent eye contact, or even be more careful not to ask questions that might trigger them to pour forth on their personal interest.
The author makes it pretty clear that he knows that his guesses are just that, educated guesses, and not meaningful diagnoses.
You’re right that it can be a fine line, and a judgment call. We may draw the line differently, you and I.
I would agree on your first sentence: it isn’t rude to make a tentative assumption about someone based on their behaviors. But to me, not only do you have to allow it to be proved wrong, you have to keep holding onto a really big grain of salt about your initial assumption, and remember that it’s just that, a guess, and assumption.
What you’re saying works relatively well in small, homogenous, tight-knit communities with good will like a college campus, or even really homogenous small towns, but less and less well out in the world full of radically different and unexpected kinds of people.
Yes, you absolutely have to be willing to hold on to a big grain of salt. And yes, it is important to remember that what you see as signifiers/markers/tells of belonging to the group you are on the lookout for can also have different meanings to different groups. (I WANT everyone wearing a padlock necklace to be subtly telling the world that they’re kinky, but I acknowledge that that it is unlikely that that is the target demographic that Tiffany’s was thinking of.) Sometimes people are wearing baseball caps because they like the team; sometimes they just needed something to keep the sun out of their eyes.
Thank you for your feedback! You’re right of course. I try to not treat people differently based on what I perceive or think I perceive about them. It’s a passive thing, like realizing the guy at the checkout line is wearing a shirt from the same concert tour you went to when you were in 9th grade. Although in this case, obviously, it’s not really an appropriate conversation starter.
I don’t spend much time with children on the spectrum. I don’t have a clinical background (clearly!) so I don’t have business sitting in on groups, but the few kids of family friends, etc. who I know to be diagnosed, I treat delicately. Most often I find them in modes of deep focus, which I do strongly identify with. The best I can describe it is as like… getting wrapped up in the last minutes of a very close sporting match featuring a team you love. When you’re being bothered it’s excruciating. It’s actually become more apparent to me lately how often I will still slip into that mode – I’ve trained myself to be present in polite company (most of the time – sometimes twitter just doesn’t stop), but when I’m with my parents I’m still super distant and irritable most of the time.
As for girls on the spectrum, they are definitely being diagnosed more often. When I was coming up it was something like an 8 to 1 male/female ratio of diagnosis and the prevailing theory was genetic (or less commonly, epigenetic) origin favoring those with a Y chromosome. But then illnesses and conditions present differently among the sexes more often than most people know (it’s definitely been a problem with depression diagnosis), so perhaps they’ve always been there and no one was looking. But the women I know on the spectrum are all grown and successful and probably smarter than I am. I’m actually reminded of the time in high school I was invited to meet Temple Grandin (she taught at my future alma mater just up the road, at their very prestigious vet sciences college) but I didn’t know what I’d say and thought it would be awkward, so I declined.
And thank you right back for the article and gracious response! Several parts of it are giving me new ways to try to have insight into my niece’s point of view, so I really appreciate it!
I think there are probably quite a few women who meet all the other diagnostic criteria but weren’t diagnosed as being on the spectrum because they were girls/women. This seems to be changing now, but I would be interested to see how much gender affects the diagnosis of folks who are edge cases (my guess would be that boys/men would be more likely to be put on the spectrum, and girls/women less likely, but I obviously don’t have the research to back it up).
I have nothing to go on but anecdata, but in my friend group, Several of my friends (and I) would probably have official diagnoses if we had presented as we do AND had Y-chromosomes, and/or been younger. At this point, the youngest of us is in her mid-thirties (and she was diagnosed when we were in college). We muddle on. We share tips.
I sometimes wonder if my life would have been easier if someone had noticed that my particular pattern of weirdness was not just bookish shyness. I also wonder if some of the ease in my life can be attributed to the way that women are taught to perform emotional labor. I still have a horrible time reading others’ emotions (and editing to add: presenting a socially suitable affect is a matter of practice and study at times, my emotional cues tend to be fairly opaque to the untrained eye), but all of that early training provides useful heuristics.
I really enjoyed this whole essay, and your description of navigating eye contact particularly caught my attention. I was trying to explain to a friend recently why I avoid eye contact when I’m feeling overwhelmed. In some moods, eye contact feels more like someone reaching out and touching my forehead than a purely visual connection; it can feel almost physically intrusive. I could tell I wasn’t explaining it very well, so it was great to read “to take up space is to both expose one’s throat and blindly charge” and think yes, that’s what I meant, put better than I could ever have said it.
I once explained to a close friend that I couldn’t talk to her if she insisted on making such intrusive eye contact. She had been taught in some peer counsellor training thing that she should attempt to make meaningful eye contact with people going through emotional distress (which I was) as a signal that they were really being listened to. I still remember that afternoon, sitting on her couch as we contorted and gyrated as I tried to dodge the gaze she was hell bent on maintaining. (It’s a memory colored with considerable affection, I should add. And fifteen years later we’re still friends.)
I love this, on the whole, and at the sentence level. Thank you for writing it.
Thanks! It feels cumbersome when it’s finished, but Mallory has a deft hand, so I trust her to make it presentable 😉
Thank you for sharing this.
thank you for reading! 🙂
“It’s one of many reasons why I think the avoidance of eye contact is so common – to fully engage is to take up space, and to take up space is to both expose one’s throat and blindly charge.”
“There is the conversational mode, which is to say the unprepared mode, whereby the blind spot is exposed and one simply tries to make do. And there is the public mode, the prepared effort, the professorial voice, mannered and declarative in ways bordering on excessive.”
“Then there is, of course, the stereotyped interest.”
Huh. I think I’m on the spectrum.
What should I do if I think I’m on the spectrum?
Here is a list from the Autism Self-Advocacy Network of common characteristics of autism: http://autisticadvocacy.org/about-autism/
Official autism diagnoses are usually made by medical professionals, so you may wish to schedule an appointment with your GP and speak to them about it. Depending on where you live and your doctor, this will probably result in a referral to someone with more specialized knowledge about diagnosing autism. But it is a good first step.
Please see my comment below, for a bit of my personal story. For your journey, I recommend a blog that I have found very helpful – it’s called “Musings of an Aspie”. The author is a woman who has been diagnosed as an adult, and she describes how this has affected her relationships and her family life. She also includes many links to excellent practical resources. It’s a nice place to start. Best of luck on your journey! It is nothing to fear. You may have a new lens through which to view yourself and your own history – a little scary but very illuminating.
What a great piece! I really love your voice, and really related to looking for “tells” in other people that let them know they’re like you.
I also really appreciate places like the Toast that let Autistic people (And other non-privileged groups) speak for themselves instead of being talked about.
“If you spend enough time in group therapy you gain a kind of second sense for whatever particular ailment landed you in it.”
The whole piece is beautiful and thought provoking, but the opening is what resonated most with me. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in group therapy (mostly related to family violence and PTSD) and boy howdy, can I often identify fellow survivors (aka – my people).
I only grow more and more aware of my ignorance and the gaping holes in representation, and look! Here is a small piece of a solution to both. Much appreciated. Thank you John, Toast.
This is also my exact thought at this time as well. As was said upthread, if I was younger and if I had been born with a Y chromosome… I am now wondering if my shitty school years would have been different. And if I would do better in office politics now, which I mostly just try to ignore.
IT as “the homeland of my people” THIS. I was newly enraptured of asynchronous transfer, and busily explaining how it worked to a customer on the phone, when I realized her silence did not equate interest. I was stunned.
Our homeland needs a flag.
It sort of does: http://rlv.zcache.com.au/celebrate_neurodiversity…
Thank you so much for this article, and thank you to The Toast for publishing it. I am a clinician whose work includes children who are on the spectrum. I have realized in the last year or so that I would also likely have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum when I was younger. As an adult, I have a lot of “tells” that the trained or sensitive eye might notice.
While I have found it challenging to realize that I have been coping with the social and emotional blind spots that afflict those of us on the spectrum, I’ve also found it very liberating. I have a tribe. I am still me. I am okay. I am still brilliant and wonderful and flawed and broken just as I always have been. Now I am better equipped to understand myself, and to understand what the hell goes wrong in my relationships with others sometimes. I can also support my children better, knowing that they very likely will struggle in a similar way.
If reading this article has helped you see that you may be on the spectrum (as I suspect many in this beautiful, eccentric, passionate, and brilliant community very likely are!), please be comforted to know that you are not alone. We are many, we have been sadly underdiagnosed and misunderstood, and we are pretty damn awesome.
That's useful to think about. It's often counterintuitive for me to devise ways to teach things that I don't really remember consciously learning, and there are many ways in which I am not adequately taught how to bridge that gap between my own (fragile, imperfect) parenting and this brilliant, sensitive, sweet child whose behavior does not always reflect his nature. I feel lucky to have him in a school district that loves and supports him after a nightmarish kindergarten experience in another district. (Years in the past – he's in middle school now, but the trauma of that first year lingered throughout elementary school.)
I feel like many of the sources I can find on parenting a child with autism are things that neurotypical people have come up with to make our children behave more like us, and some of these things are not really considerate of the unique needs and beings of our neurologically different children. In many cases, the adaptive behaviors that the children themselves devise are not really problematic, just not what we expect or what we ourselves would do.
I know I'm messing up lots and will mess up lots more along the way, but I'm grateful to the insights of people who have more of a view of what my son may be experiencing. For a lot of years, we could tell how his day at school went by how he behaved when he got home. If he was cheerful and compliant, it had almost certainly been a bad day at school. If he was weepy, exhausted, and had meltdowns, he'd probably had a good day. The realization of what a good day took out of him, how hard it had been to hold himself together and conform to the expectations of others, really helped to give a little perspective to how much harder he had to work than most people. I'm lucky that he's now often able to verbalize internal reactions, but it's not something everyone can count on.
And I'm rambling, sorry! I'm tired and slightly weepy, and your comment got me thinking a lot about my own social limitations and how to be more generous in my parenting. I appreciate what you wrote! We are trying to work on physical cues, but it may be that we are not going in depth enough. He was taught with a computer and a mirror what facial expressions meant as a four year old, and eventually how to make those faces himself, and it may be that he needs something as broken down as that for measuring interest.