The Understory
Autism is such a trip. It’s something of a revelation to notice how much, actually, everyone you get close to really fucking hates you, deep down in their bones—and to realize in the same breath that, actually, this has nothing to do with you. When that bolt hits, it just kind of makes you scratch your head at the world and say, “Oh.”
Between the official diagnosis and documentation and the “I am totally an ally because I know how awful it is to have to make allowances for somebody like you and I truly hope for the day when we can cure people like you of being like you” crowd, there’s a lot to recompile about the world one lives in, and one’s set of assumptions about how one fits into it all.
You kinda go through life, nodding, thinking, “okay, whatever you say;” just trusting and accepting what you’re told about yourself, even when it clearly isn’t working. You’re used to the world being this big place, full of things you don’t understand, and you’re grateful for any pointers you get along the way, to make sense of it all. It’s this minor brain explosion to realize, maybe they’re all wrong. And that they’re wrong for, frankly, the most obvious set of reasons: they’re just talking about themselves. As people do.
All this difficulty we face, it’s not some big system that we’re oblivious to, so we just have to trust that other people know what they’re doing when they tell us how awful and broken we are. It’s that they’re the ones who are blinkered.
There’s this full reversal. Everything they project, it’s… them. It’s themselves they’re describing with such contempt, for the most part. It’s their own perspective, their own assumptions that they read into this thing that they aren’t equipped to understand—because it’s not for them. The difficulty we face, it’s entirely about perspective. And they’re the ones used to everything being tailored to them, so they have no idea how to react when something isn’t. We’re the ones who have to mode-shift, interpret, translate, every single day just to get by. We’re the ones who got this.
All of this sense of Wrongness that one lives with—to be able to hold up a mirror, and understand the actual dynamics of this hostility and stress? To be able to recognize it as hostility at all, and not the faux concern that it’s presented as? That changes everything, completely. There’s this baffling clarity, literally like a window shade snapping up. And everything looks very different: “Becky, you know, I’m suddenly compelled to ask, are you okay? ‘Cuz that ain’t a good look for you.”
Dimensions of Mind
I don’t wanna water things down by cross-comparison, but there’s a huge overlap between neurodiverse and queer circles (for instance: me!), and there seem to be a bunch of arguments how they’re all kinda dimensions the same thing that needs more study.
By extension, so much of the way people respond to autism (or other diverse neurologies), especially by “long-suffering caregivers” or others who try to present themselves as allies, comes off as a whole lotta TERFy garbage. Take your Graham Linehan, or any other garbo “gender-critical” figure, and swap out the nouns in what they say, and it’s basically what you get directed toward autistics and other diverse neurologies on a daily basis. Same basic kind of grossness, except it’s less obvious without the signifiers—because we aren’t often acknowledged as valid people. The culture still insists there’s something wrong with us, that should be fixed—for our own good, yes, but certainly for the good of those who would rather not learn to deal with us.
Though I hesitate to muddy the waters, I feel I need to make this comparison to emphasize the universal patterns of toxic responses to atypical neurological states, to which, yeah, the various LGBTQIA+ spectra seem to be close kin. As all that alphabet soup should attest internally, a certain solidarity helps in identifying and working against this external garbage. We all know what it means to be treated as subhuman because of literally the way our brains are wired—sometimes on multiple axes at once. But a few of us, we’ve gained enough legitimacy to be able to reach down the pit and form a ladder.
It’s amazing to take the anxi-vax crowd and clarify the self-centered eugenic bigotry driving their crusade against science by, again, shifting the specific nouns: “Vaccinations caused our child to be gay!” Which, to be clear, is actually what we get from InfoWars. They’re just more open about their hatred. But outsize of that bubble, in 2019 that sentiment is likely to make most people shift from foot to foot, uncomfortably.
If you broaden your selection of shifted nouns to other marginalized groups, it gets even more dicey. Like, whoa, you can’t say that at all, ever, material. But in the case of autism, it’s okay. We don’t know what’s good for us, because long-suffering experts who have watched us closely through tempered windows say that we don’t.
To flip that table, and lay bare the dynamics one has been living under for decades on end—it unleashes so many emotions, on so many levels, it’s hard to know what to grab onto. For me, though, after a brief spike I was surprised to see that this kind of dissipated the low-level anger and resentment that I have so long internalized and redirected at myself. Now what I get from all this, it’s more a sense of pity. I think of the people around me, those who have shown my such scorn just for existing, “Oh. I see you now. Gee. I mean, of course you’d respond that way. You don’t know any different, do you. How can you.”
It’s like I’m seeing a feral animal. I don’t blame it. I don’t hate it. I don’t want to get close either, but I think, you poor thing. You really have no idea what’s happening around you. It must be hard, huh.
It’s also theoretical at the moment, like all other aspects of my life. There’s all this trauma for me to work through, and I can’t actually deal with people In Real Life without reacting like a startled raccoon myself. I’m a total mess, all things considered! But, that compass is no longer spinning wildly. I see a bearing now.
And flipping the narrative leads to some pretty amazing dimensions to reality, that I’m surprised to feel excited to actually explore—surprised, given how severely my excitement has been tamped down by life, so far.
I don’t know how to get there, I don’t know what kind of a plan to make, but I’m beginning to see a way forward. Which is more than I’ve ever had.