neurodiversity

Representing Choice

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So no kidding, the key that lodged in the back of my head and led me to recognize my queerness, some 30 years after it would have been useful to know, is this whole scene here—the dynamics of which we’ve all seen discussed in abstract, right? But to see it dramatized like this, and to recognize these thoughts and feelings so deeply…

  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 17
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 18
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 19
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 20
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), pages 17-20

This is precisely what I’ve felt whenever someone’s gotten close to me, and these are exactly the thoughts that have always run through my head. Even when the relationship lasts for years, that thought hangs there, coloring every single interaction: how long until they see me for who I really am, and then what will happen?

Like… it took a bit of unpacking for me to understand why I identified so closely with this business, based on what I had come to recognize about myself. The first step was recognizing the aroaceness, as reflected in the early interaction here. That wasn’t too tricky. I had empirical data to work with, and had been wrestling with years of browbeating for my lack of sexuality in relationships, which I just sort of interpreted as queerplatonic situations, without knowing the term.

The transness took a little longer to click, but then it was the biggest fucking “oh” in the world. My pan business… well, that took longer still, and isn’t directly informed by this comic, but after everything else it was more of a shrug. Sure, we’ve gone this far. Let’s just collect all the flags. Why not.

I think what really sells it is Steven’s awful, brain-dead avoidance strategy, which… yeah… followed by, “Maybe, instead, we should talk about what we want to do?” 

What we want to do?

…

Oh.

…

OH.

…

oh?

Like, I genuinely never understood that I had a choice. I thought I just had to play with what I was dealt, go along with other people’s expectations for me. When people gave me an ultimatum and told me we couldn’t be friends anymore unless we changed the terms of our relationship and did things I didn’t feel comfortable doing, I had the option to say no, you go coerce someone else. I’m fine here. I didn’t have to actively suppress everything I was in order to make other people comfortable all the time. I didn’t have to deal with abuse. I didn’t have to be who other people wanted me to be, and were angry when I wasn’t.

The autistic masking sure as hell plays into the above as well. like, there’s always this anxiety in the event one manages to “pass” that one is just working one’s self into a bigger and bigger problem, so that when they notice the truth, some real shit is going to go down.

“… what we want to do.”

Like, that kind of shook me. and for several months after I stumbled over the comic, I kept dwelling on it, putting myself in the place of Stevonnie, making analogies to all these scenes from my own past—thinking, what would I want to do? What do I want to do now? Does this apply in a real way? Is it too late? Do I have choices? What are they?

It turns out, yes. I had choices. Choices that I didn’t know enough to make. And then, I did.

Now here I am.

The Jitters

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The thing about bodily sensations—pleasure, pain, excitement—is typically I have trouble telling them apart, as with this autistic brain everything is so extreme for me. It all just parses as various degrees of “too much,” that I have to grit my teeth and weather through until it ebbs to a manageable level. Social overwhelm, sex, injuries, overly strong scents, high temperatures, they’re all the same to me. I’m hit with this wave of shock, and my whole body shuts down. I tremble, start to black out. I can’t process what’s happening. It’s like a DDoS for my nervous system.

I say this because I feel like I’m suddenly become a little sensitized to caffeine. It’s never affected me much in the past, beyond kind of calming me down and clearing my head. In college I used to drink a couple cans of Surge to help me sleep. Maybe it’s my changing chemistry. But the last few days, I’ve had one mug of coffee and I feel like crying and taking a nap. I didn’t make the connection until now. My body feels like someone’s been yelling at me for an hour.

So, I guess that’s one more thing to pay attention to now.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So much of my life takes a different focus when I understand it’s not my responsibility to convince bigots that I’m human. It doesn’t matter who they are, how they may be related, what leverage they may carry over me. They were always wrong. And I survived, and I’m here now.

It was they who failed me, not the other way around.

Stonewall

  • Reading time:3 mins read

For allistics, every interaction is on some level a power struggle. It’s not about understanding; it’s about asserting. You can see this in politics as well; the more explanation a candidate gives for a position, the less people seem to respect that candidate. If they just assert, â€œthis is how it is,” no matter how irrational or unreasonable it is, then people back away and go, okay, clearly they know what they’re talking about. 

I don’t like to fight, I have no interest in controlling anyone, and I want to know the reasons for things so that I understand how stuff works. But the more that I try to earnestly engage with allistics on my level, giving them all the tools I need to deal with a situation, the more aggressive they become. Because they see it as a fight they can win.

So the more quickly and bluntly you can shut them down, give them no leverage to even question your decisions, the smoother things will tend to go—as unintuitive as that feels.

“No.”

“I’d rather not.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I just can’t.”

I can’t stress this enough: allistics don’t want to know things. They don’t want to understand reasons or methods or meaning. They think they have it all under control, and that you’re undermining them, insulting them, if you give them anything to work with that interferes with the conclusions that they will form on their own. 

You’re controlling the story, they think, with all these facts and details, and not letting them write it themselves. How dare you. Well, they will show you who’s in control of the story. 

The only solution is not to engage. Don’t give them anything. Then they can’t throw it back at you. 

“This isn’t a negotiation. This is me telling you no.”

I think this is why consent is such a big issue for me. I don’t do power struggles. I don’t do negotiation. For me to say something, I’ve already worked out all of the angles I can and proposed the most generous possible solution, reserving as little as I can manage for myself. For someone to question that and say, no, you’re being a dick; I need more than the 95% you’re giving me, it’s just…

No.

I said no.

Fuck you, I said no. I won’t let you kill me.

I am so vulnerable to manipulation and guilt, to give up what autonomy I have over my own mind and body and emotions and needs and desires. I’m so prone to giving more than I can spare, even after I’ve drawn the final line, just to keep the peace.

No more explanations.

Just, no.

Setting boundaries is hard as hell. But if you don’t, it’s an invitation for abuse.

The Phantom Carrot

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I think what makes life hard for me in a neurotypical world is that I don’t respond well to coercion or ultimatums. It’s not that I’m proud or defiant. It’s that I don’t get what’s happening. Someone declares something, expecting it to activate my self-interest—kick-start a negotiation or an argument or a plan or some kind of active response—and I say, “Oh.” They say, “This is going to happen!” And I think, “Well, that’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to interfere with your decision. Surely you know your mind better than I do. I guess I’m going to have to live with it.” It doesn’t enter my mind that I’m expected to do something—and if so, what exactly.

I get the sense people see this as willful, or that I don’t care what happens, or like I’m calling their bluffs all over the place—when the issue is that I don’t fully grasp the nature of the threat, and have little sense of self-preservation. You tell me a thing, and I incorporate it into my understanding: this is how things are. My own desires don’t really factor in.

Even on a flat plane, it’s hard to make that leap that I am able to act in my own interest, or what that might entail. It’s such a stretch of the imagination to just… do a thing. That if I realize I’m hungry, I have the agency to just make a sandwich. I feel clever every time I figure this shit out.

This has always been a problem with me. That last decade was another level, of course. Every interaction was a threat of some sort, expecting to coerce something that I didn’t understand. I still spend so much time puzzling over what they were trying to make me do (and failing). But this extends to, you know, just basic engagement with the systems that frame our society. Capitalism. The legal system as it stands. Cultural norms. All of this stuff we lean on, it relies on this tapestry of implied threat, expecting that of course people will sense what’s good for them and act accordingly.

And I, like. I can’t work with this dynamic. It doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me. And I don’t have any strong impulses that guide my behavior. You tell me I have to die now because of some mistake I made, I nod and I say, “Oh.”

We need a new way of doing things in our society, that doesn’t rely on coercion and punishment.

The Understory

  • Reading time:6 mins read

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.

Prosopagnosia

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I have such a hard time recognizing people when they change their hairstyle; it’s like they turn into completely different people. I’m sure I read the association before, because it’s there in my skull, but it just now hard-clicked what an indicator this is for face-blindness.

This, right here, goes closely along with the whole forest-for-trees issue of autism:

Individual features are fine, but I can’t make sense of the whole unless it’s something I’ve previously put a huge effort into mastering.

It’s that inability to hold more than one small thing in my short-term memory at a time, basically. And, I think I specifically don’t filter facial information down into my long-term memory very much at all, except maybe in the most abstract sense. Like, verbal descriptions.

It also strikes me how I subconsciously built these mnemonic tools to get around these problems, much as I have for all of these other masking behaviors, by vaguely associating new faces with other well-entrenched faces. Like, I just see this person as Mark Zuckerberg, and so on—which in turn over time screws up my sense of reality as to what the original model looks like. It gets strange when I see footage of an actual person who has been depicted by an actor in some medium, and I get weirded out that they actually exist, because they look sorta wrong.

All day, every day, interacting with this world that wasn’t built for me, I’m drawing on this deep, carefully curated set of tools that I don’t even realize I’m using in order to hack the fucking baffling system in front of me. And it’s exhausting. Nothing comes naturally.

At the same time, all of these coping mechanisms I’ve built up, for years I think they’ve led to false results when people have tried to test me and figure out what’s going on—because I’ve broken down the systems so meticulously and set up so many glitchy back-door workarounds.

Like, right now I’m taking the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which is the official thing they tend to use to assess this, but I’m mnemonically cheating my way through every trial. I know there will be three faces, and I’m memorizing, oh, David Duchovny. Or Haunted Eyes, Browbone.

If I weren’t concentrating so hard, putting this energy into memorizing specific details or making associations, this would all wash over me and I’d be lost. But that terrifies me so deeply, I can’t let go. I can’t stop the masking behaviors, these lifelines that keep me going—even as it siphons away my energy like a straw in my jugular.

If there were a delay between showing the faces and identifying them; if they showed other vaguely similar faces in-between; if they did a fake-out, like a police lineup, and it were possible the originals weren’t there; if there were more options to choose from, I’d flub it all.

But it’s this hacky… videogame logic, kinda, that I apply, in order to cope. I learn the system so I can write my own internal code to cheat it. Or else I’d be lost.

Even so, working as hard as I can and draining my battery until I feel ill, which I now do, I still don’t cope all that well:

Which is representative of every area of my life, pretty much! I just barely do better than a coin-flip. Which is… pretty much the extent to which I can rely on my masking behaviors at all. They’re so incredibly unreliable, but they’re all I have. It’s enough to let me sort of scrape by under certain conditions, avoid falling down the pit, but never quite function adequately.

This is what it means to be “high-level” autistic: to be able to fake it well enough to fail at being “normal.”

Service Games

  • Reading time:5 mins read
Jeremy Parish muses over the NES ports of SNK’s Athena and Taito’s Arkanoid

Watching Jeremy Parish doing his best to defend a game he clearly does not enjoy, a bunch of things are clicking into place for me, suddenly, about the role of performance and execution in the allistic mind, compared to theory and intent.

For most people, what you mean to do, have to say, is all well and good—but even at their most generous they have trouble caring all that much unless it’s presented to them on their own terms. They almost seem to take personal offense when someone doesn’t bend over backwards to predict what they want and have it all ready and waiting, fixed exactly the way they know they like it best, before they arrive.

Whereas to my mind at least, polish is… fine? Like, it can be a nice last thing to help with clarity of vision. But what I’m most interested in is what the message is, what someone has to say. I don’t tend to assume that things are about me, for me, because nothing ever is.

The things that give me life are the most developed, interesting, original visions—which often are difficult to communicate and need some level of intent engagement. If that’s not there, and all I see is polish, it’s, there’s nothing to engage with. I don’t see the point at all.

Athena I find an endlessly fascinating game, in part because it’s so impenetrable. There’s so much going on here, so much I’ll maybe never fully understand, and that’s amazing to me. Arkanoid is also-good, but that’s almost entirely because of its vision. The clarity of its execution does little to improve communication of its vision, so it doesn’t really fuss me one way or another—except to make me nod and say, oh, yeah, I get it; interesting. I find myself thinking about it far less, ergo it occupies less space in my mind. With the game taking up less space, inspiring fewer synapses to take root, it gives me less fuel for general Understanding of Stuff. Less of a sense of wonder. Less of a sense of something bigger, even than the game’s own ideas. (Again, though, Arkanoid is pretty wonderful itself.)

And, you know. In the exceedingly rare instance when something does appear to cater to me, it rankles the heck out of my suspicions. And often with good reason. It’s almost always toying with me, and I almost always feel used at the end of the exchange.

The works that are all head-down and almost totally unconcerned with how they come off to other people because they’re so focused on exploring a notion that they’ve hit on, those are the most absolutely exciting things, and I just wanna be friends with them.

Granted, Micronics (the one-bedroom company that handled the notorious NES ports of several early Capcom and SNK titles) is awful. No way I’m gonna defend their coding. But I don’t see what that has to do with the ideas at play; it’s just another systemic barrier. Like, to me there’s a big difference between dismissing Athena, the game, and dismissing Micronics’ coding on Athena. Yeah, it’s an absolutely barfy port—but enough about that; what’s going on with the game is…

Anyway. This mode of engagement here, this allistic impatience with the strange and expectation for service, it ties into issues of abuse in past relationships, and into observations about privilege and expectations about media and shaping of information—like how white cishet men go apeshit when things aren’t specifically made for them. This all also further ties queerness to neurodivergence…

There are degrees to everything, of course. Parish is behaving entirely reasonable in this video, and makes some sincere effort to engage with the merits and ways-of-thought of even the more inscrutable of the two games. But I think in the clear effort that he shows to be fair, he kinda illustrates the issue.

Like, the dynamics become very clear: Athena is a strange game that doesn’t make much of an effort to explain itself, and it takes a supreme amount of patience for him to cut through that and engage with its perspective as well as he can. And he’s clearly not thrilled with the task.

To put maybe too fine a point on it, the attitude that Athena receives in this video, it’s sorta, well, it’s the best I feel I usually can hope for in treatment myself, from most people. And this level of patience is pretty uncommon, because of the effort it takes. Most people aren’t used to having to do this all the time.

Being autistic, of course, I am! It’s the only way I understand anyfuckingthing. And so if I’m gonna put the same effort into just comprehending-at-all a glossy surface with limbo behind it as I do a rusty shell filled with wonder and mystery, I’m gonna invest my energy where it’ll do me the most good.

(I’ve always been drawn to archaeology and lost information that has to be puzzled together. The thing that really got me into Doctor Who, after multiple efforts to engage me, was the return of “The Lion” in 1999 and stumbling into the whole missing episode situation.)

There’s a certain magic to puzzles. If by the act of engaging with a thing I understand it into existence, and am able to help communicate its ideas more widely, I feel like I’ve made the world a little better. Like all of the supreme effort it takes just to live has a purpose.

Which I guess also explains the kinds of writing I’ve done over the years…