When a child grows up in an environment where there is only one source of support, and that source of support is unpredictable, unstable, and capable of harm, the child’s identity becomes tied to that of the person they rely on. They may learn that if they go along with their caregiver, their needs will not be met. In this case, it can actually be a successful adaptation to learn to counter the caregiver, if that means getting their needs met.
The problem arises when this child never gets the experience of being supported by a field–by the wider community. They lose their ability to form bonds with a variety of people who might meet their needs in more healthy ways. Their whole identity calcifies into a constant state of opposition to the only person they recognize–their unstable, unpredictable, possibly abusive caregiver.
Sound familiar? We see this type of dynamic within families all the time. We also see it in our national politics, and more and more on the international stage as well. Leaders and governments are galvanized around opposition to some party, population, or set of policies. In doing so, they lose their ability to live in the world of phenomena: the only thing that exists is that to which they are opposed. It’s toxic, maddening, heartbreaking – overwhelming to anyone paying attention.
So what do we do, when this state of affairs arises? Providing coherence, context, nuance only gives more information to be pushed against. In psychology, there is the idea of triangulation: ceasing to engage in dyadic entrapments and focusing instead on a shared field of engagement.
We have had many opportunities to form cross-cognitive bonds with those who are oppositional by constitution: nuclear proliferation, climate change, Covid 19: these all appear to be the kinds of existential threats that we can unite around. Unfortunately, this is a cognitive bias, not a rational train of thought. None of these threats are fast-moving enough that we can recognize the danger before forming an opinion about it. This opinion gets formed by the same framework that locks us into oppositional mode in the first place.
I’m more and more convinced that only a fast-moving apex predator like Godzilla will be recognized as a force of triangulation that we can unite around opposing. In fact, the original Godzilla film from 1954 had a humanist, anti-nuclear subtext, which, of course, was stripped out when the film entered the US market.
Perusing reddit today, I noticed someone posted about wanting to start a men’s group and asking for fun ideas. Many of the comments were followed by an enthusiastic “yes!” or other signifiers of feeling seen. Nothing in the post spoke to my identity or special interests.
I don’t point this out to knock anyone’s interests. On the contrary, seeing people feeling inspired to get together and create community is one of my special interests, so I shared in the joy, even though I recognized that this particular group would not be a group where I would feel seen.
And I recognize that even though I present as a man, if I were to advertise and start a men’s group, both the people who showed up and myself would likely end up feeling awkward. I would likely have to do a lot of masking to appear as if I was feeling in my element, which pretty much defeats the purpose of a support group based on gender presentation.
On a whim, I did a search for [women’s group] in the same subreddit. There were several different threads, and, unsurprisingly to me, the activities and issues being described felt much more akin to my nature. I didn’t get that feeling of “yes!,” though, or if I started to it was tempered by the understanding that regardless of how I feel on the inside, or the activities I enjoy, or the topics I like to talk about, I likely would not be regarded as a part of the community were I to attend unannounced. I get it, but again, I’m left feeling unseen.
In my life, one of the most-asked questions I’ve received about my identity is “are you gay?” Remember, gender and sexual preference are not the same. I think what people might be picking up on is that while I present as a man, I don’t feel that I inhabit a male identity that resembles the men I see around me. Does that make me a trans person. I don’t know, honestly.
Because gender is a social construct, the rules of gender presentation are created (mostly without awareness) by the community. For example, there might be a group for trans adults who would hear my description of myself and feel that I am like them – we see one another and feel seen – we are relationally similar. Another group of trans people might have a different sense of what it means to be trans – they might recognize me more were I to feel a strong need to present on the outside in ways that align with my feminine insides. They might tell me, “you’re not trans: you’re bigender.” I might take their word for it.
Because gender is a social construct, my autistic mind generally either doesn’t see the structure that people around me see (because I just see information, and coherence comes later), or, seeing it, immediately tries to deconstruct it and question it’s validity. When people ask me things like “are you gay?,” I take it kind of like people asking “how are you?” From years of trial-and-error, I’ve recognized that in most cases, people don’t really want to know the answer. They want to feel safe. They want to get just enough information so that they know how to be and not offend anyone. They want to be able to place me, within the list of categories they have devised for people to fit into.
More and more, I’m comfortable being unplaced. I recognize that it’s a valid and valuable state of being. (Maybe that makes me nonbinary. You’d have to decide: I’ll totally come to your nonbinary social group, if you recognize me as such and invite me). I suspect that if more people were comfortable being unplaced, being who they are, then there would not be as much controversy around what to me is a thoroughly uncontroversial reality. Some people take their social constructs very seriously, and conformity is a life-or-death affair. When I notice someone like this, from my unplaced state (these are often the people who ask if I’m gay, as if they would be totally unphased if I walked up to them and asked them if they are straight), I find myself relying on my white, male, large-bearded-man privilege (regardless of feeling like a terrified little girl inside), and, when the question comes, I often will ask them, “what makes you ask?,” or, “what does gay mean?” This is a much more efficient way of shutting down an awkward conversation than just not engaging. Were I smaller, and more feminine, and non-white, I might not feel as safe to be that direct.
And that’s been the case for most of my life: my big giant man disguise helps keep the frail, frightened girl inside safe, protected from the harsh realities that girls face in our society. It’s kind of a remarkable arrangement, actually. Sometimes I do feel like it would be amazing to have a body manifest that appears the way my insides feel. And on the flip side, I think it would be amazing to feel what it was like on the inside for a person who thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world to show the fish they just caught on their dating profile – my body is well-suited for that mindset.
But mostly, I just think it’s a good idea to let people be who they see themselves to be – on the inside, on the outside, relationally, emotionally, all the ways. And to allow ourselves to be a little unplaced, ourselves.
Who am I? That’s up to us. Let’s try to make it a pleasant arrangement.
an interesting consequence of being both autistic and adhd is the push-pull, fast-slow, act-ruminate, interplay between these two processing styles, that beget strong long-arc themes: pattern-recognition, justice sensitivity, rejection-sensitive dysphoria; and also tolerance for ambiguity, conflict resolution, and a need to articulate the awkward unspoken paradox.
looked at as a snapshot, i can appear to be by turns reactionary, quick to judge, and disruptive; or emotionally flat, ruminative, or disengaged. It is this paradoxical dynamic that causes me to crave nuance, and reject binary paradigms; to love deeply and also feel hurt easily; to rejoice in a graceful solution, but also to be the first to point out the inconsistencies in that solution.
i make a lot of mistakes and missteps, but i process the consequences of those mistakes in granular detail, sometimes for decades. i will find myself advocating vociferously for an idea which i may have previously rejected; or stopped in my tracks, hearing a word, and becoming lost in contemplation of the moment that that word was formed in the mouth of the person who hadn’t heard it before, but deeply needed to articulate something that had not before been articulated.
i have a strong desire to connect with people directly and deeply; and yet, even after a moment of deep connection, that connection will not translate into immediate trust, which i only experience through myriad moments of connection over time, if at all.
what’s fascinating to me now is that the language for a person like me–autistic and adhd–are quite new constructions for qualities that have always been part of the human experience. they come to us from the mouths of scientists, who, to their credit, look at things for a long time and talk about them; but to their detriment, these terms arose as descriptions of difference relative to a norm, rather than as healthy human characteristics. this paradox is just information to be articulated and, hopefully, digested in the great body of human understanding.
love your neighbor, kill your idol, consider the consequences, and have a nicely nuanced day.
as an autistic person, who is highly competent in certain environments, and near disabled in others, I’ve found that I can do things that are normally quite difficult for me if they are related to my field of interest–parsing seemingly arbitrary lists of conditions to fill out necessary forms, for example. I’m doing this a lot lately, in setting up services that would supposedly allow me to better be of service.
But lately, I seem to have hit a wall. 5 different services that I’ve tried to sign up with have denied access, with cryptic and seemingly arbitrary error messages, and no path to a human to rectify the problem, and no response from the non-human contact form provided. for someone like me, sometimes just having another human to walk through the steps with makes all the difference between failure, disconnection, and simple connection.
I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, but I must admit that the thought has occurred to me, “maybe these connections are failing because I am on an arbitrary list called the autism registry.” conspiracy theorism is the result of a certain kind of isolation. someone like me, who thrives on connection, and who is competent in environments based on nurturing human connection, but who withers in isolation, these missed connections feel highly personal. it’s easy to see how the short hop to the rabbit hole could be an obvious choice for some. the fact that an autism registry has been mentioned on the national stage makes that hop feel more like a logical step.
especially when finding a simple hand to hold is so expensive.
take care of each other. volunteer to sit with a friend while they fill out a form. ask a friend for help if you need it. what if a livable world depends on such a small gesture?
It’s been very emotional for me to reemerge from the darkness of lockdown to return to building community through music-making. In my conversations with folks, it becomes clear that a younger generation of families don’t know about some of the ways we connected before, and don’t necessarily remember many of the ways things were different then.
In going through my instrument collection to decide what to bring to my family music classes, I brought out the box that contained the EBCMP banner. For those who don’t know, EBCMP was the East Bay Community Music Project, the organization I founded in 2012 to cultivate community music-making opportunities for people of all ages, ethnicities, faiths, economic access, neurotypes, and abilities, and any other way one might sort people into categories. I now continue that work as imeetswe, for reasons I won’t cover here. But I believe at this point in history, part of my job as a facilitator and advocate is to remind people of what once was, and what is possible again, and this banner is a powerful reminder for me.
We used to meet on second and fourth Sundays, and at this particular time we were meeting in the multi-purpose room at Malcom X Elementary in Berkeley. My mother would often drive over from the Peninsula where she lives, and join us. She was usually the oldest person in attendance, just because not so many older folks would join us often, but she did. Our second gathering in August of 2014 coincided with my mother’s 70th birthday, so we planned a ceremony to honor her entry into the crone realm (which, whatever your association with the word might be, is an honor and a privilege, and an important place in the community).
We got together in the morning, and ate potluck breakfast. We had asked folks to bring pieces of colored fabric that could be torn or cut into strips, and some of us had taken some time in the morning to cut the many colors and textures of fabrics into strips. We sang some songs together as usual. Then, we had my mother sit in a chair in the middle of the space. As my mother sat in the middle, on her chair, each family in attendance, in turn, approached her (her name is Susan, or Grandma Sue), and gave her a kind reflection, and handed her a piece of the torn fabric. She had been instructed to tie the strips together as she was handed them. I don’t remember exactly how many families were in attendance, but there were enough that when each family had shared their kind reflections, she had a long, long rope of tied together fabric strips.
Then, as she held one end of the fabric, all the rest of us sang Que Sera Sera, a song that my mother loved (it was originally sung by Doris Day, and my mother was about 12 when it was on the radio, in a time when we were all connected by the songs that came over the radio).
My mother stood. We all sang, and wound the fabric around my mother, until she was all wrapped up in the kind reflections that folks had given her. And then, we unwound her, still singing, and then she walked around the families gathered and wound the fabric around the community, and it was long enough to encircle us a couple of times.
I wonder how many people remember that crone ceremony for my mom, or any crone ceremony for anyone’s mom, for that matter. She still remembers it, I’m sure, and I do too. For some, becoming a crone, or welcoming one into the community, is an important rite of passage–a recognition of having lived life fully, and of having a certain kind of wisdom that only comes from living a long time, and the importance of that wisdom to the community.
And what, then, was done with the fabric? Was it discarded? If you know my mom, you are fairly certain it wasn’t discarded. No, my mom proceeded, over the course of several months, (when she was also consumed with the many sewing and knitting and crocheting projects that she’s always consumed with) she turned the fabric strips into a quilted banner to represent the community. We used to carry it in front of us in our annual Spring Parade (you participate in an annual Spring Parade, don’t you? Doesn’t everybody?), and it was draped over the donation/announcement/signup table at our Sunday gatherings.
So as I uncovered the box that contained this emblem of a certain moment in a certain community of people who had chosen to gather because they loved to sing and move in community and recognize the cycles of the seasons and the ways people change, I admit, I cried. I had a moment. And because of how my particular brain is wired, it just made sense to share this moment with the community of people I find myself within now, who may or may not understand what I’m sharing, or what I think is important about a moment like this. I think about all of the moms in my community, and of all of the moms who might have moms that are moving toward the crone realm of their lives, and I wonder if they would appreciate being recognized in ways like I’ve described.
A crone represents a certain type of neurodiversity, and this community is organized to recognize the value of all of the different ways our brains are organized or disorganized, or differently organized. It used to be that to be old was a certain type of neurodivergence, because it was rare for people to live past a certain age. To be older is not so rare any more, but still worthy of being recognized for the value of simply having lived through many cycles of seasons, and styles of communication, and changes in hormone balance, and attitudes toward difference.
I share because I see something of value that I’m not sure the people around me see, and it’s just my brain’s wiring that makes me think that’s what I’m supposed to do.
In a neurodiverse community, all are welcome, all are recognized as having a unique perspective, and something of value to offer to the community. And we can, if we pay attention, and if we show up, recognize uniqueness within a community as having value, especially in a time where sameness is centered and strived for.
Thanks for listening. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for recognizing the value in the many ways of being a human being in the community we find ourselves in.
