here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:
as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,
growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:
walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.
the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.
we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.
instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.
what. the. fuck. happened?
and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?
do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
Here’s a bite-sized piece maybe someone can digest and apply across a spectrum of environments (if someone’s mind is flexible enough): There are people sitting next to you (or maybe even you) for whom a click of a button on a website unleashes a host of unexpected sensory and cognitive attacks, in the form of attention- and cognition-demanding responses to that one little click.
Test my hypothesis: go to a website for a church that rents space. Click on their scheduling link button. Chances are a completely new visual environment will leap out at you, as if out of nowhere, and you’re asked to log in with your account (remember, this is your first time visiting this website–what is this account? Am I accountable to the church? I just want to borrow a room for a minute). And then it demands highly personal information and account information for a seemingly unrelated account. (wtf is going on here? I thought this was a church). And then, after careful consideration (this is a church, right? They must have a loving intention) and tentatively entered personal information, the calendar application wants to mate with my calendar application, and gives me no opportunity for consent (I’m being raped by a church calendar. wtf just happened? Who can I call?).
And imagine this happening in the context of trying to create safe spaces for children’s attention and cognition to unfold at its own pace.
It’s not even a micro-aggression – it’s a highly-charged aggressive set of demands, that require attentional and cognitive equilibrium to process well. In the absence of this equilibrium, and in the presence of an obligation to be competent in this highly-charged aggressive environment, these demands are beyond aggressive – they are debilitating. They kill the spirit.
It should be obvious that I’m describing my own experience. And speaking from my own experience, of a person who is highly competent in certain environments, I experience that the disability I experience is the product of the environment, and not a flaw in my character.
But then, imagine that this person experiencing disability (meaning me, in this case) is told, in a thousand tiny moments spread across their life, that they shouldn’t be feeling what they’re feeling (because the people who design these environments aren’t feeling what other people feel when other people enter these environments). Imagine telling someone that they “shouldn’t” “be” “feeling.” Those concepts together are highly aggressive and dismissive. Isn’t that called gaslighting? But what do I know: I’m only operating from my experience. Who’ll believe me?
If you can feel what I’m getting at, you’re getting at the environment that we’re operating in as people with highly specialized nervous systems–HSPs, NDs, ADHDs, ASDs, and all the othered initialed sensibilities. It’s a whole process to even understand it from inside, let alone explain it to someone who designed it, and is highly invested in the design.
People who experience the world in special ways, who are highly competent in certain environments, experience these aggressive responses a thousand times a day. Or, when these environments are codified in the form of obligation, they may be experienced as an almost permanent disability. We are being gaslit into believing we are permanently disabled. But we are perfectly abled within in our special environments. And often, these special environments are highly conducive to inclusion, community, emergent wisdom, teamwork, cooperation. Environments that many people actually like, but rarely get to visit, because these humanly interactive environments are highly endangered.
And almost no one is listening. Most have tuned me out already.
But the ones who are listening are the ones who are hearing me now. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening. I hope we get through this. If we keep listening and connecting, maybe we will get through this. I have hope.
To be an autistic person is to be a person with something valuable inside you but to rarely find the right environment where your value is recognized as valuable by people around you.
This is me, speaking from the heart of an autistic person.
If you’ve been following my neurodiversity journey–as I articulate the experience of a person with autism, ADHD, aphantasia, and proprioception hyposensitivity from the inside, along with the other ways i share myself–and you’ve found that the insights I’ve shared connect with your experience, or contextualize something you suspected, realize that sharing these insights is one of the ways I care for my community.
And realize that, as a person with no degrees or qualifications as an advocate other than my lived experience and my inborn gifts, what I share makes no sense in the context of capitalism.
If you find that a person like me is a valuable part of the community, and worthy of support, realize that, within the context of 21st century American capitalism, there’s not much support for people like me, or for the people I advocate for, who often don’t have the gift for articulation that I share with my community.
I could institutionalize myself: pursue an advanced degree that legitimizes my advocacy in the context of capitalism, and in doing so, would need to unplug myself from the community that I move through, and in doing so, become another victim of capitalism – saddled with huge debt, and most likely unable to find an official advocacy position that would pay off that debt in my lifetime.
I choose, instead, to move through my community in the ways I’ve been moving, because my community moves me to do so, and that’s how I show up. That’s how I care.
If you find this valuable, I’m asking to be allowed to continue advocating for your sensory and cognitive gifts, to continue recontextualizing valuable predispositions that have been pathologized. I’m asking to be adopted. I’m asking for your care. I’m asking for your support.
In asking for your support, I’m not asking to be the CEO of Spotify, or Starbucks, or Paramount+, or Ridwell, or any of the other services that folks find valuable and subscribe to. I’m asking for just enough care to be allowed to live and continue to do the work that I do. If you subscribe to even a little bit of the philosophy I share, consider subscribing to me, so I can continue caring for my community in the ways that I do.
Thanks for all you do, and thank you for being you.
