This post is, as stated, a companion to the post Lady Autist. I’d recommend reading them in tandem for context.
It has been about a year since I posted anything to my blog. This is for many reasons: new job has been sapping all my creative energy, new job plus full life means not that much time for writing, not feeling like I can publish anything that I write because it lacks what reads to me as an appropriate sense of audience and therefore can never be completed.
Audience is a tricky thing. As stated all over this blog, as an autistic person understanding the point of view of other people is a permanent struggle. And, as I mention in Lady Autist, I calibrate almost everything that I do to reflect what I think people want from me so that I don’t get into trouble. This is a highly circular and energy intensive endeavor. I often have to act with incomplete information, observe the behavior of others, hypothesize about what I have done wrong, formulate new test cases and repeat. In preparing for this companion piece I realized that I don’t so much have an internal monologue as I have an internal focus group. To achieve the mask, I run endless scenarios using the composite images of people that I know or aggregate data about how groups of people together behave [or have behaved] to approximate how my future behavior might be received. It’s like my internal experience is sort of like the comedy tour and my interactions with humans are the Netflix/HBO special: I am always testing my material out on the audience in my mind [just to be alive, not to do anything as useful as make money or anything].
I don’t like this. It’s the mechanics of the mask that I didn’t get into very much in Lady Autist because then it would have taken 50 minutes to read [that is a comedy special], and even I know that taking up 50 minutes at the open mic is gauche [I was worried about taking up 10]. This thumbnail of mask construction illustrates why it takes the energy to power a car for me to account for the needs of others [so they will like me and not economically disadvantage me]. Every time I go out amongst the humans I have gone on the comedy tour in my mind first. I live in a small town that I have lived in for almost 20 years. I feel like I know EVERYONE, a far larger number than Dunbar’s [150] to account for. But I have mental images of thousands of people, just in case I run into them at the GD farmer’s market and have to impersonate a human.
Everyone all the time needs to think I am a human [where “human” operationally means a 4-6 range knob person] or bad things happen. I’m a breadwinner, I have two kids and a mortgage and some very nice things to maintain with the money I get paid at my job. I have a reputation that can affect how people interact with me and include/exclude me and my kids in this community [this struggle is called internalized ableism]. Despite the ADA and people generally being nice and understanding, if I am weird too loud I risk being very isolated and under-employed [like many autistic folks are] so I mostly cannot risk taking off the mask [this is called institutionalized ableism]. Those meltdowns and shutdowns have to keep happening on the weekends and in the staff bathroom. I can even stand on a stage for 10 minutes telling people that I am high masking and then mask while I accept their praise for my piece.
I am not going to get to live in a world where I can take off the mask. I don’t know that I even could.
However, it is my hope that in talking about being high masking that I can contribute to making a space where other people can take theirs off, or maybe never have to make one in the first place, because there is more general understanding that motor and social differences are just part of being human. That being human is an experience that exists outside the range of knobs set between 4 and 6.
This sort of happened at the reading. I had 5 people in a crowd of about 35 out themselves or members of their family to me as autistic and then say, “the KNOBS! this makes it so much easier to understand. Thank you.” And no one said everyone was a little bit autistic because, I suspect, I successfully explained why they are not. This is the real reason I posted Lady Autist on my blog [I need to send people the link so they can send people the link]. The reason I needed to write this companion was because I realized that in writing Lady Autist for the specific event A Reading of Her Own, I had a highly concrete audience in mind that lessoned the fatigue of the comedy tour/focus group in my head.
See, I have this everything-is-connected problem. It’s not that I experience it internally as a problem, but it creates a problem for writing and more importantly communication. The autistic urge to over-explain is about this sense that more information means better communication [because it does if you’re an autist], but for allistic folks more information is overwhelming. When humans [any humans] are overwhelmed they shut down, they can’t process it all. When I write I want to include everything, I want all the pieces of information that connect to make the point appear in the piece. Because I want to showcase all the pebbles of information that came together to make the idea. It’s like citations. This is how I think about it but I tend to use my inhibitory control to suppress all the relationships when I am talking to people since I know that getting off topic breaks communication rules [too many rabbit holes]. No one cares what book I read and where I learned about that book and what shirt I was wearing and what the weather was like on the day that I learned about, say, neurodivergence as a concept. They want to know what neurodivergence is and how it helps them understand a larger point like why my life is effing hard.
Having to write a compact piece like Lady Autist for a specific audience in a specific setting meant that I had to focus the core of what I wanted to say so that I could communicate it to that audience. I could assume that they knew about the hardships of being a woman and institutionalized patriarchy, that the percentage of people who knew what intersectionality was in a trans-inclusive audience was high, that they knew the quip about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels. But I couldn’t be sure they knew anything about autism because like nobody does. It isn’t a concept that is easily communicable to people and I didn’t want to shame my audience by going on some diatribe about how, no, everyone is not “a little autistic.” Don’t shit on your audience. So though I wanted to be able to talk about my internal experience, I had to talk about autism and masking. I had to create a canvas where talking about my experience made sense.
Though I am a person who carries around, probably, yotta bytes of information about a vast array of topics, I know that not everyone’s brain is like Wikipedia in real time. I know that knob is turned up to 11 in my brain and that most people are working with a 5 [because statistics]. Over the last decade and a half, the only writing I have done that I feel universally good about has been the sermons I have written for my church. I have written about 20 of these in that time. They are well received by members [I can really put the butts in the seats, as they say]. However, I recognize that, like an open mic event, church sermons have very narrow [though not as narrow as one might think] criteria for what makes them good/digestible by an audience. I know my church audience well and they are not only fairly tolerant of my tendency to get pedantic, it is almost what they want from me because I have a lot of information that is helpful to their own free and responsible search for truth and meaning, plus [if I may flatter myself] I deliver this information in an engaging way.
It has been hard trying to maintain writing for an audience that could be anyone, otherwise known as the Internet. In the last year I also have made a lot of other accounts private or cancelled them all together because the collapsing of audience specific context in many “public” places online is a menace [of course, the echo chamber reinforcement of so many niche places on the internet is also a menace, but that is another topic for discussion]. What I am saying is that the exercise of writing for a real audience made it much easier to write because I was able to give myself permission to just tell the people in front of me the “connected” part of the “everything-is-connected” picture instead of the “everything,” where I spend my time. Being selective, which is to say editing, is a great deal more important than being “a naturally good writer,” whatever the hell that means.
So, thanks Montana Book Co folks for this great event, for the community you have made in our small town, and for giving me [a very burnt out autist] something to feel joyful about in the short term and something to be inspired by in the long term.
The Oracle of Z 