More like obsessive /autistic/ magical
The results are in, baby, and I might even like myself a little bit
I questioned writing this at all, wondering if my autism, the thing that makes me obsessive, was worth mentioning in my newsletter about obsession. That was dumb, so here I am, if you don’t know it already: I am an autistic person, as I have always been, and I finally have the permission to be honest about it.
I understand my autism as a neurological phenomenon that impacts every aspect of the way I experience the world and always has, including but not limited to: sensory processing issues that make it hard to eat, wear clothes or be in public places; the difficulties I often have communicating and socialising; my tendency to wander or switch off; my clumsiness. Basically, everything I have known about myself since childhood, from my preferences to my skills to my sensitivities to my temper.
cute, serious, awkward lil dumbass
The lack of a diagnosis until I chased one at 24 and finally got one at 27 damn years old is a story in itself, and we can blame a historical lack of understanding about the way autism presents in girls. Not knowing meant that I behaved in ways other people found strange, but I did not realise or start masking my behaviours until I got older.
Well into adulthood, I was often bullied and ostracised, and friends would stop speaking to me without warning. I would blame myself, bending over backwards for the next one, hoping that they wouldn’t find some reason to discard me, too. It wasn’t until recently that I learned to recognise that I need friends who are kind and flexible; who truly want what’s best for me, because I won’t ever ask for it. It’s easy to take advantage of someone who wants desperately to be liked and doesn’t understand why they aren’t.
Autism is also responsible for every single thing that I love about myself: my empathy, my capacity to love, and my bottomless, obsessive curiosity. I learned to read when I was two and I never stopped. While traditional schooling ground me down and broke my heart, particularly as I got older and my “quirks” became less forgivable, I never really stopped learning. It saved my life: I didn’t have the easiest time, but I developed special interests that consumed and comforted me. I memorised books about mythology and history, I smashed through the Tetris world record, I built a city from Lego, I was so fixated on the TV that my parents thought I was deaf.
lil baby loves to read upside down
As people get older, that curiosity can fade and die. I feel so lucky that mine did not. Do you know how much it rules to be 27 years old, to have experienced grief and trauma and abuse and life, but to still be able to step foot into Disneyland and enjoy every tiny detail? To find genuine comfort in nature, in animals, in any little thing your attention grabs onto? To arrive in a new place, wherever it is, and be able to find what makes it special? To have a heart so full of love and empathy that it might burst?
Often, when looking for early signs, I look through photos my grandad took of me in the 90s. I see before me a cute, serious, blatantly autistic child. When posing or caught unaware, I stand awkwardly, looking away from the camera. I look frightened, like the weight of the world is on my tiny shoulders. When I am reading, or in the sea, or touching an animal, however, I look peaceful.
My grandad loves to tell stories of the years that I spent dragging him to Blackpool to see the illuminations, despite his offers of a better holiday. I would do the same exact things every year. I would swim in the sea in October, because I never feel safer than when I’m in water. I would request a donkey ride, telling him, “why walk when you can ride?”. I would insist on a street-facing window in the hotel and then sit with the curtains open all night long and shout to him about what I saw: “bus! Lights! Bus!” I never once got bored of doing that. I am that same child.
my happy place
Without that insatiable curiosity I would not be writing this. Growing up I had zero security and much ADHD. I was a horrible student and a worse employee in at least 20 minimum wage jobs. My teachers lamented the loss of my potential as I behaved horribly despite a very promising start. However, I did have the ability to research obsessively and the drive to articulate my perspective. Learning to channel my energy productively got me through school and earned me two degrees, leading me to a career where I don’t have to pretend to be someone I am not.
I do not want anyone, ever, to look at me and think I have done well in spite of my autism: everything I have, I have because of it. Remember emo diary, that project that relies solely on me having 16 years of meticulously kept archives and diaries of my own life and interests? Like…duh.
As a teenager, my special interests were bands like Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy. I knew everything about them, wore their merch head to toe, annoyed my friends by crying to their music at sleepovers. As an adult, I started to write about those artists, and with time we developed friendships. While I sit in meetings or on the phone, embarrassed by how much I love them, they tell me that they admire how I unreservedly love what I love.
Last year, Pete Wentz told me that what he loves about my writing is that, “there’s something great about being unabashedly comfortable with what makes you feel happy and what feels good to you”. That alone made any school-era bullying trauma fade away.
I haven’t wanted to wish away my autism in a very long time. It is no coincidence that I’ve come to this conclusion now, surrounded only by true friends and a partner who, after my diagnosis, wrote a card that read, “this is who you are, who you’ve always been, the person I fell in love with and the person I love more than ever”.
The most painful things I have experienced as an autistic person living in this cold, inflexible world are not the fault of my autism, but often of people who don’t understand and refuse to learn how to accommodate people who might communicate or behave differently.
In the last few years, I have asked myself: do I want to not be autistic? The answer is, finally, a resolute no. Everything I have that is good and beautiful is a result of my autism. I just want people to be kinder.
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