Neurodivergence

I know I’ve been missing for a little while. The day job got busy. That’s not the reason. The day job got busy plus I’ve been dealing with some seismic changes in identity that have taken some time to process. I can’t, in fact, do everything at once.

Identity is a funny thing. It grows and shifts over time. It is constant yet malleable; a putty, a plasma, a quasi-solid. 

My identity is formed of many words. I am a semantic being, existing in words. If there is a word for what I am, then I have a name. I am real. If there is no word for a thing that I am, then I doubt its existence.

So. There have been many words I have used to describe me.

Woman.

American.

Liberal.

Lawyer.

Bisexual, polyamorous, artist. 

Bipolar, nerd, introvert.

There are many words for the many things that I am. Each of these words carries meaning, a set of other words stemming therefrom that describes certain behaviors and expectations of myself. I am an American, and with that comes certain cultural attitudes and norms, core assumptions about life that are shared with many other Americans. I am a lawyer, with all the education and warped thinking that identity entails. I am bipolar; I have had to come to grips with this condition and learn to adapt my life to the difficult and often unpleasant ways that my mood-disordered brain works. 

Now, finally, at age 41, I have learned a new word to describe an aspect of my identity that I have always struggled with naming, a fundamental odd-ness that set me apart from others.

I am autistic.

What does that mean?

The DSM-5-TR describes autism spectrum disorder in terms of social deficits and restriction of interests, but that’s only how it manifests. That’s how it looks to a neurotypical person. That’s not what it means to be autistic.

What does it mean to be autistic from the perspective of an autistic person? It’s a brain that functions differently than others’ do. I’ve heard people describe monotropic brain patterns rather than polytropic: we far more easily focus on only one thing at a time. I’ve heard people discuss hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli. Combine those elements and you’ve got people whose brains can’t track more than one sensory input at once that are constantly bombarded with sensory inputs to which they’re very sensitive. It’s completely overwhelming.

An analogy to the computing world. We’ve got serial rather than parallel processing abilities and the gain on our sensors is turned up to maximum so there’s just more information for those serial processors to work with. For some of us, the pathways that our brains build to cope with the sensory onslaught allows for more efficient communication with neurotypical folks than for others. But we’re all building those pathways to navigate the world and handle that sensory information at an incredible speed. 

And we manage. Human brains are miraculous. But we don’t manage the same way that neurotypical folks do.

One of the things that human brains are very good at is categorization based on very little information. This is useful when we’re trying to decide whether that movement in the brush is a predator to run from, a prey animal to hunt, or a friend to greet. It’s similarly useful in the modern era for determining things like whether that motion coming down the street is a taxi to hail or a Mack truck to avoid. It’s less useful when categorizing individual humans. For example, anyone who’s been through implicit bias training has been taught to slow down their first impressions and make sure that their brains are coming up with categorizations that are based on useful facts, not assumptions rooted in harmful stereotypes and prejudices. Left to its own devices, a human brain will categorize new people into in-groups and out-groups within seconds. 

Autistic brains work differently than neurotypical brains. We build pathways to processing information differently than neurotypical people do. We react differently than neurotypical people do to various stimuli. And neurotypical people have difficulty adapting to that.

When the DSM-5-TR talks about “persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction,” it’s talking about how we react differently to social stimuli than neurotypical people do and neurotypical people categorize us as other. The neural pathways we build to process the multiply simultaneous stimuli of social interaction as a serial input instead of in parallel mean we’re at best slightly slower to react and at worst nonresponsive from a neurotypical perspective. It’s not a “deficit;” it’s a different communication style; and thus we have difficulty communicating with neurotypical people. 

When the DSM-5-TR talks about “Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities,” it’s talking about how our monotropic brains with sensory reception dialed up to 11 try to organize the world around us to address our needs. We get fixated on certain topics or items because that limits the information coming in while keeping a pleasant stimulus coming down the single pipeline. We like patterns and routines because we don’t have a lot of spare processing paths to manage changes: processing a change means not processing what we are actually interested in, such as our families, our projects, our careers. And if we do become momentarily overwhelmed, we can fill that processing path with a more pleasant sensory experience: a motion, a sound, the feel of an object. 

So. I am autistic. Given monotropism and hypersensitivity, what does being autistic mean to me?

When I speak, people look at me, confused. I speak like I write, when I can get the words out; but others don’t understand. They hadn’t asked me. They hadn’t wanted my opinion. They lose interest quickly. 

I never understood jokes.

I hate vacuum cleaners and airplane engines (though as a child, I loved airplanes themselves passionately). The sound of nylon on nylon or wool on wool makes me shudder but the feel of cashmere or fleece or raw Teflon are the most soothing sensations imaginable. I never grew out of the habit of putting objects in my mouth. 

But those are symptoms, not meaning. 

I have always felt like a person apart. I have named myself Observer, Outsider, Witness to events around me, not partaking in society, simply watching as life unfolds. I have questioned my humanity. I have never been able to name this difference that I knew existed.

It has a name, though. I am autistic. That’s all it is. There’s this sense of things slamming into focus, 41 years of nameless other-ness gone in an instant, a seismic shift in identity. I am autistic. It’s not alien; it’s not weird; it’s a named thing, a real-world concept with its own set of assumptions and definitions that goes along with it. I don’t have to call myself “quirky” or “weird” or “unique,” which have never felt right. Those are cutesy little half-truths that describe outward appearances but do not define me. I am autistic. That is a definition as integral to my identity as any other and that has been a part of me as long as I have been me, and now, finally, can be named.