I want to change the environment to support the needs of everyone, instead of placing the burden of being unseen on those of us with behavioral symptoms of our neurological differences.
I am 42, with pink and purple hair and I sing and dance in the grocery store aisle – not too much, not too loud, don’t want to get attacked for being my naturally playful self!
But I’m joining in making this a world where we actively teach everyone it’s okay to act silly and happy in public.
It's ok to piss off grumpy people, as long as we don't let them hurt us.
I am lucky enough to be a middle aged middle class white person with breasts. People are least likely to get away with attacking me in public.
So I see it as my Goddess-blessed moral imperative to help balance out this hypermasculinized culture with demonstrations of a world where feminine values are also revered as sacred.
I’m Never Gonna Not Dance Again.
I spent a few days in group therapy. This girl in her 20s said her mother slaps her and asks what’s wrong with her when she gets too excited in public and flaps her hands, like happy autistic people do.
I found that triggering, and a month later I can finally talk about it without getting so upset my brain shuts down. Now I am capable of working to solve the problem.
The problem is not ignorance.
The problem is mental wellness – her mother’s as well as her own, and our culture – our modern, profit-driven culture.
Knowledge doesn’t change minds.
Stories do.
So here is a story that I hope influences some minds.
I melted down in front of my sister and brother two months ago.
I thought we were close, so they must be capable of understanding and helping, but they were both terrified, and they left me in a mental health crisis.
It was not their fault I nearly chose self-termination. But that did happen. And I need to talk to them about it so it never happens again.
The need used to be overwhelmingly compulsive…the need to keep talking until I am sure we understand each other and that I am behaving and learning what I am supposed to.
But it took me two months to figure out how to reach out to my sister without going off at her.
Two months of shut down. If you know what autistic shutdown is like, I am both sorry you can commiserate with me, and relieved to know someone out there gets it.
But taking action and being authentic and careful – and choosing to put my trust in her ability to trust me – it was like cutting off the anchor that burdened me until I acted.
My siblings and I, we all have been through Hell. We all struggle all day every day with different ideas about why. We love each other and we have consistently shown our love to each other as best we could all our lives.
And I know it is on me to change myself so we can reconnect in love and trust after the disaster of their first visit since Dad died last year.
I have so many stories to share. But this is the story of how I chose life, and why I was able to, when so many like me are unable.
Autism feels a lot like being stuck all the time.
Things stick to us…labels, reputations, thoughts and feelings and experiences we can’t seem to let go or repress.
Our thoughts are sticky, but not the ones other people want us to make stick, oh no. The more we want to obey, the more we want to fit in, the harder it is to act the way we think they want us to. The harder it is to think at all.
The stress increases, the tension builds under the surface, we resist, we fight, we struggle to just keep it together until we can be alone, until we are safe.
Until we lose the ability to choose.
Anger is scary. It’s cost me everything more than once.
No one likes me when I’m angry. Especially not me.
But people still love me.
And I still love them.
I couldn’t calm down on for my siblings and six year old niece, and it was a bad meltdown, the worst since 2020.
My face was covered with self-inflicted bruises and I was humiliated that I’d done that, terrified that I’d forever destroyed my relationship with my siblings.
And in my terror, I made terrible decisions.
I yelled at my sister for tone-policing me instead of hearing her fear.
I “yelled” at my brother-in-common-law on IM for telling me I couldn’t process my feelings on Facebook because it was hurting my sister and brother, and blocked him.
I knew I was hurting them. I couldn’t stop melting down because I was overwhelmed. Adding demands to my fried brain added to the storm, to the panic.
In the storm, I can’t call on all my skills, learned so late in life. I can only fall back on the coping skills I mastered surviving growing up undiagnosed in 90s Orlando suburbs, my disabled dying mother’s caretaker, my little sister’s human shield, our baby prince’s punching bag.
I grew up feral in the suburbs instead of coddled by liberals, but when I was 12, mom died and we moved to “a better area” suburb, with well-funded schools.
And that, dear friends, is how I survived my last, final, ain’t never happening again, self-termination compulsion.
Because in the better funded schools lived families that raised their kids without violence, and some of them befriended me.
Kids that grow up feeling loved have very different lives than those of us who grow up told we’re loved by people who humiliate, beat, mock, and lie to us and about us in front of our faces to others we look up to, and in front of our peers.
And I learned that they liked it when I got us all together for a party.
So after graduation, every year for my birthday in May and every holiday season, I hosted a party, and invited everyone I loved.
My birthday falls near or on Mother’s Day every year, so people with mother’s were rarely available.
I maintained getting us together once a year until 2020.
We had a friendship habit, a tradition that united us as a group, memories to remember together, lives to update each other on.
I made it happen, but always felt like an outsider looking in.
The Earthborn Alien eats among the happy chattering humans she's known two decades and loves like siblings, listening to them talking about living their lives and I'm watching through a portal from another time, out of sync with the world around me.
But four of my friends I met in 1993-95 kept up with me through text, email, instant messenger, and or Marco Polo.
And Marco Polo lets me see myself while I’m talking. Which helps my alexythemic autistic self see my emotions reflected in my behavior.
Talking to two of my bestest and longest friends, knowing they were watching, I told them everything going through my mind, stream of conscious.
I told them I had 13 pills and they couldn’t kill me unless I took them with alcohol, and where the alcohol I’d bought for that purpose was hidden.
I thought about how they must be feeling, and what I must be feeling.
I talked about my love for my children and my husband, and how I couldn’t feel anything, so I must be dissociated.
Dissociation from my overwhelming emotional distress let me reason with the self-terminal giver-upper part of myself.
First I talked myself into telling my husband. The next time he came in, I wasn’t ready yet, but the time after that I told him to take the alcohol and dump it and hide the medicine.
If he had fought me for them, taken things from me, gotten upset with me, reacted in any way other than calm acceptance and warm love, my amygdala would have stormed again, and I might have been hospitalized, which would have further traumatized me.
I joined group therapy because of the near attempt.
That is a whole other story. So let’s end this story with the part where I reached out to my psychiatrist, my therapist, my closest friends, with my health insurance I get through my husband.
In Florida, being married disqualifies me to receive disability. So, that makes it my job to use my privileged education and skills to advocate for my people. My job is to earn money with my art, somehow.
My job is to teach myself business skills so I can help support my family with all my other skills.
Thankfully, I know of others like me who made their dreams come true and blogged about it, so I can binge read and pattern seek.
Adventures of an Earthborn Alien 