Note: the original version includes a downloadable audio recording. It’s here: link to Elf Theory.
People keep telling me I might be autistic. I’ve heard it from friends and acquaintances recently, always with some hedging. Not that it’s an offensive remark these days. Autism is thick in the 2020s cultural bloodstream; everyone who seems a little quirky probably gets comments from time to time. There are good reasons not to put too much stock in them. This post sums up my thoughts here.
Before I go further, I need to do some hedging myself. Pop-psych versions of autism bother me so much that I find it a difficult topic to think about, let alone write about. The stereotypes have nothing to do with how I see autism as a real, living thing, it’s just that they’re awful, and they can get under your skin even if you don’t think they will. I have more to say on that, but first, a bit about my twin.He was diagnosed when we were two. By the time we were five, the care he required was so extensive that my family had to place him in a boarding institution. This was in the early 90s, before most people were familiar with autism as anything other than a narrow set of cognitive problems and savant capabilities (the latter is largely thanks to Rain Man and other Hollywood abominations.) As far as I know, my parents learned as much about it as they could, trying to keep him home. Back then the treatments weren’t as advanced as they are now, but he’s so far on the “autism” side of the autism spectrum that I don’t think the outcome would’ve been different if we were younger.
I know I’m speaking in normative terms, the language of treating – healing – altering a person’s natural state. It’s hard for me not to. I would like to talk to my brother and have him respond. I would like him to be more of a presence in my life. These thoughts push the limits of my counterfactual imagination.
Until recently, I always thought I had a lot to lose and not much to gain with a diagnosis. It’s not about stigma, especially since the stigma isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. In 2021, Autism Awareness Month became Autism Acceptance Month, a designation my family would have found bewildering back in the day, but I suppose it’s an encouraging development. The thing is that the very same force that got people comfortable with autism, at least to some degree, has made me want to keep my distance from conversations about it, at least those in the public sphere. I mean the internet. It produces autism as an object of knowledge and ostensible totality. What I’ve found about autism online doesn’t even come close to approximating my experiences with my brother, or those that make me think I might be autistic too. It’s not just that I don’t want to be seen as uncritically following pop-psych trends; I’m more bothered by the possibility that even if I kept a diagnosis to myself, it would start to become a kind of psychic furniture. I’d feel recruited into the same operations that don’t register my brother as a real person, on account of the fact that he can’t use the internet. The data of his life as he lives it will never be available online. In the age of language machines, people without language don’t exist.
But my thoughts about getting diagnosed have started to shift. I realize I may have spent far more time experiencing a certain kind of pain than most non-autistic people ever will. This is what I hear. I always thought that the pain was normal, but the possibility that it isn’t means there’s a chance that I could figure out how to avoid it in the future. If this is true, I’d be an idiot not to try, even if it means profiling myself in a way that’s useful to stupid politics.
As I mentioned, I am aware that plenty of non-autistic people get clocked as autistic by their friends. It’s the zeitgeist. So, going off the autistic-woman checklist, I’ll share why I think I might qualify: prone to philosophizing (no kidding) and intense embarrassment; sees the world in terms of patterns and structures; tends to lose track of time in the midst of focus-intensive activities (usually writing – but isn’t that normal for writers and other creative types…); and, although I am not especially credulous about abstract matters like politics, I can be overly trusting in personal affairs. Historically, I’ve failed to view certain forms of behavior as aggressive, deceptive, or otherwise symptomatic of disorder or bad intent. (I’ve tried to correct for this over the years; moving a lot, especially between big cities, has helped.)
More than any of that, though, I tend to keep autistic company. My first boyfriend had Asperger’s and was quite candid about what it meant for us. Another fit the pattern to a T, but we never talked about it. Friends and coworkers told us they were autistic; we visited my brother; but for however long he suspected that either one of us had more than a mere affinity with it, he kept it to himself. This was before the great onlineing of autism and the emergence of “neurodivergent” as a well-known term. It seems quaint and maybe unbelievable if you’re under a certain age, but not long ago, you could seem pretty damn autistic and not have anyone mention it.
In the weeks leading up to our break-up – three years into the relationship – he told me he thought he might be. I was very glad to hear it, but since it took a lot of courage, I didn’t want to react too strongly. I don’t remember exactly how I replied. It’s hard for me to reconstruct in memory, because it’s part of a chain of events that ends with his death. Autism has a lot of comorbidities, and my helplessness in that situation is something I’ll probably never get over completely.
I have a recurring dream where my brother and I speak. They take place in different settings, but we’re always talking freely, just he and I. It’s perfectly intelligible on both ends. He is telling me something about himself.
I’m aware of The Telepathy Tapes, the podcast that “proves” a link between autism and magical abilities (telepathy, precog, connection to a higher power etc.). I won’t watch or listen because I don’t see how it could avoid exploiting autistic people and their families. It’s very popular, but I want no part of this phenomenon. I wish I could talk about my dreams without giving a foothold to projects like this.
But there is some spiritual significance in how I think about autism. I think that if I’ve got it at all, even the tiniest little drop, it presents as a kind of inflation of meaning – a sense that the codes of language aren’t just stacked on top of each other but are also arranged horizontally. Words come with a surplus – more shades of connotation, more points of contact with primordial mana than what we typically pick up on and put into communicative play. This confounds one of the big autistic stereotypes: I like poetry, I understand metaphor.
I see this as an autistic trait because symptomatic extremes in either direction often share a root cause. A strong taste or distaste for certain foods can start with the same nutrient deficiency. Attributing too little meaning to language, to an “autistic” or even schizoid degree, can come from the same psycho-physical constitution that makes a woman blush at the most mundane of sentences. All words are poetry; actual poetry is so intense as to be profane; music and perfume and elegant clothing are mana.
I like a lot of femme-coded things that autistic people aren’t supposed to like. Actually I don’t know if those clichés still exist…
When I say autism is you and I, I mean that this expansive dimension of communication follows me to everyday interactions. If I qualify for a diagnosis, I’d want to tell people it doesn’t isolate me. If anything, it helps me get on their wavelength.
Mostly my twin isn’t just a reference to my twin, it’s also because the figure of the autistic person has shown up as a metaphysical double over and over again since I was young. I was really close with my ex who died. The drawn-out process of witnessing life and clarity drain from his spirit was a formative experience. The form that this experience seems to want to take keeps changing. This is the first time I’m writing about it. It’s decades of insomnia that reconstitute themselves moment to moment, often without a signal or bridge to anything that seems like it could possibly ring true for anyone but me.
I know I said this post would be about something else. That one is still in the works. This one is a précis: words that model better words. It’s all I have so far; I hope I get closer to the truth eventually.