ANATOMY OF
A XENOWOLF
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Regardless of the (absent-present) methodology, there is also no concrete results section. All you have are clues and cues remaining mostly illegible to you. All you have is the instinctive gut-rumble that tells you “Oh, this is not acceptable in the eyes of these others, the ones above me in the hierarchy and the ones who speak with an almost imperceptible film of hostility coating their words.” And it’s not like you can ask a follow-up question for clarification either, that would be “back talking.” (Also known as replying, responding, or reciprocal communication.)
When I was little, my friends and I played a roleplay game where we decided between being werewolves or vampires. I don’t remember there being rules other than identifying yourself from the outset and I sincerely don’t think there were any. The “game” was to choose which you felt an affinity for and run with it, literally. We’d run, aimlessly chasing each other during recess; an inexhaustible routine of run, be, run.
While I see the appeal of both vampire and werewolf-hood, I typically chose to be the latter on the playground. A borderline obsession with the Underworld films could be at fault: my dad introduced them to me when I was in second grade. Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman being a thing together was a bisexual awakening for sure. But, I just simply didn’t identify with her as much as I did him. She was perfection itself, secure, assertive, sleek, an immortal “Death Dealer” badass.
But him? He floundered. His hunger, his starving, his immediately throwing up a meal that he devoured ravenously in public, his confusion, his being thrust into an unstable world with rules and lore and dynamics that are vital to his survival and yet so out of reach. It all felt like mine.
Beyond his confusion– which, to be fair to him, is valid as fuck given the circumstances– I identified with him physically, emotionally, resonantly. When they have sex in the second film, his slim hips matched hers in a way that made me feel like they could be interchangeable, technically, but something about his was a delicious masculine I needed to consume so I could become it.
What the problem is is that you’re doing identity formation– a person’s inner world-building, via categorizing other people’s responses to you socializing as you are; and people, kids especially, are mean as hell. You spend your early childhood exploring boundaries, observing, collecting empirical data on all the responses you get to being yourself around others. It's an experiment centered around visibility, it’s a methodical metaphorical testing of the waters for whether people want to even be around you at all. It’s trying to be human with other humans and seemingly failing.
My hands have always been large, strong, a source of pride. I have long slender fingers and I’ve only met a handful (ha, pun) of people my age with hands larger than mine. Once, a person we hung out with in high school told me they were “bear paws” and I flushed from being compared to such a grandly powerful animal. I mean come on, a bear? What a compliment, my being a composition of beastliness.
One of the most agonizing parts about cutting your hair is the fantasizing about it for years in advance. I feared it would look bad, but really there’s more to it than that. I thought about how devastating short hair could be for women, especially in
a (hostile) place like where I’m from. I thought about the way Pinterest’s search engine recommended “round face” after I typed “pixie cut” and then provided me with articles helpfully explaining how to cut your hair perfectly to your face shape in order to avoid “looking fat.” A “round face” could be a liability when getting short hair, cutting it a gamble.
No longer would I have something so convenient obscuring my face and I feared that I’d do it, hate it, and be proven wrong. Worries included that it wouldn’t feel freeing and I would actually hate myself more on the other side of it; I knew I would have a hard time bouncing back if any increase in public-facing masculinity backfired and made me feel worse.
[Spoiler alert: it didn’t, it made me feel like myself. It was gender affirming self-care that I needed.]
the frame
I’ve always been a writer, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. In true “gifted kid” fashion, my preferred form of escapism from this cruel wrld’s violence was reading. I inhaled books and after a while got the bright idea to write my own. I started my first novel in fourth grade, hit page 87, and threw it in the outdoor trash at my Gama’s house like it was forensic evidence I didn’t want people to connect back to me. Which is silly because I’d already had my teacher take it home to edit (if she wanted, I told her I didn’t want to put more work on her). I also had Gama and Campa (her husband, my paternal grandfather) read it; Gama was astounded, Campa pointed out that I misspelled “fifteen.”
I stopped writing fiction, but picked it back up in middle school in the form of fanfic. (Which, I still get people leaving kudos and comments on, by the way. Both are unfinished because, well, it’s as they say: fanfic writers live batshit lives.) But I kept journals. I've always been writing. I've written so much down.
Historically, communication– which is what writing is, talking– wasn’t always easy for me.
Certain methods and techniques for how to talk to others did not compute with my brain. Like small talk or being taken advantage of or signs of one’s romantic or sexual attraction to me. And, isn’t that something everyone’s supposed to just get? How can you not “get it”? Why didn’t I “get it”?
When you’re fourteen and leaving eighth grade for high school, you hug your (Millennial, hilarious) French teacher goodbye. She kindly says that she’s excited to see what you get up to in the rest of your life. She says she’s going to miss chatting (you’re a chronic teacher’s pet partially because they have more interesting perspectives/conversations than your peers generally do). She cries a tiny bit and laughs, “You’re just like already a high schooler, you know? You’re an old soul.”
“Nothing works
Nothing works for everyone
Good stories are bad lives
Good stories are bad lives”
— Sober to Death, Car Seat Headrest
My manly pride rears its ugly head in my reaction to my family’s feelings– trying to remain my intermediary self. A man steps up to the plate, a man provides for his family, a man remains stoic until he can’t. A man works until he breaks.
Autistic people often struggle with processing and intuiting natural bodily cues, such as needing to eat, use the bathroom, rest, and more. As with most everything, the ability to externalize is “lacking.” We’re so stuck in our inner worlds that even our own vital internal alarms forget to communicate. One second I’m feeling myself slip into hyperfocus on an interesting assignment and the next, eight hours have passed and I’ve needed to pee for the last three at minimum. It’s kidney damage by way of incurable absent-mindedness.
“‘Cause your pain is a tribute
The only thing you let hold you
Wear it now like a mantle
Always there to remind you
I’m the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change
I am the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change
I am the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change
I am the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change”
In sixth grade, you’re walking home alongside an exodus of middle schoolers marginally-to-much wealthier than you. It’s a half day and there’s a Wendy’s eight blocks into your usual route that dozens of hungry preteens are about to descend upon. You feel bad for the underpaid workers, since your mom has worked as a waitress at nearly all the restaurants in Jackson– maybe all is a stretch, but she is pretty in the know on all. And, many of the restaurants in Jackson seem to function at best as a kinda middling episode of Kitchen Nightmares, so it’s especially rough out here.
There’s kids around you that you know from class, but it’s not like you’ve had the chance to talk to them really. You don’t have a phone or internet, and your stepmom has forbidden social media anyways if you did. (You won’t get access to any of that until after your (other) mom dies in less than four years, but you don’t know that at this point and that’s neither here nor there.) But now there’s an open opportunity to connect and you’re chatty on a good day. It’s a half day so it’s a good day.
Somewhere along the way, in a conversation with a girl named Caroline, you mention something revealing of your socio-economic status. You tip your hand without even realizing there was card-comparing
going on– and in short order, she tells you, “Oh I didn’t know you were poor. Like, you hide it really well, you don’t seem like other poor people.” You’re confused about why the fuck that’d be something you’d need to hide and in your bewilderment, you fall silent (again). After y’all finish middle school, she’s one of few students in your class who go to Lumen Christi– your high school, J-High’s rival. It’s a private Catholic high school that costs $9,750 (but, up to $12,035?) per year to attend.
“The rain is waiting, expectative
God is in the rhythm”
the meat
It’s summertime and hot, your stepmom is very pregnant with your brother. (She’ll give birth to him in the middle of August.) You’ve watched her grow into “real” maternity, the adjective suggested by others as if she wasn’t already one of your moms. (She gets mad at you when you describe either your younger brother or older sister as “half-siblings,” though that’s technically what they are. Sensitive to the idea that that means “less than,” she interprets it as a rejection and not the tacit knowledge it is and that you mean to use it as in your speech.)
From what you’ve observed of this, it’s been hellish. Beyond the physical difficulties of pregnancy itself, she’s been treated largely as a “vessel”– you heard her self-identify as that in cries of pain after we visited extended family for the holidays and no one cared enough to ask about her wellbeing over that of the unborn inside her when they greeted it (the vessel(ed)-fetus). You sense that she’s scared of what that means for who she is now and will be after, and whether her loved ones care about her as an individual.
In the car that morning, when the coworker drops something off and slides back into the driver’s seat of the minivan, you ask your question.
“Do you like having kids?”
It’s earnest and takes her aback. You won’t remember what specific affirmatives she gives, but you will remember her clear bemusement at your curiosity.
You asked because to you, kids mean pain and sacrifice. (Kids are often accidental, of course.) Kids mean your body is no longer yours. (If it ever was. My biological mother was very explicitly pressured into getting pregnant with one of us.) Kids mean you are a gynae-spectacle for nine months of public bodily contestation. (Strangers with hands outreached in grocery store aisles want to touch her belly and she startles, visibly uncomfortable.) Kids mean you could be a kid having a kid and still be forced to have the kid before you’re done being a kid. (The first time you were sexually assaulted in some way you were six and a half. It couldn’t have resulted in pregnancy but you never know about these things, you know?) Your insides are no longer yours, and on the outside, everyone has something shitty to say to you in anticipation of the birth. (It will happen. For her? Not until mid-August. As for you? Now then, isn’t that the question? Many are asking.)
What you’re really asking is, “Has it been worth all your pain? Have your children been worth your sacrifice?”
In the passenger seat, you shake off your mild embarrassment and the two of you have a good conversation. Or, at least that’s how you feel walking away from it. In a few days time, you’ll revisit it unexpectedly during dinner. Your stepmom talks about how her coworker shared it with her and everyone working that day; apparently, they had a good laugh. You feel a twinge of betrayal and consider why a question asked with such sincerity and an unspoken painful context would warrant such a reaction. You don’t get it, and she tells you, “It’s just a mature question for a kid to ask.” [Read: weird]
When I was little, my older sister Ziola told me that while I was “booksmart,” I was also “street dumb.” I didn’t agree, or at least the distinction didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me– but I got the impression it wasn't my place to disagree. This wasn’t a suggestion, this was an informal diagnosis. Protesting her use of the word “dumb” did nothing:
“Is that any better?” I ask.
Once again, my identity is not an issue of flaw, per se, but a matter of lack. Or, if we’re being queer about it, social failure à la intrinsic nonconformity. I am who I am, and it’s not enough, I think. Or, so I thought as a child. I know better now. I think.
You are thirteen when you and your younger sister (who’s eleven) go spend the day at your stepmom’s coworker’s house. You don’t live in this state, only while on breaks from school, and you don’t have any friends during the summer as a result. (No phone yet, thus no connection to those still in your hometown either. It’s immensely isolating.) You watch your sister play Xbox with the coworker’s rude ass son (also eleven), who is using his advanced knowledge of Halo to be a tool. You low-key turn into a babysitter for his two much younger sisters. You had a feeling this would happen, maybe because of the exchange you had had with their mom while running errands.
Truthfully, there actually isn’t a methodology; the process of learning to be a human is all trial and error. The guidelines contain no rules and that’s pretty frustrating, so I understand if you need to pause. Really, it’s just a collection of genre conventions, you can take them or you can leave them. You can fulfill and subvert; you can flip it on its head and submit.
“And I wrote down:
We must come to recognize that God is an unlimited supply
And that everyone has access
God does not run out of blessings
Someone else receiving a gift from God is not one taken away from you
And I wanna apply this and practice this in my daily life, thank you
Receiving God’s good is an act of worship
And cooperating with God's plan will manifest goodness in your life”
I lost my shit once when Ava said that Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine looked like a man because, well, it was somewhat true. It freaked me out that I could want to be like someone who got clocked as an abnormal feminine so easily. I think it’s the strong jawline and intense eye contact I believe Florence and I can both pull off.
One of the more notorious autistic traits is an aversion to eye contact– which, oof yeah, eye contact is rough. When I was younger, I convinced myself it was fine if my
brain had “wee woo” alarm style panic responses whenever I had to maintain eye contact with someone. Ava struggled with it too (and continues to), but she’s always subscribed to a personal politics of refusal and never let anyone talk her down from what she knew was best for her. (Autistic folks can have issues with willingly being pushovers for authority figures, which really doesn’t make those kinds of power-trippy people happy. We bring a “oh y’all some are indirect, passive
AGGRESSIVE, ineffective communicators with contrived implied expectations” vibe that can rain on (neurotypically oppressive) parades.) I, on the other hand, just always forced myself to do as I was told and suffered in silence.
But I watched her get shit constantly from (rude) adults, oh so helpfully, informing her “you’re never going to get a job if you can’t make eye contact during the interview.” Often, they didn’t say it near as kindly and there is some validity to what they had to say, but it’s still unacceptable. If only they’d use that same energy for educating themselves on autism, advocating for normalizing less eye contact to be more inclusive, or you know, not perpetuating what’s functionally unnecessary for a person to be a person.
Personally, of the changes I’ve made in my own life since accepting that I’m autistic, eye contact and embracing my natural lack thereof has been especially liberating. I know it disappoints some, I’ve been told that my eye contact is “magical.” Someone told me once that it's like they can see the totality of a person’s face better via eye contact, that mine were “soulful” and “intense.” I suspected as much, I’ve noticed that nowadays people sometimes startle when I finally do look them in the eyes. (Additionally, for those not in the know, a key part of autistic culture is that some folks actually overcompensate for not intuiting the “appropriate” amount of eye contact in a conversation. Remember, it’s autism spectrum disorder– so it’s not about there always being a deficit of that type of connection, it’s about “irregularity.” Basically, sometimes we go too hard on the eye contact.) Beyond the autism, my eyes are also blue-gray, so I feel a particular kinship with the Miley Cyrus wild-eyes meme.
Run Lola Run (1998) represents one of the best moving-imaginary depictions of what it’s like to experience neurodivergent time. (Neuro-)queer temporality rejects linearity and embraces failure, because we who live so abnormally understand there will always be an eventual falter. It’s about how you internalize it and whether you dust yourself off and press restart. Progress isn't a straight move from point A to point B, why do we pretend it is? Why do we pretend interrelational moments are?
Said in a more concrete, specific way: have y’all ever listened to a neurodivergent person tell a story? It’s all over the fucking place, it’s on the walls, it’s detail-ridden, it’s delivered in a delicious hybrid of monotone enthusiasm and time-jumpy playfulness. It can be so hyper-specific, it's painful. Regardless of whether you’re able to follow, it is comprehensive.
appreciate in hindsight my ex’s accidental gender affirmation. Once, he gave me a pair of his boxers for keepsake and I became obsessed with the feeling I had wearing them. At the time, I misinterpreted my euphoria as delight in sharing something with him. My joy was redirected and misread as a loyalty for my boyfriend, the boxers then meant confirmation that he loved me and wanted me to think about him.
While I now understand that the almost six years we spent together was a mistake, I
My time on the internet as a digital studies scholar involves collecting a metric fuckton of screenshots. The anti-public online sphere is fascinating; the way people comment-jump to conclusions with rage, grief, disgust, and fear is so bald-faced and unapologetic. One might find me in these forums (mostly Instagram comments) advocating for empathy and offering a reality check of “Hey you rude damaged fuck, it’s not your place to tell this person how to feel.”
Example given: right, below.
@shed.tbh hey, I get what you're saying but I don't think you have the right to "be the guys who says it." Yeah, it's an emotional topic, and it's trauma that Sophia here says she's been through some type of in the past ("I would rather die than go through that [trauma] entirely alone again"). You actually don't know that she feels differently than she said she did right here. Personally, the first time I was sexually assaulted I was 6 and yeah, there are times where I've been like, I'd rather die than expereince all of the people (mostly men, sorry but it's true in my xase) who blamed me for it happening WHEN I WAS SIX YEARS OLD. My pain of randomly being assaulted was too much for them to understand or handle and so they dismissed it as a possibility of being random, or said it was something I asked for (i.e. what were you wearing? etc) The problem is that here, when sexual assault victims testify to the way that these assaults made them feel, there is ALWAYS "the guy that says it" in the comment section saying something dismissive, trying to rationalize it to suit their narrative ("It's just illogical"). No it isn't, it's just someone else's pain that you have absolutely zero right to diminish in the way you are right now.
“Too fast for freedom
Sometimes it all falls down
These chains never leave me,
I keep dragging them around
Now I’m dancing with Delilah and her vision is mine
A different kind of danger in the daylight
Took anything to cut you I [could] find
A different kind of danger in the daylight”
But, I will say– I tried really hard to be a woman, I tried so hard to be the best woman I could be, testing out my gender presentation in a
variety of flavorful aesthetics over my adolescence. I identified most with the manic pixie dream girl trope, because feminine autism is exotic. (It’s not, it’s just overlooked, dismissed, trivialized, etc in our culture. It’s rendered invisible and illegible, and thus unknowable and unverifiable– that’s kinda the whole point of all these mis/under/late-diagnoses, I fear. It’s so our grievances are easier to invalidate.) I identified with the hand-sewing, the homesteading, the handmaiden, the help meet. I identified, quite happily I might add, as Aunt Liv. I identified as a girlfriend and accessory for so long. It took me too wayyyyy long to understand that winning trophies for myself was a) possible and b) significantly more rewarding than being one for an eventual Him.
This the type of shit that makes your kids go no-contact with you: You’re casually cruel and blatantly disrespectful for your own amusement and/or stress relief. You punch down and pull the ladder up behind you whenever you find success. You say that your child moving away to college is what made them “woke,” not realizing that what’s actually going on is they found a family willing to see and hear them, not deride them at every turn– I would put money on the idea that you do not have the emotional intelligence to recognize they were fortunate enough to find better after hauling ass to get away from you as soon as they could (physically, legally, financially, emotionally).
It’s hard to hear, but you might be the problem– and your instinct towards searching for an inherent defect in your child, or a “social contagion” that’s taken away the idealized image of your child that you’ve been fostering all these years, is definitely a problem. It’s painful, I know. But your child closing their door to you means y’all’s attachment wasn’t that secure in the first place. It feels like a rejection and it is technically, but I believe that in the grander scheme of things, it’s also an invitation to grow. It’s a sign from God for your moment of reckoning.
Example given: say your child comes out as trans, or queer, or something. Starts dating someone of another race. Begins questioning the faith system under which they were raised. Upon meeting other folks, they hear perspectives so different from where they’ve been raised with you that it feels almost otherworldly and yet is not; they all are, in fact, of God’s scorched earth, too. They meet new people and they love them and in the process, learn to love themselves a little more.
In response, you freak the fuck out. Call them slurs, beat them, threaten monetarily, accuse them of being (sexually and/or morally) perverse, and more. Or, maybe you can give yourself a pat on the back and a parent of the year participation trophy because you didn’t do that: you just give them a blank look and refuse to talk about it with them, or become visibly uncomfortable every time they try to share their life with you. The life wherein they're living more authentically and true to themselves than you could ever dream possible.
What would you do if you were in their shoes? Would what Jesus do? (Definitely the things described above, for sure for sure 😜😜)
Thank the Lord, I haven’t had someone deny me my autism (at least not to my face) yet. I sort of wish a motherfucker would, I have a lot of pent up rage to take out on someone (discursively, of course). Regardless, I’m well aware of the trend of autism-deniers saying unhinged shit like “you’re not autistic, you don’t look autistic!” [which is typically them being confused that autistic folks can be visually-aesthetically appealing, or they’re panicking subconsciously that they’re attracted to an autistic person and in denial mode].
--“You’re not autistic, you’re too smart!” [yeah, smart enough to understand this is a stupid argument– y’all literally cling to autistic “representations” like Sheldon Cooper, the mythic “idiot savant” is your bland bread and butter understanding of what autism can be. For what it’s worth, I prefer Temperance Brennan from Bones. Confirmed as autistic by showrunner Hart Hanson, Hanson says he was disallowed by the network from explicitly calling her autistic. “If we were on cable, we would have said from the beginning that Brennan has [Asperger’s, which is now considered an outdated term given Hans Asperger’s ties to the Nazi Party and generally eugenicist bent]. Instead, it being a network, we decided not to label a main character, for good or for bad. But those elements are in there.”]
--“You’re not autistic, you’re successful!” [Hon, I mean this with such kindness– come the fuck on, it’s ASD, or autism spectrum disorder. My strengths happen to be profitable, as I have willed them to be overtime. My weaknesses, my support needs, are admittedly low, but still there. They are still disabling, and truthfully, respectfully– you don’t know the inner workings of my life. What trials hide behind a veneer of ease? I regularly forget to brush my teeth and shower. (Autistic brains don’t love habits. We have to consciously build routines and never stray if we want things to stick.) I’m chronically underemployed and live paycheck to paycheck. I eat once a day, usually, because I’m very poor and forgetful and have issues with task initiation and when in an especially rough spot/unmedicated, I can lose the ability to think in multiple steps. It makes cooking and getting groceries tricky. I have delayed emotional processing, meaning the plot can be lost and it can take me several years to realize a person was being a dick to me.]
Dear elders, are you judging me? Think I’m lazy or stupid or whiny or pathetic? Am I part of an entitled generation who can’t be bothered to take care of themselves? Fuck off. I look forward to outliving you and repairing the damage you’ve done.
You are sixteen and sitting in the cafeteria, the lunch period has just begun and there’s masses filtering in to find their place among limited seats. (Genuinely, Jackson High was overcrowded and there weren’t enough chairs for everyone; your freshman year, a dude took one out from under your friend's stuff while they were in line,
dumped all of their things on the floor, and while taking it, hit you in the head with its metal leg. You exclaim and lock eyes with the two officers who always stand near your friends’ table. They look at the guy carrying away the chair, shrug at you like what?, and look away.)
the guts
You’re talking with a girl named Madie, who has lived an oddly similar life as you. You’re talking about sexual assault and harassment– the newest freshmen class has a group of stupid ass boys calling themselves “the Bird Gang” who keep groping girls in the hall and taking pictures and videos up [our] skirts. One of you puts their chips all in on the significance of this conversation and shares a few of your own times being used as a sex-toy by strangers, both much older men and boys who never get told off.
Right at that moment, another friend, Connor, comes by and puts his stuff down on the table. He overhears what you’re talking about, somewhat, and says, “Oh that doesn’t happen though– you don’t have to worry about that, it’s stuff that girls make up.”
You turn, in disgust, and explain that you’re detailing your own lived experiences. His embarrassment at what’s a really grievous mistake is almost nonexistent and that enrages you more. You could cry– and do, have, often– reliving all the times you’ve been made to feel uncomfortable in your own body because a selfish male has a hard-on.
“Finally, in the epilogue of this book, I revisit questions of what it means to interrelate when one’s bodymind has been deemed pathologically asocial, or residually rhetorical. Among an encyclopedic list of impairments, autistics are said to lack metarepresentational and empathic abilities, a lack that is supposedly evidenced by our misuse of pronouns– swapping first and third person, privileging proper nouns over pronouns, and engaging other such usage errors. What is sociality without a you or me? As a means of closing, I posit a queering of autistic pronouns, a queering of relational indexes. An asocial present is often rendered by clinicians as a nonexistent future, an autopocalypse: More people are becoming autistic; therefore, more people are becoming nonpeople.” (Yergeau, 34)
The girls’ bathroom in my elementary school at one point was a remarkably stable fixture in my dreams. I threw up a banana in one of its two stalls once. (It was my breakfast and they had us running laps at 8 in the morning for some goddamn reason.)
Perhaps it was that same day after gym class, or perhaps it wasn’t, but I remember looking at myself in the bathroom’s mirror and feeling a lightning bolt of fear course through me:
I was sweating so badly and wanted desperately to put my hair up. Waist-length honey blond hair, however pretty it can be in sunlight, gets matted when slick with sweat; it’s miserable. But, I couldn’t pull it back into a ponytail despite the hair tie around my wrist. I worried I would lose my femininity or would look too masculine without my curtain to hide behind and something about that felt dangerous. People would notice the masculinity, I was sure of it. They’d sniff it out, intuit my deviance and how much I looked like an ugly little boy. A sweaty tomato-red boygirl not worth respecting (and very fun to use as a punching bag!) So, I kept elastics on hand just in case, never used them for their intended purposes, and considered my suffering a womanly penance.
“I ask these questions somewhat desperately. There is an exigency here. How can we– in the classroom, in the clinic, in the pages of our scholarly annals– how can we transform social spaces in ways that enable those distant Others to speak back? How might we reinvent discourse on rhetoricity and intentionality and in/voluntarity and abjection in ways that are critically savvy and conscious of disabled embodiment?
For my part, I want a rhetoric that tics, a rhetoric that stims, a rhetoric that faux pas, a rhetoric that averts eye contact, a rhetoric that lobs theories about ToM [theory of mind] against the wall.” (Yergeau, 31)
You’re walking through a sad, decrepit department store in a sad mall in a sad hometown, and there’s a skylight letting in light and you want to sit enclosed within the fragility of their rays for a while.
There’s a gif of the transformation in An American Werewolf in London (1981) – it fascinated me when I first saw it and, mesmerized, I watched it on loop; it gave me a(n albeit dramatic) means for visualizing how my own skull felt stretched, bone pushed to its limits trying to accommodate excess.
Now with the benefit of hindsight, I understand the sensory nightmare that was most of my time being in school; the fact that I was having daily panic attacks so bad– that I didn’t know I was-am autistic and thus didn’t know the frenetic awful buzz, the tenuous ring in my ears, and the off kilter feeling of the pressure inside my skull– all of it was sensory overload, overstimulation, meltdown, shutdown, self-harm stimming to self-regulate. (Which, if you want specifics: scratching myself till I bled in the middle of class so that I could center my thinking on the pain, focus, and stop losing my goddamn mind.) I just needed to answer the questions being asked, to fill out worksheets, or hit the ball while the environment encouraged my brain to cannibalize itself. What the fuck was-is wrong with me that I can’t seem to naturally pull it together enough, in certain environments, to stay in a conversation or coordinate my movement well?
Dad says that he’s sad he didn’t have a son so he could put him in little suits and though you’re too young to talk a whole lot, something about his statement feels wrong to you in a way you wouldn’t be able to name even if you could speak.
The short answer? It’s my brain, it’s my neurotype. It’s the configuration of this particular network of neural pathways and associations; the algorithmic above, our Creator, gifted me with a brain that makes
connections differently, my own cybernetic, idiosyncratic processor. The bandwidth I have for such things as not being overwhelmed by bright sunlight and daylight shots on IMAX screens in dark theaters? Practically nonexistent. The capacity I have for listening to multiple sources of auditory input and being able to separate the sounds and discern individual words without subtitles? Pretty minimal.
There’s evidence that resting autistic brains, on average, can be processing up to 42% more information than a resting neurotypical brain.
On being “emotionally unavailable”: that’s complete fucking bullshit and something for which I will never fully forgive the person who said this (who probably never thought about it again after her typing fingers concretized the opinion and hit send back in 2021). I’m not emotionally unavailable and would rather unkindly argue that I’ve served as a mostly-disrespected emotional receptacle for much of my life. If we’re being accurate, I’m not emotionally unavailable, but I am/can be affectless.
This is not accidental, per se, nor necessarily inadvertent. I have a killer poker face, significant self-control, and a disgustingly high pain tolerance. Why? Well, I’m autistic and wearing a mask in order to perform well socially is really just living with a lot of cognitive dissonance and hiding your distress well. But, put more simply, it's because I’ve seldom trusted others with my sincerest pain, but I’ve always been willing to listen, willing to (hyper-)empathize, willing to give. So what happened is roughly 90% of my close relationships from the first nineteen years of my life equated to me doing fuck tons of playing therapist for the other person and receiving close to zero care or intimate emotional support in return. It’s difficult, it’s not that I’m emotionally unavailable, it’s that I don’t fucking trust you. Truth is, I never have. Not with the real stuff because you showed me that I couldn’t.
Many of the only times my dad and I spent time alone together was when we were building something. Between Ava and myself, I’ve been the more helpful by far. Aves, bless her, hasn’t ever been super into offering her assistance, but I’ve always privately held a masochistic belief that people might like me or at least keep me around if I’m useful to them. I’ve also always been a good listener, fast learner, and physically strong, so: I became my father’s assistant each time a break from school came around.
I was aware then as I am aware now that it was convenient for my dad to try to time home improvement projects for when I would be in town, for when I could offer my hands and my back, my skills and my flashlight-holding ability. To be fair to him, he also worked on his own– often, too often– or would recruit my Uncle Jon or Uncle Kevin. Most of the time, I delighted in being his right hand man, brimming with pride that he trusted me to be the one to do the work. Laboring with him, I felt both masculine and feminine; sometimes I was condescended to, but for the most part, it was equal opportunity.
There were gendered tensions beyond my dad’s control though. For as much as I am the man I felt like I was on the job site, the reality of my anatomical sex– female, a pernicious Objective Truth™ I’ve been reckoning with all my life– could sometimes confront me in stark and brutal terms. In the summer of 2019, we were contracted to build a 500 ft fence for someone in my dad’s department. The woman and her husband were having a lot of work done actually, including hiring a different pair to build a deck off the side of their house. Something of an undertaking, they wanted an accompanying door carved out of their siding/then-living room, stairs with a (handmade locally) wrought iron railing, a taller privacy fence for the seating area, and almost all-new electrical work. The builders taking on that to-do list included a sweet man in his late 60s or early 70s whose name escapes me and then fucking Mike, who was in his late 30s or 40s.
My role in the operation involved a lot of detail work. Our intricate design had alternating slats of wood, and it was my responsibility to prepare each board– sanding them all twice, then cleaning and staining them navy blue. I ran the sander for hours each day and usually put my earbuds in, kinda did my own thing. I was support, there to give my dad new bits to implement and install. We did not work with the other men, but did share a construction zone and chatted.
One day, I asked-told my dad I was staying home– something something college applications kept me there, I think. When he came back from work that night, he told me about an exchange he’d had. The old man was gone, taking a scheduled hiatus for a surgical procedure he had, and Mike, as his sole apprentice, was acting in his stead. On lunch, my dad and Mike shot the shit and Mike asked him, “Hey, who is that woman that’s usually with you? Is she a student from around here?” (We live in a college town, my dad works at the college.)
My dad explained that I was (operative word here, was) his seventeen-year-old daughter. To which, Mike responded, “Wow, seventeen?” I can’t remember if there was more and I never heard him say it with my own ears, but the intonation that my dad used to repeat Mike’s words back to me was lecherous. His clarifying question on my age was, without a doubt, an admission of guilt.
To me, my dad added, “I wanted to hit him.” He didn’t, of course, but it’s the thought that counts and validates my rage.
One of the most agonizing parts about growing up autistic without knowing is the blatant sensation-seeking behavior that gets
denied every time. Or, the sensitivity that doesn’t exist to others. Essentially, autism is, yes, a social and communicative disorder that results from asymmetrical brain development. But, it also impacts sensory processing, which is something neurotypicals (and common diagnostic foci) tend to ignore about the condition because it doesn’t affect them, it’s an internal thing for us.
Not being able to “properly” absorb relevant or disregard irrelevant information through certain senses is a little trippy if you think about it– but hey, that’s what’s going on. We already knew my eyesight is shit, but I also have difficulties with my auditory processing and with touch. I can’t smell or taste all that well, though I have an autistic lovely in my life whose sense of smell is cracked. For me, auditory challenges include not being able to parse out different inputs at once, comprehend and follow rhythms, or avoid getting overwhelmed or distracted by electricity’s hums. (Performing in orchestra was a fucking nightmare (I was a violinist for seven years), on a number of fronts, but the hindsight of knowing I struggle with these things helps me get why it was so rough on me mentally.) As for touch, I have an insane sensitivity to touch– it can be heavenly or majorly unpleasant. It’s an odd contradiction, I have a very high pain tolerance and can ignore physical discomfort, but both the pain and pleasure that my skin allows me to embody can be intense. (Many autistics are [(in)famously] touch-averse, but again, spectrum disorder– there’s growing discourse about whether hypersexuality and “high functioning” autism have a connection. The heightened gratification that’s possible occupies some autistic people’s toolkits for self-regulation; which is to say, some sensory-seeking autistics use masturbation as a reset and maintain their preferred “sensory diet.”)
The house next to us growing up (the one Bruce lived in until he went to prison for dealing coke and then was gone for several years and then came back and re-rented after getting released?) had a large paved parking lot behind it for some reason. Behind that was an even larger plot of land sitting vacant before the train tracks started. A streetlamp stood there shining despite the lack of street to light below it; I’ve always been sensitive to light and wouldn’t be able to drift off to sleep, staring at that glow in a trance of insomnia-induced awe like it was my own personal transformative moon.
You’d think my zany, sometimes zesty gender(fluid) presentation is what would make me feel alienated from others–but the double take people do when I walk by on the street’s got fucking nothing on the reality of poverty. That type of alienation makes its grand arrival over Zoom, when classmates are talking about how they're doing for an icebreaker and lament about not being sure what to order for dinner. When it’s your turn to speak, you can’t and so you don’t and stare blankly at the screen until the club leaders decide it’s time to move on. The next week, you show up to the virtual community session early and explain to the three student leaders– who are at most two years older than you– that you’re living in an escaping-domestic-violence situation right now and became a co-parent to two babies before you ever lived on your own. How could you follow DoorDash up with how you’re thinking about dropping out of college to support your family even though you tried to kill yourself at least twice to even get here in the first place?
How do you explain in classes that you tried to kill yourself at least twice to get here? How do you explain that it was either UMich giving me the money to afford my escape or nothing? How do you explain that you determined you. were. going. to. college. in second grade so you could get away from what was trying to whittle you down into nothing? How do you explain that you read the writing on walls when you were thirteen and started collecting things to furnish your future apartment with, to make the exit that much easier? How do you take fucking humanities classes centered around liberation, struggle, hardship with the leaders and best and they don’t understand how fucking serious it is out there? How do you explain how fucking serious it is out here?
(I’m autistic, so maybe I’m just misreading the social cues in the room– does one explain how fucking serious it is out there? Or do I assume (mostly incorrectly) that people have a similar background and can understand all of the gouged out grooves in my heart, from when I was a child with a wood carving knife and repurposed office supplies trying to lighten the load?)
For most of my life, my hair reached all the way down my back, thick like my mom’s and sisters’ dark, curly-ish manes. But, the catch is I was my mom’s “blonde baby,” the only one to have hair so light. (I’ve heard it was white when I was born, then the sun touched it once and turned it strawberry like Gama’s.)
Something about my hair had a hold on my family. Gama kept the ponytails from both mine and Ava’s first haircut in case she wanted to redo the hair on a Barbie doll later down the line. (She liked buying Barbies off eBay and scheming up ways to eventually refurbish them. She also kept our baby teeth in two little heart-shaped boxes covered with gems that she bought on clearance at Walgreens for Valentine’s.) My mom nearly cried when I first talked about wanting short hair and I never even had to talk about it around Gama for her to solemnly tell me that my hair was too gorgeous to ever consider cutting. It took me about two months after she died to finally do it– partially to see if she'd come back to haunt me if I did.
The day that you get your first acceptance letter from a college you applied to (CMU), you open the email in the car on the way to eat Sunday dinner with your boyfriend and his family. It’s him, you, and his mom– there’s a moment of celebration and then you’re in the Olive Garden parking lot.
An important detail: he also has recently gotten accepted to a college for the first time (MSU, you refused to apply there because of abysmal personal associations with the Spartan brand; the fact that the tour guide told your group with her whole chest that to avoid being sexually assaulted on campus you just had to “make good choices” doesn’t help their case.) While eating, his mom brings this up in coded language: “[Redacted] has an announcement to make.”
“I do?” He asks, sincere, but gets it quickly and makes a bit out of trying to remember. He tells everyone and they celebrate and everyone claps. (Literally, that’s not facetious).
His aunt, sitting across from you, quips, “Oh my god, I’m so grateful she didn’t have an announcement to make– we’d have to order another bottle” as she gestures to the glass of red wine standing between you two. You try to make eye contact, which is a rarity for you, but she’s too busy looking at her sister, his mother, and they’re cackling together. (Read: Haha, teen pregnancy, keep your legs closed, don’t ruin our baby boy’s life whore.)
How tacky, you think. It’s not lost on you (like it is your boyfriend) that it’s particularly incisive a comment because of your family’s history with teen pregnancy and poverty, which maybe she knows because they’ve told her. Or, maybe she doesn’t and she’s just a slut-shaming cunt.
We, the [autistic] people, are futureless, right? There’s no guarantee of potentiality when stuck in a brain that worships at the altar of demand avoidance. There’s no promise of tomorrow when [autistic] people are underemployed, problematized, and en masse given functionally the same “treatments” as [morally fucking bankrupt] conversion “therapists” use on queer people.
(That is not an exaggeration; ABA (or, Applied Behavior Analysis, our current gold standard in how we “treat” autism) was invented by Ole Ivar Lovaas, the same man who (co-)invented conversion therapy, which has been reclassified in modern times as effectively a form of torture perpetrated against the LGBTQIA+ community. While true that the application of ABA treatments range from practitioner to practitioner just like in all forms of healthcare, this legacy is insidious and still pertinent:
“ABA is focused on training Autistic kids to fake a neurotypical personality. It’s a behavioral therapy, not a cognitive or emotional one…[they] train children to camouflage their Autistic traits using a system of rewards and punishments. ABA patients get sprayed in the face using water (or on the tongue with vinegar) for failing to make eye contact, or for talking too much about their special interests. If a child engages in echolalia (phrase repeating), chews on their fingernails, or flaps their hands, they’ll be punished, even if they find these impulses painful to restrain. ABA patients are also forced to rehearse compensation strategies. They're made to sit still for hours until they parrot back a conversational script correctly, and aren't allowed to play until they provide an “adequate” amount of eye contact. They may be asked to repeat conversational niceties like “please” and “thank you” over and over until they hit on the corrent tone of voice, or be told to stand up and sit down repeatedly while the therapist snaps their fingers at them like they’re a trained dog. When Autistic kids act out or demand attention, ABA therapists are supposed to withdraw, leaving the room or ignoring their distress. This teaches the Autistic child not to expect any help from the outside world.
ABA therapists also punish children by electrocuting them. The electroshock devices used in ABA therapy were briefly banned by the FDA in 2020, before being reinstated in 2021…The founder of ABA used to coerce children into providing hugs and kisses to their therapists by giving them candy.” (Price, 100, 101))
Dear Diary, Monday, February 18th, 2019
It’s been awhile [exactly 384 days since the previous entry, around when I stopped writing in my diary because it hurt too much to think]. To be honest, I don’t know why I’m writing in this, or what I plan to say. I guess I could start with some of the biggest things that have changed. Gama is dead, she died February 26th, 2018. [I was fifteen.] Ziola had her first child, my niece…[Redacted] and I are still together, our three year anniversary was…My mom married Scott unfortunately…those are the biggest things. My family is well, I think. As well as well can be.
I think I want to talk about Gama. Her anniversary (of her death) is soon, next next Tuesday. [Redacted] says her death hardened me, but I’m not sure if that’s right. I know I must be different, but what was I like before? Anyways, I should say what happened. Gama lived really unhealthily [because she couldn’t afford otherwise and was very mentally ill]. She was chainsmoking pretty bad by the end, at least 2-2.5 packs a day. She was barely eating, said that everything made her stomach hurt. She claimed it was red meat in particular that caused her health, specifically stomach problems, but I think it was her overall lifestyle. [It was everything. Everything killed her; this wrld killed her.] She fell asleep on the couch constantly still, but she said her legs were hurting more and more all the time. She couldn't stand for too long, and a trip to the laundry room downstairs was a journey. A month or two before she died, she accidentally spilled grease on her stomach when pulling pork chops out of the oven in a cheap, one-use aluminum pan. It burned her stomach, and maybe some of her pubic hair area, pretty badly. She didn’t go to the doctors, instead she texted me [over Pinterest’s direct messages] asking how to bandage and care for it.
A week before it happened, Ava said that Gama told her that she had had an experience where she suddenly couldn’t breathe, and maybe couldn’t see. I was never told. I begged Gama to go to the doctor plenty over plenty of her ailments, but she didn’t, it was too expensive.
Flash forward to Saturday, February 17th, 2018. We were staying at Gama’s [like usual, we went most weekends for like my entire life] and I was basically spending the entire day playing World of Warcraft; and texting [Redacted]. Gama had bought Ava and I like one pound bags of candy for Valentine’s Day and I was eating all of mine [Swedish Fish; I love those candies still but I can’t eat them without tasting the bittersweet of the last time I talked to her]. But at one point, I stopped gaming and came out to the living room. Gama was sitting at her spot at the counter, playing Candy Crush like usual on her laptop, and I sat across from her. Just like that, she started telling me about her life. How she was abused growing up [I already knew that, she told me details of it my whole life], who my dad’s biological father was [she didn’t finish high school because a stupid, mean fucking teacher failed her twice over arbitrary things. So she escaped her mom and stepfather(s) by moving out to Missouri before she turned 18. As a waitress at a bowling alley, she got hit on by a millionaire rancher who cheated on his wife with her. She got pregnant with my dad and came back to Jackson, Michigan], how she stopped drinking, how she loved Campa and [Redacted, not my ex] and Dad and Katie and my mom. She told me about how she had dark times in her life and got drunk and tried to kill herself, she showed me the thin white line across her wrists, and I didn’t understand how I had never seen them before. [I didn’t show her mine, but could have at that point. In that respect, we were non-identical twin failures.] She told me that she believed in God, and that she had forgiven her mother for her childhood. We talked about life, we laughed, I told her about how [Redacted] and I sort of had sex, about how [Redacted] bought us condoms. About how Scott made me feel [suicidal, mostly], what we thought about the situation with my dad. Eventually, the conversation ended, I think Campa got home, and I didn’t know everything about her, but I knew a lot.
The next day, I was going to [Redacted]’s for a date, and we had the day off of school the next day (Monday), so mom picked just me up, and took me to [Redacted]’s. I did my makeup in a Tinkerbell-themed mirror on the floor using a brush Gama got me for Valentines, and we chatted again. I think it was about Scott and how much I had to do the week ahead. Mom pulled in the driveway, I hugged Gama, picked up my bag, and hugged her again, I think I made an “ugh” noise. She told me, “Just keep smiling, I love you” and that was the last thing she ever said to me. [She had a sudden aneurysm mere hours later, while using the bathroom. She stayed on life support in the Neurological Intensive Care Unit at UMich Ann Arbor for one week after being Life-Flighted out of Jackson once they determined they couldn't do anything for her there.] [As I type this, transcribe it, my fingers are moving slower of their own accord. I don’t think they want to leave this memory.]
— end of entry —
“[Peace to the Black babies born below the Mason-Dixon
That twang in your diction don’t make you less gifted]
Be grateful, steadfast, and persistent
Our ancestors made four ways out of no ways, so let’s stick to tradition
May God’s grace cover you like an oak tree on the hottest day
I pray the air in your tires never deflate
And you keep the gas hand above a quarter of a tank
And in whoever name you pray”
— White Caprice, Kari Faux