I have known I was neurodivergent since college and have a confirmed ADHD diagnosis. Therefore, I was already familiar with how the autistic brain works to some degree. There are many new studies coming out that argue autism spectrum disorder should be included, not a separate diagnosis. I agree with this, but only partially. Some symptoms overlap, some don’t. Depending on the situation, ASD and ADHD are completely at odds. My case is complicated because I am also bipolar, but one is not the other. ADHD and Autism don’t really have bearing on the health of the brain, just how it works.
How depression comes in is convincing me that I do not belong without my social masks, therefore it is easier not to engage. But it’s not all depression, because sometimes “willing to engage” is about the sensory environment to which I’ve been invited. When I am in meltdown, I do not leave the house. I am in meltdown/burnout cycles a lot. Therefore, I don’t leave the house a lot because when my depression lifts, I’m still an introvert. I just think different thoughts when I’m alone. I don’t concentrate my energy externally, because in a lot of ways it is seeking a validation that won’t ever be there. Someone else said this, but pretend that I did because I’ve slept since then….. “when you say that I have ‘mild autism,’ what you really mean is that my autism affects you mildly.” I know my behavior goes off the rails, and I take responsibility for that because I’m not five. I also don’t have many relationships that last long, par for the course.
Zac and I are successful, I think, because we’re not putting any pressure on our relationship. We both just exist. We don’t have any expectations of each other except that time together is sacred and if we don’t have it, we make it. Yes, Zac is poly and I’m undetermined, but that doesn’t mean that I am not respectful of his time and other partners. It’s not because I was ever uninterested in being with Zac full time, it’s that I recognize that he’s not available and I’m not capable.
I believe that you have to have a series of failed relationships before you admit defeat because the fairy tale is so real as children. One day, a man will come along that will complete me, and he will be everything I ever wanted. First of all, I’m queer so that’s unlikely…. yet not impossible. I do have a preference, but it’s not a hard and fast rule because all people’s brains are interesting to me until proven otherwise.
I had to get to a place of “not being the marrying kind,” because I’ve been autistic, adhd, queer, and poly since I was born. I just had to find that out over 46 years and not immediately..
They say that you have to know things about your childhood as it’s part of an official ASD diagnosis. Here are the things that stand out to me:
I believe that I was bullied a lot less than other kids when I was a child, because I had the street cred of being the preacher’s daughter. To the extent that I was bullied, it was for being intense, weird, sensitive, and the last person you should pick in any group project ever. I do not work well with others, and I also do not function well outside of it. This is because I have my own system (obviously), and getting a neurotypical person to work with it is obnoxiously hard….. especially when you don’t know you need those allowances. Only once in my life have I been top dog at “group,” and that’s because of my autism, not in spite of it. I disconnected completely from what was going on and just stared at my computer, essentially transcribing the lecture and going to class on my own. I e-mailed every transcription to my group, and because of it, I didn’t really have any group work. All my classmates recognized I had CLEARLY already done my part.
I do not process voices well when it comes to learning, therefore I had the same problem in school that I had at Alert Logic. I could not write anything down while I was talking, or while listening. Those are two separate skills and I am a monotropic thinker. Multitasking just does not happen. I’m sorry. A very real tip for dealing with me (or any autistic person person you’ve just met, as this is extraordinarily common) is that if you need something, write it down. Let us have something to refer to later so nothing drops off the radar. This is true of ADHD as well.
What generally happened in school was feeling beaten up by teachers because when they were talking, I was listening (and nothing else). If you don’t take notes, your teacher thinks you are a straight up problem. Yet, without taking notes and focusing seriously on their voices, if they’d asked me what they’d said, I could have repeated the lecture verbatim. My “performance improvement plan” became writing down all my assignments and making sure the teacher initialed it before I left. This would have been a great solution if teachers hadn’t felt put upon. I should fucking know when things are due, and the fact that I just can’t get it together shows what a dumbass I really am, because if I just applied myself, this wouldn’t happen. Repeat with every boss ever, and why autism and ADHD are so invisible. When you are as smart as I am, disability is invisible (and why so many women are being diagnosed in their 40s and 50s with ADHD/ASD. Women are not taught that they have limitations, women are taught that they are failing at life. You cannot keep up the pace of a busy working wife, parent, and coworker, and everyone will let you know it. There are accommodations for all autistic quirks. Good luck getting society to respect them, use them.
I take in everything I read, deeply. It’s a different relationship altogether than lectures/sermons. Therefore, I could study very hard and not be able to regurgitate it during a test, because demand avoidance would eat my lunch and performance went out the window. On math tests, I rarely got more than 20% right because my logical function is so poor. I absolutely do not know how I graduated from high school, and I still have nightmares that I didn’t.
Speaking of which, part of my reticence in going back to college has nothing to do with money. I could take out an assload of debt, and I’d probably get into lots of schools around here. I doubt I could pass Algebra. I didn’t even really pass logic. I have taken everything I can possibly take that’s in my major and minor (Political Science and Psychology, respectively), but the basics from freshman and sophomore year elude me. I am really choosing whether it’s important to finish the degree, or setting myself up for failure when I’ve already gotten everything out of college that one would want- specialized training. I write about international affairs all the time. I just learned this week that while I was at UH studying Milosevich/Kosovo, several of my friends were on the ground there.
At that point, who of us really studied international affairs?
My friends who signed on the dotted line will absolutely know more than me about world conflict, and if I’d been medically able, the military would have been good for me. I know this. Clear instructions. Black and white with no gray area. Iron steel structure, taking refuge in a system. Living the life I’ve been living with a safety net I’d never had before………… and that’s how political science and John le Carré became inextricably interrelated in my mind.
Speaking of “inextricably interrelated,” that comes from my freshman psych 101 professor talking about how neurodivergent people need a combination of therapy and medication, that neither will work alone. As a result, I’ve quoted her for almost 25 years. Her name is Victoria Schultz-Zwahr (or it was then) and I have never been more in love with a class because I was finally getting answers to questions I’ve had my whole life. The only problem is that the class was focused on basic things like generalized anxiety disorder, unipolar and bipolar depression, etc. We didn’t get into the differences between an allistic and an autistic brain, otherwise I believe the light bulb would have gone on much earlier.
College was easier than grade school because no one cared. My professors who had three and four degrees could give a shit where grade school teachers failed. I knew I had three tests and/or papers due on day one, not a “pop quiz” or saying “we’re having a test on Wednesday” (and it’s Monday). I did so much better in Con Law than I have in any other class.
But my grade school experience is just a reflection of my life now. Always wanting to talk to people older than me (then, the teachers) because there was generally no small talk. Generally no bullying except for the things that all neurotypical people do to neurodivergent kids who are bright. Again, it’s not your perception…. couldn’t be. It’s always my brain.
I learned that I understood math a little bit during the first few weeks of geometry. That was when geometrical concepts were in words, proofs. When we got back to numbers and angles, I fell from an A to an F and no one noticed. It wasn’t my work ethic, it was lack of function. I don’t even see geography like most people due to lack of stereopsis (3D vision).
So, of course I was married and of course I’ve fallen in love with every best friend I’ve ever had, which generally makes the relationship end because I tend to find unavailable people attractive. This is because I can get lost in my own little autistic world and have a monotropic thought process in which there’s a secret world under the real one. That has been true since I was 12 years old, but I got that bubble with an older woman because I’d been trying for it since I was born.
Just leave me alone and let me ruminate to escape the reality of being autistic, thanks.
The reality of autism is that you do not function well in relationships, partially because of a lack you can’t correct and partially because of society’s treatment of autistic people in general.
True but crude- just because I can hold my urine and my conversations doesn’t mean I’m not autistic. Just because when I meltdown I social mask it into mild discomfort doesn’t mean I’m not in hell. Even “high functioning” is offensive, because what it means is that you see me as high-functioning…. as I said earlier. These concepts of “functioning” were invented by neurotypical people to classify us, not an actual label of competence or not. I am not high or low functioning, I am either high needs or low……. and here’s the thing….. they switch off being dominant.
If I have a few good days in a row, I think I’m higher functioning than I really am and “all of a sudden” nope out of everything. That’s because I am only now discerning when meltdown and burnout are coming. When my sensory issues and social masking are just too much, and I cannot deal. This is true of all autistic people, but mental illness makes you believe that you’re worthless because your brain is trying to protect you. It wants you to isolate because when no one else is there, it’s the only time you’re safe….. and other people prove it to you all day long.
However, if you go into an autism group and say that you’re exploring and not diagnosed yet, prepare for the shit storm to begin. I know because I’ve done it. Those groups all have rules that say “self-diagnosed is valid,” but so far they haven’t meant it. That’s because they think I made my decision on whether I’m ASD on a TikTok.
Here’s three things about that. The first is that autism presents differently in men and women, to the same degree that ADHD does. Some children are extraordinarily hyper, some stare out the window…. both valid, both ADHD. The second is that an official diagnosis is not something to be taken lightly, and it’s not that I’m unwilling to go through the process, it’s that it’s intimidating. The third thing is that if you self-diagnose as autism, there is probably a 90% chance that you’re autistic, because who gives themselves that label voluntarily if they don’t absolutely need it? I know I’m autistic like I knew I was queer at 12. Who would come out as gay if they didn’t have to? Who would recant all that and say “no, actually I’m bisexual” if they didn’t mean it? Who in their everloving minds would come out as poly in a society that holds up monogamy like a beacon and cheating is par for the course? People have multiple partners all the fucking time, it’s just dishonest.
Keeping an affair from your partner for many years is not poly. It’s just cheating, and you are very much an absolute dickhead if that’s how you approach it.
For instance, cheating on Zac would not be having another partner. It would be having another partner and not telling him. He doesn’t need to be up in my business nor do I need to be up in his, but that’s his health on the line, not mine alone.
I think what separates mono and poly people is being willing to have those truly fucking difficult conversations without blinking. But in order to know whether you’re neurodivergent and mono or neurodivergent and poly takes a while. Because Autism and sexual orientation are both spectrums, it is a noted thing that lots of neurodivergent people fall onto the poly side of the scale because that’s how autism/ADHD work. You are in each moment, without the ability to plan ahead. It feels like in this blog I am retconning it, but that’s not true. Things just look different after time has taken place.
When I go on this journey to discover the past and what I can learn about it, other people’s memories are competing with mine, thus blowback. Supergrover got me with “telling our story as if it is fact,” when she didn’t tell me a story. I cannot think about something I haven’t read/heard. She thought that our memories should be the same, and there’s no way for that to be possible. I’ve loved her for 10 years with an intensity I’d never found anywhere else. The fact that she was straight mattered less than zero in the end…. not even a real number, as it turns out, because we couldn’t divide by it.
She couldn’t see that our stories did not match up, and wouldn’t until we compared notes. She expected me to divine what she was thinking, and I am very bad at that. I picked out all my worst flaws and tried to explain it- to her it all seems like bullshit. As I told her, “I would have found a way to work your side into it if you’d told me what it was.”
It’s what led me down the poly path, that the emotional attachment was just as important as romance, and having Zac in my life doesn’t mean that Supergrover is not a priority. She just doesn’t get all of me, which is best because I think she’d like to spend some time with her husband as well. 😉
But I didn’t tell her about Zac, and I didn’t tell her about poly, because I knew she’d be freaked and pop off at me in neurotypical rage. She’d been popping off with rage a lot at me, and I decided this was the thing that wasn’t worth it. I needed help, and thought there would only be recriminations, when she clearly helped make me poly in the first place because of the hard out, not because of who she is as a person. I cannot give my heart completely to anyone else, and it’s a miracle that I opened up this much…… because she’s avoidant and compartmentalize while I bleed out.
This is another continuing pattern since I was five- loving someone so much and having them be annoyed at my neurodivergence is a hard row to hoe……. but I learned it in childhood.
I wasn’t kidding when I said that I couldn’t put anyone before her, and that has proved true on many occasions…… yet it goes unrecognized and I’m just a judgmental dickhead out to get her. The reality is that she married me with her secrets, and she needs to fucking get over it. Just because that’s my opinion doesn’t make it right for her…… at the same time, you get tired of being in a friendship and thinking only their thoughts matter because they say they do.
She thinks I’m a demanding asshole because I need resolution on a few things, not that she’s a bad person. She gets annoyed when I bring up something more than once, and I’m tired of that shit, too. It’s not rehashing if you never gave me any information to begin with, is it? It’s all a stalling tactic and I’m done.
But I wouldn’t know it was a stalling tactic if I hadn’t gone back to the beginning and saw that it was all a bunch of stalling tactics in which at first my willingness to speak truth to power was appreciated, then not so much. I wasn’t the only one who participated in our relationship becoming unhealthy, because at least I was willing to entertain the fact that there might be a problem. But in order to resolve everything, she’d have to be vulnerable, and she doesn’t do that. Not with anyone….. I don’t pray for much anymore, but I do pray that Michael was able to make better inroads than I did, because as far as I know, he’s never done anything to break her trust.
She trusted me before him, and I’ll never forget it. At the same time, I was in autistic meltdown and burnout, so shit rolled downhill. I apologize for every moment I was enraged, but I do not shy away from the fact that the problem was real and not all in my head. It was a gaslighting technique, but it wasn’t personal, ever. It’s just the natural consequences of telling someone you have processing disorders and metal illness because convention says “as soon as you perceive that you don’t understand something, say it must be because my brain is broken.” All neurotypical people do this. All of them. If everyone is having the same issue, it’s systemic.
It is often why I stay home, why my mother had to drag me out of the house all the time. I was depressed when I realized I was queer in northeast Texas, because I couldn’t see that going well. But it was more than depression, because from the time I was in third grade I had a computer in my room. I’ve been doing the same thing I do now since I was nine. Get up and write so you can be lost in your own thought processes rather than having to understand someone else’s.
So, in person, I present as kind, warm, funny, outgoing, etc…… and yet….. I still have autism.
Stories That Are All True 