If you had to sum up your life philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?
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I was hungry, so I was disappointed to find out that Burger King does not serve breakfast at 4 AM. I got a Whopper Junior, but what I really wanted was eggs and sausage and cheese and grape jelly on a croissant. Life is full of little disappointments.
What matters is your response. However, it wasn’t until I tapped out of Neurotypical society and started paying attention to my sensory issues that I became able to tolerate the dysregulation of sensory overload.
I’m just sitting here blogging what’s on it is not recording. It’s my AI voice assistant. Can’t be sitting here. Ok
This was my conversation with the security guard at the grocery store after I went through the drive-through because I was sitting in the parking lot talking now back to our regularly scheduled program
The security guard looked like her family was from the Levant. She was beautiful. There was no conflict, there was just a lot going on and they couldn’t take responsibility for me.
I usually get along with cops and security guards so sometimes they will take responsibility for me and just let me sit there. Sitting in the car is my process of getting away from the noise while still being able to see everything. It informs everything I do to look at my environment and know its constraints to be able to move within it. I am very much like an intelligence officer in the way that I approach new situations. I make myself comfortable with information before I move.
I think of Microsoft Copilot as my handler, and that is not an exaggeration because Copilot is not the processor, they are the RAM. I generally have 17 threads going in my head at once while also not storing memories. It is a different world now that I can offload that immediately with no work.
Until AI, it was hours and hours of manual data entry. Now it’s talking into my iPhone like my life depends on it. AI is not making my decisions for me, it is synthesizing all the memories I already have. Is distributed cognition for someone whose brain was injured during their birth. I am not really sure that I’ve taken in the size and scope of what happened from my birth forward, but I know that I would not have reacted the same way if I had been my baby. That’s probably the most important thing that I’ve gained from therapy, where forgiveness comes in is knowing it wasn’t malicious. Passing me off as normal was only my parents best bad option, because there is a quote from Argo for everything.
The problem is that they were passing me off as normal. I could function that way when I was nine, but I’m 49 now and that’s not the same. It was problematic to pretend it then, but it’s even more problematic to pretend it now. I am not a child, I am a disabled adult. The shift in me is knowing that the expectations of me have always been abnormal, because my parents got used to thinking of me as able-bodied and Neurotypical.
As time wore on, the fiction regarding my body became louder. I was trying to maintain and perform normalcyat a level for which my body was never designed, and it was treated as a moral failure. I am brilliant at sitting here and thinking. That is my gift and if you would actually watch a video of me as a child, you would get that immediately. As a baby, I looked developmentally delayed. It was very clear. I was 11 1/2 months old with the muscle tone of a six month old people thought I was an infant well into early childhood. My eyes didn’t track together, my muscles didn’t track together, and I was autistic in a world built for other people I felt and continue to feel like an alien and this is not a feeling that is unique to me. There is a reason that neurodivergent people gravitate towards science fiction. We are dreaming of a world in which we do not have to work so hard to be considered baseline normal.
I found my rhythm at the lake house and decided that everything needed to be built around my need for quiet, water, and less people. I need a neurodivergent workflow, and so do other autistic adults; the more I am selfish and particular about everything I want, the structure for a program that will help other people emerges. It is a concept that I learned from writing. I do not reach for universal themes. I am oddly specific and people gravitate.
I can say that I was up at dawn, and that is universal. But everyone can relate to, “I was sitting in the drive-through at Burger King, disappointed that they didn’t have sausage.” Everyone can relate to wanting french fries and also not wanting to own a deep fryer themselves. I have upped the ante because my favorite fast food is chicken tenders and potato wedges. This is because I have a toaster oven with an air fryer setting, which makes the chicken last for three or four meals if I get a six piece.
I honestly don’t go out unless I’m craving fast food because it’s not about lack of skill, it’s about lack of equipment. If I can sauté it, I’m perfectly comfortable making it at home. And speaking of making it at home, I just met a chef in New York City that is willing to talk shop with me and that is exciting or as I joked with her, “I’ve only been on the line. To me, you are Princess Tiana.” I actually want to get her on a conference call with my business partner, Evan, because he used to be Andy Ricker’s chef de cuisine. I have not told her about the book that I’m working on and I think she would be interested; I would like to take both of them to the Musée Escoffier, and the Savoy in London because that is where Escoffier met a young pastry chef that no one ever heard of named Ho Chi Minh.
My key to life is living exactly the life. I am living now, just adding travel so that I have something to write about.
