Wokening to Neurodiversity
If you are autistic, you will be called out and cancelled.
In theory, we all can see that there are lots of different types of people. Yet in practice, humans are wired to assume that on the inside, others are motivated by (or should be!) the same things we are personally motivated by and we assume that others are working with roughly the same psychological wiring that we are. Thus, as humans, we become very distressed when our fellow species-members behave in unrelatable ways. At which point, a normal human brain goes instinctively to writing off the unrelatable behavior as wrong, mistaken, even evil.
This is not a flattering feature of our species, and it has caused many of the heinous acts our kind has wrought throughout history. Yet, we are this way because it was effective at helping early humans survive. It is a trait of homo sapiens.
Just as it feels instinctively alarming (talking about body level, hind-brain reactivity) to interact with others whose behavior is unrelatable to us, it also feels instinctively settling, soothing to be surrounded by others who we believe to be similar to us. This has at two components worth unpacking here:
1) “*sigh of contentment* I feel belonging in my group”
The sense of belonging allowed our tribal ancestors to relax into the interdependence and loyalty that ensured in their survival. Not only was their own tribe experienced as “us” but they absolutely needed the sense of “us” to work together in order to defend their survival from the “other” in life-or-death situations. Sometimes “other” was another human group, sometimes an extreme weather event, sometimes a predator.
It worked, so biology hardwired that shit.
2) “Even though some people in my group seem kinda odd at times, I believe that they are basically a lot like me.”
This pattern is so innate to human experience that even looking at it directly, it is hard to see as a pattern of our wiring. Can we even contemplate this belief as being an assumption that may or may not be accurate?
Some of us can. Indeed, some of us humans are painfully forced to recognize this sociological fallacy from the earliest stages of our development. We learn that we will be misunderstood with vastly higher frequency than we will feel “seen”. When we share even our most heartfelt promptings, the essence of our experience will fall flat for almost all of our brethren.
I have discovered, armchair sociologist that I am, that most people actually sometimes “know” that they belong. They report to me that they truly feel seen by the group. They perceive a fabric of the social harmony of their in-group, from which they are inseparable. A few examples I have often observed in my own life-experience are singing circles, women’s groups, and advocacy or protest environments.
Where many people “know” they are seen in these moments I, and a minority of others, “know” that we are being un-seen in the exact same contexts. I say this as a musician, a woman, and an activist: Due to my hard-wiring, I am always an outlier, even within my own in-group. My comrades are clearly aliens, and they clearly believe me to be — and expect me to be — one of them.
What I’m talking about here is what is often referred to as “neurodiversity”. There really are lots of different types of humans and the differences are not necessarily just superficial. These differences aren’t necessarily cultural. They aren’t all causally related to privilege, ignorance, or an objective spectrum of human goodness.
Humans actually come, “out of the box”, with a variety of “factory settings” that deliver unique gifts to our in-group and further ensure our collective survival.
I’m undiagnosed with high-functioning autism (aka “Aspergers”), and some of the other people in your life are also. We look and act so much like “normal” folk that for the most part we outwardly blend in and we end up finding societal niches in which we are able to use some of our gifts.
Are you autistic or not?
As you may intuit, neurodiversity isn’t actually simple. That being the case, it can also be helpful to look at neurodiversity in terms of our general differences. When we create lists of traits and features that clinically display in a vaguely similar constellation among a subset of humans, we are sometimes able to further intellectual understanding, medical advancement, and policy-making, or cultural evolution. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll be oversimplifying in this way a lot.
But nature isn’t boring like that. Nature designed humans as an intricate socially-held-together super-organism that is comprised of myriad unique cells (eg. individual humans), some of which have relatively specialized functions that other cells don’t have.
None of us are all “autistic” or all “neurotypical”. Each of us, regardless of which label (or other neurodiverse label) may best summarize our experience, has a completely unique landscape of psychological and experiential patterns. I am autistic, but there are probably ways that I’m a better “NT” (ie. Neurotypical, with “normal wiring”) than you are. Most people can relate to a general experience of fitting in as normal, yet they tend to report also having (often hiding) inner experiences which seem to diverge from what is considered socially acceptable, or natural.
Yet, it is evident that nature determined neurotypical wiring to be the most useful for the masses to have, and for the most part I get why.
Neurotypical humans experience emotions in a mirroring and inter-transmitting way that adds another channel or dimension to their collective intelligence. It reminds me of one bee emitting a pheromone and then the rest of the group adjusting their behavior without any hitch. Zero processing time.
One can observe that NT’s enjoy swarming in this way, moving in concert with each other.
They sometimes report feeling other people’s pain as if it is their own; this seems to be the way that NT’s experience care. NT’s like getting this sympathetic NT-type care from each other.
Neurotypical minds organize the world into conceptual boxes and categories, each with a certain relationship to the other, including a connotative quality such as “good”, “extreme” “uncool”, or “verboten”. They enjoy swarming in this way too and they intuitively understand the general way in which other people organize their own thinking. When an average person draws on their own internal map of what-relates-to-what-and-how, other NT’s don’t need to ask questions or argue because their own map is very similar. Every NT knows what is good, right, and proper thinking (and doing) so as to make a good impression and not cause a raucous.
They are able to hold truth as a fluid thing that can shift hither or thither, and this enables them to squeeze through uncomfortable situations with white lies by shifting their position, orientation, alliance or inner story.
The average human mind also contains a useful black box into which they readily deposit ideas or information that might otherwise disturb their peace of mind or endanger their social acceptance in their ingroup.
When conflict does happen in NT groups, it is generally about a reorganization in the pecking order. Afterward, things settle again into the new order of authority and whichever position the winner held is now the truer social truth (It might seem crude when talked about in this way, but nature likes this system because it works).
Another benefit of the highly social nature of NTs is that they experience strength in numbers. They are not just one + one + one + one. They can come together as a gestalt of capacity and power. A common chant at climate marches says “Ain’t no power like the power of people, cause the power of people don’t stop!” For NT’s this feels exciting, true, and…well, empowering.
And, there are some serious liabilities here. The neurotypical mind experiences reality as being constructed socially. How true a thing is depends on how many people believe it. How true a thing is depends on what the people who are high up in one’s pecking order believe.
In their pleasure of swarming together, NT’s socially constructed “truths” become more real than reality. Partisan politics, sports, finance… these socially upheld systems of value and belonging are what NT’s live and die by, or even kill for (such as in wars).
Their split-second pre-sorted thinking, and lock-step group behaviors beget the ills and fallacies of prejudice (racism, sexism, etc), amtssprache, denial, the placebo effect, and the bystander effect.
If what I have written so far is coming across as personally offensive to you, you may have some neurotypical patterning. In which case, I am looking up your skirt and talking about what I see there. If you’ve had enough already, consider clicking away. I do not wish to stimulate hurt in you.
My hope in writing, though, is that some readers of this essay will have the humility to consider looking at our social landscape with a more inclusive understanding. In better understanding ourselves and the ways in which others may be different from us, we become wiser, less reactive, and less prone to all of those negative ways-of-being that humans are so well known for.
Maybe you can infer from what I have written already that NT’s often perplex us, even disappoint or disgust us. For autties, “normal humans” can seem to be unintelligent, irrational creatures and they move about without consciences, caring for acceptance and popularity with their in-group more than anything else. They use the theater of emotional display to manipulate others, even themselves. For gawdsake, they have altered the entire planet, ocean, and atmosphere. They swarm through ideology after ideology, without regard for things which don’t interest them, such as what people (or other species) outside their in-group may be experiencing, or the pursuits of truth (eg. the sciences), let alone whatever may actually be happening in their own physical environment. That’s what their black boxes are for.
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“Wow. It actually sounds like you think autistic people are better than the rest of us!”
That thing that just happened, where you interpreted I am trying to dominate you [by being better]? — By my talking about an autistic experience of dismay at patterns of normal human behavior? That’s the kind of interpersonal conflict I get into often as an auttie talking about human behavior with the defensive neurotypical mind.
Such a generalized better-than-worse-than assertion is, in NT land, experienced as a pecking order challenge. I am not pecking you down, Neurotypical Reader. I’m just sharing my honest perspective. I am fully aware that this is way more complicated (and interesting) than “who’s better”.
I’m trying to draw you into our actual experience. My experience and a common experience one might read, for example, voiced in an online forum by folks on the autism spectrum. To us, you really are often irrational and your motives seem primitive. I already outlined much of why nature selected you guys to be the majority; you guys have all kinds of valuable capacities we don’t really have. Thanks for being your kind of awesome.
And yet, why did nature make autism?
Autism is a different experience of being a human than most people can relate to, and for the most part people don’t even try, because they assume we are a lot more like them than we are. If they discover we identify with autism, they most often express denial-for-our-sake, offering a spontaneous pep talk to bolster our self esteem (which in our secret heart we may see as comical).
There is a widespread belief that it would suck not to be a normal human. And, there are circumstantial ways in which this is the case, due to widespread lack of our being understood and commensurately respected. But for those of us who are not wholly traumatized by — broken by — inhospitable environments when we were growing up, we feel fortunate to be who we are (and would often wish to rescue you from the constraints of your normalcy).
The autistic experience is very intimate with the intricacy of reality itself. Everything is perceived in its more-natural complexity. It can take us some time to get oriented in any given situation and we may move through it more slowly because we are managing a torrent of unsorted data.
But there is an aliveness here that I am inclined to refer to as autistic verve. When our heart latches on to a special interest, we experience a heightened state of enthusiasm that is pretty unique to autism. Have you ever seen a bunny leap straight up high, kicking their back legs up-to-the-side from pure joy?! The autistic happy-clapping, squeal and jumping is a human equivalent. We become zealous about something…the thing that is our thing… and we cannot but focus on it with great intensity. All the little things about it, all the ways that other things interact with it… its a zippy zappy, curly swirly intensity.
On occasion it is useful, in moments of collective crisis, when the NT’s are stumped, to bring in the auttie to look at this puzzle. Her thinking will synthesize a vast swath of data, and sometimes results in an advancement of the collective understanding (such as with Temple Grandin).
While we autistics experience our own perception as at-times being cursed by sensory overstimulation, we observe NT thought processes as being utterly high-jacked by emotionality, logical fallacy and cognitive bias. When our perspective is listened to, we provide our communities a reality check that extends beyond whatever social-truth is being accepted by the majority. Nature wanted human groups to contain a few natural whistle-blowers.
When people do, on rare occasion, take the time to stay with us as we walk them through the immense body of detail we are specializing in, they may discover “savant” gifts — unique forms of genius, insight, or capacity.
Like many neurotypical people, males tend to pursue more left-brain interests. Common for auttie men are passions for math, sciences, engineering. Their geekiness and their relative disinterest in the interpersonal sets them clearly apart from what is usually “cool” in the mainstream. That being said, recently pop culture has taken more appreciation of the autistic male archetype.
On the other hand, females tend to be more relational (and relatable). We are far less often diagnosed because we blend in better, having more “success” with relationships. We may love kitty cats, conversation, romance, and such like. My own special interest has long been love relationships, polyamory, and boundless spiritual love itself. I geek out on learning to understand human behavior, assimilating maps of human motivations like Myers Briggs and the Enneagram. Even as a young person I knew my highest goal was to someday become a wise, goofy old grandmother.
Through our autistic verve, we feel the same emotions that other humans feel, but apparently not in the same way. There may be a more vivid internal cresting of sensation and affect, but there is less identification with the emotion, it seems, and the feelings dissipate quickly. We are often rational and collected at times when others are up-in-arms about the situation — our emotions present within our experience, but not ruling it.
When we love you, our love has a cherishing, fascinated quality. Whether you are our child, our grandfather, or our lover, you may even become one of our special interests, and all of the intricacy of you is the fire of our heart. We want to study the way the light shines on your magical hairs forever.
There is something virginal — a timeless youthful wonder that doesn’t die for us. We never really understand why others don those rigid roles and rules about age, gender, love relationship forms, fashion. We are just ourselves — authentically ourselves. We tend to feel and behave relatively without age, as if we are old when we are young and also young when we are old. We don’t necessarily feel particularly mannish or womannish. It is an open minded way of being oneself, not dictated by what others or culture think we should be.
Compared to what is relatable for NT’s, we perceive more cleanly, literally, and without presuming or assuming a connotative layer of meaning. We are not constantly viewing our world through lenses of goodness and badness, coolness and uncoolness, us and them (though we try to catalog these cultural norms so we don’t get into trouble). Therefore we tend to be the least judgmental people you will ever meet. We don’t have the mental compartmentalizing hardware that creates prejudice.
The way that we experience care is as curiosity. We want to behold your authentic experience, we want information about your experience, we want to understand your unique experience. We may care so much that you not feel pain that we endeavor to redress the causes of your suffering immediately. We sometimes feel confused when you wish to continue feeling pain.
I think the most striking and precious aspect of autism is our radical honesty. Lying is nearly impossible; it is as if it would injure our souls. It is not in our nature to be dishonest, and we are virtually incorruptible.
We are also capable of deeper-than-normal trust, even when you may have betrayed us in the past.
In the cultural innocence of our honesty, we sometimes talk about something we like about ourselves, or something we do well. To do so is taboo for neurotypicals, because your shared culture connotes appreciation-of-self as bad. It resembles conceit, braggadocia and you wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole. We share about what we think is awesome about being us and your eyes widen.
Indeed, in situations when we understand our own experience, we do not beat around the bush. We are reliably direct in the way we express ourselves verbally so that you don’t have to wonder what we are really feeling.
But you don’t trust us. When you view us, you are looking for neurotypical cues — value-signaling and emoting — and what you see doesn’t correlate with what you would expect to see from an NT. You feel suspicious of our flat affect and believe we are hiding something when we tell you we are experiencing a given emotion that is not plain-to-see in our manner. No matter how much integrity we practice, you think you have it figured out, and you are sure that something just doesn’t add up. We are unrelatable, so what happens next?
An example: If your social reality is swarming in an ideology that says that all white people are racist and can only be redeemed if they confess and repent, you’ll want to save everybody. You found some racism in your own experience and so did all your friends. You all learned the redemptive behaviors that your social reality asserts are continually cleansing you of badness. And you want to help others experience that exact same salvation that you are taking new found comfort in.
At least four out of five of the people you open interrogation upon have the right answers. They admit they feel terrible that they are or may be somewhat racist. They agree to go to the training you recommend. They will be saved, and they thank you.
When you tell us (and for the sake of this example, we are a white skinned dude) the story of your journey out of racism we’re like, “Hey, that’s cool…I’m really glad for you”.
And you’re like, “What. What about yooou.”
*checking in with self* “Yeah, I don’t experience racism”
*gaffaw* [you flash a knowing look at your friends that says “You hear that friends? White boy says he’s not racist!”] “Only racists claim not to be racist,” you say (you’ve heard it said so many times; you know you’re right).
We try to get more precise with our honest answer, ask clarifying questions… “Are you referring to privilege as racism? I readily acknowledge privilege as a whi…”
“Wow, you are too scared to see the truth [of your shameful white self]”.
“I am scared because it seems like I’d have to lie in order for you to believe me”
*raising eyebrows* “Oh no. That’s ok. Trust me. I get it.”
At which point, we become your scapegoat. You feel good about it, because you trust your gut on this one, plus you have [illogical but neurotypically passable] proof! You begin to speak to all of your acquaintances about us unfavorably (we may not yet suspect you now dislike us.) When you speak to us, you are still formally courteous, perhaps complimenting us showily, or saying something vaguely accusatory between the lines that we half-suspect but that we are disinclined to presume (because we, too, are projecting our own [benevolent/naive] nature onto you).
So it goes on for some time that your social reality deepens and broadens the scope of its “truth” that we are a white supremacist.
By the time you and your friends are hurting us and calling us out in the open, everyone in your ingroup already agrees that your punishing treatment is justified. When you finally chase us out of the group forever, the others pat you on the back and you feel good about yourself. We feel confused, lost, hurt and hopeless.
We don’t respect your invisible pecking order and it really gets under your skin sometimes. We don’t even see the hierarchy that is obvious to you, so obvious that you don’t even think about it. When we speak to someone you know to be socially important as if he were our friend, our equal… all hell breaks loose. You scold us and we are baffled. The authority figure has had his high rank challenged, and he will swiftly prove that he’s on top of us with some kind of deft social maneuver (demoting us, slandering us, lying about what we said or did).
We ask questions about the elephant in the room and you wince. We remark about the emperor’s nudity and you become angry. You believe we are rude — that we are trying to make a fool out of others. Or you are uncomfortable, embarrassed, and you want us to just go away. We are So. Uncool. OMG.
Our curiosity slays us, socially.
We are managing much more sensory stimulation than you are and we pause to compute at times when you feel the correct response is patently obvious. We ask questions that are pre-answered by your web-of-associations(and assumptions). You become impatient with what you assume is a lack of intelligence and when we do speak you are already waiting for us to be done talking.
You do not listen to what we are saying because what we are saying doesn’t immediately map onto what you already believe.
Sometimes we experience sensory overload. We are distressed about the most minor sounds or the brightness of lights. We are freaking out at the prospect of feeling the tag on the inside of our sweatpants all day. You see a wimp.
Some of us cope with the constant onslaught of extraneous and intensified stumuli by establishing routines which we can rely upon to ensure more familiarity and fewer unforeseen variables. When the routines are disturbed, we become overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of novel experiences which are now storming our senses from all directions. We are upset our routine was broken. You recognize it as rigidity, stubbornness, or selfishness.
Sometimes we may be floating aimlessly in an ocean of stimulation. We cannot track it all. We get washed away, day-dreaming. In the back of our mind, in most moments, we are trying to remember what we are supposed to be remembering. We are always late, forgot to shower, missed the bus, shoes untied, lost our homework. We may be brilliant in school, but failing our classes. People make it mean that we don’t want to be responsible for ourselves or that we don’t care.
We are alone with our experiences.
You notice that we are extremely literal in the way that we interpret your words, and you catch on to that we are different. You experiment with saying mean things between the lines and we don’t notice.
You make it mean that we are gullible (negative connotation).
A gullible man is just asking for it. You discover you can take advantage of our trust, trick us into doing your dirty work for you, frame us for your crimes. And the neurotypical jury will always trust you over us because they can see plain-as-day that you are being honest by the way your emotional display matches your claims. At the same time they can see right away that something ain’t right about our explanation; why else would our body language be so dull? If we were innocent, we’d be in tears, we’d be a-hollerin’ and a-hootin’. It’s literally a no-brainer.
But you are just playing the game of life, and you win, fair and square, because it’s “survival of the fittest”. If it wasn’t fair, the court of public opinion would object, but they are applauding you. In social justice terminology this would be talked about as oppression.
Growing up autistic tends to be painful… a uniquely unseen kind of painful. We are trampled to the bottom of the social ladder again and again. We are experimentally drugged by a coalition of our parents, counselors and physicians with their fingers-crossed hope that it will change us for the better.
For those of us who get diagnosed with autism, school systems and therapies may try to train us like dogs (often literally with a piece of candy for each right answer) to imitate even the most inane of normal human behaviors.
Consequently, autism is clinically correlated with depression, self-isolation, even desperate rage. We are a go-to target for social bullying (because we often look normal but can’t adequately defend ourselves). We can be deeply hurt and even traumatized without anyone even noticing because we don’t theatrically emote to elicit their sympathetic mirroring (the way they care).
In extreme worst-case scenarios, autistic individuals may dwell in secret loathing of our communities. My understanding is that there is a higher incidence of autism among school-shooters, for this reason. When one understands the context of their hatred one feels very, very sad.
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In using first person and identifying the reader in the “oppressor” role, I know that each of these examples may not apply to you, personally. Yet I have written in this tense because most of you have not yet realized that you do live many of these neurotypical patterns which are hurting others, even perpetuating evils that you have believed your choices and behaviors to be countering.
Most readers will not relate to all of these acts of ignorantly enacted abuse, but have you stood aside when they were happening in your ingroup or community?
Try it on. I do not mean these questions as a thought experiment. In what ways have you personally been ignorant about autism and neurodiversity? In what ways have you been an arrogant neurotypical homo sapiens?
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There are other delineated diagnoses that fit into the wide-ranging umbrella of neurodiversity, though I do not attempt to speak for those perspectives. If you are interested, here is an article exploring neurodiversity in a more inclusive way.
Isn’t there a way that humans really are all cut from the same cloth, deep down?
Hell yes.
When we are not living in our hurts from the past, nor in our fear of being rejected in the present, nor in our mental ideas of who we should become in the future…when we are not busy avoiding pain and seeking pleasure…when we are not occupied with judging ourselves and others, we may experience the simplicity of presence. In these, perhaps rare, moments we know ourselves as true nature knows itself: in its many beautiful forms such as joy, strength, love, understanding, and forgiveness.
Most often in a secret buried place in our soul, we share heartfelt contact with the sacredness to which we all belong, which we all are.
