alternates

Posted on May 1, 2024 by C. M. Condo
Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Physicists traffic in some pretty wild theories about the nature of our existence. I’ve expressed frustration about the idea of multiple universes as an easy out of inconvenient three-dimensional constraints. (After all, other planes of existence can explain away a lot of inconsistencies.) The reason I bring this up, however, is not to uphold or debunk such theories. Full disclosure, I have experienced occasional moments in my life where the way I remembered something was completely different from how someone else remembered it, and I’ve decided that, for lack of a better explanation thereof, I’m comfortable with the possibility of slip-streaming from one version of reality to another.

I bring it up because I was discussing with my therapist how angry I was having to lug around my past of being bullied, ostracized, assaulted, lied to, or taken advantage of, something that happened so often and for so long that my soul feels broken and damaged beyond repair. I live in a barely managed state of despair. I have no idea how to move past something that took up such a significant chunk of and made such a significant mark on my life. I am now middle-aged, and still struggle with loving myself or seeing myself as worthy of being treated with kindness and dignity.

But last night I was thinking that perhaps I needed to expand upon my limited thinking about the situation, my potentially unfounded assumption of a two-dimensional, linear timeline that only moves in one direction. It is at least possible, if not plausible, that there is a plane, or are multiple planes, of existence wherein I never experienced one or more of the handful of traumas that have since defined my reaction to triggers as a reopening of old wounds that bleed afresh as though brand new each time.

There might be a version, or maybe several versions, of me that had different experiences. That would be more mentally and emotionally resilient because she never went through the things that hold me under my pain like cement feet. (I’m not interested in hearing arguments about resilience being measured by the number of awful things that you’ve had to get through–I’m not convinced that’s how it works.) I don’t need to slide over onto (into?) one of those planes to access the possibility that I could be mentally healthier and happier than I am now.

It may be that the scars trauma leaves cannot be escaped by surfing different paths; they may imprint such indelible marks that there is no way to keep from dragging them along whichever turns you take. I may not be able to erase the emotional, if not spiritual wounds I carry by any amount of metaphysical drift. But the fact that it is at least possible (if rather unlikely) offers a new way of thinking about it.

The hardest thing about moving past trauma and, more important, those deeply ingrained trauma responses, is that I don’t know what I would move forward to. I don’t know who I would be without them. It’s so far removed from who I am, from how I feel when I allow myself to access that seemingly bottomless well of darkness, that I don’t even know where to start.

However, the idea that that well-adjusted person already exists somewhere (if where is the appropriate term) presents an opportunity to imagine what she might be like. Of course, I can’t ever completely erase the effects of trauma; the best outcome I can hope for is a disentangling of that trauma from my current way of feeling and thinking so that I can react more like a person who did not experience those events. But even that feels out of reach at the moment. And the idea that there is a version of me that does react that way gives me hope.

If I can envision a non-traumatized (or less traumatized) version of myself, I have a goal I can work toward. I can imagine her responses to different things, and how they are different from mine, especially what might be distorted about mine and how to un-distort them.

In my last job, it took months for me to convert my knowledge about how toxic the workplace was and how awful I was being treated into the action of quitting. But the non-traumatized me might have acted on that knowledge far sooner, under the realization that she did not deserve that sort of treatment, especially considering what she has to offer in terms of experience and knowledge about the work. She might have left after a few weeks in search of a better opportunity, and might have found one more quickly.

I want to be that woman. I want to be the woman who trusts her feelings about how she is being treated and acts upon them. Who trusts that other people should treat her with respect and to not accept those who don’t. Autistic people are discouraged from entrusting their instincts by a lifetime of negative feedback. Negative feedback is one thing, but I went through some truly horrible shit, so horrible that to this day I have never told anyone the whole story, although a couple of people know one thing or another. (And by a couple I mean literally two, and one is my therapist.)

But if I can act as if I were just a person that got that negative feedback, minus the horrible shit, and that now recognizes, as I do, that nearly all of it was due to misunderstanding my intentions, maybe I can get there after all.

No alternate existences required.

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autism and trauma: betrayal trauma

Posted on March 27, 2024 by C. M. Condo
Photo by Lili-Ann Eldeiry on Unsplash

WARNING: SOME READERS MAY FIND THIS POST TRIGGERING

I have a lot of trauma from growing up as an undiagnosed autistic. My peers treated me horribly, making mean comments behind my back, pretending to be friends so they could pull humiliating pranks, isolating me and making fun of me in front of the rest of class, excluding me from parties, spreading false rumors, pushing me into lockers, you name it, I went through it. It was one, long, living hell, one that I shared with no-one until I got into therapy a few years back. I have PTSD from this trauma that I have worked through, although it still catches me off guard sometimes.

But there is another type of trauma I suffered as a young adult that has proven far more difficult to work through, and that is betrayal trauma.

In my mid-twenties, I became involved with a man that I only many years later realized was a narcissistic sociopath. He broke down my barriers, pretending to be in love with me, while keeping a marriage and three kids going behind my back in another state. He forced me to do a lot of things I didn’t want to do, with drugs, with sex. He insisted I was his one true love and the only person he was having sex with while sleeping with dozens of women and not telling me. My friends begged me to leave him, insisting (correctly) that he was lying to me, but I didn’t want to believe them. Even when he got tired of me and tried to dump me, I kept going back to him, over and over, for years. It wasn’t until I literally walked in on him having sex with another woman that I finally realized I’d been had.

This relationship caused a type of trauma referred to as “betrayal trauma.” While sociopaths are highly skilled manipulators, and one needn’t be autistic to be taken in, autistics are especially susceptible and will stay with someone long after many neurotypicals would have been able to tear away. We don’t just believe our manipulators, we want to believe them, and will keep believing them when they tell ever more outrageous, easily detectable lies. After not having close relationships with friends or significant others for the better part of our lives, we will grasp at anyone who shows a little kindness, and will cling to them long after the kindness has been traded for abuse.

And so, despite the fact that this happened half a lifetime ago, I am still like this. Until my forties, I would stay in relationships and jobs long after whatever was good about them had become impossibly bad, continuing to give and give and not get back. In relationships, I finally grew tired of always being at the ass-end of these situations and made a decision to never settle again.

When it comes to work, however, I am still reliving that trauma. I can understand intellectually that the people I work with are toxic people, but I still won’t leave. I keep thinking that once I’ve been there long enough and they’ve gotten used to me, I will become part of the in-group and the mistreatment will stop. Or if I hold out doing crap work long enough, someone else will come along and have to do that work and I will get to do the real work that I had thought I was hired for. Or if I kill them with kindness they will eventually relent and accept me.

After years of working in the veterinary industry, I can tell you that veterinary workplaces are notoriously bad when it comes to office culture. Among my bosses were an active alcoholic who would insult and belittle the nurses in front of patients, a micro-manager who would spy on the staff through the office phone system, a moody practice manager who I had to flat-out lie to to stay on her good side, an anesthesiologist who constantly accused me of misconduct (while no-one else did) that I was taken to task for each and every time, and a doctor who willfully ignored the mean-girl treatment I suffered by the rest of the staff and, when I tried to inform her of it, insisted I must be mistaken.

In each of these situations, I would burn out or find an “acceptable” excuse to leave, weeks or months after any other self-respecting person would have quit. I was lulled into the idea that if everyone else was putting up with the climate, why should I be the one to complain? In my whole life, I have only worked three workplaces that weren’t toxic, if I can include subbing in as a receptionist at my father’s business over the summer when I was in my twenties. The second was the research animal wing at the university where I got a bachelor’s in animal sciences, but as it was a student position, it rotated every year; I had to leave after fifteen months. The third was an emergency veterinary clinic, where I couldn’t handle the emotional toll of several dying or euthanized animals and their owners multiple times per shift. Emotionally, I am most definitely not equipped for that sort of thing, but I still regret having to leave because the manager was the best boss I had ever known.

As bad as betrayal traumas are, they can be much worse for autistics. Our social difficulties render us unable to see non-verbal cues, and most of us endured constant negative feedback growing up, teaching us that our instincts in any given situation are always wrong. Since we always say and do the wrong things, any mistreatment we receive must be due to us being wrong. It’s never the other person’s fault. If we are being treated poorly, we think, we must deserve it. And that is the line if thinking that leads us to stay, because if it is our fault, then we must be able to do something to fix it. So we keep trying and trying with no results, and it is not until we encounter hard, incontrovertible evidence that we are being treated badly for something that isn’t our fault that we are able to make a break.

Betrayal trauma is also accompanied by post-traumatic guilt, that we should have known, should have paid more attention, wrote things down, believed our guts or hearts. That it is our fault for staying. This mental sleight-of-hand, the seamless shift from our fault due to behaving badly to our fault for not seeing mistreatment and leaving sooner, is what makes betrayal trauma so damaging and so hard to undo. We have to clear two separate hurdles; the first, that we didn’t deserve to be treated poorly, and the second, that we could be forgiven for sticking it out and trying to make it work.

My problem with these ideas is that, to me, they are incompatible. That I both don’t deserve to be treated badly and should forgive myself for not seeing it sooner… I can’t get those two paths to merge in my head. Because I feel like the first says I should be more aware that I am being treated badly, and the second that I shouldn’t feel bad for not being aware of it. In my autistic brain, which relentlessly tries to apply logic to every situation even when it’s impossible, I can’t concede one without precluding the other.

So the work continues.

If you’re an autistic and you recognize yourself as having suffered (or suffering) this type of trauma, don’t be so hard on yourself about how difficult it is to overcome. Just stick with the therapy and remember that thought patterns, no matter how seemingly baked in, are still plastic and can be moved or replaced.

And remember it’s hard. I’m middle-aged and still working through it. Allow yourself some grace.

Posted in Book Two - Mind, Setting 4 | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

it’s not me it’s you

Posted on August 20, 2023 by C. M. Condo
Photo of a small butterfly floating alone above a sunflower
Photo by Ken Goulding on Unsplash

I think most people worry about what other people think of them at least part of the time. As an autistic woman who struggles to perceive unspoken information, I used to worry about it a lot. I worry less now because I’ve grown comfortable with the idea that it’s OK if someone doesn’t like me or get me or if they misinterpret me.

However, the idea that this occasional concern about what other people thought was a common experience was dispelled by an article I read by a despondent extrovert complaining that after COVID, the “extrovert/introvert script got flipped” and now all of a sudden she was “mismatched” to “the world’s expectations.”

I know. You’re laughing. I’m laughing. I mean, I could end this post right here, right? But that wouldn’t be any fun.

Starting with the obvious, suddenly finding oneself mismatched to one’s social environment is not unique to this poor little misunderstood extrovert; it happens to everyone at some point in their life. So you’d think there might some space in here for a bit of empathy on her part. You’d be disappointed. Instead, she writes “one thing the introvert memes taught me was how irritating it is when extroverts attempt to draw introverts out and I’m loath to be that person” and then, in the next sentence, insists, “once you put yourself out there, you’ll have more fun than you imagined.”

The event that occasioned this ill-conceived diatribe? The writer had gotten together with a large group of friends for dinner at an outdoor restaurant, the first such gathering since the pandemic, and the first where “things felt almost back to normal.” But upon saying goodbye, a couple of people “announced” (whatever) that “although they’d had a wonderful time, they wouldn’t make it to another planned gathering three weeks later; they needed at least a month to recover.” The writer was so traumatized by the idea of needing a whole month to recover from a social event that, well, here we are.

So at this point I’m thinking this must be a joke. I’m looking for a punch line, a blatant exaggeration, a cartoon, some indication my autistic brain might have missed that this is tongue-in-cheek. But there isn’t one. This woman is serious.

At the risk of being wrong about that, moving on. There is no such phenomenon as “the world’s expectations.” But even if there were… Um, get over it? Seek out new friends who share your proclivities? Try to understand someone else’s point of view? Make an effort for the first time in your self-obsessed life?

Alas, none of these thoughts occurred to her. Instead, she frets that she’ll “have to adapt to a society that expects different things of me than I expect of it.” While members of the world’s neurodivergent community collectively roll their eyes.

She digs in deeper bemoaning a seemingly sudden onset of people not showing up at gatherings they had previously said they would attend. And we’re not talking plain no-shows, which are a bit annoying, but people who would actually call to apologize for not being able to come. The horror! She then gloomily portends “an unhealthy descent into solitary confinement.” As though choosing to spend more time alone was a slippery slope to turning down every future social event and spending the rest of one’s life without any contact with other human beings.

As I often say, it sounds stupid because it is stupid (ISSBIIS). Most people don’t mind if a friend chooses to limit their attendance at certain types of events (and even if they do, they don’t write a several-hundred word pity party about it in a national publication). There are too many potential scenarios to list that explain it, but off the top of my head, here are a few: Maybe the friend works a grueling job and a weekend of quiet is necessary for her recharge. Maybe the friend has kids and would rather spend time with them instead. Or maybe, she just doesn’t like going to that particular type of event, heaven forbid, and only went to see friends she hadn’t seen in a while, and the rare appearance at such things is all she needs to feel fulfilled.

Valid reasons notwithstanding, I suspect that what at least some people needed a month to recover from may not have been the party but the writer. She’s obliviously self-centered and not the least bit interested in what her friends want or need. Who wants to hang out with someone like that? I’d definitely need a month off from this woman. If not a year. If not forever.

Because if big parties at restaurants (and who doesn’t love it when a loud group of people hijack their favorite restaurant?) aren’t someone’s jam, good luck convincing her. She actually writes that “if it’s true that introverts are…more thoughtful and sensitive people, then we desperately need those people at the party.” (Why? To make up for your total lack of thoughtfulness and sensitivity? Because I don’t think introverts can fix that for you.)

And then…I’m trying to keep it together here while I’m writing this…she claims, “It’s okay if they just sit on the sofa arm eating chips.”

I know. I know. Tears. Give me a second.

Back over here in reality, what COVID did for me was show me which social gatherings I can live without and which ones I missed. Once I started venturing back out, this clarity helped me prioritize gatherings I enjoyed over those I didn’t. I no longer think of my social life as a series of obligations, but a series of things I like to do with a person or people I like to do them with. Aside from special life events (birthdays, weddings, etc.), I now guiltlessly turn down any social invitation that my autism or general state of mind will make difficult and/or unpleasant. And sometimes, whether this woman would believe it or not, I genuinely want to do something and suddenly find out I cannot and have to bow out.

It’s pretty hard to get through life without realizing any of this, but the writer has somehow managed, if not endeavored, to remain blissfully unaware, and even with all that’s happened, is carrying on without slightest shred of self-examination. COVID has ruined her life and the only possible explanation for her friends’ baffling lack of interest in returning to their former social calendar was that they were victims of a sudden societal shift towards not showing up for things.

Hopefully, one of this woman’s friends will pull her aside at some point and try to explain that a willingness to put one’s personal needs above others’ social preferences is not a shift in “the world’s expectations” but an acknowledgement that life is short. That a full life and a fulfilling life are not the same thing. That COVID didn’t change anything.

It just taught us the difference.

Posted in Book Two - Mind, Setting 4 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

one and all

Posted on June 19, 2023 by C. M. Condo

This is my first stab at writing since I completed my master’s thesis and graduated, about four weeks ago. While engaged in my thesis, I resisted the urge to blog even though topics kept presenting themselves, such as a little over a year ago when I saw an ad on social media warning that “Tylenol Causes Autism,” something so patently ridiculous that it didn’t need the extensive rant I would have made about it and has since thankfully slipped back into oblivion.

After graduation, I didn’t do any intellectual work for a month because I didn’t have to, for the first time in five years. I wasn’t sure if I would continue this blog or not, but subjects keep poking at me, so back into the fray I go.

Onward to the topic of this post, which is a label. A size label, on women’s clothing. (This may not seem to be a post about autism, but considering I’m dedicating an entire blog post to a single label on the back of a sweatshirt, I think it qualifies.)

I like big, oversized, against-type sweatshirts, and this one is no exception, white with a pale lavender and pastel blue reverse tie-dye pattern, something that does not match the Gen X goth chick vibe of the rest of my wardrobe in any way whatsoever. For reference, my other oversized sweatshirt is a cheap printing of kittens shooting light beams out of their eyes on the front sized XL.

The size label on the pastel one reads “One Size.” I still remember when certain items of clothing, like ponchos (those itchy wool ones my grandmother used to knit) were labeled “One Size Fits All.” Since that time, many such items now bear the only slightly more accurate label “One Size Fits Most.” This particular label on this particular sweatshirt eschewed the political pitfalls of either and simply indicates “One Size.” And to be fair, this sweatshirt is big on me, particularly in length.

In this case, though, such a designation, despite the length, seems inaccurate. I’m a smaller than average human, almost entirely for genetic reasons, and thereby I prefer to steer clear of issues about women’s sizing, but this one got to me for something I just noticed today. When I pushed the sweatshirt’s sleeves up, I noticed that they are narrow enough to stay up. In comparison, for the kitten one, I have to roll the sleeves several times over to get them to stay.

If you ask me, the latter is much more suited to the “One Size” designation than the garment I have on now, specifically because of the sleeves. The “One Size” applies to height, but definitely not women’s size, because these sleeves would be too tight for anyone over a women’s size Medium, typically a size 8 or 10. (On a related note, a size 8 or 10 is much smaller than the medium-sized American woman is now and suggests a long overdue rethinking of women’s sizing but that is a third rail I’d rather avoid.) I’m just inordinately upset at the makers of this piece of clothing, labeling it “One Size” while ensuring that only a fraction of women would deem it so.

I take words very, very seriously. Since my ability to infer unspoken communication between people is practically non-existent (the autism thing), words are important to me. The audacity of this designer to so carelessly label this product “One Size” when it clearly isn’t, not even if you default to “One Size Fits Most,” seems needlessly discriminatory, if not downright insulting, and it bugs me. A lot. It’s right up there with “Tylenol causes autism,” which is also downright wrong. Not a lot of women can wear this shirt, lucky for me, I guess, since it was at a consignment store and would have sold already if it had been labeled “S/M” instead of “One Size,” as it was with the XLs, where many women who wear that size would have tried it on and then not bought it because of the sleeves.

It’s as though they thought they could remake women’s sizing to be more open by calling it something different, as though saying something made it true even if it wasn’t before. (This also applies to the Tylenol thing.) You can’t just remake the world via relabeling. Not that people don’t try. Firing a bunch of people is “downsizing” or, I read somewhere, “restructuring,” a euphemisticky euphemism that means nothing because it could mean anything.

And it’s everywhere now. Back when I was still working, I would pass a sign for an elementary school on my commute that read “We cultivate and empower lifelong learners.” (It looks even more ridiculous than it reads because the sign is in all caps.) And it was annoying. Because what does that even mean? After asking myself that question for weeks, I found the root of my aversion–it doesn’t actually mean anything. There are no concrete goals or even tasks there. (Not to mention that the public school system doesn’t leave a lot of room for cultivating and empowering anything other than multiple-choice test-takers, but I digress.) It sounds stupid because it is stupid.

This non-speak is everywhere now. I had an 80s jingle for MacDonald’s in my head last night. (Do we even have jingles anymore?) When I was a kid, we used to do a complex clapping sequence to it. It went (I think) “Bic Mac Filet-O-Fish Quarter Pounder French Fries Icy Coke Thick Shakes Sundaes and Apple Pies. You deserve a break today so get up and get away to MacDonald’s!” Not only did this actually feature the entire menu, it also, helpfully, suggested an veritable course of action.

Not so for slogans these days. Now Panasonic wants to give you “A Better Life and A Better World,” LG wants you to know that “Life’s Good,” and CocaCola wants you to “Open Happiness.” Red Bull gives you Wings, and Reese’s is Not Sorry. Note that none of these has anything to do with what the product is or does; we could shuffle them around and it wouldn’t matter. CocaCola is Not Sorry and Red Bull want’s you to know that Life’s Good. And the reason we can do that is because none of these slogans, these phrases, actually mean anything. And I could keep going. It’s fun, I’ll write a slogan and you’ll have to look it up to know what it’s for. Like “Think Different” or “Impossible is Nothing” or “Never Follow.”

What does any of this mean? Nothing. It means nothing! You know it, I know it, and on top of it, everyone hates Red Bull and Reese’s commercials, and consumes those products in spite of it, which makes you wonder if that isn’t the point, to make something so horrendously annoying that it clears the bar for memorable, since the last few slogans from the last paragraph sound familiar but don’t actually suggest even a product category, let alone an actual item.

We’ve now devolved into using the English language’s capacity for ambivalence to an absurd degree. Everyone says a lot of things, and they all mean absolutely nothing.

Just like the “One Size” label on this sweatshirt.

Posted in Aspect IV | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

done-ing

Posted on February 14, 2022 by C. M. Condo

*this post contains profanity

Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash

I’m doing trauma work with my therapist, starting with an event in my childhood that I’d only recently started calling a trauma, even though I remember it clear as day despite it having occurred when I was in fourth grade. At the time, after the initial shock, pain, and shame that washed over me, I just went sort of numb. I never told my parents, or my therapist at the time, or anyone, because the event itself had instilled a permanent uncertainty in my head about my view of things, such that I discounted its impact and that of similar events that proceeded through adolescence, young adulthood, and, occasionally, even now. I thought of them as singular instances of pain come and gone, rather than, as I have only lately come to realize, cumulative.

I still find myself thinking it was nothing, really. I doubt it burned itself into the brain of anyone else in attendance, particularly the other students, who, while probably thinking it was a dick move by the classmate who caused it (no surprise because class consensus had long been that he was a dick), did not disagree with what he said. He said it in response to a poorly worded question by the teacher as to whether any other students in the class were singled out or made fun of. I remember immediately realizing she’d messed up but saying nothing about it, as the one social truism I had learned by ten years old was that it was unwise to draw attention to myself in such situations. She had, of course, intended to ask if any other students felt singled out or made fun of, but the way it was phrased, after a brief pause, the little dick raised his hand and said my name.

I’d had no idea the class felt that way about me, which I now see was at least as upsetting as the fact itself. I’d never been “popular,” but I thought I was somewhere in the middle between the popular kids and the kid who’d complained about the bullying to her mom, setting in motion the turn of events that led up to my discovery. I had a sudden realization that my confidence in my perception of the world was horrifically misplaced. Not knowing I was autistic (or possibly even what autism was), I decided that something inside me must be deeply flawed, if not missing entirely.

It left a cavern inside of me that I could never fill, this conviction that whatever I thought or felt about a situation was wrong and whatever got fucked up about it was my fault because I was irreparably broken inside. Adding to this, no one ever stuck up for me, or defended me, or pulled me aside later to tell me that it was the other person, and not me, who was to blame for what happened. No information to counter my view of myself was offered until well into adulthood, and, to this day, never in one of those situations. At any time, I am in danger of finding myself adrift in an antagonistic sea, where nothing I grab on to is ever secure enough to float on.

I write it like this and it seems ridiculous that I had not realized the event’s impact or how devastating it was until now. The feelings I’m describing are textbook trauma responses. But the thing I’ve learned about self-destructive thinking patterns is that they don’t feel wrong or out of place among more mundane ones. They just wriggle in and clothe themselves in the same insignificance as which sweater I should wear with these pants. They don’t wear reflective vests or have blinking warning lights or anything. So this trauma remained in my head, doing its dirty, undermining work, unnoticed and unaccountable, for decades. Decades.

So I’m angry, too. And as upsetting as it is, I want to get upset. I want to feel it. My mental health team has expressed surprise at my willingness to dig in and go through the pain and tears to finally uproot it, but I am thoroughly tired of this particular tail wagging the dog and I don’t care how much crying and hurting I have to do to rip the damn thing out because I am done and I am really mad that this one brief thing, this terrible thing that happened that was wrong and was handled wrong by the one person (the teacher) whose job it was to not do these wrong things (or at least try to fix them afterwards) completely dropped the ball, has left me scarred ever since. Fuck. FUCK. I am DONE. Pull the rotten tooth that’s been poisoning me for so long. Scrape out all of the leavings. Dig in. Leave marks. I don’t care.

It reminds me of my physical pain, that horrifying, fifteen month ordeal where I was in indescribable agony, where I would beg massage therapists and physical therapists to dig in there and try to break it up or soften it or whatever because anything was better than feeling like someone was scraping a serrated knife under my shoulder blade relentlessly, all day, all night, despite the pain medications, the injections, everything. Just get it out, I would think, tears pricking in the corners of my eyes that I would shove back in because I’d already wasted too many on it and was sick of that, too.

That’s where I am with this trauma. I’m tired of the gut punches I’m never prepared for, that suck the air out of me and leave me in a quicksand of despair that I am never able to pull myself out of without help. I’m tired of feeling wrong all of the time. I’m tired of hating myself for it. Why anyone wouldn’t go to any lengths to have it stop happening is beyond me.

I’m not close to being done, of course. I get myself a Valentine’s Day card every year to remind myself to love myself, and this year, for the first time since I started doing it, instead of delighting me, it rang hollow and made me sad. It’s still beyond me to think that the gut punches aren’t normal, that not everyone has a quicksand of despair in their heads that sucks them down anytime they are wrong about something or hurt someone without meaning to. Apparently, most people just feel bad for a while, apologize if appropriate, vow to do better next time and then move on. Just feel bad for a while. What I wouldn’t give to just feel bad about something instead of ductaping myself to a chair and whipping myself mercilessly about it for hours, if not days.

That’s not normal? Fuck. Fuck.

So I’m done. And eventually I will be done with this trauma, too. We’ll both be done. Bring on the done-ing.

Posted in Book Two - Mind, Setting 4 | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

the real thing

Posted on November 12, 2021 by C. M. Condo
Sign in store window that reads "You Must Wear A MasK To Enter"
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

In working on my master’s thesis, I’m doing a lot of research on autism. I’m also reading the writings of other autistics. It is by turns infuriating and insightful. A lot of research from the last century describes what autistics supposedly lack. We lack imagination. We lack the ability to imagine others’ mental states. We lack social abilities. We lack central coherence. We lack executive function.

It’s all so very nice and neat, these little labels, little buckets of competencies that seem to be missing, depriving us of a full component of selfhood, of human-ness. But the more I read what other autistics have written, the more I realize that the buckets researchers claim we are missing are the wrong ones. Because I do feel as though I lack certain skills, even though this is not how I am supposed to think of myself. I lack the ability to front. I lack the ability to intuit when someone else is fronting. Thankfully, these can be learned, or at least, compensated for.

Of course, I’m not supposed to say I lack anything. The autism community tells me the opposite of what the researchers say, that my abilities are not less than those around me; they’re just divergent. Different.

Not that it matters if you call them deficits or alternatives; they still separate us from non-autistic people. We still don’t see the world the way NTs do, which bothers me a whole lot less than the fact that they don’t see the world the way I do. What is ordinary to them is gross and misshapen to me. What is normal to them is overwrought to me, is backwards, is impossible.

Researchers like to claim that we autistics lack the imagination required to intuit others’ states of mind. But that’s not how it works. We don’t lack that imagination. We have a surfeit of it that renders each theoretical situation with the same brightly-colored and well-defined contours as reality. It is not that we cannot imagine other states of mind, but that we imagine them so well they become just as real as, just as fraught as, and thereby threaten, our own mental states. We are literal, enormously, painfully so. It’s not that we don’t get metaphors; it’s that we are keenly aware of the ways in which they fail to align with reality and can’t ignore the dissonance.

For me, this creates host of realities that don’t follow any universal set of rules. Commercials drive me crazy. So do rom-coms. Because it doesn’t matter that they aren’t real; in my mind, everything is real. So whenever I run up against a situation that would not, could not happen in real life, it frustrates me because the only reason I know that it could not happen in real life is through experience, not through some built-in remove that kicks in automatically in non-literal situations. Autistics have no such remove. It’s all real. All of it.

No wonder we are so socially inept. Exposure to popular media means we get conflicting information about what is and isn’t socially acceptable and we have no internal sense of which is which, no matter the setting. Did you know that it’s rude to take food off someone else’s plate? I didn’t, because in commercials when it happens people laugh about it. I remember being stunned to discover that it isn’t funny when I tried it myself. Not only that, I’ve discovered that saying “I’m stealing a french fry” somehow makes it acceptable even though I’m performing the exact same activity and calling it “stealing” which in my mind should make it worse, not better.

How am I supposed to function in this environment?

My whole life has been like this. I only pass now because I have learned the hard way what does and doesn’t work, and only because I’ve tried all the stuff that doesn’t work and not gotten the expected response. And even though I know my brain does this, now, sees situations on television or in movies and lends them misplaced verisimilitude, I am still incapable of seeing them any other way.

So when I see something that I know intellectually is fake, I get angry. I want to scream that’s not real! that’s not how life works! and the NT people around me are like, um, duh. And I’m like I can’t handle this I have enough trouble sorting through situations as it is. And I worry about autistic kids like myself thinking that writing “new friend check yes or no” on a chewing gum wrapper and handing it to someone is cute and not rude.

Everything is so fake. And knowing that is depressing. I feel like 99% of what I’m exposed to is built on sand. People’s teeth aren’t blindingly white in real life and no one expects them to be, for instance. Seriously, I am obsessed with the relative whiteness actors’ and commentators’ teeth. And unwrinkled clothes. And all-white kitchens that look like no one ever cooks in them. And doormats with no dirt. And the incredibly fake settings in pharmaceutical commercials, where someone is either a shut-in in a gray house or works as a volunteer for a community garden or climbs mountains or something (don’t any of these people have to work for a living?). It’s so wrong, all of it, and I spent so much of my life not realizing that, that when I see it now it is deeply upsetting.

That’s what autism is. It is intolerance for incongruence. It’s no wonder we prefer the company of things or animals instead of people. It’s because we need as much as possible in our lives to be exactly what it says it is, and people just aren’t like that until you get to know them really, really well, and the level of detail we need to acquire on those we are closest to constrains the size of that subset rather considerably.

I’ve gotten trapped in discussions about the merits of social discourse (read: lying) with non-autistics and I’d just as soon not do that here, because that’s not my point. My point is that we autistics are crappy dissemblers and the fact that NT people do it without thinking is weird and wrong to us. Everything and everyone is weird and wrong to us. Our lack of central coherence isn’t a lack of coherence; it’s a lack of consensus among the information coming in. If I’m looking at, say, a sign about mask-wearing, any tiny detail that is out of place, off center, crooked, colored incorrectly, misspelled, miscapitalized (see above), even if the mask cartoon doesn’t look like a real mask, if any of those things are there, my comprehension falls apart because I can’t not see them and can’t fit them into the purported whole the sign is supposed to create.

It’s why I prefer text to pictures. I can be extremely metaphorical with words because what words mean is strictly defined. (And when someone uses them incorrectly it is almost physically painful to me because words are the only thing I can count on.) It’s why I get so upset when people decide they can remake the rules of the English language because someone else is doing it (don’t get me started on erroneous hyphens, for instance). Despite the fact that the English language lacks a governing body, the need for universality in word-based communication renders it extremely stable. (Not “extremely-stable.” That is wrong. You only use a hyphen when you change a word’s part of speech, from, say, a verb to an adjective, like in “word-based communication.”)

I just want people to mean what they say. I want people to be more honest. Every time I read or hear a statement by a company accused of some sort of wrongdoing I feel like it’s pointless, because all they will ever say is some variation on “mistakes were made by a few individuals and do not reflect who we are as a company, we take this very seriously, blah blah blah.” Why even bother asking? Or printing the response? Why not just print “We asked for a response and they gave us the usual BS?”

Just once I’d like a company to say something like “We did this even though we knew it was wrong because we made money doing it.” That would be delightful. Or, “I’m not getting a vaccine because I don’t like being told what to do.” Ooh, that would be delicious. Just own up to your stuff, already. Stop pretending everything you do and say was done and said with nothing but the most honorable of intentions. Stop pretending you’re not self-centered.

Everyone is self-centered. Autistics just don’t hide it automatically like NTs do. It would be such a relief for someone besides us to admit it. The differences between us and NTs would contract. And NTs would get a little glimpse of the world as we see it, as full of contradictions, of things not being what they are supposed to be. If only. If only even for a day. That’s what National Autism Day should be. It should be a day where everyone has to answer every question literally and truthfully. Like, “How are you?”

“I’m mad at my husband because he dumps coffee down the drain and doesn’t run the faucet afterwards and it stains the sink.”

Now THAT is a conversation starter, you know? In a way that “fine” will never be.

But it will never happen. Wrong things will still be real. And real things will still be wrong.

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Crash the lab

Posted on October 10, 2021 by C. M. Condo
Photo by Dillon Kydd on Unsplash

I now work at an animal hospital again. Only part-time, because autism, and at the front desk, because after multiple surgeries my dog-slinging days are officially behind me, but a place to be around pets and animal lovers and use my veterinary/animal sciences knowledge.

There is a white board in the back that lists pets that are on the way and have just arrived, with the pet’s name and the reason for the visit. Like, “Fluffy ingrown claw” or “Chloe V+ D+” (vomiting and diarrhea). The other day, it had “Crash HL lameness” and my anti-central-cohering autistic brain did not immediately register “Crash” as the name of the pet.

Crash Thomassen (not his real last name) was a black lab (not his real breed) who had apparently, appropriately enough, torqued his knee at the dog park for reasons not unrelated to his moniker. Once I met the gregarious pooch and it clicked that Crash was the name and not the injury, I thought that Crash was probably the perfect name for him.

Pet owners tend to be rather uncreative when it comes to names. At any given time, we have multiple Peppers, Lolas, Sadies, Luckys, and Buddys in and out of the facility. (Oh, side note here, please do not name your pet Lucky for any reason.) The only exception is pug and bulldog owners, who lean towards hipster names that are much cuter on dogs than on people’s kids, such as Martha, Gertrude, Chauncey, or Walter. So when someone comes up with an excellent dog name, it gets noticed. Crash was a hospital fave.

And a personal fave. The name Crash speaks to me. Because that’s me, right now. I have crashed, and burned.

Three semesters of grad school via Zoom have wrecked me. Class discussions and impromptu tangents are the fun part of grad school. They balance out the herculean and thankless labor one must otherwise expend reading gross amounts of peer-reviewed literature and pulling together a research project that will culminate in a thesis or dissertation, otherwise known as the longest and most harrowing paper you will ever write in your entire life. Zoom took the fun part away and made the herculean gross part exponentially more thankless. Grad school work requires a level of sustained intellectual concentration that I simply cannot muster right now. And I am not just tired of schoolwork. I am tired of thinking. I have completely lost the motivation to apply mental effort to, well, anything.

I got an email today through my professional website from someone who listened to an interview I had given in April of 2020, before Zoom wrung every last drop of passion out of me for the work I had been doing. The email referenced my desire to create a new language around autism, to amend the ADA to more specifically address accommodations for those with neurological and other invisible disabilities, and even the problematic use of the word “disability” to describe autism, a condition many, including myself, regard more as a gift than a burden (or at least, equal parts therein). The email writer’s interest and excitement were palpable even in the brief note, perhaps all the more so in the context of my thorough lack thereof.

I used to think someone needed to do this work, and that I was as well-equipped as any to do it. It used to be my excitement that was infectious, my dedication that was so enviable. But it’s just gone. Now the only intellectual work I do is counseling first-time pet owners that most of the time, a vomiting puppy is not an emergency and that sometimes, cats stop eating for inscrutable reasons and will start again when they are hungry enough. (Er, this is not intended as medical advice. If your puppy is throwing up or your cat has stopped eating, please call the vet.)

I used to have a five year plan on the wall in my home office space, with a timeline specifying numbers of articles in the lay press and in peer-reviewed journals, conference attendances and presentations, what I expected my career to look like as I leaned in to advocacy following completion of my master’s which was, at the time, a given. I tossed it when I packed up and moved into a new house last month, perhaps assuming I’d print out a new one and hang that up instead. But I didn’t, and I haven’t.

I know Zoom courses were hard on everyone, instructors and students alike. But I relied on my peers for more than stimulating conversation and alternative insights. They reflected and amplified my passion for the work, commiserated with me on the challenges, and made me feel like what I was doing, as crazy and unlikely as it seemed for someone like me, was worth doing, and even more, that I was the right person to be doing it.

Even as we joked about the difference between reading an article and “going over” it, bickered good-naturedly over whether you could include something for which you only read the abstract as a reference, and self-consciously modeled academic wherewithal for undergraduate students in courses where we were TAs, we were reifying ourselves and our reasons for being there. As difficult as it was for me to sit in a room for three hours and stay “on” and mentally engaged, it was exponentially more so when my peers were tiny, disembodied faces on a computer screen, if I could see their faces at all, as a plurality of us would turn off our cameras at various points during the online lecture to shop or put laundry in the dryer or cook dinner or whatever other mundanities we could now engage in whilst attending class at home.

At some point, I was always going to have to learn to look inside myself for the necessary passion and work ethic. But I feel as though the collegial part of the process was truncated unnecessarily in the most abrupt and painful way possible, like being in a relationship wherein the other party has suddenly become incapacitated. When we switched to online coursework after Spring Break in 2020, it was like a fun, weird, interesting new thing that I engaged in with people I had forged relationships with in the preceding eight weeks. By the Fall, though, I and a collection of mostly strangers slogged through the material as individuals on separate islands, only communicating through online, inaptly named discussion boards that only facilitated discussion in the presence of a real world counterpart and were woefully inadequate to the alternative.

I could no longer spontaneously bounce ideas off a classmate or professor walking to or from my car. The friendly arguments about reading material that I cultivated–I loved engaging with people who disagreed with me because I got so much out of being forced to justify or change my point of view–were completely gone. Even the online Zoom discussions were nothing of the sort. One person would talk and stop. Another would talk and stop. And another. Half of the students wouldn’t bother talking at all. There was no back-and-forth. And we were all so starved for casual interaction that when the professor would shunt us off in smaller Zoom rooms of two or three, we wound up talking about just about anything other than whatever it was we were supposed to be discussing because in that dark fall and winter of 2020, those little groups made up the lion’s share of our social interaction.

I think part of the reason I’m recalcitrant is because I’m pissed. I feel like I was cheated out of something I was owed. I harbor no small amount of resentment at being forced to pay full price (through loans, of course, so it’s not even like it was my money) for a lousy facsimile of a graduate school experience, as useless as paper doll clothes on a Bratz, and about as fungible. I barely even remember what my Zoom courses were about. Instead, my strongest memories are of being lost and frustrated, of finding so much of the material opaque, and of feeling like I was completely out of my depth. I would rather re-take an in-person class I hated three times over than have to take courses I would have thrived in in an in-person setting online again.

So, like any self-respecting adult, I’ve decided to invest in my inner two-year-old and turn away from the whole business and answer phones at an animal emergency room. To say this is a waste of my experience and talents would be an understatement, but I don’t care. It’s my way of thumbing my nose at the whole sad dumpster fire that this pandemic made of my plans. Fuck that, I keep thinking. What’s the point. I threw all that time and energy into it and now I’d rather watch football and pick out curtains for the window in the downstairs bathroom than pad up and dive back into the indignant moral superiority I felt when advocating for neurodivergents, a fire that kept me going even when it seemed like nothing I did would ever have that much of an impact.

Maybe this post is the first step in finding my way back to that passion and energy, in rediscovering what it was inside of me that made me think I had any business doing it in the first place. It didn’t used to be hard. It was easy. Graduate school was so easy for me compared to some of my fellow students. I bloom under the right kind of pressure, especially with a little friendly competition, with really smart people around me that force me to stay sharp and keep up with them. Nothing hones my writing skills like a deadline. Now that I’m out of the coursework and into the thesis portion, though, with an ultimate deadline still a year and a half away and no other striving, quick-witted grad students around me, it’s just easier to slip into obscurity, especially wearing the same scrubs as everyone else and a mask to hide my face. If no-one reminds me that I’m special, then I don’t have to be special. Fuck that. What’s the point.

I don’t know what it will take to reignite my pilot light. I keep hoping it will be something outside of me. Like the email I got today, although all that has done is brought my current dilemma into sharp relief, illuminating just how far off the path I have wandered since the pandemic forced my graduate education into a state of suspended animation. I had assumed I was just burned out and needed a break, and that’s probably true. But am I supposed to wait for my body to tell me I can go back, or will I need to pull myself up at least part of the way out of this hole by sheer will power even though I’d rather stay here in this nice, dark, quiet little space uncluttered by my or anyone else’s expectations?

I don’t know. But at least I’ve started writing again.

Posted in Book Two - Mind, Setting 4 | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

recuperation

Posted on July 22, 2021 by C. M. Condo

The Ape is on hiatus to recover from a surfeit of anxiety and stress, and will return in Fall 2021.

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Musk-rat

Posted on May 16, 2021 by C. M. Condo

Or, Why I’m Not Happy that Elon Musk is Autistic.

Photo courtesy of The New York Post

I am always grateful when someone famous announces that they are autistic. Or so I thought. Now I have to say that I am almost always grateful, because in the case of Elon Musk, gratitude was not the first, or second, emotion that I felt. Instead, I felt apprehensive and weary, because I knew I was going to have to write this post, re-inform people as to what autism isn’t, and explain why I’m not happy about his announcement, over and over, because people love asking the one autistic person in their lives about every little thing that has anything to do with autism. And not only am I the only autistic person they know, I’m the only autistic person I know, so this blog is the only place I get to vent about it.

Basically, the last thing the autism community needs another example of a white male autistic who fits the vanishingly rare stereotype of the super-genius misanthrope. At the risk of stating the obvious, most people with Autism Level 1, as Asperger’s is clinically termed, do not have 99th percentile IQs and aren’t billionaire entrepreneurs. A considerable number are not even white men. People with “high-functioning” autism are a diverse group of individuals with a range of functionalities of which those like Musk’s (and, full disclosure, mine) are the ceiling, not the average. Such outliers are exceptions to the rule, their success unattainable for the rest of the autism community.

Most people on the spectrum, including me, struggle in our day-to-day interactions because we don’t intuit social norms. We pay a price for unintentionally upsetting neurotypicals (non-autistics) around us, who often accuse us of having a “bad attitude” and “negative tone.” But these traits are just fine if you are a white male of outrageous wealth, autistic or otherwise.

Musk is a self-centered blowhard whose only goal in announcing he had Asperger’s was the promotion and benefit of Elon Musk. When someone like him comes along and says they are autistic, it reaffirms stereotypes about autistics being unfeeling savants and reifies a social structure where the norms that apply to an overwhelming majority of the population are lifted for the elite few.

This is a problem for several reasons, of which being allowed to be a jerk if you’re privileged is the least of them. Lack of knowledge about autism makes a celebrity of Musk’s stature a template against which all other autistics, including the non-white, non-male, non-rich and non-genius, are measured, thereby setting an impossible standard none of the rest of us can reach. People already carry around a lot of negative implicit bias against autistic people, even though most would claim otherwise, and Musk just reaffirms what they already feel.

For autistics who aren’t named Elon Musk, there are severe penalties for not adhering to social guidelines. We have to work for bosses, at the local fast food joint, retail store, or office, and we do so at their pleasure and according to their rules. Musk may be a genius, but he wouldn’t last a single shift at the local Starbucks, and he’d undoubtedly blame everyone else for getting himself fired, because that’s the kind of guy he is. Most autistics are not like that, but those like him make it that much harder for us to convince people of that fact.

Do we need people to make autism more visible to non-autistics? Yes, absolutely, and that’s why Musk’s reveal isn’t all bad. At least we’re talking about autism, right? There are as many different types of autism presentations as there are people with autism, and I have no doubt as to his diagnosis. But autistics struggle to hold down jobs, make and keep friends, and meet the expectations of the neurotypical (non-autistic) people around them, challenges that, if Musk ever faced, he certainly doesn’t have to worry about now. If only his admission had come with caveats, with a “Yes, I’m successful, but I’m the exception, not the rule,” I would have cheered him on. Instead, he’s become the latest front in our ongoing battle against tired autism tropes.

Most people will never be billionaires. Most autistics will never be Elon Musk. This is an opportunity to recognize that autism is more common than we realize. So long as we realize that Musk is not a common autistic, that is good thing, and I [wearily] welcome it.

Posted in Setting 3 | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

get past

Posted on April 30, 2021 by C. M. Condo

Online newspapers are strange animals. Unlike the paper versions that have a different set of articles every day, online outlets show certain pieces with lots of hits for weeks on end, while the less popular/clickable ones can slip out of view in a matter of hours. So you’ll keep seeing the same headline over and over in some cases, and be unable to locate one you saw that morning in others. In this context, there’s one headline that seems to have been up for months, although it’s probably more like weeks, on one of the online newspapers I frequent. It’s about a [presumed, and presumed female] travel writer whose advice for those of us unfortunate enough to have more prosaic lives is that we just need to “get past fear.”

That’s it. That’s the headline. “[Travel writer name] to [us poor schleps]: Get past fear”

I’ve gotten some pretty useless advice in my time (chronic pain sufferers are constantly–constantly–fielding unsolicited medical advice), but “get past fear” takes the prize. First, fear, in and of itself, is a hard-wired evolutionary response that has served us well at the species level for tens of thousands of years. I’m really glad my ancestors never “got past” fear or I might not be around. Second, advice to just “get” past whatever “fear” means to the travel writer is nothing more than a particularly annoying manifestation of an already swollen category of misguided, inadequate life “hacks.” It’s like telling someone to “get past sleep.” Wouldn’t life be amazing if we didn’t have sleep? Think of all the things we could do! All the leisure time we’d have! It would be so freeing!

And it’s about as likely. Get past fear? What does that even mean? Fear of what? In the context of solo travel by a woman, that seems like really, really bad advice. Fear is what makes you careful. Fear is what keeps you from being alone with strange men, from going on a hike out of cell range without telling anyone, from buying LSD from a bartender you just met. What kind of fear is this woman talking about? Fear of not being able to pay your rent? Fear of being kidnapped? Fear of having an emergency in a strange country where you don’t speak the language?

Or is it the “fear” (if I could put more scare quotes around it without looking stupid I would) of “discovering” “who you really are”? And who is even afraid of that anyway? How is it possible to be afraid of something that, let’s be frank here, is all but impossible in any real sense? How much about yourself that’s available as self-knowledge could you not know already, and how much more is likely to be revealed, EatPrayLove-style, by a change of scenery?

It’s not like you will suddenly discover that you are a completely different person. And despite what most marketing executives would like you to believe, it’s not even a real thing, this “new you” that could be brought about by traveling, drinking organic hard seltzer, getting a Peloton, or buying designer clothes at 70% off. (It’s still the same you, just in a different place, buzzed, in more debt, and in a different outfit.) And even if some unexpected self-discovery was out there to be made, how is that a terrifying prospect? Gee, I always thought I was the kind of person who liked sushi but I’ve just realized I’m not. How horrifying! Well, I better make sure not to have any more epiphanies like that one. I barely survived!

Assuming there is some other type of “fear” to get past in this context that has escaped my literalist autistic brain, I sincerely doubt that a simple admonition to “get past” it is all that was missing from the experience. OMG! I just need to get past fear! I wish someone had told me sooner! This is the answer to all my problems!

As an example, here’s a little personal disclosure: I hate large flying bugs. I can handle flies and small moths, but anything over an inch long with wings is scary to me. Maybe not a phobia in the truest sense, but definitely anxiety-inducing discomfort that increases exponentially with the number of said creatures around. The area where I live is a few weeks away from being beset by a once-every-seventeen-years, biblical surfeit of harmless but extremely large and clumsy flying bugs. I’ve got real fear, unfounded as it may be, about this upcoming event. In fact, my heart rate goes up just thinking about it.

According to this travel writer, I just need to “get past” this fear. (Specific instructions not included, of course.) But you know what? No, actually, I don’t need to do that. I need to go somewhere where there aren’t masses and masses of large flying bugs, which is what I did last time this happened and it turned out great. Unlike visiting old friends, getting past my fear of large flying bugs will not improve my life in any quantifiable fashion, and, worse, would require a significant investment of psychological resources better spent on improving my fair-to middling self-esteem and not losing my s**t about my upcoming thesis project. I do not need to get past my fear of giant insects–or anything else, for that matter–in order to live a fully-realized and happy life. (What I do need to get past is how annoying I find life hacks to be in general. Life is supposed to be lived, not hacked.)

And that’s it? That’s all she’s got? That’s her sage advice after soldiering through all the trials and tribulations life has thrown at her? After all of the experiences, tragic and sublime, that she’s had to confront, move through, and learn from, this is the fresh, novel insight she’s offering to the masses laboring through drab existences of unfulfilled potential? I’ve read fortune cookie fortunes with more depth and purpose. Get past fear? Get past my middle finger. The least she could have written was “I conquered my fear of [X] by doing [Y].” [Y] might not work for me but it least it would have carried some weight in terms of context, in terms of the person doing it, in terms of her unique existence and fear of [X].

There are lots of difficult things in life that we have and do need to get past, the pandemic and resulting fallout being the most present and significant therein. “Fear” of some intangible personal discovery, however, is not among them. On the other hand, fear of something genuinely dangerous, like mountain cats, is a healthy and well-respected survival strategy. My advice? Don’t get past fear. Pay attention to it. Assess and analyze it. Decide if it’s helping you or holding you back and deal with it as such. And don’t go someplace with lots of hungry mountain cats.

Eventually, people will stop clicking on that stupid headline and I will be able to get past it and start writing blog posts of substance again. Now, that is something to be feared.

Posted in Setting 4 | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment