I’m autistic, and I will never be normal. Never ever. Not in a million years. No matter what I do.
I didn’t learn this until my thirties. In youth, I thought I could fix myself. I had a fake-it-till-you-make-it mindset. I really, really thought that I could be normal. I just had to try hard enough. After all, people kept criticizing me for being strange. They all said it was my fault. They all said I had to fix it. They all said that I could fix it; I just had to work hard and be considerate of other people. By implication, that meant I must be lazy and selfish, since I wasn’t normal yet. I strange and out of line and wrong. Because I was lazy and selfish.
So I got to work. I did a lot of things:
- Therapy, for many years. Several different therapists.
- Medication. Aripiprazole (Abilify), quetiapine (Seroquel), citalopram (Celexa), amphetamine (Adderall), bupropion (Celexa). Different dosages and combinations. I tried this for about five years.
- I considered trying drugs, meaning illicit drugs. I heard that autistic adults could benefit from things like ketamine and psychedelics and MDMA. There have been studies.
- People-watching. Sitting in public and paying careful attention to how people work. Watching them talk. Carefully observing their reactions. Taking mental notes. Analyzing. Observing again.
- Meditation. Mindfulness and concentration. Every morning for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Focus on staying in the present moment. Focus on being present with other people.
- Books. On body language and psychology, mostly. And many websites on things like social skills and conversation. This fed into all the analysis from people-watching. It ultimately didn’t help me socialize any better. I learned to understand people more in the abstract, though, and that has been a blessing. I’ve been able to see things about people right away, e.g. “You were raised in a very religious household, weren’t you? Probably rural?” And they blink and go, “Okay, how did you clock that?”
- Soliciting criticism. “Was I weird? Am I walking funny? Am I standing too close to you? Did I do anything ‘off’?” This was a sincere attempt at trying to change myself. The people around me just took it as annoying and neurotic. So the response I got was “shut the fuck up you weirdo”. Until I do something weird (that I had probably asked about), at which I get yelled at/made fun of, again.
- Practice, practice, practice. Constantly talking to people, observing how they respond to me. Taking note of what works and what doesn’t. I got slight, incremental improvements. This was the most beneficial thing for socializing. I got to the point where I could hold down a job, buy a car, apply for an apartment, and so on. Normal adult things.
- Changing my posture and body language. Someone told me I “walk like a serial killer”. To be fair, my natural gait is weird: head forward, blank stare, no arm movement. So I deliberately stand up straight and sway my shoulders slightly. It looks stiff because I’m doing it deliberately. Now people ask my why I walk funny. But at least they’re not frightened by it.
- Changing a million other little things. Learning just the right amount of eye contact. Not fidgeting. Standing a certain way. Controlling my facial expressions. So many different things.
I worked on this from my early teens until a little after thirty. So, about twenty years. It didn’t work. There is a harsh truth here, which I have had to accept: I’m different. In a thousand subtle ways. I cannot ‘fix’ them all. It’s impossible.
(And then I warn someone who is about to meet me that I’m autistic. “I’m kind of strange. Just so you know.” They roll their eyes and tell me that I’m a delusional idiot who thinks he’s special. They quickly change their mind after meeting me in person, though.)
Accepting this requires two things.
First, coping strategies. Not, “I will force myself to be normal”. But, “I will construct my life such that I can get away with being myself”.
Refuse to accept the consensus. This is the hard part. Spiritually, I must stand in front of all the people in my past who told me certain things about myself. I must be arrogant and irrational enough to say, “No. You are all wrong, and I’m right.” And I have to mean it.
Pursuant to that point, let me tell you a story.
When I was young, I found a book in a friend’s attic. It was a mystical book from some place in Asia — India or China or somewhere like that. Full of little paradoxical stories. One of the stories was about a monk. He was having trouble achieving some spiritual insight, because of all the people telling him that it was impossible. He was surrounded by people who were trying to discourage him.
He tells this to his superior, who takes him to a dry stream bed and makes him stand in the center. This story takes place, by the way, in the spring, when snowpack melts in the mountains. The elder monk stood outside of the river bed.
Down comes a flash flood from melting snowpack. The novice can hear it. It will arrive in a matter of seconds.
The novice is terrified. He doesn’t know what to do. The elder monk says, “Stand still. Don’t look at the flood, look at me.” He instructs the novice to stand with his shoulder facing the flood and put out one stiff hand, palm outward. He shouts at the novice to hold firm. He tells him not to flinch.
The flash flood comes roaring down the stream bed. The novice suddenly feels funny. He says to himself, “This is it. I either die, or this crazy advice will work. Might as well commit”.
He sticks his hand out. And a miracle happens: he splits the flood. The flash flood is riven in two by the force of his resolve. The waters flow around him, leaving him unharmed.
If you’re autistic, that story is worth remembering. Don’t bend, don’t flinch. Split the flood.
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