All of You is Welcome Here

You are invited to take off your mask, kick up your feet or rock side to side—the water's fine.

Let’s kick the tires on this thing and see what comes loose.

What thing? The Whole Thing. This late capitalist world we find ourselves in is designed for an ever narrowing definition of “fit people” and is becoming more and more willing to throw the neurodivergent, disabled, LGBTQ+, older, younger, global majority, poor, middle class—or anyone who doesn’t play by rules intended to benefit a tiny group of very wealthy, mostly very white male people—under the bus as it rolls on oblivious to the destruction in its wake.

Great, but how?

Well, your mileage may vary, but what I can offer as a way to address this is my point of view as a late-diagnosed Autistic person who has done years of research into the history of stigma towards difference, including the inglorious growth of eugenics over a hundred years ago that then fell out of favor after the Nazis brought the idea of eradicating difference to its logical conclusion (inspired by the US embrace of eugenics that included sterilization of anyone considered defective and the Jim Crow laws of the South). The attempt to eradicate difference has now morphed into so-called genetic research. Of course there have been some amazing discoveries that have helped people with previously incurable diseases, but more money goes into attempting to eradicate autistic genes than goes into giving much-needed support to actually autistic people who are alive.

When dealing with autism (and many other “diagnoses” and varieties of difference from the ever narrowing idea of the norm), there is very little attempt to understand differences which are disabling only inasmuch as they don’t jibe with the current social and economic setup. The primary offer of help for autistic children is something called ABA, which was born the same year I was (1963) and involves attempting through a variety of punishments and enticements to get an autistic child to mimic “normal” aka neurotypical. The same people who created this technique also created “gay conversion therapy,” which attempted to make gay kids act heterosexual. One of the primary “success stories” profiled in Life Magazine in the 1970s went on to kill himself in his early thirties.

However, ABA is still considered the “gold standard” for treating autistic kids, because the anxiety is not for the autistic child but instead their parents and the world outside who need to see them as “normal.”

Without launching into the whole song and dance of the horrors of this, the pattern here I think is obvious: anyone who is marked different is considered disabled intrinsically and the onus is on them to conform to the narrow idea of acceptable.

Once I discovered I was in this club, many baffling aspects of my existence made sense, and instead of it being horrifying to me, it was liberating. Because I could see what had been going on my whole life. This doesn’t mean I am not disabled by the experience when attempting to fit into the world of work and mainstream socializing, but it does mean I understood why I felt so unadapted even in my late 50s to the world as it was. I am writing a memoir about this process of reframing my life as it relates to the history of autism, and will give specific examples in future posts, but this is the broad outline

So, by “kicking the tires,” I mean seeing the causes and what is actually happening, who benefits from pathologization of difference and offering a space where we can reframe this stigma and look at how our various ways of becoming and being offer much more sustainable, ethical, and healthy alternatives to the death-mobile the billionaires of the world have us riding on right now.

What kind of space will this be, why should I be here?

I want this to be a capacious space. While I will be addressing autistic experience primarily for the foreseeable future, mostly via offering a backstage glimpse into my thinking about all this and the writing process of the memoir, what is clear to me not only from my own research but the writing of others (see photo above of books atop my draft chapters to get a sense of who I mean and as a de facto reference list for this post) is that neurodivergent and otherwise disabled people are uniquely qualified to address the issue of the dangers of attempting to eradicate diversity. We all learned as kids that biodiversity is crucial for the environment to be sustainable, but it’s equally true of neurodiversity in terms of humanity. And to be clear neurodiversity includes Everyone. Neurodivergent refers to people who reside outside the narrow frame of normal, but neurodiversity implies a space for people of All neurotypes. I want everyone to feel welcome here and hope the insights from outside of the neuronormative will have value regardless of where you feel you fall on this grid.

Way before I knew I was autistic, I knew I fell outside the margins. There are many ways to be “unadapted.” I named my website The Unadapted Ones before I knew I was autistic, inspired by an observation of 19th Century philosopher William James:

There are infinitely more things ‘unadapted’ to each other in this world than there are things ‘adapted’; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopaedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.

As I have been writing my memoir and reading books by extraordinary autistic philosophers and thinkers such as Remi Yergeau, Erin Manning, and D.J. Savarese, it is clear to me that my theater work (that some of you may know me for more than my prose) is deeply reflective of my autistic perception and experience. I see now that it’s there that I wrote unmasked, without knowing it, and the tools created by my various theater labs were also reflective of autistic perception. You can get a sense of what I mean from the website of Apocryphal Theatre in London. I didn’t know why I burnt out and disbanded this company in 2011 that I loved deeply, but finding out I was Autistic gave the answer to that troubling question as well. I will discuss autistic burnout in detail another time, but it’s a thing and is why so many Autistics don’t end up accomplishing all they or others thought they “should” be able to do.

So what can you expect from me here and why subscribe?

I will be posting as regularly as possible, my goal is once a month (and I hope to do more like twice a month). However, I have to hold space for variations, because alongside being Autistic and susceptible to burnout for this reason alone, I also have Long COVID. This extra special fun pack has led to me qualifying for disability. While it’s not enough to live on (because of autistic burnout, I’ve never held a full time job in my life, so the income is minimal), it certainly helps. I am mentioning this now because another part of my autistic masking is I run myself into the ground to keep commitments, then get sick, and we start all over again. What I want to embrace here and encourage you to embrace (by actually doing it myself) is allowing for limitations and variance. To give ourselves grace.

One of the many grace notes of discovering I am autistic is I have learned to give myself a lot more slack for what I thought (in the parlance of recovery) were “defects of character.” I now know these qualities—such as sensory sensitivity, difficulty adjusting routines and expectations, affective hyper-empathy to the point I can’t Not feel what you are feeling if we are in the same room, rejection sensitivity, pervasive desire for autonomy, and the need for monotropic (highly focused) time to get into a flow (for instance writing this post)—are part of my makeup. Instead of battling with myself to have a different neurotype, I need to accomodate and accept who I actually am rather than constantly trying to shave off parts of myself to fit the “norm.”

I am very much a work in progress and still integrating the fact I am Autistic (which I only discovered for sure in 2021), and as I do, I learn more about me and the research out there, which is legion. I also am delighted to say I now have wonderful autistic communities, including in recovery, in philosophical research and writing, and in more general venues. Many women especially my age are getting diagnosed late, because when we were kids our flavor of autism wasn’t known yet, and even once it became more well-known, the female manifestation still eluded many so-called experts, because they were (and still are) more focused on external manifestations than internal experience.

I would love to have you join me on this journey.

Along the way, I will also be sharing many of the healing tools I have learned over the years, including meditation, yoga, autonomic nervous system regulation, healing modalities for long COVID, journalling, ways to create safe communities, and also tips for writing when you inhabit a bodymind not aligned with this world. Most generic writing advice is geared towards people who are able-bodied, neurotypical, untraumatized, and have a lot of time on their hands. None of this is true for me, and I have developed ways to work outside these requirements (and am learning even more this summer thanks to Esmé Weijun Wang’s amazing Unexpected Shape Writing Academy). I will also periodically review books and art aligned with the values of this site (neurodiversity friendly, most likely experimental, not in love with late capitalism…you know, the basics.)

Disclaimers

As a disclaimer in terms of speaking from the margins, I am a white and therefore not able to embody or speak from the point of view of the Global Majority. I also live on unceded land of the Lenape people in Manhattan. However, I will be bringing in to my posts (and citing) the writing and ideas of Indigenous thinkers and People of Color.

I consider my gender to be nonbinary but probably because I’m 62, I can’t imagine not referring to myself as she, which in my time meant a huge amount of discrimination and dismissal all by itself. Probably this is an autistic thing, but it feels disloyal to throw the “she” under the bus entirely, but I’m happy to be referred to as they as well. There is something called “auti gender” which in a nutshell means the autistic tendency to totally disregard gender roles or expectations and essentially not give a shit, and I think this perfectly embodies my feelings on that matter.

Which leads to another important disclaimer. As the saying goes “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” I can’t speak for millions of people’s experience, only from my own (and the research in books and in conversation with other autistic adults). There is what is known as the “spiky profile” which many Autistics have, which means we can be incredibly good at some things and very bad at others, with no seeming rhyme or reason. A good encapsulation of this from my own experience is on the same day I passed my PhD viva in 2009, I could not find my way back to the train station in a town I had been visiting almost every week for 6 years. I wandered haplessly around Northampton (UK) with my little rolling suitcase sobbing. I was 46 years old. I now know I’m dyspraxic (which at the time I called being spatially dyslexic) so if I had asked for directions, I would not be able to remember anything other than the first step, so I just wandered for I don’t remember how long until I found the train station, embarrassed, ashamed, and completely baffled. I would not find out I was Autistic until 2021.

A note on Autistic Syntax

I will be writing a post about this soon, but I do want to address the issue of what I refer to as Autistic Syntax in brief here. In researching what an unmasked autistic text might be, I discovered this in my stage texts, which I have been writing since 1998 and generally come to me quite quickly and seemingly “out of the blue.” I now think it was my buried autistic voice rising to the surface. In these texts (and in the memoir), the “I/me” tends to be diffused and include “you” and “her/she,” sometimes “we” and “they” even.

This feels quite intrinsic to my autistic experience, which does not see the “I” as a stable entity but instead more of a construction created for credible consumption. I have not used that more unmasked autistic text here in this intro post, because many allistic (non-autistic) people have told me I need to explain it for them to understand what’s going on.

There is also something called “autistic long form” which this post kind of gives you a sense of already. The Autistic’s need to give context and Explain A Lot. Believe it or not, I do my best not to do that, but if I try too hard to be concise, it feels after a while like masking. Masking being what we do on the regular so you who are not autistic can understand us. However, I want to ensure there is space for my unmasked autistic voice here and in the memoir, so you will be seeing it.

Why should I consider a paid subscription?

Hopefully if you’ve read this far, you think there’s enough reason to subscribe for free to Songs for The Unadapted Ones, and I am super grateful for that.

But I do want to put in a pitch here for a paid subscription as well if you find value here and/or want to support my writing in general. A paid subscription grants you access to commenting and conversing with other paid subscribers. Once there are enough such subscribers, I will be able to offer Zoom conversations about writing, guided meditations and yoga, and pop up silent writing sessions. Also it will give me more time to write and post here alongside working on the book.

I am hoping this site will be able to grow into a real community, and that would be helpful for that. Because of the long COVID and chronic Autistic burnout, I can’t expend energy outside of my own writing without some help. Probably many of you can imagine how hard it is to ask. We live in a culture where asking for help is considered a sin, but for better or worse, dealing with long COVID since 2020 has rid me of any last vestiges of internalized ableism.

Speaking of which, if you want to be part of the community but can’t afford a paid subscription, simply email me and explain why you are interested, and I will give you a gift subscription. Those of you who can afford to pay will also be helping subsidize those who can’t. If you have enough money to pay to be a founding member and are willing to do so, I would be extremely grateful and again it would make offering more community spaces possible.