Born in the Wrong Decade Part 2: Thoughtcrime

In the previous installment of this series, I talked about how by the age of nine I realized just how different my internal experiences were from the people around me. This was crystalized in my mind when Back to the Future became a focused interest and I felt a strong sense of shame and "wrongness" from the intensity of it. As my childhood continued, I developed focused interests in other movies and television shows, such as The Simpsons and The Addams Family. The shame gradually became less intense as I became more familiar with this pattern, but it was still there. Whenever a new focused interest grabbed my attention, I felt an impending sense of dread-- dread that I was becoming obsessed with something. 

I was aware of the term "obsession" by the time I was eleven, and I even recall how I learned it. My mother had made a passing comment about someone being "obsessed" with something. When I asked her what it meant, she said, "It means it's all the person thinks about or talks about." The negative subtext inherent in her explanation was clear: what could possibly be acceptable about someone thinking about and talking about only one thing? Growing up, I questioned a lot of the common wisdom inherent in society-- such as that it's somehow worse when a girl tells a dirty joke than when a boy does-- but for some reason I did not question the idea that "obsession" was a bad thing. Perhaps if I hadn't already felt a sense of shame before others began commenting on my propensity to hyperfocus on certain movies and television shows, I would have questioned it.

In an assignment for my English class during my Freshman year of college, I wrote about the overwhelm of emotions I felt the day after my introduction to the Back to the Future films at age nine, the urgent feeling of wanting to watch them again so badly. It was my first time writing about this moment in my past, which I looked back on with a lot of self-criticism: liberally using the word "obsession," which I described as "ludicrous." I wrote about my brother growing tired of my watching the films so often, and the undertone in my piece clearly implied that I had been responsible for his irritated reaction. Not once did it occur to me that if he was so put off by my viewing habits he could have just left the room instead of making it about me. I accepted that I was the Problem, and my obsession was the root. When I wrote this essay in 1999, I believed that I had overcome this "Problem". After all, if I hadn't, it meant I was immature, out of control, and perhaps even, somehow, unethical. Only recently has it occurred to me that it was fair to describe my brother's reaction as "immature"-- after all, he was a child, too.

The real Problem is that inherent in everything I describe is a lot of question begging: that is, I began with the conclusion that what other people called "obsession" was wrong and that it was something I needed to learn not to do, that it somehow violated them in an egregious manner. If someone told me I was "obsessed" with something, it meant I had failed in some way and I had to figure out how to fix the Problem. It honestly occurred to me only a few years ago that I was looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. Ironically, it was because of a conversation I had with my mother, who has evolved in her thinking over the years, especially in light of how autism and its quirks are understood in the more-enlightened 21st century. She admitted that it simply took her a long time to understand my internal experience as a fan geek, and that there is nothing wrong with enjoying something with such an intense focus. While it is, of course, important to be mindful about whether the other person you are talking to is interested in the topic, that is a completely different issue than whether it is "wrong" for someone to be hyperfocused on something. More recently, I have realized that the only thing I was guilty of was the social "sin" of thoughtcrime. It is now clear to me just how pervasive societal shaming of "thoughtcrime" is.

Take being LGBTQIA+, for example. Up until very recently LGBTQIA+ people were expected by an overwhelming majority of society to hide their thoughts about same-sex attraction, feeling like they were a different gender than what the world perceived them as, and even a lack of interest in dating and sex. Yes, thoughts that people didn't have, or at least had less frequently than most of the world, were something to be hidden. This type of "thoughtcrime" can at least easily be explained by the fundamentalist Christian-based attitude that has shaped many parts of the world, including the United States, for centuries: any sex act other than the missionary position between one cis man and one cis woman is a sin against God. 

But what, then, of other "thoughtcrime," such as a focused interest on a movie? I think what it comes down to is people being unable to acknowledge their own discomfort around something they don't understand, even if it is not rooted in a social taboo such as non-hetero-cis-normative sexuality or gender identity. A lot of autistic fan geeks know this and, like me, have expressed frustration about people angrily telling them, "You're obsessed with that!" Additionally, I have observed a lot of quirks in other fan geeks (many of which I suspect are on the spectrum) that I don't understand, and I realize I need to be okay with not understanding. 

For example, a lot of fan fiction writers create stories where the main focus is graphic sex acts between their favorite characters. One popular "shipping"-- as such relationship-creating for these characters is called-- is Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. I don't have an issue with someone writing about one or both of these characters coming out as gay, but why would they want to pair characters that hate each other? Why on earth is scene after scene of graphic sex the focus of these stories? A friend of mine, a fellow Back to the Future fan-- who is, incidentally, a phenomenal writer-- wrote a graphic story about Marty and Doc going at it (thankfully, Marty was written to be eighteen, the age of consent). I told this person, "I just read it. That was HILARIOUS!" and they said, "It wasn't meant to be funny." Well, I don't get it, and that's okay.

I don't know why so many fan fiction writers focus on stuff like this, and out of curiosity, I asked my friend about it. My friend said that they aren't "getting off" on it, but rather it's some type of "curiosity" for them, like they're watching to see where the scene will go. I suspect that other people actually are "getting off" on it, but I guess everyone is different. With the exception of a few sporadic and unremarkable attempts to write "how-Marty-met-Doc" origin stories, I don't write fan fiction. But even if I did, I can't imagine a time or a place where I would have written something like this. I've also come to realize that if I'm uncomfortable with others writing it, that's my problem. To make it about them is akin to policing thoughtcrime. Why do so many fan fiction writers create stuff like this? Does it matter? As long as they're not, say, stalking the actors who portrayed the characters, they're not hurting anybody. 

I guess what I've learned over the years is that people are just weirder and more complicated than we've historically acknowledged. More people are opening up about their quirks, essentially declaring that the emperor is naked. 

And the emperor IS naked.

Is It Ableism? Part 10: Challenging Comfort Zones

Thanks for coming! I'm gradually moving my blog to Substack! You can check out this post there!

Progress in the 21st Century

I often tell people that I was born in the wrong decade.

I look at autistic kids who were born in 2000 or later-- a good 20+ years after me-- and I envy them. They were born into a world in which unprecedented progress in the understanding of the human mind-- professionally and publicly-- has increased exponentially since I was a kid. They get individualized education plans (IEPs) based on their needs. Does the kid have auditory processing disorder (a condition often comorbid with autism)? They'll will be seated at the front of the classroom where they will be less likely to be bombarded with extraneous noise that would otherwise make it difficult for them to process the teacher's instructions. Does the kid miss social cues? No problem-- there will be time set aside to work with the kid on social skills, and the teacher will forgive the child for missing something that most of the world takes for granted. Does the kid have esoteric interests? Well, then the teacher had better at least try to understand them instead of dismissing them. Does the autistic kid do better working alone than in groups? Then the kid will be allowed to work alone even when the rest of the class is working in groups. And if there is a project where groups are mandatory, the teacher will handpick students that they know will get along best with this kid. Is there bullying? If the teacher tells the student to "just ignore" it, then a lot of people will think the teacher is ignorant.

If only "autism" had been a word in the '90s, at least outside the context of Rainman, then my life would have been much different,  my childhood less of the nightmare that it was. Between the kids that bullied me emotionally and physically, the sometimes-callous teachers who told me to "just ignore" it, and my well-meaning-but-tragically-misguided parents who thought they needed to change me, my life was often a living hell. My parents get it now and realize that they made some serious, non-trivial mistakes. But even today I wake up screaming from nightmares about being a kid and arguing with my mother about certain things about me-- such as my androgynous sense of gender and concurrent gender expression-- that I knew were never going to change. My parents thought they were helping me, but the reality was I often did not feel completely comfortable in my own house. As a teenager, the only place I felt comfortable was my progressive overnight camp. Today, I compare it to the way Harry Potter felt going to Hogwarts.

I was born in 1980. As much as I complain about growing up in the '90s-- what I refer to as the final decade of the dark ages-- I realize how much worse it would have been had I been born in 1930, 1950, or even 1970. I look back at the way autistic people (or people who in hindsight probably were autistic) were treated in decades and centuries past and find myself getting infuriated. I think about how often people were institutionalized, sometimes just for having unpopular opinions. An autistic person having a meltdown? Forget it. Whereas today we better understand that a meltdown is the result of extreme frustration that most other people don't experience-- and NOT the same thing as a temper tantrum, which is something a child does to protest not getting their way-- what did people think it was 100 years ago? Or 50 years ago? Probably insanity, grounds for institutionalization. Hell, even in the '90s, people dismissed my meltdowns-- which I tried VERY hard to control-- as temper tantrums. I didn't have the words for them, but I knew that's not what they were, and I felt insulted as a teenager when people dismissed my genuine hurt and frustration about a certain situation (usually a social issue) as a temper tantrum.

I think about the ways people with other disabilities were treated. Deaf? No sign language for you! You'd better learn to read lips! Gesturing, let alone a gesture-based language- isn't normal! This was as recent as THE GODDAMNED 1960s, as illustrated in the film Mr. Holland's Opus. 

These poor old souls, what they must have gone through in a world that didn't want to even try to understand them, let alone accept them.

But, to quote Dr. Jack Kevorkian, "That's the way the world runs. It advances slow, and somebody gets burned-- badly."

But it advances, and that's what's important. I'm immediately suspicious of the mindset of someone who laments about "the good old days" and rhetorically asks, "What's the world coming to?" The good old days when autistic people were locked up? When deaf people were not allowed to learn sign language? When black people were legally segregated?

What the world is coming to is progress. Change seems scary to some people, but change is going to happen. Does some change worry me? Yes. We are making significant leaps in artificial intelligence technology. I can think of a million things that can go wrong. I think of all the sci-fi stories about intelligent robots killing humans. But I also see AI as being something that can do a lot of good. For one thing, it's probably easier to teach a computer than a human to be unbiased when interviewing an intelligent but socially awkward autistic person. It will be difficult to teach the computer, because computers are made by humans after all, but I'm confident that we'll get there. One time, my grandmother was talking to me about how the idea of AI scares her. I asked her what she thought about how we have a device that can fit in our pockets and that has access to an unbelievable amount of information. She said she thought it was interesting. I asked her what she would have thought had someone told her in the 1950s that this device would eventually be invented. She said it would have scared her.

Well, there you go. Despite all the problems that exist in the world (the asshole in the White House, climate change), we are overall living in the best of times. As we prepare to enter the '20s, let's make them the Roaring '20s... Roaring with progress, that is.

Your Child's Rights

As I get ready to revise my book for parents of children with Asperger's Syndrome, I find that a lot of wounds have been reopened. A few parts of the book deal with the horrendous bullying that I endured, particularly in middle school.  I relate stories about being humiliated in ways that boggle the imagination. In addition to being taunted, I had clay thrown at me in ninth grade ceramics class. I was also hit, kicked, shoved, and, in one case, even strangled. While other kids worried about who they were going with to the next dance, I worried about whether I could get through just one day without being abused, both emotionally and physically. A few times, I told my parents that I wished I was dead (which I didn't mean), and a few times I told them that I wished I hadn't been born (which I sometimes did mean).


The most painful parts of these memories deal not with the humiliation itself, but with my parents' responses to the humiliation. Like many girls with Asperger's Syndrome, I was (and still am) a tomboy. Between the ages of 13 and 17 I wore my hair back almost constantly; between the ages of 13 and 15 it was literally constantly. I wore T-shirts/sweatshirts and jeans to school. I liked the way the clothes hung off of my then-scrawny frame; I liked looking like a tomboy-- it was who I was. When forced to dress up in skirts and blouses for the holidays I felt very uncomfortable, but at least those episodes were over in just a few hours. My parents responded to the bullying by telling me that I needed to learn to look-- and act-- more feminine. What they did not know was that this was not an option for me any more than was writing with my left hand. The idea of taking my mother's advice and wearing skirts, form-fitting jeans and low-cut shirts-- or "boob neckline" shirts, as I jokingly call them-- was terrifying to me. When I say that I was a tomboy, I don't mean that I was a girl who liked to play with boys' toys (my toys were more gender-neutral, if anything) or that I was a girl who liked to play sports (I stunk at them). I mean that when I declared myself a tomboy I made a very emphatic and firm statement about my gender identity. To add insult to injury, there was another tomboy at school who dressed similarly to me and never got bullied. When I tried to cite this as evidence that my clothes weren't causing the bullying, my parents just brushed it off.


I was left confused and shaky by my parents' advice-- which they did not just dispense once but literally every time I was bullied or shunned in some way. I felt like my summers at left-leaning Camp Negev-- where I had friends and there was a lot of talk about gender identity-- were my only salvation. (Today I compare it to Harry Potter going to Hogwarts.) First of all, it is profoundly naive to think that the bullying would have suddenly ended had I started dressing in skirts, form-fitting jeans and "boob-neckline" shirts, especially since the way I dressed was the one thing that was rarely criticized in school. Secondly, why the hell would I have wanted to be friends with people whose friendships were contingent on the way I dressed? Third, and most importantly, the message that I was getting was that I was bringing these problems on myself-- that I was the problem, not the bullies. I wanted to be accepted for who I was, and I constantly got the message that this expectation was unrealistic. 


My parents, who have since realized the huge mistake they made by giving me this advice, had no idea how tormented I was by their criticisms about my taste in clothes. To this day I still have dreams about fighting with them about it which cumulate in my waking up screaming. However, one of the people who is reading my manuscript (a relative of mine), who generally makes criticisms on my book that I agree with, made comments that basically implied that I should have taken my parents' advice, even wondering why I wouldn't change my style of dress to stop the bullying. Yes, he still believes, as my parents did, that this was the reason I was bullied. 


No matter what reason your child is bullied, you cannot tell her-- or imply-- that she is bringing the bullying on herself and that she needs to change, even if you think doing so will improve her own safety (if she wants to change, that's a different story). Schools are funded by your tax dollars which are not just paying for your child's education. They are paying for the staff to create a safe environment for your child. And you may have to go up to the school and complain to the teachers (which my parents did, despite their criticisms). If it falls on deaf ears, then you must go to the principal. If that doesn't work, then go to the superintendent. Keep pushing until something gives. At any rate, if the staff cannot create a safe environment for your child, then they have shirked their duties and have quietly sent the bullies the message that what they are doing is okay; trust me, bullies can tell when a teacher thinks another student is weird. If your child's safety is contingent upon her making some change in her personality and appearance that causes her great discomfort, then that is not justice! It is not!


Today I am happy and well-adjusted, but had I gotten the message from my parents that I was okay, then their support would have made handling the bullying that much easier. Had the school actually made a concerted effort to create a safe environment for me, then I would have never found myself wishing I hadn't been born. 


No kid should have to think like that.

How Fiction Reflects the Human Mind

This post isn't related to Asperger's Syndrome per se, but I think people with AS are more likely to identify with it.

Children's fiction is imaginative. The sky's the limit. Dinosaurs talk. Kids have super powers or can cast spells. Monsters are friends with children. And so forth. The scope of fiction narrows as you head into the intermediate and young adult section of bookstores and libraries. You won't see talking dinosaurs or friendly monsters, but a lot of imagination is still there, even in popular fiction. Harry Potter, need I say more? I actually really enjoy teen fiction. Even when a large focus of the story is centered on "high school drama," I've found that characters often have unique voices. Additionally, lots of teen fiction deals with issues such as challenging authority and "coming out of the closet." Sometimes these themes are presented in unique ways, such as in The Hunger Games.

Now walk into the adult section. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough or in the right places, but imagination seems mostly gone. So much adult fiction seems to be midlife drama, and very little of it has any kind of unique twist. As I stated, even "high school drama" books have a level of creativity. But seriously, it is so difficult to find an adult book that isn't about some woman having a mid-life crisis, or a man having an affair, or a woman feeling like dirt because she can't pop a baby out. Even in books advertised with unique storylines, these storylines take a backseat to mid-life drama. I am almost finished reading Mercy by Jodi Picoult. The book is allegedly about a mercy killing. However, the majority of it is about a man having an affair with another woman. False advertising! About 3/4 of this book would have to be cut if it were to be entirely about a mercy killing. If I read one more time about how Cam "pulls out of Mia at the last minute," and "spills," I'll mercy kill myself!

For this reason, I stick to YA fiction and the adult books I read are largely non-fiction.

To me, this progression of children's fiction to adult fiction represents the evolution of the neurotypical human mind. Children are largely imaginative. In the teenage years, some imagination is lost in favor of romantic relationships, but relationships are only one part of life. In adults, it's all about marriage and procreating. I know I'm making a generalization here, but that's how it seems, and fiction seems to represent this. We Aspies get tired of everything being about romance. We want books that make us think and that have a unique story from a unique perspective. Alas, publishers obviously realize that unless a story has at least a subplot with a romance in it, it won't sell. Adult fiction often has to be Adult fiction to sell.