would you still love me if i was a neurodivergent worm?
We only watched the first season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal last week. Season one is about helping people rehearse for difficult conversations using replica sets, actors, and complex flowcharts of dialogue and environmental variables.
In a multi-episode arc, he also develops a rehearsal for parenthood, where years pass in weeks and the crew have to smuggle real babies and child-actors in and out of the house according to child labor schedules.
I was enamored, not quite by the ideas of practicing and scripting, but by the emotional and experiential vacuum it creates: the manipulation of time and circumstance to allow rumination on your discomfort, your body in a space, the feelings a place or conversation can elicit. The rehearsal of intensity, of embodiment.
Season two touches on the Autism community’s reaction to and appreciation of the show. I noticed I felt defensive and wondered what that was about.
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In the past few months, the connection between my mind and my mouth has changed. I don’t know why or what, only that I cannot stop talking once I’ve started a train of thought. It registers that I’ve thrown us off track, that the other person isn’t quite following or sure what’s happening, but I feel helpless to stop it. It feels good to speak more freely, but it’s alarming in the sense that I don’t understand the change or how to control it.
I started trying to research it, why being in my brain feels so drastically different lately, and the phrase “unmasking Autism” came up. I closed the tab.
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I’ve always been suspicious of certain types of diagnoses; it’s sketchy to me that a person being in distress says something about them and not the circumstances which have distressed them. That we have names – books of names! – for collections of resulting behaviors, but do not pathologize the unique pathways of abuse and systemic injustice in the same way. That they can call you something, tell you that it says something about the trajectory of your life, without acknowledging the context shaping that reality around you.
When I was dragged to therapy to address my eating disorder, I took a paper survey to determine whether I had anxiety. I suppose it came back positive, or whatever the terminology would be, because I was accused of lying on the test (“for sympathy”, which never made sense to me, because it’s not like I was getting any).
I didn’t need to lie on the test. I knew the name for what I was experiencing, I knew why I was experiencing it. It’s just that no one had ever thought to ask. Instead they talked around me, mumbling about hormones and flipped switches, transparently avoiding the neurosis that would force them to inspect their own behavior.
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One of my parents has Bipolar Disorder. The only time I’ve written about it was in fourth grade: an essay about how they get really angry sometimes, but only because they’re “sick” with something called “vipolar” (I’d misheard from the backseat on the way home from my grandfather’s house after a fight). It was, to me, an alien thing that lived in our family, an actualized elephant in the room that no one would discuss. As I got more breadcrumbs about their life, their childhood, I thought to myself that I’d be pretty angry too.
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After finishing the second season of The Rehearsal, my partner took an online assessment for Autism and that, I guess, gave me permission to be more curious. I think I expected it to confirm what I already knew: that I’m kind of an anxious nerd, but on, like, my own terms. It’s on purpose. Even a little ironic, maybe.
Perhaps not.
I scored much higher than I thought I would. My partner laughed and gently pointed out a few, um, quirks that make a little more sense with this framing. I told this story to a friend later, and he also laughed, and recommended that I pick up a copy of Unmasking Autism, which is apparently also a book.
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It’s taken an extreme amount of effort to understand my complexities and contradictions as part of my humanity. To understand my behaviors and reactions as logical responses to my environments. To process that there is nothing wrong with me, there is nothing to fix, that I’ve been loveable this whole time, actually.
Having Autism would not negate any of that, but it does rebuild a box that I’ve intentionally deconstructed. It puts a name to something – to lots of somethings – in a way that makes everything feel smaller, contained again. To name it is to claim its too-muchness, its need for summary and brevity, when I want only to expand.
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None of this is to say that I’ve ever felt “typical”, just that many of my notable characteristics make sense to me.
Sure, I get overstimulated by lights and sounds, but I’m inundated with new stimuli literally constantly; is this really symptomatic of anything other than being very online? And I’m obsessively preoccupied with “interests”, but isn’t that what interests are? The things you enjoy thinking about and engaging with endlessly?
And although I dislike social situations, I don’t think I necessarily struggle with them, and I don’t struggle with understanding people; I often feel I understand them too well, that I’m too adept at reading subtext, too comfortable finding threads to untangle in others. Confusing – I’m learning that this is possibly a trait of Autism, too. Couldn’t it just be a general hypervigilance? Or is that the point?
The introduction of Unmasking Autism says that being autistic “means you may feel things and react to them differently to non-autistic people.” But how do I know how other people feel things? How could that possibly be quantified? Does that question indicate something diagnosable about me?
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I know that Autism / mental illness / trauma are not the same things, nor are they at odds with each other; the way they fit together for me is just kind of discombobulating. And I am so, so, so, so resistant to saying: “Oh, yes, it actually was my brain the entire time.”
Because that isn’t true.
And to say that my mind works differently from other people’s feels like another way to excuse them treating me differently. How could they know when even I didn’t know? How could any of us have seen this coming?
That’s the root of my fear, I think: I have reached a point where my life makes complete sense to me, where the path from point A to Z is obvious and I can be furious at how predictable it all was. The thought that it’s not really that simple, that I’m not quite so righteous in my indignation, that there really are things outside of everyone’s control, risks turning me upside down again.
And like always, all of this can be true at once: that I’ve experienced unnecessary hurt, that people fell short in their care of me, and that they too were hurt and failed, and that all of this was perhaps exacerbated by an actual difference in how we see and understand the world.
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In my late teens or early 20s, a therapist told my parent that they likely also had Autism and OCD. We talked about it excitedly at first, as if we finally had permission to put words to a thing we’d always known about each other. It was expansive in that way: newly knowing glances at each other in crowded restaurants, a new patience when one of us bounced a leg or chewed a fingernail.
I didn’t need to hear it about myself: there was just an understanding that we were alike in all the ways we were different from the world. That I was a mirror.
I don’t know whether they were ever formally diagnosed, because this also disappeared under our Mary Poppins rug, where everything is a sickness with a sharp edge.
And I think to myself, again, through my own gritted teeth, that I’d be pretty angry too.