Category Archives: Writing

ABA, Clinical things - meh, Conversion Therapy (Is Evil), Interests, Music, Queer/Trans, Writing

Autism, ABA and The Arts — Childhood Memories

Leave a comment

A mind-bendingly difficult thing from my past that i’m coming to terms with:

I might have been screened for and possibly diagnosed with autism back in grade school, or some sort of gifted + autistic, although that was before “doubly exceptional aspie” was a thing (early 1970s).

I went through the Very-Concerned-Teacher-to-shrink-to-non-staff-specialist gauntlet for a while. I definitely was being assessed for cross-gender behavior; pattern matching games and a “mind in the eyes” test was part of that.

That’s mostly sorted for me now, or sorted enough that I’m slowly moving from being floored by it to acceptance and integration of what happened.

What’s still too raw to talk about in much detail: realizing that writing and music was the communication vector that might have kept me from getting aggressively ABA’d or institutionalized in some way or another, right at the moment when modern “child autism” was starting to be acted upon (as in, ABAing autistic children). So, it’s a toss-up as to what would’ve happened, had I not lucked into writing and music as “ok, well, you’re ‘creative and sensitive'” as a result. Things went from “You’re a problem. *sounds alarm*” to “You’re innately talented, so of course you’re that way”, quickly, come fifth grade (homeroom teacher) and seventh grade, partially. I never was labeled as “gifted” within the school system, but writing and later, music was how I found my way to forms of support that were actually supportive, rather than more aggressive interventions, both informally and formally.

It also was a way to express myself creatively in a classroom setting, rather than *stacks small stones away from the other kids* or *runs into the closet, overwhelmed*. In other words, I was “learning how to behave”, so the early negative reinforcement machinations of ABA-like things wound themselves down. This unfortunately did *nothing* to stop students themselves from aggressing against me, but it did change the classroom dynamics, including the times where I was flunking out, in a class where I had tested beyond grade level or otherwise was capable of doing the work. The right-wing “take” on this is to attribute this to laziness, but…well, no, actually.

Same goes for my family — if my parents were presented with a diagnosis of autism, or as was starting to get phased out, schizophrenia as a clinical “who even knows” place-holder for autism (this all happened in the early 1970s), it’s very possible that my parents took one look at the school system and attempted to intervene on their own instead, because that was my family, back then. (This was before my father’s drinking, and the subsequent bullying and aggression kicked in.)

So when my active interest in spinning and stacking games shifted to reading the dictionary and their encyclopedia set, then once encouraged, to writing and music, it was tolerated, and accepted, both in my family and at school. “Narrowly escaping a worse fate” is my best guess and operative assumption, for now.

Autism, Music, Poetry, Writing

Introduction, Part One

Leave a comment

Hey. I’m a blogger and I’m autistic. I self-dxed three months ago. (Fuck off if you don’t like it.) This is my personal blog around my coming out process as autistic, and what I’m discovering along the way.

Some things about me:

Writer, musician, performer, poet.

Trans, intersexed, woman-identified, demisexual, pansexual, queer, mixed race. (yay, comma salad!)

Anarchist, post-marxist, anti-imperialist, genius, billionaire, playgirl, philanthropist. (OK, I’m making some of that up. 😛 Lucy Parsons is my imaginary dream lover, though.)

I used to work in the computer industry as a tech writer, and I have the scars to prove it. Now, I’m semi-retired (I’m in my 50s), have worked in the arts and publishing full time since 2005, and have an MFA in writing. I’ve read and performed at spots throughout the country, have work published, have albums out, and so on. That’s not the focus of the blog (go here, here, or here for that), but it’s an integral part of who I am.

I’m also writing from the U.S. a year and a half into the Trump administration, so I’m watching my barely established rights as a trans woman getting taken away from us by some “legal coup” Handmaid’s Tale shitheads. El Hefe seems to thinks its hilarious to mock people with disabilities, specifically for lacking of normative physical traits. I mean, he got “elected” on this as a platform. Always festive, always a joy. I don’t feel personally attacked by all this, at all. Sarcasm! Take that, shrinks.

So, why autism? What gives you the right? Why self-dx? “Vere are your papers. Ve need your papers.” Give me a minute here, imaginary interlocutor, and I’ll explain.

I had a hunch that I was on the spectrum for a long time. I was up on the stories that were going around about autism being an “epidemic”, the profile pieces on aspies in the software industry, and sometimes, the arts as well. The software industry aspie stories in particular seemed sort of…male to me, but it all rang a bell, too. (I also had written off my childhood experiences that map to autism to “Well, I’m weird. Thankfully, I escaped mostly intact”. The parts that map to autism to this day were attributed to “Well, I’m weird and I’m still trying to escape, to be honest.”)

When coverage about autistic women started becoming more common, that was when I really started to wonder. I also had a sequence of very alexithymic and sensory overloaded experiences that got my attention. I started reading about highly sensitive people, which then led me to more in-depth reading about autism, and starting to watch videos about autism on YouTube. When I found the work of people such as Rudy Simone, Cynthia Kim and Steve Silberman (as well as the film Autism in Love), completed online tests, read the diagnostic criteria for autism (DSM IV and V), as well as lists of autistic traits that focused on women, I realized that this was where I fit.

It still blows me away that I made it to my mid-50s without putting two and two together, but there’s reasons for that. Nobody who would otherwise have been read as “high functioning” was getting diagnosed until the 1990s, women are still undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in high numbers, and there’s hardly any information for autistic POCs at all, save for some possible indicators that autistic POCs are being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar. It’s also possible that I was diagnosed and not told about it – I definitely was evaluated as being a possible “feminine boy” in grade school (because trans girl, as I later figured out – this was in the early 1970s), and much of that process could map to a pre-diagnostic process for autism as well. For example, I did the pattern-matching test, and the “map faces to emotions” ones as well.

There’s a lot about my childhood that fits the diagnostic narrative. I started reading one day, when I was three. By kindergarten or first grade, I was reading at sixth grade level, because nothing beyond that was available in the library. My parents’ books mostly bored the crap out of me, save for the encyclopedia and dictionary, which I read all the time. I toe walked, until my mom hissed at me “do you want people to think you’re gay”. I stimmed, but was getting watched like a hawk, so (my guess) it went into finger tapping, toe tapping, leg shaking and pacing instead of those stims and hand flapping. I did love to spin, though. I’d get bored with a group sport, so I’d make up a new game on the spot, and start playing to the new rules, somewhere between second and third base. (Note to self: this upsets male children.) My emotions would flip on a switch. Kids would tease me, I’d cry and yell, then run off to hide in the closet. I had no idea how gender worked, on a social level. I did feel social affinity with other girls, but teachers would shut that down. (At one point, I was lab partners with another girl, and the teacher separated us, to both our objections.) I’d chase off a boy who was interested in a girl I liked, and barely knew. (“Can’t they see how I feel?”) The grade school bully used to hit me in the arm regularly, so one day I’d had enough, so I stood up and clocked him. I’d find biographies of Mao and Einstein tucked away in a corner of the school library stacks, and not understand why kids would try to drag them away from me. (Especially the Mao biography. Nixon was president.) I played alone. I made small walls out of pebbles. I loved spinning things. I’d hide in the drapes, at a wedding. My dad would try to teach me basic electronics (and was probably evaluating my intellectual response along the way – he wasn’t very hands-on with this sort of thing, typically), and it took me 45 minutes to figure out how to connect the switch to turn on the light, because I focused on the cardboard that he used as a makeshift breadboard and the components instead. (Probably as a result, I had an interest in cardboard for a while – “There’s entire stories on the back! The address points somewhere, and there’s people at those addresses. Who are they?” My parents talked me out of that as well.) Nobody was sure if I was very smart, intellectually challenged or both. I was flunking out of math. I tested several grade levels ahead – for math. My abacus was my best friend for a while.

This all was in the early to mid 1970s – there was no public discussion about autism, save for the occasional “how tragic” story. Asperger’s wasn’t part of the diagnostic criteria, and the assumption was that if weren’t completely mute and, at least in society’s eyes, had limited to effectively no executive function, you were just “eccentric” or “weird” or “savant-like” or in my case, “smart, or dumb, or who cares, let’s just say very, very weird.”

So, that’s a bit about my background and what led me to this point in my journey. Where I’m at, three months into my process, in the next post.